by Rebecca Hahn
If I were an ordinary girl, I’d have no way of stopping him. I would be caught, and by the time it was over, I’d be lost forever. I’d be exactly what he wants.
But I’m not an ordinary girl, am I? His wings are near around me now, but they’re not yet touching me. His spell is turning me away from myself, but I use that urging, I use the twitching through my skin, and I throw it in a different direction, down, into itself, smaller and smaller.
When I look up again, the pebbles are boulders. I scamper, squeaking, out from under his scales and race down the mountain.
Eight
I RECKON I’ve come through this place a hundred times in the past year and a half. I reckon I flew right over, or jumped past these tumbled walls, or darted under the old leaning table in the center of the clearing, and I never once saw it for what it was.
I was gone then, lost in the flying and the jumping and the darting. I didn’t have my thoughts to catch me up, to snag on the quiet that settles here, strange and stagnant. Nowhere in the dragon’s woods is as quiet as this. I don’t mean the quiet of animals sleeping or the wind dying down. I mean that the very leaves, which crunch so deliciously in the woods, are muted here. I mean that the air here is dense and colorless. The tingle, the heady scent of magic, is nowhere here.
The trees lean in all around, but the ruins of this cottage and its garden aren’t part of the dragon’s woods.
I’m down off the mountain, on the northern edge of what was once the king’s land, almost to last of the dragon’s retreating woods. It’s been two or three days since I first ran from the dragon—two or three days I’ve spent at the edge of my ability to outrun, outtrick, outscamper, and stop quite still in a burst of sunlight, a speck of shade, so that for a moment I’m near invisible to passing eyes. I’ve been leading the dragon’s folk in a merry chase.
Could be that’s another reason I see this place today. I’ve been paying so much attention to the fairies and the spirits and so on that their sudden absence shocks, like a bowl of ice water splashed in my face, like a great hand that reaches down and trips me up, leaving me sprawling on the ground, nose just inches away from something glinting, half buried in the dirt before the square rock that I now see that was once the step to this place’s front door.
I sit up. I’ve been jerked out of a lynx shape, and my eyes are straining, missing the cat’s precision.
It’s been a long while since anyone lived here, longer than before the woods started moving in two years ago, I’d guess. There are plenty of abandoned homes and farms all through what’s left of the retreating lowland woods, but none of them has crumbled the way this place has. And none of them stands separate from the trees, in its own spellproof clearing.
Over there, that would have been a shed for the chickens or a cow, now just a pile of boards rotting. That heap of stones up the hill a bit would have been the well, with a footpath running back through the garden. And here where I am, there would have been a road, or a trail at least, going off toward the farms and the villages in the valleys a hill or two away. They would have come up to this exact spot, whoever visited this hut, and they would have stepped up onto that rock and rapped on the door that stood just there, and passed into the room beyond, an entryway by the look of it. Not a hut, then, but a house. Someone would have lived here, milking the cow, chasing the chickens, drawing water from the well, and helping up whoever was clumsy enough to trip themselves at the front door.
I reach out and grab the sparkly thing just in front of me in the dirt. I shine it with my fingertips.
Someone must have lived here or come visiting who had some money. This isn’t a fake metal thing you might buy at a market. This is gold.
I know I ought to be leaving straightaway. I’ve almost made it through the woods. One more quick dart and I’ll be in the king’s land, and the dragon won’t be able to get at me there.
I’m even picking myself up, brushing myself off, but now, as clumps of dirt fall away, this gold ring is beginning to shine, and the words wrapped around the band stand out, black from the bits of earth still wedged in their grooves. I’ve not forgotten my letters, not even after all this time, and I lift the ring to read it.
Sometimes, when a person is about to tell you something that’s going to change your life, or make you cry, or make you leap for joy—sometimes you know it before they say a word.
It’s in the way they look at you and in the way they open their mouth. It’s in the tilt of their head, the tension in their hands, or the slump of their shoulders.
Times are, you don’t need words to hear a thing.
I look at this ring, and before the letters fit together, before they sound inside my head, I know what I’m going to see, and I start trembling all through me.
“To my daughter—” it says. My hands are shaking so, it’s hard to keep the ring turning, to keep squinting at the words: “a darling princess.”
And who else would have had a golden ring out here at the edge of the world? Who else would have come to this isolated place, and her a princess?
Who would have lost her ring and never returned to find it?
I fold my hand tight around the ring and turn my back to the woods. I walk around the ruins of the house, not through; it doesn’t seem right to go through. I step across the garden, where I figure the paths might have been, looking here and there, always searching.
At the back, near the tumbled well, I find the stones. Two of them, grown over with grasses but still unmistakable in their meaning. On one, there is carved a woman’s name I don’t recognize. On the other, there is the name of my mother.
To my daughter—
I wonder, I can’t help but wonder, who put them here. My uncle? Villagers? The soldiers who showed up on that very doorstep, who knocked with their leather gloves and made the baby inside cry, so that they knew they had come to the right place after all?
And I wonder, did her ring fall off when she rushed out, trying to get away, or trying to reason with them or to beg for her child’s, her servant’s, lives? Did she lose it in the struggle—grappling with the men, with her own brother? Did it jerk its way down her skin and drop to the floor of the house and roll, unnoticed, out the open doorway into the dirt?
Or did it slip from her trailing hand as they dragged her out to her grave?
Yes, I am trembling. My very thoughts are trembling. Somewhere above me the dragon flies, and here in this corner of the world, in this bit of space that doesn’t belong to him somehow, that doesn’t belong to anyone but the ones underneath these stones, I am trembling, and my thoughts are running wild, and there’s nothing here to see or hear me.
My mother was here. She stood in this garden just like me. She held this ring in her hand; she looked off into the woods. She thought about the dragon and she thought about my Gramps, who wouldn’t have known where she’d gone.
But there the sameness between us ends. She had a baby, first small in her arms and then crawling about, getting itself into the vegetables or the flowers no doubt, maybe rolling a ball across the floor of the house. She had someone else, too, her old servant who she would have talked to about things, who she would have worried about late at night when she’d put the baby to bed and couldn’t keep from remembering that half the king’s army was on her trail.
She would have been afraid for her life, and she would have had nowhere left to go. Not home, to her enraged brother. Not to the woods, not with her baby. This was her final hope. This was her last chance to be free.
And me? There are a thousand places I could go. I could go back up the mountain and let the dragon turn me into some great wild beast. I could continue south until I make it out of the woods altogether, and then I could run back to my uncle and spit in his eye.
I could stay here in front of these stones—stare at them until the rain and the wind wear me away, or until I grow roots, like a girl in a story, and turn into my namesake tulip, bright and bold and helpless.
Then
, with the wind blowing through the trees and the sunlight glinting on the two stones, it comes to me: a memory so deep it’s been well buried for years and years, so long I’d think I was making it up, except I know it’s true. I’ve become so still inside, so empty in the last months that now I can touch each thought within me, feel its texture, its importance. This one is bright and sharp and real. This one makes my heart beat fast, before I even know what it’s about.
First, there was a sword. It scraped from its scabbard, harsh, like the first loud sound on a day when you’ve had no sleep. It shone in the sun, clean, bright. It was mesmerizing. I was watching from the doorway, and I saw it all, and I saw the way the lords, my mother, my Gramps, even my uncle watched the steel gleam, as if it wasn’t theirs to control, as if they’d nothing to do with it.
The body of my mother’s servant already lay on the ground.
My mother didn’t try to run when my uncle swung the sword her way. My Gramps did—not away, but toward her, dropping his horse’s reins, pushing through the lords, who stood silent, as if turned to stone.
The woods were whispering my mother’s name.
My uncle drew back his hand, and a spark struck from the sword’s tip. My Gramps screamed. I remember that. It wasn’t my mother. She stood straight, maybe in disbelief, maybe in acceptance. But my Gramps screamed, and it was a sound that made my breathing come fast, as it hadn’t before, not when these visitors rode up all grim-faced, not even when that sword scraped free—and I left the doorway to clamber down the steps, stumbling as well, toward my mother.
It was so fast, I could have missed it. As my uncle slid the sword forward, my Gramps reached him, grabbed at his arm, and my uncle swung the sword his way almost without looking, as hard as anything, and my Gramps crumpled to the ground. And then, easy, as if it were nothing, my uncle swung his sword back again and then forward, one steady motion. When he drew it back once more, my mother folded with only a sigh, and it was done.
My uncle turned toward me then. I’d stopped before reaching them, as my thoughts had stopped, as the world had stopped, as the whispers through the woods had stopped, cut off with my mother’s breath. My Gramps—though I’d never met him then—said, through his pain, “Roderick, let the girl live . . . I’ll give you the kingdom.”
My uncle looked down at his father and around at his men, who were shifting now, their eyes wide. He held his sword to the side, and a lord came to take it from him at once. Then he looked at me again, long and steady. I saw that darkness in his face for the very first time, and there wasn’t a speck of guilt there, and he didn’t come over to comfort me or speak some gentle word. Still holding my gaze, his voice flat, he said, “We’ll see. If this is enough to stop them, she can live.” Then another lord came forward to lift my mother, and I didn’t see anything more because someone was raising me onto a horse, and my Gramps behind me.
“What’s your name then, little one?” he said into my ear. I could hear the scream left over in his words, a harsh scrape like the scrape of that sword as it slid out into the light.
“Marni,” I said. His arms were tight around me. I watched the soft spot between the horse’s twitching ears.
“Marni,” he repeated, bending round to look me in the face. “I am to be your Gramps.” I saw for the first time those deep, intense eyes, that already silvering hair, the determination that never once faded, that saved me then and kept me living all those long years to come. It’s an expression I’ve never seen in the lady’s face, nor in the dragon’s, nor in any of the woods folk’s. Those of the woods can’t help what they do. If they say they can’t live without you, or that they’ll make a bargain but otherwise they’ll take your land and your people, or if they send you tempting dreams to draw you out of your dull, everyday life, through the woods, and up into the wind-strewn sky—well, you can’t much blame them for it. It’s who they are, and they can’t go and change it.
But people, now. We’re not as strong as they are, or as clever, or as filled to dripping with all sorts of unnatural powers. We can’t lead them to their deaths with a light so bright and beautiful it’s like to make you cry. We can’t promise them impossible things and then deliver, hand them their every wish on a golden platter.
Could be, though, that we’ve got something just as terrifying, something just as likely to confound them.
It’s what my Gramps had when he stepped in front of my uncle’s blade and when he spoke for me, a crying little thing he’d never seen before, and gave up his throne to keep me safe.
It’s what my mother had when she ran as fast as she could from the dragon and all his people, and the prince and all his army, for the sake of the tiny spark inside her that was going to be me.
It’s what the queen had when she freed me from the city prison, well knowing that the king would near to kill her if he found out.
It’s what I had, I guess, when I turned the dragon’s spell inside out, and when I told the Lord of Ontrei I’d not marry him, and when I stayed with my Gramps all those years when I could have gone off to the woods.
It’s our choices. It’s our changing, every day, into creatures who might do something completely different from the day before. It’s our stupid stubbornness and our constant unpredictability, and the irrational way we have of holding on to our love, our anger, our hate, letting them grow within us until they’re a part of us as sure as our hands and feet, as sure as the laughter that catches on our breath, the moonlit tears in our eyes.
It’s a magic too, in its way, and times are I reckon the dragon’s happy to leave us our kingdom, happy to stay away.
After all, it didn’t do him much good to send his trees after her, did it? She was only right next door, and he didn’t dare come get her. The woods were whispering her name that day, so why didn’t he send them in to save her? It bounds around inside my head, that thought, that question, and I can’t get rid of it, no more than I can make the names on these stones leap up into people, laughing, smiling at me, knowing me for the baby girl that learned to sit up and clap her hands, and made herself dirty digging in the flowers, and watched the leaves flutter on the dragon’s trees for the first time right in this same garden.
I open my palm and look down at it, at the ring gleaming softly in the sunlight. I lift it between my first finger and my thumb, and I slide it onto the middle finger of my left hand. I twist it round. It’s snug; it will stay.
As I pull my right hand away, I brush against my vengeance. It unfolds itself, drifts out from my arm. It hovers, looking at me. It’s still wondering what I want. The king? it asks, and somehow I hear it clear in my head. I’ll kill the king?
And yes, it is his fault. It wasn’t hers, the woman who stood so still before that sword. It wasn’t mine, the tiny thing that watched and then buried the memory so deep I only now found it again.
But it wasn’t as simple as just being his fault, neither. And anyway, here, with those stones staring back at me, I’ve not the will to wish for death. There’s only one thing I want, and no magic could give it to me.
So I shake my head at my making. It’s soft in the light, insubstantial, drifting like a kite or a thought. I say, “I want the woman this ring belongs to,” and I lift up my hand for the vengeance to see.
It comes closer. It wraps itself round my finger, curls between the gold band and my skin. A princess? it says. A darling princess?
“She was,” I say. “She was a princess. Not anymore.”
I will bring her to you. It unwraps itself from my finger, pulls away. Wait here. Then it’s gone, up into the sky, over the woods, lost in the bright white sun.
It makes my eyes tear up to think on that moonlight thing traveling the world over, looking for a person who doesn’t exist. Could be it’ll keep on forever. Could be it’ll pull itself to bits and fade away and disappear, still searching for nothing. My wrist is bare without it, but I twist the ring again, and I don’t miss it.
There’s something else I ought to
be doing. Cutting flowers or some such to leave with them. But there’s nothing here, only weeds and rocks. I don’t even feel the urge to clean their stones, to make the words show clear. It’s right to let the grasses cover them over. It’s right to let them fall back into the way of things.
So I only kneel down and press my cheek against their names, first the one I don’t know and then the one I do, the one that threads its way into my dreams and hopes and tears. I stay like that as the air grows cool, warming her stone with my skin.
Nine
I AM WAVERING.
I don’t leave the clearing all the next day, or the next. I don’t know what I am to do.
Or, I know what I am to do, but I don’t know if I can do it. I escaped from the dragon, yes, but that was only barely. I ran from his folk, but I got away only because I never stopped running, never turned to look back at them, never gave them a moment to get inside my head again.
Could be, if I darted to the south, I’d make it out through the last of the trees before the little ones surrounded me, before the lady grabbed me tight. That’s where I was running when I landed here: to the king’s land, back to my mother’s kind, back to my Gramps. Then, I thought only of getting away, nothing of what happens after that. Nothing of what happened when she went back.
Now, though, sitting by my mother’s stone, I can’t stop thinking on it, and I know I can’t go south. Instead, I’m readying myself for that last climb, where I might well lose myself forever. I’m readying myself to answer the question that needs answering.
When you’ve been running for so long, it’s not an easy thing to stop, to turn yourself around and look clear at what you’ve been running from. It’s easier to sit, and twist your mother’s ring, and feel the breeze drift past. It’s easier to wait today, and then tomorrow.