A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

  When he opens his mouth to speak, I see that missing tooth. “You might not believe me, Marni, but I’d rather not kill you if there’s no need. I don’t rejoice in spilling my family’s blood.” He looks around again at where we are. Maybe it’s the moonlight, the way it makes the clearing seem like another world, silver and sparkling. Maybe he’s had time to think since I went to the woods. Whatever it is, something eases in his face, and he says, softly, “I would have—I would rather have never had a need to kill her.”

  His words hang in the air. There’s no fit reply to them. Nothing but a scream or a knife in his heart. It isn’t only the king who is going to find it difficult to live in peace.

  When he looks back at me, he must see the rage on my face. He blinks and turns away, uneasy.

  This time, the Lord of Ontrei breaks the silence. “May we offer you a ride home, lady?”

  I see the king glare at him. I keep my own gaze on my mare’s back as I say, “Thank you, but no. The queen is tired, and I’m wishing to be getting on.”

  “I’m well,” the queen says at once.

  I twist to smile at her. “I promise I’ll not go back to the woods again. I’m only wanting to see my Gramps.” I reach out a hand, and she lifts her own to take it. She is bone weary; I can see it in her eyes. But I can see, too, the relief she feels at having me back, the honest joy in that bright smile. I squeeze her hand. “Thank you,” I say, and I hope she knows I mean not just for coming to get me, but for missing me at all, and for giving me that key, and for her friendship those weeks in the castle.

  She nods.

  I turn then, and I finally look at the pretty roan to the king’s right and the grinning man on her back. Oh, that grin.

  “Lady.” He gives me a bow from the saddle.

  “My Lord of Ontrei,” I say, quite cool, or as cool as I can anyway, but I feel his gaze right through me, and it heats up my cheeks.

  And then I can’t help it anymore. I let myself smile, a great big smile that I’m sure sets my eyes to sparkling all brilliantly. I know I’ll regret this smile in days to come—he’s getting that look again, just as if he knew he could have me for the asking, just as if he felt himself almost crowned a king.

  That trouble’s still away in the future, though, and I let him think what he will for now. The king’s face is twisting as he looks past me, toward the empty doorway of his sister’s last house. “Uncle,” I say.

  A shudder goes through him.

  I don’t say anything more. It’s enough. What he’s seeing now, what he’s remembering—he’ll remember it every time he sees me. Every time I call him “Uncle.” He’ll never be free of it.

  I edge my mare between them—the tortured king and his charming lord—and I kick her into a walk and then to a canter, and soon we’re galloping across the hills, into the kingdom and out of the woods for sure.

  And as I’m hunched down over my mare’s back, hill after hill rolling by, something rushes over me, something I’ve never felt before. It’s in the soft wind blowing past my face. It’s in the grasses under our feet and the stars above our heads. It’s in the close huffing of my mare’s breath, and most of all, it’s in the thought of where we’re going.

  They kept offering it to me, didn’t they? The lady, the queen, the dragon. Even Edgar. They kept telling me I’d found my way home. They were wrong, though. I didn’t know it full until now, until the open meadows and the pounding hoofbeats lifted up and wrapped me round, whispering, Home. We’re going home to Gramps.

  Eleven

  HE’S SITTING OUT on the porch.

  It’s the middle of the afternoon two days later; I’ve slept in meadows, rejoicing in the brush of long grasses against my skin, looking up now and again to track the moon on her travels all across the wide sky. I’ve ridden as fast as ever I can so the news of my return won’t get here first. I didn’t stop in the king’s city. I took the road around, and soon enough I was riding up to that turnoff you might miss if you weren’t paying enough attention, but I was paying attention, and there’s no way in the world that I could miss it.

  Then I’m coming down the hill, through the bushes, and I see the porch columns first, wrapped round with morning glories as they always used to be. I see a flash of white—his hair, I guess, though it was half black still when last I saw it. And then there he is, sitting with a new cane across his knees, watching me come. Alive.

  “Back so soon, Emmy?” he calls out as I’m rounding the last of the bushes. He’s hardly changed; he sits as tall as ever, and when he turns to look at me, his eyes are as clear and sharp. There is that white in his hair, though.

  He doesn’t say another thing. Just looks at me.

  I get down off my mare and tie her to the porch railing. Then I stand there at the bottom of the steps, waiting.

  “Well, Marni,” my Gramps says at last. He takes a breath, as though to go on, but instead lets it slowly out, gripping his cane.

  “Well, Gramps,” I say, and then, to give him time, I walk up the steps and slide along the wall until I’m leaning in my old place, hands behind my back, feet bare against the porch’s wood. Someone must have cleaned this place before he moved back in. The chairs are dry and strong, newly made, I reckon. The leaves that covered the porch have been brushed away. The bushes that threatened to take it over have been pruned back.

  It’s as it was.

  I wait for him to speak again, looking out over our yard to where the path crawls up the hill. I’ve waited two years. I can wait a minute more.

  It’s three or four before he says, “Where have you been?”

  I smile, not at him. “Why don’t you go first?”

  I’ve forgotten what it’s like, to stand so separate from the ground, from the bugs that crawl all across you, from the plants that brush against your legs. Even the birdsong, shrill and sweet, sounds far off from up here.

  “Please,” he says, “won’t you sit down?”

  It surprises me; I look at him, and then I can’t look away again. The shock is gone. He’s holding tight to the table and to one arm of his chair, holding himself back, maybe. I know every line on his face; I know the curve of his nose and the shape of his ears. I know how they look when he is sad or mad or happy. I’ve never seen the thing that’s on his face now.

  “Please,” he says.

  I walk around him, around the table to the other chair: my chair, the visitors’ chair. I wonder, do the lords and the ladies come again to buy his flowers? Do they bite their tongues to keep from asking after his Tulip?

  “She’s been taking care of you, then,” I say when I’ve sat down, before he can start in on it.

  “Emmy?” he says. “Yes. For you, I think.”

  Seems everything is surprising me today. “But she hardly knows me.”

  “Well, maybe not, then. Maybe she’s taking pity on an old, lonely man.”

  I’m like to start crying, I think, and I don’t want that. “I went to the woods,” I say. “I followed the voices, took the lady’s hand, and ran all the way to the dragon in his cave.”

  He’s scarce breathing, he’s that still.

  “I ran away from myself, Gramps. I didn’t think there was nothing left for me.”

  He says, all soft, “What brought you back again?”

  “I’m not going to have a baby, if that’s your guess.”

  “I’m not guessing anything, Marni. I’ve given up on that.”

  I haven’t heard that name from that voice in a lifetime. It’s as if a string’s been plucked somewhere inside, and the note sounds through my bones, across my skin, changing me, back into something I remembered once.

  “I was wrong,” I say. “It wasn’t enough for me, running about in the woods. I still cared.”

  “About—” He wants to ask it, but he cuts himself off before he can. “About what?” he says instead.

  “About you, yes,” I say. “About words and people and—and horses. About what I was going to grow up into. About
finding out the answers to things.” I can’t say it, not right away, and I stop. He waits. I look him in the eyes; if I’m to ask it, I’m going to ask it right. “Where did you go,” I say, “that night I came back and you were gone?”

  Now he’s the one who looks away, and while he talks, he faces out onto the grasses and the bushes, where the wind sends ripples across the hill and the sun strikes dazzles along the path’s rocky dirt. “You were growing up,” he says. “They were all after you: the village lads, the lords, and . . . the others. You didn’t want any of them. You wanted to stay with me here, growing flowers until you died. But it wasn’t going to be like that, Marni. Not for you. It couldn’t be.

  “You were—what, sixteen? I’d seen it before. I saw it with your friend, Annel. She wasn’t ready for whatever was coming her way. She didn’t want it, so she ran, just as your mother had run. And they, both of them, had a thousand more reasons to stay than you did—and neither of them had the very trees folding in around them, coming in closer every day. You didn’t realize, maybe, but I knew. I knew one afternoon you wouldn’t come back from the woods.

  “Oh, yes, I knew,” he says with the twitch of a smile, turning back toward me. “You thought you were so clever, my girl. But you had so little happiness, and so much to weigh on you, and I didn’t want to take away the bit of freedom you had. You weren’t yet the age for the fairies to be whisking you away.

  “Until one day, you were.

  “And I couldn’t stand it.” His voice has dropped from his storytelling lilt to the murmur of a confession. “I couldn’t stay here to see you disappear too, wait to see whether or not you’d ever come back, with a baby or without one. I couldn’t lose you, Marni.”

  “What did you do?” I say. His every word is sounding in me now, shifting everything I thought I knew. “What did you do to stop me?”

  “I made a deal,” he says. “I knew that as long as I was around, there’d be no place for you at court, and that was the farthest I could get you away from all this.” He sweeps a hand around the porch, the yard, through the door toward the back. “Not just the woods, but the loneliness, the exile. He promised to find you a place in the king’s castle, to watch you, to keep you from the woods if he could manage it.”

  “You made a deal with the king?” I say. I scarce can credit such a thing.

  But he is laughing quietly, shaking his head. “No, Marni,” he says. “The king knew nothing about it.”

  “Who, then?” I say.

  He pauses, his face all serious. “I’m not sure I should tell you. You had a vengeful streak, even as a child. There was a village boy once, a year or two older than you, who went stomping around in the daffodils when his mother wasn’t looking. Do you remember this?”

  I shake my head.

  “Oh, you screamed when you saw it. You vowed destruction upon the poor lad, who went crying to his mother. You thought it was the worst of crimes to ruin the flowers. You wanted to tear out his eyes and roll him in mud and shred his little boots until the offending soles were strips of leather.” He’s chuckling. I don’t think he’s ever told me this before. “You would have punished that rascal to within an inch of his life if he hadn’t looked up at his mother, all teary-eyed and scared to death, and begged her not to let the witch get him.”

  “The witch?” I say.

  He shrugs. “Well, there were stories then about what you might grow up to be. The boy must have heard his parents talking. The mother apologized to me, of course, and I would have been a great deal angrier about it, except it gave you a harmless method for getting your revenge.”

  “I cast a spell on him,” I say.

  “You cast a spell on him. You gathered up your roots and your fly wings or whatever it was you thought would be magical enough, and you chanted your little heart out and sent him a plague, or nightmares or something similar.”

  “I hope I didn’t really,” I say.

  He looks at me. “Could you have?”

  I don’t answer that. In truth, I don’t know. “Did anything bad happen to him?”

  “He grew up a happy and healthy young lad,” my Gramps says, “and with no hard memories, or anyway nothing that kept him from coming by to court you twelve years later.”

  “Jack?” I say.

  “Henry.”

  I nod, as though I remember one from the other anymore. I say, as if it’s a joke, “I promise I won’t cast a spell on whoever made you a deal.”

  “Ah.” He doesn’t say anything more for a moment. Then, “The Lord of Ontrei,” he says. “The one who walked down from the castle to ask for your hand.”

  “I remember.” I wonder what he knows of my months in the city, of how I could never forget that day now.

  “The things he said—I knew he was right. Roderick had left us alone for so many years, I didn’t want to think it would change. But the woods were moving, and Roderick had always believed your mother’s death had sent them back the last time they were coming in. He’s not a bloodthirsty man, Marni, but when he thinks a thing must be done to keep his kingdom safe, he does not hesitate to do it. And Lord Edgar’s words—they showed me how your uncle’s mind was turning yet again, this time against you.”

  “And?” I say, a whisper. “What did you do?”

  “You made it clear that you would go nowhere if I was still around. And in any case, I thought Roderick would be more likely to take you in if I wasn’t here. No king feels completely safe while his predecessor’s living just next door.

  “So the next day, when I woke and you’d disappeared again into the woods, I sent a message with a farmer’s boy to the Lord of Ontrei at the castle. He came down to the hut, and we made a deal. I would disappear, make it seem as though I had died. When you came back home—if you came back home—the Lord of Ontrei would be there to offer you a place, to bring you back to the castle with him, to give you a new life.”

  “You meant me to marry him.”

  My Gramps smiles, but it’s tentative. “I never told him that you would. But he agreed the castle was the safest place for you to be, both from the woods and from the king. With all the lords and ladies there to watch, we thought he’d hesitate before doing you any violence. And I think Lord Edgar had some idea that he could win you after a time.”

  Oh, didn’t he just. “Where did you go?” I say.

  “Lord Edgar sent me away with some of his men. They put me on a horse and took me with them, all the way to the Ontrei estate on the northern meadows.”

  “You didn’t even take your cane.”

  “Authenticity,” he says. “We thought of everything.”

  “I see.” And I do—how they’d been anticipating my every move. How they’d figured it all out—that I’d go straight to the castle, that I’d begin to fall for Edgar. Only it hadn’t turned out quite as they’d planned. “You were wrong, though, weren’t you? It didn’t matter to the king in the end whether I was there or here, not with the woods still moving in like they were. He was bent on taking my head no matter what you did.”

  “Yes,” says my Gramps. “Both of us got that part wrong. We misjudged—him, the woods . . .” He’s looking as if he wants to say more, but he pauses.

  I dash a hand across my cheeks, angrylike, and blink my eyes back into focus.

  “Marni, if I’d known—”

  I don’t let him finish. “What did they do with you, then, when the trees came in? I reckon Lord Edgar’s place was well buried by them.”

  “It was a funny thing,” he says. “On three sides of us were the trees, going farther and farther south, but his house and his yard and his stables—they were spared. It was like an island in a sea of green. I’d never seen a thing like that.”

  I stare at him. “Yes, you have,” I say, slow.

  “You mean this hut? I heard it was left alone as well, but I never saw it. I never came back until the woods were nearly gone.”

  “No,” I say. “I mean when you went with the army up north, th
ose seventeen years ago. I mean when they killed my mother.”

  Now it’s his turn to stare. He doesn’t ask how I would know such a thing. Maybe he figures I’ve seen people and gone places he’d not be able to imagine since we last spoke. Well, and I have.

  “It’s still there,” I go on. “Still untouched by the woods, that house and their garden and their stones. I reckon—I reckon the same thing that kept back the dragon’s woods there kept them back from you, too. You both were willing to stand up to him, weren’t you, to keep him from what he wanted? You—and her.”

  “You’ve been there.” It’s a breath, no question in it.

  I nod.

  It seems the world must have turned itself over and inside out since we started talking, or at least that the sun would have gone clear across the sky or the birds would have changed their songs. But no. When we stop long enough to hear it all, to see it all again, it’s just as it was. It’s a perfect day, really. Breezy, sunny, blue and green, not a drop of rain or an ominous cloud. This is how I remember every summer day of my childhood. I reckon children don’t feel cold and heat as much as older folks. I reckon if the sun is shining and they’re able to run through a meadow, pick flowers, sing themselves a song, any day seems like this one.

  My Gramps was drawing something before I came riding down to the hut. I see the charcoal and the bit of paper on the table, one part covered by his hand, the other showing half a face—a woman’s face that looks to be smiling.

  I reach out to the pull the sketch toward me; he lifts his hand.

  Her eyes are crinkled up as she laughs; her head turns slightly, as though listening for something, as though ready at any moment to run off on another adventure. She’s like me, I can tell, but she’s all her own, too. There won’t be another just like her, as there won’t be another Gramps or another just like me.