A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

  It’s the next day, not long before midday, that I hear crashing through the trees off to the west. The dragon’s folk have been flitting here and there in the woods round about the clearing since I arrived. They make their own sorts of noises, but those blend in with the wind and the soft padding of the ordinary beasts. This crashing isn’t from a fairy or even a griffin or a phoenix. It’s the sort of clumsy noise that sounds all through the woods—the sort that comes only from someone not caring if anyone hears, or not aware enough to realize what they’re doing. The sort that comes only from a human.

  Could be it’s another girl, another Thea, running off to the dragon. But it’s a louder crashing than one young girl would make, and girls never run off together. Then I hear a whinny, soft, but it threads its way through the trees to me. And then I hear a voice, calming: “It’s all right, girl.” It’s a voice I’ve heard in my head many times since I left the castle, as I’m knitting with the lady, as I’m sitting in the cave looking out over the mountains and remembering conversations, laughter, the warmth of velvet chairs and a fire.

  It’s not a voice I’ve heard in truth, though, for many long months.

  I’m standing before I think it. I’m across the clearing, to the edge of the western woods. The speaking owl there swivels its head to stare at me. The little ones push themselves almost out of the woods’ grasses, gnashing their teeth, waving their weapons.

  She’s moving northward. She’s almost past the clearing.

  “Aunt!” I call. “Aunt, over here!”

  I wait, straining to hear. I think of turning my ears into those of a bat or a wolf, but I haven’t changed myself, not a bit, since I came to the clearing. I haven’t risked it.

  There’s silence in the woods. The owl swivels his head back; the little ones turn too, all still.

  And then: “Marni? Marni, is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me!” I call. “Come this way!”

  The crashing starts again, but it’s moving toward me now, and then she comes into view, my uncle’s wife, dressed all in plain dark cotton, her hair piled up on her head. She starts running as soon as she sees me, or as near to running as she can get through the underbrush. She’s leading two fine mares—the gray I used to go out riding on with Edgar, and a white.

  They come into the clearing, and she throws out her arms, reins and all, to fold me into a hug.

  “Aunt,” I gasp. “Aunt, what are you doing here?”

  “Oh, my dear,” she says, pulling back to hold me at arm’s length.

  For half a moment, looking at her brilliant smile, it’s as though I never went to the woods at all, but live still in my uncle’s castle, in the care of his queen. I find my eyes tearing up for some fool reason.

  “Oh, my dear, I wasn’t sure I’d ever find you.”

  I shake my head. “In these woods, Aunt, you’d be lucky not to get yourself lost instead.”

  “Yes, well.” She lets me go. “To be perfectly truthful, Marni, I didn’t feel there was another choice.”

  “You haven’t—you haven’t run away to the woods?” I’m gaping at her, I know. It’s the most unlikely thing I can think of—my uncle’s practical wife, taking herself to the monsters.

  But no, she’s shaking her head, giving me a half smile. “No, not like that. I’ve come to find you.” She looks around the clearing, at the ruined house, at the tumbled well. “I never expected to succeed so soon.”

  “You wouldn’t have if you’d come a few days earlier.” I take her arm and lead her farther into the clearing. She sits next to me on a broken stone wall and lets the reins lie loose in her hands. The horses start nibbling at the grass.

  She’s looking somewhat like I feel—stunned, unbalanced. I give her a few minutes, but my curiosity’s raging, and soon I say, “Why did you come for me, then?”

  She looks over, rueful. “It’s not enough just to want you back?”

  I only hold her gaze, impassive, until she says, “No, I don’t suppose it would be enough. I always hoped you’d found a place to be happy out here, even if it hasn’t been easy at court these last months.” Her words fill the clearing, make it even less magical than before. I near forget the many eyes watching from the trees as she goes on. “After you left . . . well, at first there was a sort of peace. The woods began drawing back, and the lords were so relieved they forgot that without you around, the king had no heir.” She stops, and then says, “In the last few months, though, they’ve remembered.”

  “There’s been trouble?” I say.

  “Not yet,” she says, “not full out, anyway. Still, hardly anyone listens to Roddy anymore, and it’s only a matter of time. A few nights before I left—we were at dinner, the whole court, and there was a scuffle over who would sit where. Ontrei’s been at the king’s right hand again, and no one disputes that. But Roddy has been keeping old Handon in the chair to my left, and Lord Beau of Cavarell decided he had something to say about that. He took poor Handon’s seat before the man could totter into it. Of course, the whole Handon clan rose up, and the Cavarells rose up against them—they were pulling knives, Marni!—and I don’t know what would have happened if Ontrei hadn’t shouted them down. He had his own men there, enough of them that when he gave Handon back his seat, Lord Beau only muttered dark things to himself and went to sit elsewhere.

  “It won’t last forever, though. One day there will be violence. Possibly against Roddy, even, or—or me, though at the moment they hardly view me as a threat.” Her voice is wavering now, so soft I scarce can hear it. “A good joke, maybe. Not a threat.”

  “Aunt—”

  She cuts me off. “That’s not why I’ve come.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, Marni.”

  I wait. She’s looking away from me, and there’s something there, in the way she holds herself so careful, so tensed. She says, softly, “It was the dreams.”

  My skin prickles, and I think of the dreams I used to have, waking and asleep—of the woods, and the dragon, and the lady beckoning me away. She said she didn’t come for the woods. “What dreams?” I say.

  She says, “It was only three days ago, that morning before I woke. You were there, as real as you are now. You were standing in a clearing just like this one, and you were telling me to come find you.

  “No,” she says, and she’s shaking her head, and her hold on the reins is tightening, tightening so the horses look up at her, twitching their ears. “It wasn’t as straightforward as that. You were there, and looking at me, but you weren’t saying anything in words. You might have been crying. Or singing. You held a golden ring stretched out toward me, so I could see the moonlight glinting off of it. And I knew—I knew—that you wanted me to come to you. It was a compulsion so strong that when I woke, I was out of bed and through my door almost at once.

  “I didn’t go that day. It was difficult. It was an ache inside me, as though I had lost something terribly important and the only way to find it was to leave for the woods immediately. I ignored it as best as I could, until that night when I was falling asleep, and I could see you there again, behind my eyelids, even before I had drifted off. I knew you would be calling me all night long. There were tears on my face, and my heart was racing. Roddy was still at dinner; I had begged out early with a headache.”

  She stops. I’m afraid to reach toward her, afraid to startle her out of her memories. But she’s staring so blindly, and I put my hand over hers. She turns to look at me. She says, still staring, her voice gone all low, “Instead of sleeping, I forced open my eyes. I don’t know how I didn’t scream. There was a—a creature. Not a living creature, Marni. A thing of white light and air, glowing. It was sitting on my chest. I didn’t move. I’ve never seen such a thing. I’ve never heard of one, not even in the stories of the sorcerers from my land.

  “It wasn’t living, but it seemed at the same time somehow more alive than you or I. It seemed truer than we are, more essential. I didn’t scream, and I couldn’t breat
he, either. It was looking at me, and I knew that if it wanted to, it could kill me with a thought, maybe with a dream. It must have been the thing sending me those dreams. I knew that at once, too.

  “But it didn’t kill me.”

  “No,” I say, before I know I am saying it. “It never would.”

  “It flew from my chest,” says my aunt, “and I breathed in and out, and followed it over to the window. It hovered just outside. I heard—Marni, I heard it saying, Find her. It waited, and what could I do? It wasn’t a thing you could refuse, not without tearing a hole inside yourself, not without going against the deepest part of yourself. I think I told it that I would, or maybe it could tell without me saying anything. It turned, and it shot off north toward the mountains, and I watched it go.”

  “And you came to find me.”

  “That very night,” says my aunt. “I came to find you.”

  I let go of her hand, and I take off the ring I’ve twisted round my finger. I hold it out to her.

  She reads it. “This was the ring you were holding in your dream.”

  “Yes,” I say. “The creature you saw was of my making.”

  She shakes her head, turning the ring so it catches the sunlight. “But why?”

  Now the tears are hanging at the edge of my lashes, and I blink, hard. “It was meant for a vengeance, but instead it brought me what I wanted.”

  “You wanted me?”

  “I wanted a princess,” I say, “a woman who used to be a princess.”

  She hands the ring over, and I slip it back onto my finger. “Your mother,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. “A thing not possible.”

  It’s then, as the queen tilts her head away, that I see it, the flower she’s stuck into her piled-up hair. I reach out a hand toward it, brush it lightly. “Aunt . . .” I say, and my voice is near to breaking.

  “Yes,” she says. She tugs it out, holds it between us. “A tulip. That’s what they call you sometimes, isn’t it? I brought it to remind me, you see. I brought it to keep the voices away, to help me remember what I’d come for. I didn’t know how long it would take me to find you.”

  She hands it to me. I cup the flower in my hand, feeling its heft, its silky smooth petals. I worry that it won’t stick itself in my hair, and I’ve nowhere else to put it, so I thread it through the buttons on the front of my nightgown, the same nightgown I was wearing that night I ran from the prison, the night the queen handed me the key. I’ve been wearing this dress a year and a season, and it still holds together, and it still shows white in places, the places left clean after ten days in a city cell. Woods magic, I guess. The same that takes the dress away when I turn bird or beast and gives it back the moment I’m human again.

  “Well, Marni,” the queen says, “I’m not your mother, but I’ve come all this way, so I will ask anyway. Will you come back with me? The king has no reason to kill you now. One lord at least would welcome you home. And—I don’t suppose you’ve heard—”

  “My Gramps is back at our hut, and alive,” I say. “I’ve heard. Where did he come from, then?”

  “You can ask him yourself if you come with me.”

  And I near say yes, just like that. It would be easy. To get on that gray mare and leave it all behind, to forget my year in the woods, to give up the question this clearing put into my mind.

  But she’s looking at me so appealingly, as hopeful as a green spring bud, and instead of convincing me to follow her away, she’s reminding me of all the things that choice would put at risk. There, in my aunt’s kind eyes, I’m finding the strength to go back up the mountain.

  “I can’t come with you yet, Aunt.” I say it slow. I’d rather not say it at all. “There’s something I have to do beforehand.”

  She sighs, but she doesn’t argue. “And what will that be, Marni? Please tell me it’s something outside these woods.”

  “No, it’s here,” I say. “There’s no need for you to come. We’re near enough to the king’s land; if you go back a few dozen paces, you can wait outside the woods. It shouldn’t take long, not more than a day, I’d think.”

  But she slides off the wall and shakes out her skirt, and I love her more than anyone in the world, almost, as she raises an eyebrow at me and says, “My dear, the sun is rising higher every moment. Shall we be getting on?”

  She hands me the reins to the lovely gray. I pat her down, and she snuffles at my hair. When I mount up, a piece of me settles back into place. It’s not all forgotten, then. I could ride this beauty all day and never want to stop.

  When the queen is mounted as well, we share a long look, not smiling, but each as determined as the other, and then we push off together, out of my mother’s clearing and back to the shadows.

  Ten

  SHE WAS RIGHT next door, and he didn’t dare go get her.

  This is what I’m thinking when the woods sends its soldiers after us. The woods’ soldiers don’t use swords or spears. They don’t rush up at you all violently, so that you have to fight them off with fist and steel.

  They use beauty. They use curiosity.

  There runs a centaur, a bit off to the right, and I’ve never met one before, not in all my months with the dragon. He looks back at me, straight into my eyes, and I know that if I follow him, he will take me to hidden glens and breathtaking views, the like of which I’ve never seen even in my dreams.

  There flies a tiny winged girl between my horse’s ears. She zips and tumbles, and her laughter dances like raindrops. I could join her. I could twist through the wind like that; I could laugh like her.

  There gleams an opening to a tunnel beneath the woods, to caves I’ve visited before, where crystals shine with a light all their own and your echoes in the greater chambers speak to you of things you’ve never said.

  There floats a spirit, all shimmering blue and white. Spirits know such things, they’ve been around so long. If you can coax them close, they will tell you stories so strange you’ll forget to sleep or eat. And this one’s only inches away, drifting along beside my mare, keeping pace with us.

  I think if I were walking on my own two feet, I wouldn’t be able to resist them. I wouldn’t be able to keep from leaping up and sprouting wings, or throwing myself forward into a beast with paws and a mouth full of teeth, or just running, mind lost, after the nearest wonder.

  But every step my mare takes is slow, careful. They don’t have power over her. She’s as solid, as steady as they come. She’ll run her heart out, and she’ll whinny for the joy of a springtime day, but she’s not so easily lured away from her path, away from her rider.

  And the queen’s every bit as unflustered. I know she sees the things I do. Her eyes are darting all about; her mouth is tight. But she’s not the sort who would have ever been seduced by the woods. That helps too, to have her next to me, my clear-sighted, reasonable aunt.

  I keep one eye on her, and I concentrate on the feel of my sturdy mare beneath my legs, and I hold on to that thing I need to remember about the dragon and my mother.

  Once, a bird nearly does me in. Not a human-faced bird, not a magical bird in any way, just a starling sweeping over my head so I feel the air move. When I look up to see it shooting away in front of me, I rise out of my saddle before I know what I’m doing, and I think the queen sees it, sees the way I’m turning all over feathers and beginning to shrink, because she pulls up in front of my mare and says my name, sharp: “Marni!”

  She jolts me into myself.

  I sit back on my horse, who’s turned her head to roll an eye at me. “She was right next door,” I say, stamping it into my head, “and he didn’t dare go get her.”

  The queen eyes me. “Should I know what that means?”

  “No.” I smile at her. “Thank you for that, Aunt. Without you here, I would have flown away.”

  She looks me over for a long moment. “I don’t suppose you ever knew what those days were like for us, when you were locked up in the city prison. Or knew how many gi
rls were tricked away by the monsters the woods kept sending out into our gardens, over the river.” She pauses. “Not that any of them turned into birds.”

  I ignore that last part. “He doesn’t take the ones who don’t want to go anyway.”

  “Who doesn’t? The dragon?”

  I nod. I don’t want to name him aloud, not here. It’s only superstition, but in a magical woods, I reckon superstition counts more than usual.

  “Is that what’s going on here, Marni?” she asks. All around us the woods folk are poking their heads out, listening in, no doubt. “Are they tricking you into what you want anyway?”

  I glare around at all the eyes and teeth and tails. Some scurry away out of sight; more only blink and keep on staring. Cheeky little things. “It’s not that simple, is it?” I say, and pull my horse to the side to get around the queen. “Not for me, and probably not for the girls he lured away, either. You can want a whole slew of things. It’s what you choose that ought to matter.”

  Then we’re riding on again. The queen stays nearer to me now, I notice. The woods folk keep on with their songs and wild beauties, but there’s no more need for the queen to bring me back from the brink. I get the sense that they aren’t trying as hard now, maybe because we’ve resisted this far—maybe because they can see her there, jaw set, ready to punch the first one that comes too close, as hard as ever she can, straight on its crooked nose.

  I knew the lady would be waiting. I’ve never entered the woods before without her there, just around a tree or beyond a rise, ready to keep me company through my rambles if I would let her, wanting to take my hand and draw me off through the trunks.

  She leaves us alone as we ride through the last of the lowlands and across the foothills. She’s nowhere to be found either as we begin to climb the mountain, but when I know we’re getting close, when the trees start to thin and the air grows cool, she’s there, standing just out of our path beneath a tall pine, hands empty for once. Her dress falls like another sweep of needles from her shoulders to her feet.