A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

She doesn’t call out to me. She doesn’t slide her voice into my head, even. She watches us make our way up the slope, and I think we could ride right on by without her stopping us.

  It would probably be sensible to do exactly that. I know that’s what the queen would think, and she makes a grab for my reins as I stop my mare and dismount.

  I hand them to her. “I’ll only be a moment,” I say.

  “Marni—” she starts, but without her usual conviction. I remember how the lady froze Edgar up when he saw her out by Gramps and my hut. Seems she’s too much for the queen as well, who’s looking from me to her in a sort of daze.

  I’ve wondered sometimes what role the lady plays in these woods. The dragon is king, that’s sure enough, and she, too, seems something more than the ordinary magic folk. For one, there’s only her. No cousins, no sisters. Even the griffins and the phoenixes have one another; even the rarest of the creatures, like the centaurs, aren’t one of a kind. The lady is just the lady.

  And for another, she’s the only one I really know. I’d recognize a little one or a hawk, maybe, that had run or flown with me. But the lady’s the one that talks to me. She’s the one that waited by my Gramps’s and my hut, day after day, and taught me curses and showed me how to wrap a sunbeam round my finger, how to sing her songs.

  She’s the one who knows who I am more than anyone else in the woods. More than anyone outside of them too, excepting my Gramps. She knows the part of me that loves this place. She knows the bit that rejoices in the mystery, in the strangeness. She knows because she rejoices too.

  I step over to her, across the rubble and the tough weeds of the mountain. A mouse darts between rocks. I’ve come upon her a thousand times like this, her waiting beneath a tree, watching me. I used to laugh, running to her, jumping up next to her on her log. Time lasted forever then. Those afternoons, they smoothed out long, filled with adventures, wonder, the lady’s crafts. She called me Tulip, and she taught me half the things I ever knew.

  This walk is all of those walks into the woods toward the lady—and nothing like them.

  She doesn’t speak or move when I get up close. She doesn’t try to take my hand.

  I say, “Aren’t you going to ask me what I want?”

  She’s so still, I start to wonder if she’s real or just a spirit playing tricks on me, taking up her form. She opens her mouth, the mouth I never can see but always somehow sense. She draws in a breath; it rushes through her as though she were all hollow. “You used to sit with me,” she says, and her voice is high and sweeter than I have ever heard it. “You were perfection, my dark flower.”

  I’ve heard that before, and I’ve said this, too: “I grew up.”

  She shakes her head at me, back and forth and back. “You don’t have to.”

  I smile at her, a small smile, not because it’s funny, but because I know it’s true, what she says, and I taste salt from the tears I didn’t know were sliding down my face. “I know,” I say. “But I grew up anyway.”

  She holds out a hand to me, an ordinary hand that doesn’t glow but feels all cold when I take it. She shivers. She looks at me with those tiny suns, and when she speaks, the sweetness is gone, and it is so eerie, so thin, little hairs stand up all over my skin. “Come along, then, Tulip,” she says. “I’ll take you to the dragon.”

  I beckon the queen to follow behind with our mares as the lady leads me upward, and after a moment I slide the flower out of the front of my nightgown and hold it tight in my hand.

  The lady leaves me at the edge of the tree line. She drops my hand and steps back into the woods. I wait for the queen to come up alongside me. She’s down from her horse now as well, leading both of them by their reins.

  She looks at me, doesn’t say a thing.

  All along the slope up the last bit of mountain to the dragon’s cave, griffins and phoenixes stand and lounge, and all of them watch us.

  I hold my flower, my tulip, like a talisman, and I start through them. I don’t look to see if the queen is going to follow. I scarce care now whether she does or not. But I can hear the horses’ hooves on the rocks behind me.

  Brave, that woman is, to follow me out among these beasts. And brave, those horses, to come along with her.

  I look at them as we go, the shaggy griffins and the brilliantly feathered phoenixes. I see the glint of their beaks. I see the curve of their muscles, the tendons in their long necks. Annel is among them, over to the west. She’s watching me, too, but there’s nothing different about her gaze, nothing to separate her from the rest. Except I keep on looking at her, and after a bit she does turn away.

  They don’t stop us. They don’t cry their shrill cries or flap their powerful wings. They let us clamber over the rocks to the mouth of the cave.

  We stop there.

  I can hear the harsh breath of the dragon. I can smell the fire, too, of his great belly. I turn and meet the queen’s eyes.

  “Stay here,” I say.

  She looks as if she’s about to argue—she looks round at all our company, and I see the thought of being alone with them clear on her face—but she stops herself and nods.

  “I’ll be here,” she whispers. She’s holding the horses loosely, but they’re backed up against the wall of the cave; they look as though the last thing they want is to go down that hill.

  I leave them there, watching as I slip into the cave.

  It’s dark. I stand for a minute, waiting for the shadows to transform into nooks and boulders.

  He’s in dragon form. I know it from the sound of his breath, and soon enough I see him, a gray shape against the black. I pick my way over near him. He’s lying on the floor of the cave. His head is down on the dirt. He peers at me out of half-lidded eyes.

  “She was right next door,” I say, “and you didn’t dare go and get her.”

  There’s no response. He doesn’t even blink, just keeps on breathing in and out.

  “It’s a question, isn’t it? Why you didn’t go get her, not even when her brother was running her through with his sword.” My hands are cupped around the tulip. I know he sees it. He’s not one to miss a detail like that. But he says nothing about it, doesn’t flick his tail to knock the flower out of my hands.

  “I’ve thought about it, and I think I’ve figured it out. You couldn’t have taken her back. You never could take anyone who didn’t want to come. My mother . . .”

  There, he shuts his eyes a moment, he does. I see him.

  “My mother knew it better than most, didn’t she? The others, the villagers, the lords and ladies, even her brother, they didn’t know not to fear. They thought you could take their land away, and that thought let you come and take them. But my mother had gone into the woods of her own free will, without even the voices pulling her along. She wasn’t going to let you take her away, not once she had a baby to protect. Not once she had me.”

  I’m wondering why he’s still a dragon. Seems he’d have a better chance of swaying my mind in his human shape, and I think he does want to sway my mind. Didn’t he send his army after me? But he keeps still, and he keeps his eyes all slanted at me, as if he’s getting more and more dangerous—or as if he thinks I am.

  I go on. “And then, when she was gone, you couldn’t take me, neither. First there was my Gramps, protecting me with his determination to keep me safe. Could be you thought it over, too, and realized you didn’t know much about raising a baby. After all, I wasn’t going anywhere, and my Gramps had chosen the perfect spot for us, right where your lady could watch me grow day after day. So you waited.

  “But then, when I was finally turning from a girl to a woman, and the woods were drawing me deeper and deeper in, and I was ready to run myself wild, my Gramps up and disappeared, and I went to the castle and slipped from your grasp again.

  “And then it turns out I never did like being pushed one way or the other. Turns out I’ve more than a bit of my mother in me, doesn’t it? Because the more you all tried to make me run, or stay, o
r marry, the more I pushed back, didn’t I? And there’s nothing you can make a girl do if she doesn’t want to. Not even if you’re a great big dragon.”

  Still, he looks sidewise; still, his head rests on the ground and his tail wraps around him, his wings folded tight. But I think, I sense, he’s growing angry.

  It’s not that I think he couldn’t do anything to me. I’m a soft-skinned human, after all, and he’s got teeth and claws the size of plow blades. Doesn’t matter to him that I’m his daughter, maybe. Or then again maybe it does.

  Either way, I fold my legs up right there on the cave floor, and I lay the flower across my lap. I’ll be less likely to run if I’m sitting.

  “Here’s a story,” I say. I rest my hands on the dirt of the cave, feeling it soft and dry beneath my fingers. “There was this girl. She was rich and beautiful and all that. She wanted some adventure, so she ran away to the woods and met a dangerous creature there, all fire and power and passion, and she loved him, in a way. But she was young, and when she knew she was going to have a baby, she ran from him.

  “Well, and can you blame her? The woods are exciting, sure, and magical and so on. But what does a baby want with excitement or magic? A baby wants a warm bed and lots of food and a mother to love it.

  “It was too bad this girl’s family didn’t welcome her back home, but she found a place anyway, with an old friend in a safe house, and she had her baby. And she raised it up to be a child, and then a girl, and then a woman just like her. And everyone left them both alone, because they might not have liked what she did, but it was her choice, wasn’t it? The mother kept her daughter, and the daughter kept her mother, and maybe one day they went back to the woods together, and maybe they didn’t.

  “Nobody sent their armies after her, not armies of trees and not armies of people. It’s not what armies are for, is it? They left her alone to live her life as she wanted.”

  The dragon is breathing harder now. There are puffs of smoke coming from his nostrils; they float to the ceiling and around in the air currents there, this way and that, before they find their way out of the cave. I don’t know if he’s thinking this story over or if he’s near ready to gobble me up in one bite.

  I get up now. I’ve found my courage, and I want to be right close to him when I say this. As I step before his front claws, his tail gives a mighty twitch. I scarce breathe for a moment. He lifts his angular head so that we’re face-to-face. There are the thousand reflections of me, all spiraling through his eyes.

  I say it quiet, because it is dangerous, and because could be that this will hurt him, and I don’t mean to hurt him, not more than I need. It’s just that this has to be said.

  “You killed her, too,” I tell him. Now his whole being is still. Even the breathing, even the smoke puffing has stopped. “You sent your woods out after her people, and they knew it had to do with her, and they killed her for it. If you’d let her be, she’d still be alive, maybe even standing here. She might have come back on her own.”

  He looks away from me, swinging out that great neck to turn his head.

  “If you loved her . . .” I say.

  “Go away.”

  It’s a deep, scratchy voice; it sends a shudder through his scales, and the air drops out of me. I can’t talk; I can’t breathe.

  “Go away,” he says again, “and don’t come back.”

  I’ve heard this voice only twice before, and both times it came as though from far off, as though he were whispering his words into my bones. I’ve never heard him speak this full, not as a dragon. I wonder if she did. I wonder what else he can do but has never showed me. I wonder what I’ll never know now.

  I can’t refuse a voice like that. It’s not the deepness, not the power in it. It’s that it’s steeped, dripping, run all through with sadness, though sadness doesn’t say enough.

  I had thought the woods folk don’t feel things the same way we humans do. They get angry, sure, and they get happy and all the rest. But they don’t soak in their loneliness until it’s in their very breaths, until it spreads through them with each heartbeat. They don’t get themselves so bitter, as I used to be, so that the sweetest foods near choke them to death.

  Turns out, though, I was wrong. I’ve never heard an emptiness, a rawness like the one in the dragon’s voice.

  It takes all I have, everything I am, not to obey at once. “I will,” I say, with a voice that shakes, but I don’t even care, can’t care about a little thing like that just now. “I’ll go away, and maybe I won’t ever come back, but first, listen.”

  We’re staring at each other, and I can’t feel anything but the space between our eyes. I gather all my will and stay there, an inch from the tip of his nose.

  “If you change your mind,” I say, clear and slow, “and decide you want me back after all, you’re not to send your woods again. Not ever again. My land, every bit of it, will be protected. Not only by the king’s army or by the farmers and the villagers with their axes. By me. I know you. I know your woods, and I’m not feared of anything they hold. I’ll come running from wherever I am, and I’ll pick up an axe of my own, and I’ll cut down your trees myself. And what I cut down, dragon, will stay down.

  “For every foot you take from us, I’ll take one from you. For as long as I live, I swear, I will be on the watch. I’ll teach my children, and they’ll teach theirs, of the mysteries of your woods. There will always be someone unafraid, someone unwilling to be swayed by your voices, by your dreams. Someone with a mind of her own.”

  Then I stop and I wait. A minute goes by, or a year.

  The dragon drops his head, only a fraction, but I sense the rest of him too, his shoulders lowering, his haunches relaxing, and I know it for acceptance.

  Then, because I’ll never get the chance again, and because some part of me is breaking, despite everything, to be leaving this beautiful beast, I reach out slowly one more time to touch his neck, to feel the heat of his scales, the wild pounding of his heart. He holds quite still, as still as I am.

  As I’m pulling back, he says, “You are wrong, though. I did love her, dragon’s daughter.”

  I stop, half turned away. “Not enough,” I whisper, only the faintest echo of a sound. Then I keep going, away from him and out of his great dark cave.

  The queen starts to speak as I reach her, but when she sees my eyes, she stops and hands me the reins to my horse.

  The griffins and the phoenixes are spread out over the slope as before, still watching us, still strangely silent.

  We lead our mares back down through their ranks. At the edge of the trees, we mount up. The sun has nearly set over the western woods.

  “Tulip,” the lady says as we start off.

  I stop; she’s standing at my horse’s shoulder, looking up at me. “My girl,” she says, and again, “my Tulip.”

  I lean down and hand her mine. She cups it in her hands until it glows with a pale pink light. “So you won’t either of you forget,” I tell her.

  She shakes her head, eyes burning. “Never.”

  Never. The word pours right through me, and before she can say another one, I move my horse along and leave her behind.

  We’re not bothered this time. The woods folk, the lady, the griffins, and the phoenixes—all of them let us alone, and we’re free to work our slow way down the mountain, over the foothills, and through the lowlands until we reach the house again, where my mother hid me all those months. The moon is rising to the south, over the king’s land.

  It isn’t a clearing anymore. The trees are gone, all the way back, so that the path running down from the front step leads clear into meadows and fields and, a few hills away, a village. In the afternoon and evening it took to climb to the dragon’s cave and back, our world has returned to the way it was.

  We pause at the front of the house. I’m near to asking the queen if we hadn’t better stay the night here, rubble or no. I’ve slept on rougher ground than this, and I reckon the queen came prepared for sl
eeping in the woods. And while I’m ready to ride straight on till morning, most likely she’s all worn out by this point.

  But before I can speak, she’s grasped my arm, her eyes white in the dark. “Here they come,” she murmurs. “I wasn’t sure they’d actually follow me.”

  I look where she is looking, down the path, across the hills. I hear them, and then I see them galloping north: two strong mares and two dark-haired men—the king and Lord Edgar of Ontrei—heading straight toward us.

  Faster than I can think of what to do, they’ve reached the clearing and have us cornered; the ruins of the house are at our back, and their horses angle at our flanks, ready to run us down. We stare all about at one another—or they do. I look only at the king. He’s glowering, as usual, to see me, but he makes no move to grab my arm or otherwise do me harm. None of us knows what to do with this meeting, it seems. The queen is hanging back a bit. I can’t see her face, but I reckon this is a moment I’ll have to decide on myself. For a single crazy heartbeat I near turn my horse around and run back to the woods.

  Then I take a breath and lift my chin. “Well, Uncle,” I say. “Are you going to kill me now that I’ve come back home?”

  He considers me. “Only if I must.”

  The queen makes a strangled sound behind me. “Roddy—” she begins, but I cut her off.

  “Luckily,” I say, “there’s no need for such drastic measures. As you’ll see, the trees have taken themselves away.”

  “So they have.” He looks about at the open land. The moon is shining full now, so that it’s almost bright as day.

  “You might say I’ve struck a bargain. They should be done with moving in from now on.” I nudge my horse up closer to the king’s.

  He shifts, nervous, as if a girl like me could hold her own against a grown man.

  Well, and I could. But that’s not what I have in mind.

  “I’ve no wish to take your throne from you,” I tell him. He’s looking at me with my own eyes, and I feel a jolt at the way his hair curls about his ears. We stayed away from each other so fully in the castle, we hadn’t the chance to remember how similar we are to each other, to my mother, to Gramps. “We’re not the best of friends, Uncle”—he half snorts at this, as if he can’t help himself—“but I reckon we’re going to have to get along, or at least live with each other.” I eye him up. “As long as we can manage, anyway.”