A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

  “Marni,” my Gramps says into the silence, and his voice is rough and raw, so that for an instant I think myself back in the dragon’s cave, peering into the dragon’s bottomless eyes. “What is that on your hand?”

  The ring has started to stick on my finger already; it doesn’t want to slide, but I work at it until it’s slipping down into my palm, gleaming golden in the porch’s shade.

  I hand it to him. “It was hers.”

  He lifts it up and twists it around, reading the inscription. “I gave her this,” he says. “I suppose she left it behind when she ran from us. You’ll have found it in the castle?”

  “No,” I say. “She brought it with her. I found it there, where the woods never dared move in.”

  He looks up at me, scare able to believe it. “She kept it all that time?”

  “It’s true,” I say. “It’s yours. She’d want you to have it.”

  “No.” He holds it out to me; he puts it back in my hand. “I had a lifetime with her. I don’t need a ring to remember that.” Then, quieter, “I don’t deserve a ring to remember that.”

  “Gramps—”

  “Tell me, Marni,” he says, now looking me full in the face. “I realize I maybe don’t deserve this, either, but tell me what you’re planning on doing now.”

  For a moment I don’t say a thing. There’s a part of me, still, the part I fed for sixteen years with bitterness, that wants to walk away from this man and never come back—to run all the way over the mountains maybe, to the queen’s land, with its sorcerers and its wide, shining sea. It’s the way he was ready to use me, as much as Edgar ever did, to make all my choices for me. It’s the way he left me alone, without a word to give me hope that he lived. He was ready never to see me again. There’s nothing he has the right to claim from me now.

  It’s not often, though, is it, that you learn what you should do before it’s too late to change a thing. I reckon my Gramps must have felt that way many a time, thinking on what happened to his daughter, thinking of the thousand ways he might have been able to save her. I reckon the dragon might have felt it, even, when I came up to his cave and told him, straight and clear, what he’d done to her. Some, like the king, never do figure it out.

  I bend across the table, kiss my Gramps’s cheek. I smile at him. I say, “I’ve never thanked you, Gramps, for saving my life and all.”

  “You don’t need to, Marni,” he says. “It’s what a Gramps is for.”

  So then, because it’s what a granddaughter’s for, I reach over and take his hands. I say, “Gramps, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here. I’m going nowhere, you hear? Not to the woods, not to live with the king in his castle—not every day, at least. I’ll go as much as is needed to keep the lords calm. And as for the rest—well, it’s what I’ve always said I wanted, isn’t it? You and me, Gramps, and the flowers.”

  I watch him. He’s twisted his head away from me. I know this look, though. I’ve seen it many times when he thought I couldn’t: at night when he thought I was asleep; before the fire when Annel would tell a story somewhat too close to home, and he’d tilt his head so that the firelight burned right into his eyes, so he could blame his tears on that if we ever asked, which we never would have. We wouldn’t have done that to him.

  He clutches my hands with both of his. I see him shudder, and then, as he’s never done, as he’s never let himself do since as long as I remember, and I remember many long years, he lets his posture, his dignity go, and he bends forward until his forehead is against our gathered hands.

  This man, who was once a king, and he’s sobbing over his granddaughter’s fingers.

  I get up, leaving him one hand, and I go around to put my other arm across his back, my face on his shoulder.

  We stay like that. The sun sparkles on the stones of our path. The birds call from their bushes.

  It’s a while before we move again, and when we do, there’s no more need for talking. Gramps dries his eyes, ruffles my hair. After a moment he picks up the sketch from the table and puts it in his shirt pocket with the charcoal.

  I haven’t said nothing about that drawing, and I don’t reckon I ever will. There’s some things words would only ever make more difficult. I came back to him, just as he came for me all those years ago. But that won’t ever fix it, not what happened to her, not the way your breath is still like to rush out at the slightest reminder, leaving you all hollow, wishing for impossible things.

  It’s the way it is, and all you can do is keep on going, keep on choosing the best that you can. So I know she’s there, against my Gramps’s heart, but I don’t say a thing about it. Instead, I go back over to the other chair, and I sit there with him all through the perfect summer afternoon. We talk about little things, things that we forget the next moment, and the day slowly fades away until we’re watching the dark move in, seeing the fireflies flitting, smelling the night wind, cool and wonderful.

  She’s still there. She always will be. Yet there’s no need to do anything about it but let her be, just as she is, running all through our hearts.

  See, sometimes my Gramps understands things.

  And sometimes I do too.

  Twelve

  THE WOODS DON’T whisper to me anymore. But they’re there, beyond our garden wall, waiting. The lady doesn’t call to me anymore, but she’s there too, sure and certain. Just beyond the first line of trees, knitting away on her log, singing her dark lullabies.

  As the days become weeks and the weeks become months since I came home, Gramps doesn’t ask if I ever go back to walking off into the woods.

  Could be I don’t. Could be I’ve had enough of such things and I spend the afternoons when I’m at our hut working with the flowers or soaking in the sun with my Gramps.

  Or could be some days I do. It would be easy to slip out over the wall when my Gramps is sleeping the day away. Could be sometimes I turn myself into whatever creature I’m yearning to be, and I run and fly and forget the drama of my uncle’s court, and what I do or don’t think of the Lord of Ontrei, and all the complications of being human for a time.

  I wouldn’t tell my Gramps if this were so. He’s had enough to worry him. It’s enough for him that I’ve come back home, that despite it all, we’re together again.

  But he knows as well as I do, too, that we’ll never fully be rid of the woods. Oh, they come and they go these days, like the wind, like the sun, like the seasons. Folks don’t fret about them that way, not fearfully.

  But there are still one or two who go, now and again, not every year, but enough that the farmers and the villagers keep a watch on the woods, and a watch on the girls who seem too drawn to them, for fear they’ll disappear one bright night. I reckon there’s not much they can do to stop them, though. Look what my Gramps did trying to stop me—it doesn’t matter, once the woods get into a girl’s head.

  After all, as our folk will tell you, it’s not just the creatures of the woods that require wariness. It’s not just the obvious: the lights and the voices and the speaking owls, the faces in the branches.

  It’s the trees themselves.

  There’s something there, they’ll say, whispering through the leaves, sleeping in the trunks. There’s something that seeps through the spongy ground but never shows itself in any way you would recognize. If you walk enough in these woods, you’ll start to understand its language. The wind through the trees will murmur secret things to you, and you’ll be pulled by them, step by step by step, out of the human realm. You’ll be drawn to the shadows, toward the soft flashes of moonlight through the branches, into the hidden holes and tricky marshes.

  The villagers won’t let their children go into the woods, not even to the very closest edge, not even when the wind is silent and the sun shines full through the trees. It’s an insidious thing, they say, the soul of these woods. It will rock you and soothe you until you’ve nothing left but trust and belief and naivety. It will fold itself into you, and you will never know it’s there, n
ot until you’re ten nights out and there’s not a thing that can bring you back again.

  And despite what I said to the dragon, I wouldn’t dare try to stop the girls who go. If he sends his trees too far into our land, yes, then I’ll fight him back. But the woods are his, and the girls he takes choose it with some deep part of them.

  And could be at times, in some deep part of me, I miss it. It’s not a thing that leaves you fully, is it? Out here, out where the shadows drift across the wall and the flowers grow more brilliantly the closer they are to the trees—out at our hut, we find the woods harder to forget than most.

  Especially when we’ve got a certain small blue blossom growing all throughout our garden.

  You wouldn’t notice it, maybe, among the stunning roses, the bright lilies, the elegant irises, but it’s everywhere. I don’t try to prune it back or tear it up. I doubt it would make any difference; it never did before. It doesn’t kill the others, anyway. It creeps up their stalks; it burrows under their thorns. But it doesn’t stop them from growing, not as it used to do.

  Besides, I’ve no wish to get rid of it. It makes me think of Annel, of my friend, off screaming her heart out into a wild wind. It makes me think of what she said about there being some things, some parts of you, that won’t ever go away unless you reach deep down inside and rip them out.

  She wouldn’t do it; she wouldn’t tear out half her heart, and I guess I won’t either. I’ll let the flowers stay, and I’ll let myself look off north toward the mountains sometimes and think on the ones who run and fly free there, and remember what those days were like—what it’s like for them still, the ones who never come back, the ones who give themselves up to the woods.

  Acknowledgments

  First, many thanks to Reka Simonsen, for saying yes to this story and for always managing to ask just the right questions. Thanks also to the members of the Semi-Secret Society of Alien Meese; may you sound your varied calls and grow your deciduous leaves most joyfully. And thank you to my family—to Mom and Dad, to Matt, Ben, and Jonathan—for everything.

  About the Author

  REBECCA HAHN grew up in Iowa, attended college in Minnesota, and soon afterward moved to New York City, where she worked in book publishing and wrote A Creature of Moonlight on the side.

  She now lives in Minneapolis, with the cold winter, the wide sky, and many whispering trees. This is Rebecca’s first novel.

  www.rebeccahahnbooks.com