A Creature of Moonlight (28 page)

“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 sleeping 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.”

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
.

H
E'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?”