A Creature of Moonlight (11 page)

She laughs, her usual tinkle. “Oh, it'll happen, Marni. It might seem centuries away, but one day you will wake up, and without you quite knowing how it happened, it will have slipped up on you. There it will be: all you've been dreaming of, everything you've worked for. Some of it will be marvelous. The dresses, for instance—not to sound coarse, my dear, but the dresses you will
love
.” She looks down fondly at her own cloth-of-gold afternoon gown. Half the queen's wardrobe is cloth of gold. “Oh, and the pageantry, and the feasts, and the banter of the court.” She waves her hand about, smiling knowingly.

“But you must prepare yourself to endure some disappointments. There will be long hours when you've almost nothing to do but sit and feel useless. There will be the gossip—there is always gossip; it doesn't matter who you are, but it stings more when it is your sworn subjects who are doing the gossiping. And there will be times, you know, when you will be at odds with your king, with whomever your uncle decides you are to marry.” She's perfectly serious now, holding on to my arm and looking close into my face. “You will marry someone kind, Marni, I can make sure of that, but that doesn't always solve everything, does it? Your uncle is kind to me, but it doesn't solve everything.”

I can think of nothing to say to this. She believes every word, I can see it by the way she looks at me so steady. But my uncle, kind?
He stood over the body of his sister
, I think of saying,
with her blood upon his sword
.

This is the woman who believes there is no dragon, no griffins, no magic of any sort in our woods. Even when her husband rides out to battle back the trees that creep overnight into the streets of a village, she laughs at them all and decides they have lost their minds and forgotten the shape of the world.

If she believes that my uncle is kind, who am I to tell her it's not so?

“You'll have a wonderful time,” she assures me. She lifts her nose to sniff the air. She's like me in that way, wanting to get every last sensation out of the wind, the grasses, the dried-up wildflowers. “Only be warned that it won't
all
be butterflies and diamonds.”

Because she has been kind to me in truth, I smile at her and say, “If you are what a queen is, Aunt, I'll count myself honored, and I won't complain none.”

“Complain
at all
.”

“Yes, I won't complain at all.”

“You're a good girl, Marni. Now,” she says, cheerful again, “shall we finish our walk and go back in for tea? Roddy will be coming home for the winter festivals in only a few weeks, and wouldn't it be a nice surprise to have your first embroidered pillow ready to show as he walks in?”

Yes
, I am thinking as I follow her away,
and won't it be a nice surprise to have my first knit vengeance to present him with, too?

But for whatever reason, the thought doesn't give me the same sharp thrill that it usually does. There is a light snow beginning to fall, the first of the winter season, and far in the distance the mountains are gray and black, bare and stark, ready for the cold.

I
T'S ONLY A FEW
days after that walk with the queen when the lords begin to remember themselves, remember that I'm not just some waif the king brought home to raise, and I'm not just a princess, neither.

I'm a girl.

I'm a girl the right age for marriage, and there are plenty of single men at court wanting something more from life. Wanting a kingship, maybe.

Not that they say it like that. I'm taking my usual morning stroll along the river—there are several of us out today in the lukewarm sun—when the little Lord Bran makes the first attempt. He's only a year younger than me, so not that little, but he struts more than walks, and his skin is smooth-soft, and he's never seen the things I have seen in the woods or thought the things I have thought late at night, with the moon looking in on me and Gramps and all the future that was taken from us pulling the breath from my chest. So he's little in his way, and he comes over to me as I'm going along and starts out with some general chitchat about the king, who's off now to chop at the trees that have been creeping in from the east.

Then, as we reach the bridge over the river, all of a sudden he stops and grabs my hand. He's looking at me with eyes so round and pleading, and he puts my hand to his lips with fervor, near trembling. In my shock, I don't think to pull away; no man's ever kissed me before, except my Gramps. This lord's lips are cool and dry. “How lovely you are today, my lady,” he says, low and intense.

I pull my hand back; he resists for a moment but then lets it go. “You scarce know me, my lord,” I say.

“I know what I need to know. Your every movement, your every word speaks of your beauty.” He makes a grab again for my hand, but I've stepped back and out of his reach. He moves toward me; I step back again. The other nobles out this morning have gathered in twos or threes, talking and watching us, every one of them.

“Does the king know you are speaking like this?” I doubt my uncle wants a boy like Bran for his son-in-law.

“Does he need to? I speak for you alone. The king does not hold the key to my heart.” And then he is kneeling there on the cold, damp ground, even clasping his hands before his chest, his eyes cast up at me dramatically. “Tell me I may hope, my lady. Tell me I may dream of knowing you better.”

I am sure there are rules for this sort of thing. I am sure if I'd been raised at court, I would know how to handle this, how to refuse him without offense, without making an enemy of his family or any such thing. They are all watching me still, waiting for me to—what? Jump into the arms of the first lord who offers for me? The first lord as far as they know, anyway. “It's kind of you to say those things,” I say at last.

“No kindness, lady, when I speak but the truth.”

“Yes. Well. I appreciate it, still. But you haven't the slightest hope, I'm afraid. You'll always know me as much as you do now, and that'll have to be enough for you. Good day.” I turn and start off toward the castle, hiking up my skirts as much as the queen would approve of and stepping as quickly as I can in my slippers and stockings.

It isn't fast enough, though, because Lord Bran is up and in front of me before I go ten paces. “This isn't the end,” he proclaims. “I will prove to you, lady, the sincerity of my affections. You will see what I can offer you; you will come to my way of thinking by and by.” His eyes are flashing now, not with passion, but with anger. I suppose it's not pleasant to be rejected in front of the king's whole court.

“Good day, Lord Bran,” I say again, firm. He stands there in my way for five seconds more, and then he bows out of my path. I lift my skirts, not caring now what the queen would say of how high, and I sweep up to the castle and spend the rest of the day until dinner in my rooms, away from them all.

 

After that, it seems the whole population of single lords reckons they'll try their chances with me. Most are less pushy than Lord Bran. They bring me flowers as I'm walking about, or they kiss my hand upon taking their leave of me, or they pull out chairs for me when I'm wanting to sit, those sorts of things. None of the others makes a declaration. None of the others goes down on his knees. But they want to, they're telling me with every look and gesture. I've never had so many people all wanting to talk to me at once, all laughing at my every joke, all so attentive.

It puts me off my ease.

The queen knows what's going on, sure enough. She tells me once, as we're walking together from the main hall to dinner, that I'd better go ahead and pick one before the king decides to pick one for me. I know that's how it works. I know she hadn't met my uncle before she married him, and she went right along with it anyway. Hers was a political marriage, mostly. Her country's the one we get our wood from, carted over the mountains on wagons. No one here would dare go into the woods to cut down a tree for lumber to build a house. And we send her people grain and seeds. Theirs is a dry, lowland country, not covered over every inch with rich black soil and fields of crops like ours, but sandy and rocky all the way down to the sea.

She's told me of the sea—as far-reaching as our woods, blue some moments, green or black the next, always moving, except on still days when it spreads out as flat as glass. Her people catch fish in the sea; they go out in big wooden boats, and times are they get themselves lost in a storm and don't come back. Very like our woods in that way, I tell her. Both the sea and the woods are like to swallow people up.

She doesn't say a thing when I say that, of course. Still blind to our magic, is the queen. But she does get a look on her face when she's talking of her country, of the way the waves roll in and in, of how you can see the clouds coming from miles away.

She loves it, sure as sure, in much the same way that I love the silence of the woods, their dangerous beauty. And still she doesn't complain that it's so far from her. When they told her to get on her horse, she rode away and never looked back.

 

I'm not as willing to put up with such nonsense, though, and more and more I find myself walking off on my own, over the meadows to the north or around the castle gardens.

There's a garden of flowers on the eastern side of the castle, past the vegetables and the chicken houses, right as the hill begins to rise toward the horse stables. I didn't stop to look the first time I saw it. Just a whiff of dying aster, just a glance at a larkspur stalk, and my eyes start burning, and I can't blink away the shape of my Gramps, standing in the flowers, digging holes for stakes, and looking up to smile at me.

One day, though, I pass the flower garden when a girl is in there working. The queen has let go of me for the day. I finished embroidering my first pillow this afternoon—it's sloppy enough, and I reckon my uncle wouldn't be all that proud even if he did care about such things, but the queen says it doesn't matter. I finished it, and that's the important thing.

I've the rest of the day to myself, and as soon as I can manage, I run from the lords' daft smiles and the stale air of the castle out to the shriveled grasses and the brisk wind.

I'm glancing over the flower garden on my way past, thinking on how ours must look now, with no one to care for it, and I notice the way the girl working in there is holding her pruning shears, and I stop. She's got such a look on her face, as if she's certain that the whole plant race has it in for her. I start to laugh despite myself, and after a moment I give in and make my way toward her.

It isn't anything like our garden down at the hut, this castle thing. Each flower has its own square block, and the roses go all together in one section, and the petunias in another, and they haven't been planted for color or scent or nothing. Just higgledy-piggledy, this castle garden. Well, and I guess if they wanted a better one, they came down to our hut to walk our paths. I wonder if this ugly cousin of a garden has wilted out of competition with ours or if it's always been this boring.

The girl looks up as I come by. She is trying her best to snip the old blooms off a thorny rosebush—not easy without good gloves and a sharp pair of shears and knowing the way of those thorns. “Lady,” she says, sinking into her curtsy.

I hold out my hand for the shears. “Give those here,” I say. “Have you done this before?”

“No, lady,” she says, wary. “It's my job, though, and I don't mind doing it.”

“Never said you did. Here.” I gesture again, and she hands them over, frowning.

“It isn't right,” she says as I test the blade with my finger and eye the rosebush. “It's not a job for a princess.”

Crazily, I grin at her. There's something moving now through my blood, something that's been slowing through the last few months and had near stopped. The flowers are perking up all about, even as brown and dry as they are, to sense that something moving in me. “Only recently it was that I became a princess,” I say. “And truth be told, I'm not sure what the job entails. Pruning flowers, though, that I can do.”

Bit by bit I bend the thorns into shape, and bit by bit I show the girl what she is to do, and when I hand the shears back to her to finish up the job, she's talking and smiling almost as if I were one of her friends. Almost. Like the women from the village talked to me, kind and friendly, but with a reservation that never quite went away—all except Annel, of course.

Still, it is something better than the empty gossip of the court. I watch as she trims the last few stems, closes up the shears. It's late afternoon, and dinner will be served soon in the castle.

The girl is remembering, now, who they all have decided that I am. As she puts the shears into a pocket on her apron, she twitches her fingers this way and that, and her eyes dart for an escape. I ought to let her go. It isn't just the dinner waiting for me; girls who work in the castle aren't given time to dawdle, and she will be expected back soon.

It's so novel, though, to stand among flowers again and talk with a girl who wants nothing of me, and I say, “Won't you show me around the garden?” and what is she to do? Tell me no?

There isn't much to see this time of year, but she takes me past the drooping orchids and marigolds, the dried-up pansies and chrysanthemums. She's new to the whole gardening business, and sometimes she can't name a plant, but I know them all, and it doesn't matter. I trail a hand along their stems, speaking their names beneath my breath.

In the center of the garden, in among the tulips, of all things, there's a block of tiny, delicate blue flowers nestled in a bed of creeping vines. I stop dead when we come upon it, tasting something fresh, something wild on the wind.

“I didn't know they bloomed here,” I mutter.