A Creature of Moonlight (12 page)

“They don't,” the girl says, following my gaze. “Not usually. I remember all about
this
, at least. They never bloomed here before, not even this year until a few months ago. No one knows why, or anyway everyone has a guess: the woods coming in, the griffin they saw, and, of course, they appeared just when . . .” She trails off.

“Just when I arrived,” I guess.

“Lady—”

“No, don't fret yourself.” I'm not meaning to, but somehow I reach down to touch a petal anyway, to make sure it's real. The sweet scent of rain drifts out. I blink, and the lady's bright eyes flash, and half a note of her song brushes my ears. “What griffin did they see?” I say, turning from them.

“Lady?”

“You said they saw a griffin. Where? Who?”

“It was all through the castle,” she says, “how the king's army went north and how the Lord of Ontrei, as he was standing guard one night with a soldier on the edge of the woods, looked out over the trees, and there, feathers glinting in the moonlight, a griffin flew.”

All through the castle, she said—and yes, I'm sure everyone would have heard this news. Almost everyone, that is. It seems the lords and ladies are better at keeping things from me than I would have thought. After all, there are new stories every day of the woods, and the courtiers have never seemed reluctant to pass them on to me. I hear that the king himself has been rolling up his sleeves to work alongside his men, and that the villagers and the farmers and the country nobles, too, join in with the army. I hear that at the northern edges of our kingdom, there are only the sharp thunks of chopping, and the grunts of the men and women, and a deep silence from the just-born woods.

“A griffin,” I say. “I'd only heard it was phoenixes before.”

“Yes, and they say it will be the dragon next, that he'll come and bring his woods and he'll never go back again.”

“And here are his flowers,” I say, “right on the king's castle grounds.”

When I look down toward the castle, I see lights in the windows. They'll be readying themselves for dinner, putting up their hair, spraying bits of scent.

The girl is eyeing me, her hands twisting in her apron. I wait, and she says, “Do you know what it is, lady, that's bringing them, the phoenixes and griffins and such, and that's making the woods close in on us?”

I shake my head. “I don't know.”

“It's just—it seems no one actually cares. Everyone talks of it, sure, but the next moment it's gone clean out of their heads, as if it doesn't exist. And if the dragon's really coming, well, we'll all be sorry for it, won't we?”

She looks so concerned, so sure that something ought to be done about this, and sure that I am the one who'll know what to do. “In my experience,” I say, “there's nothing we're better at than pretending things don't exist. We think if we pretend long and hard enough, the things will disappear.” I shrug. “Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.”

“Which one is this?” she says. “Will it work with the dragon?”

“How many times did the gardeners try to dig up the dragon flowers?”

“Every day for a week,” she says, “and every morning they'd regrown themselves overnight.”

I look at them, so delicate, so fragile. “I think this is like that,” I say. “We can push it out of our heads again and again, but it won't make no difference in the end. The woods will keep on coming. The dragon will appear. We'll walk half blind, thinking we're safe, and one day we'll turn and he'll be there, right beside us, waiting.”

Now the lights are starting to flicker
off
in the castle, and I'll have to run if I want to get to dinner on time. “Don't worry,” I tell the girl, maybe a bit belatedly. “The king's best men are on the job.” I smile, the bright smile of a lady. “Don't forget to ask them to get you new gloves,” I say. “Your old ones won't last through the spring.”

 

When the king comes home for the winter, he doesn't stop to say hello on his way in through the main hall, where I've been talking with the nobles and the queen, but he rushes on by, only shooting me a glare so full of malice, so full of contempt, I actually take a step backwards from it. He's come for the festivals, the ones the castle throws before the start of the real cold and the burying snows. The country nobles will be coming in soon from their estates, riding up in sleighs and light carriages, filling up the rooms in the unused wings of the castle. They'll go home again at the end of two weeks, but the king will stay with his men. There'll be no escaping them when the weather shuts us all indoors, not unless I keep myself to my room and never come out. The king may be hoping I'll do exactly that.

“My lady Marni.”

I turn from watching the king sweep out the back of the hall toward the stairs to his rooms. It's the Lord of Ontrei, Edgar, and he's bowing over my hand before I know what's what.

“My lord.” I give him my best curtsy. The queen has followed the king, and the others around us bunch into their own separate groups. We are alone, or near to it.

He lowers his voice so far that I need to bend in to hear him. “You must not think I have abandoned you, lady,” he says. “I wanted only to avoid it seeming as if I have spoken to you before.”

He's so conspiratorial, with his half-raised eyebrow and those twinkling eyes, that just like that I forgive him for all those weeks of ignoring me, and I nod at him. “Makes sense, my lord.”

“Now that the king has returned for the winter, I can pay you the attention we will need to justify our engagement in the spring.”

It takes me a moment to react to what he's said, even in my own head. It's not just the sheer brazenness of it. He speaks as though I have no say in the matter. He speaks as though I agreed to this proposal last summer, rather than all but spitting in his face and kicking him off our porch with the heel of my bare foot. I try to steady myself, but my voice comes out loud and shaky anyway. “You must not have heard me right the last time we went at this, my lord. I would have reckoned you'd remember a thing like that, but I guess with an arrogance your size you've no room left for memories.”

Now we're getting looks, sure as sure, and my every word will be passed around the court by morning. When the country nobles start arriving next week, it will be the first thing they hear.

The Ontrei lord has grown right still. He keeps smiling in that blasted confident way, but his face has frozen too. Next moment, though, he slides back into action, giving me a bow and saying, loud and clear, “Forgive me, lady, for my impertinence. I will take myself away and bid you good night.”

And then he is gone, and I'm left with a whispering court. When we all converge for dinner, the king doesn't even glance my way the whole time, and somehow it's been arranged that I'll sit at a table many places down from the royal family, among a whole slew of round, spoiled nobles' children and their grim-faced nanny.

I speak to nobody and pick at my meat, thinking of all the reasons I'd rather have the Lord of Ontrei for a friend than a sworn enemy.

 

That night I can't knit a stitch. The needles clack together; they scrape. I cannot bend them to the shapes I need them to be. I give up at last and go to bed, but I lie there sleepless, staring into the dark corners of my canopy, and I imagine myself as my mother, just the age I am, growing up in my Gramps's court.

She would have had a father who loved her, sure, and a brother who adored her, before she ran off anyway. There would have been dozens of lords all trying to win her, as they're trying now to win me. I wonder if she loved any of them. If there was a boy, maybe, that she'd grown up with, who'd known her before either of them understood things like princesses and kings, someone she trusted.

Maybe it wasn't a lord, even. Maybe it was a servant boy or a villager, and she'd ripped herself ragged trying to think of ways for him and for her to be happy.

I don't know. There's no way I can know.

There was some reason, though, for her running off to the woods. Girls don't do that on a whim. They don't wake up one day, free of all care, get themselves dressed, eat up their breakfast, give their hair fifty brushstrokes, and then say to themselves,
Wouldn't it be nice to run away to the woods and never come back?

Not even princesses think like that.

Maybe she was worn down by all the things they wanted her to be. Maybe my Gramps was different then, before he'd lost her, before he had a baby nobody wanted, before he became a nothing himself. She wouldn't have had a queen giving her the tips my aunt's been giving me. Her mother was dead long before she had grown, as she was for me.

If I ever have a baby girl, I'm going to run us away, over the mountains to the land with the rocks and the sea, and I'll find us a home there, where no one will come knocking who knows our names, who might want to take us through with a sword. When my baby girl cries, I'll be there to hold her. When she stubs her toe or skins her knee, I'll take her mind off it with stories, and I'll sing her to sleep with songs. I'll teach her how to plant flowers, though we'll grow them only for ourselves, and we'll bake sweet bread together and go for long walks and catch toads just to set them free, and she'll never have to stare up into the darkness wondering why she's all alone.

T
HIS IS WHAT
it's like to ride a horse: terrifying, thrilling, fun in a way that flows right through me, pushing back all the parts I've been devoting to fretting and lying awake at night, throwing them out into the clear, cold sky, so that I laugh as we ride along, as if all I needed to feel this way was to get my feet off the ground, to give up my safety to this hulking beast that huffs and rolls beneath me, near to pitching me off, but I hang on, grinning, my skirts sweeping back all around and my boots tucked tight into the stirrups, fingers twisted in reins and mane.

I could do this forever and never tire of it.

The Ontrei lord is riding just behind me; I think he's somewhat startled by my taking to this horse-riding thing so fast, especially because when he told me where we were going, I said I'd never ridden my own horse in my life.

“No time like the present,” he said, pulling me away from the flower garden. I'd been telling the girl I met there, Emmy, where the daisies should be moved in the spring—they had planted them next to the
buttercups
, as though any daisy could shine as it ought to alongside that garish yellow. I've been coming out almost daily in the last week to teach her how to ready the garden for the snows. The gardeners, the real ones who planted all the flowers to begin with, don't bother us none. They leave us be as we squat in the dirt, mulching and trimming and making notes of what to plant. I reckon they don't mind me training their new girl for them. Emmy is like a new bud in spring: fresh and honest, somewhat unknowing of the ways of things. I never met a girl like her out by the woods, but it could be that living so close to the trees changes a person, fills you up with a sense of danger you don't get in here, where the whole world's wide and open.

My maid, Sylvie, tsks to herself at the state of my gowns, but she doesn't say nothing to me about it. Could be she senses the spark—the something that runs through my blood after I've spent a day out with the flowers—that isn't there when I deaden myself chatting with the nobles for hours on end. Could be, too, that she doesn't dare complain to the girl who might one day be queen.

“I'll teach you to ride in no time at all, don't worry, lady,” the lord said as we left Emmy still taking her notes and made our way to the stables. “I've been training soldiers how to ride since I was half grown.”

Still, after he'd handed me up onto a gray mare, I needed no more help. Well, it didn't take brains to figure this out, did it? The stirrups were for the feet; the reins were for the hands; kick the mare to get her to go; lean back to get her to stop—but why would you want her to stop when you could fly like this across the meadows and the whole world was only wind and pounding hooves and grasses rushing by, hill after hill after hill?

I've seen horses and riders all my life, stepping their way down the path to our hut or racing into the castle yards with this or that message for the queen or the king. I never once dreamed it would be like this, as if the horse and I were working together to conquer every yard.

It's only when we've come to the end of the meadows south of the city, when we've gone so far we've reached the fields and villages near Gramps and my old hut, that I pull up, and the mare and I sit there, panting and sweating. Lord Edgar and his roan canter up beside us. They slow to a halt. His mare puffs noses with mine and stamps her feet. We're up on a hill, and we look out over the checkered countryside, brown and black now that the harvest's through, scattered here and there with white clumps of snow. Villages and nobles' great houses dot the valleys, and off to the west the woods stretch south, curving to the east. I shiver, seeing them so close. It's been almost three months now since I stepped in through those branches, felt their needles under my feet.

“You're a natural,” Ontrei says. Blast him, he's barely breathing hard.

“Not much to it,” I say. “Get her going and hold on tight.” I can feel the smile cross my face, though. I can't stop it from sitting there, lighting up my eyes no doubt, and making me look all friendly and such.

“Twice now,” he says, “we've gotten off on the wrong foot. Shall we call the past the past and start fresh today?” He's holding out his hand, waiting for me to take it.

I don't move a finger, and I only barely keep from laughing at how easy he makes it sound. Just shake hands and we'll trust each other, never worry about any stabbing in the back. Seems he's never heard my history with stabbing. “Is that why you dragged me out today? You're making sure I'm still up for that alliance?”