A Creature of Moonlight (17 page)

The queen sends me a small, worried smile as she follows him from the room. She, at least, hasn't lost her mind. But after dinner, as the nobles gather again in the main hall for one last round of gossip and repetitions of how marvelous it is that the snow's finally done with its tantrum, I walk from group to group, and everywhere I meet closed circles and am presented with silent backs. I give up, and I've made my way halfway up the stairs to my room when I hear Edgar—“Wait!”—and turn to see him hurrying after me.

“What do you want?” I ask as he stops a few steps down from me. “Want to give me a look like to kill me, do you? Or a brushoff, or a nasty, cryptic speech?”

He says, “They are saying the northern woods moved in ten miles during the storm, one for each day.”

“What?” My arms drop to catch the railing. I've heard of the trees moving in leaps and bounds, but miles? Ten in as many days?

“They're blaming you for it.”

I shake my head. “They've always blamed me. Everything that goes wrong, they've always blamed me.”

“No, Marni. This is different. They're saying the dragon's come to take back his child.”

I laugh, but it's verging on a sob. “Sixteen years he could let me alone, but now he decides it's been too long?”

Edgar shrugs. “That's what they're saying.”

Five months trading gossip and laughter, playing games and going for walks with these folk, and one rumor throws it all to the wind. “Well,” I say, in a weaker voice than I'd like, but the light is doing funny things in my eyes, gleaming bright and going dark. My ears are numb with an echo of a fierce roar. I take a deep breath and wait for it all to settle. “Thank you for telling me.” I start my way up the stairs again, concentrating on putting each foot in front of the other, on holding the railing only as hard as is needed to pull myself up.

I stumble anyway when Edgar says, “I thought you should know,” and I look back down at him there. I wonder how this day would have gone if I'd given in to him and he were promised to marry me, and defend me, and love me. I wonder what he would say if I gave in now, this very moment, and threw myself into his keeping. Would he toss me out into the cold?

“Yes, thank you,” I say again.

He nods and turns to go, and I let him.

 

I reckon if there is any time to put my plan into motion, this is it. I'm near done with the knitting, and over the next few nights I work like mad from dusk until dawn, as long as there is a sliver of moon to see.

It is three days after the rumor begins that I finish it.

It is beautiful. Its wings shimmer; its beak gleams. It moves like liquid, flowing from the window to the bed to the fireplace and back again. It sits on my hand and rubs its head against my cheek as though it loves me, and I love it.

“Sweet one,” I say, “you lovely sweet thing. Welcome to my world.”

I hold out the piece of paper I've been keeping beneath my mattress all these months, the one with Gramps's handwriting and my own face smiling. I kiss it, the place he would have rested his hand as he drew. I offer it to my creature.

“This is my heart,” I say, “and you are to kill the man that took it.”

It flicks out a tongue, thin and sharp and bright, and it snatches the note out of my fingers. It takes it into itself. There's no chewing, no swallowing, but it gleams white suddenly, a flash that lights the whole room. When it looks at me again, I know it knows me—and what I want of it.

Then I tuck it into my left sleeve, and it molds against my skin so that beyond a slight glisten it shows not at all. Come the right moment, I'll let it out. Come the right moment, we'll fly free.

 

If I'd thought myself lonesome before, it was nothing compared to what happens now.

When I come into a room, all backs turn. When I smile or ask how someone's been, I'm given only the bare minimum courtesy before the courtier makes some excuse and walks away.

The king is still stuck in the castle with all his army. Every day we hear more news of the trees that are galloping now, it seems, across the landscape, though no one ever actually sees them move. But the king can't ride out when the snows are still so deep, so he paces the halls and snarls at anyone foolish enough to get in his way.

We all have started to wonder what will happen when the spring comes, if it ever does come again. Will there be fields enough left to feed our people? Will there be anything to trade for wood and coal? I imagine the queen even worries about her kingdom by the sea. They depend on us to make up what they lack in grain. If our crops are lost to the woods, her people, too, will suffer. Her people, too, will starve.

And if the woods keep coming, if we've nowhere left to go, how long will it be that we stay a kingdom? How long will any of us stay human, when around each tree there'll be a monster, and the voices of the woods folk won't ever let us alone?

I sometimes think it's already happened to me. Ever since Edgar stopped me on the stairs and I felt the echo of the dragon's roar, I've been hearing the lady's voice in my head again, even here in the castle, even through all this stone. I'll be waking from a dream that my Gramps is still alive and we're sitting on our porch together, cutting up peppers for soup, and her voice will slip its way into the scene, singing of the mystery, the wonder of deep, dark places. I'll look up from my knife, and instead of my Gramps, she'll be sitting across the table from me. Hand held out.

Or I'll be at dinner, listening to talk of the weather or some such, and between one blink and the next the lady will be whispering of how the snow shines, cradled by pine needles. I'll be there for a moment, standing with her in an open place encircled by trees. I'll turn my head up to feel the sun, and the dragon's shadow will sweep by overhead, and my legs will twitch to throw myself after him.

Then I'll be back in the dining hall, and Lord Nakon will be asking me if I'm quite all right and handing me a glass of wine. They'll all be looking at me, paused in their chatter, and I'll wonder how much they guess, how much they suspect about the monster in me, pulling at me, growing in power every day I keep myself inside the castle walls.

As the days go on and the snows begin to melt, the faces of the nobles turn from blank civility to open contempt. Lord Beau near spits in my eye when I ask him in a corridor how his daughter does, the one who is recovering from a cold. “No good if you have a say in it!” he calls after me as I rush from him down the hall. Elinor and Flan sneer at me as I pass them by. “Witch's brat,” they hiss, and it takes something to keep from turning on my heel and slapping them as hard as I can or clawing their hair from their heads. Lord Edgar says nothing more after that moment on the stairs, and I don't go near him, neither. I see him watching me, frowning, but he doesn't say nothing, and the lords who keep to his side glare at me like the rest.

And then, as the river begins to creak with the waters rushing by underneath its winter ice, the king starts trying to kill me.

I'm not surprised, exactly, but I don't realize it at first, and there are two close calls. One night after dinner I retch out my entire stomach, and I toss and turn for hours, a fire running all through me. Sylvie brings me glass after glass of water, and I feel I'm near to die before the morning, but somehow I pull through.

I don't figure it out then, but just two days later, a lord who's always stayed close to the king asks if I'll go ice-skating with him. I'm so starved for attention I stupidly say yes, even though I know the river's not safe for that anymore. While we're skating and laughing and I'm thinking maybe they've finally decided to stop blaming me, the ice opens out under my feet and I see how it's been hacked at with an axe and the lord was leading me this way. I near to drown and get saved only at the last minute by some servant who'd been walking by and hadn't been in on the plan, apparently, because he sticks in a branch and pulls me out as quick as can be. And as the lord comes up now, all concerned, I see the look he shoots the servant, and it's like to burst him into flames right where he stands.

That very afternoon, once I'm warmed and dry, I go to my rooms to set the vengeance free.

I don't know quite why I've been hanging on to it this long. In part, I like knowing it's there, just inside my sleeve. I like the secret power and I like the thought of what will happen when I let it go. I like the memory, too, of my mother's hands laid over mine. Even if this is only a thought, a wish, it's the closest I've ever been to her. The soft grasp of the vengeance reminds me of that, and if I let it fly, I'll lose that feeling against my skin.

And in part, I think my days in the castle, even these days when no one has a smile or kind word to throw my way, have softened me. I'm someone, here, more than I ever was with my Gramps. I have a title. I have a purpose. I belong.

When I set this thing after my uncle, all that will change. I haven't thought on it much until now, but I'm starting to. I've started to wonder in the last few days what will happen once my lovely thing has killed him. I'm not sure they'd give me the throne after all, not now. Even if they did, would I want it? To sit in my uncle's place, to rule over all these lords and ladies—to take up an axe and try to fight back the trees?

But I can't hesitate any longer. My uncle is trying to have me killed, and I reckon I owe it to my Gramps, to my mother—to the flower girl I was—to take him down first.

I stand in the middle of my bedroom, facing the window, feeling the breeze that is melting the snow sending its tendrils in. I hold out my left arm, the arm with my vengeance wrapped around it, and I say, “Come out, my beauty.” There's a stirring along my wrist; it unfolds itself, pulls itself over my palm and up, up to perch on my fingertips. If it has eyes, it's looking into my face now. The breeze flutters its wings to rise, and it hangs on to my skin only by the slight tips of its talons. They hurt, as insubstantial as this thing is. They will hurt my uncle much more.

I lift it to my lips and kiss its head. It shudders. It knows me. It knows what I want.

Magic is knowing what you want. The lady, the little ones, the speaking owls—they never hesitate. They would have set this creature free many days ago, as soon as they'd knit the last stitch of moonlight thread. They wouldn't have held it close against their skin. They wouldn't have waited one moment longer than they had to.

Ah, well. I'm still half human, after all. And the king will die today as well as any other day.

I raise the thing up high; its head turns this way and that, seeking its target. I know the word to let it go, and it hovers at the edge of my mouth. My tongue forms its shape.

He knocks at the door.

“Marni!”

I falter. I shut my eyes until I feel the word rolling out along my breath again.

“Marni, I know you're there! Open the door.”

And who does he think he is, to be coming round after all these weeks? “Go away!” I say, and the creature looks down at me, tilts its head.

“I won't. They're saying you nearly died.”

“I'm well and good now, so you can trot off again.”

There's a silence. I let my breath out and lift my eyes to the thing once again, smiling at it. It raises its wings high, ready to jump.

“Marni, I'm coming in.”

I growl, a short, low growl the queen would near kill me for, it's so unladylike. I think of saying the word, quick, before he enters. But the moment's not right; I can't very well be arguing with the Lord of Ontrei while my uncle dies. I want to savor it; I want to think of it every moment it's happening. It won't be long before I kick this lord out.

I coax the vengeance back under my sleeve, and I pick up some piece of sewing, some horrible-looking curtains. I'm sitting down all placid when he walks in.

He shuts the door. I don't look up at him; I'm getting my breathing back, slowing my blood down. He says, “I hear you had a narrow escape.”

“You might call it that.” I bite the thread I'm measuring to tear it, more violent than need be, maybe.

He says, “What would you call it, then?”

I make the mistake of looking up. He's not sat down; I've not offered him a chair. He seems earnest, with his dark eyebrows drawn close, and I haven't seen him getting chummy with the king, so it could be he has no idea of what's going on. I want to tell him, suddenly. Just as I wanted to tell him about visiting the woods, when we were out in my Gramps's hut, I want him to know. I want someone to know. “Twice now,” I say, “the king's tried to have me killed.”

He sits down, though I glare at him. “Once when you were a baby,” he says, “and then again—”

“No,” I say. “I mean twice in the last three days.” I stick my needle into as ugly a flower pattern as I've ever seen, gritting my teeth.

“In the last three days . . .”

I swear, if there were a real flower that looked like this, I'd never let it into my garden. I look up to see where he's trailed off to, and I sigh. He's frowning, all worrisome. “It doesn't surprise me,” I say. “Why should it you?”

“Well,” he says, “for one, he's your uncle.”

“Yes, and my mother was his sister.”

“He was younger then.”

“He's the king, and he thinks that when he's done with me, the kingdom will be saved.”

He's shaking his head. “That was only coincidence with her. There's no proof it worked before.”

“What do you mean?”

“When he killed your mother and the woods stopped coming in. Why would they have stopped just then because of that? She had been living so close to the woods. Surely they would have taken her long before, if she was what they wanted—”

“What do you mean,
the woods stopped coming in?
”