A Creature of Moonlight (23 page)

And anyway, I know that once it comes, there will be no more turning back. See, I never let the dragon know it, but there are other times, not just when the seasons are changing, when I fall out of this new life into my old self. They aren't as dramatic as the others; they don't hit me over the head. They slide in, peaceful-like, so that I scarce know they're there until I find myself staring at the stars and humming a lullaby my Gramps used to sing when I was but a tiny thing. Or I'll be knitting with the lady, and I'll think if I turn my head, the queen will be there instead, telling me how all the woods' magic is nothing but the crazy dream of a backward people. Or I'll be sitting in a sunny clearing, eating berries, and think someone's touched my hand, though when I look, there's only the grasses blowing across my knuckles.

Not as dramatic, these times, and not as painful. They ease themselves in, the sensations, and then they ease themselves out again. They're like the rain on my fur or the claws scratching along my bark.

And I know that when the dragon changes me, these moments will disappear, too.

I've seen it in the others. I see it in Annel's eyes, the distance she's gone from who she was. She's gotten what she wanted, sure as sure, and she's given up the girl that wanted it.

I want it too. I'll ask him soon enough. I'll turn to him as we're sitting there on our rocks before the cave. He'll look down at me, and I'll see my determination a thousand times in his eyes. “I'm ready,” I'll say. “Make me one of you.”

He'll smile, because he'll have been waiting for me to say just that. He'll know that I'll mean that I want to stay forever, and this will make him happy. He'll turn into his dragon self, and he'll do whatever it is that makes a girl a monster, and I'll be free, finally, from all those memories that tie me down, that make me less than what I could be. I'll rise up into my new shape. I'll breathe in, a bigger breath than I've ever breathed, and I'll feel my heart settling into its never-ending thunder. The fire will race along my sinews, pour into my muscles, temper my bones. I will scream. And we will kick the ground away and rush, tail to talon, toward the stars. We will sweep across the full white moon. Somewhere in a bedroom window, a girl will see us and hear our cries, and she will want to jump as well, want to throw herself into our flight, to risk the chill air and the jagged rocks for a chance at what we have.

Someday I'll ask him, soon enough. But not today.

I
T'S A YEAR
before I speak to a human, a year and a season. It's the height of summer again when a miller's daughter from the western edge of the kingdom takes herself to the woods. She shows up on our mountaintop one morning, torn by brambles and breathing hard.

The phoenixes and the griffins haven't been back since the day before. The dragon's been waiting at the mouth of the cave all night, and I sleep there too. The air's warm enough for it, anyway, especially with his heat next to me.

While the sun is rising, we don't move from the spot. I turn myself, now and again, into a ferret or a butterfly or a lizard just to pass the time. Doesn't take any thought to change now, hardly. It's like standing up or switching from walking to running. I can do most any animal, anything but a griffin or a phoenix or a dragon.

I'm a wild boar when the girl comes out of the woods flanked on all sides by her winged escort. She's dead tired, you can tell, but when the dragon gets up and picks his way down toward her, she straightens and even walks a few paces to meet him.

He touches his nose to her forehead, and then his great bulk is in the way, so I can't see a bit of the girl. It's as though he's wrapping her right up in his wings. When he pulls back, the girl is gone and a griffin stands in her place, pawing at the ground and tossing her head this way and that, sniffing the air.

The other griffins cry, a deep, guttural cry, and run up the slope to surround her. When they rise into the sky, I can't tell who is who anymore. She's become one of them.

 

But late that night, a full moon night, when I'm human again and the griffins have come back to the cave, the new girl ends up in front of my corner, staring.

“Who are you?” she whispers, as though the rest can't see me, as though I've slipped in unnoticed.

It's dim in here, but my eyes are as sharp as any hawk's, adapted for the dark as any fox's. I look her over. Already she has that poise, that grace, her every movement fluid. But there's a hunching of her shoulders, still, and a shy, slanted look; and her hair is a yellow I know, and I've seen her face many times. I wait for her to gasp, to recognize me, too. When I was small, she came with her mother often enough to our hut; she used to peek round her mother's skirts at me, staring as she is now. But no light comes on in her eyes. “I am the dragon's daughter,” I say.

She scrunches her nose at me, considering. The wind will be in her blood now, and there's only so much room for thought after that. After a moment she shrugs and lowers herself to the floor, curls up next to me.

The other girls have gone to sleep, and the dragon is rising and falling with each great breath before I get up the nerve to say, “Why did you come, then?”

I know she's awake. I can hear the unevenness in her breathing; I can see the whites of her eyes, blinking in and out. She's not yet all the way gone. She's not yet left it all behind, and I figure this is the only chance I'll have to ask it.

She doesn't speak right away. I wait. People like to tell their stories, you know. If she's human enough, still, and if I wait long enough, she'll tell me hers.

And she does, real quiet and careful, almost as if the words are being pulled from her, so that she doesn't know what they'll be until they come out. As if they aren't hardly words, even, but bits of herself, tears maybe, or blood dripping from a cut. “We'd gone away when the woods came in,” she says.

She says, “Father, Mother, me. My sisters that weren't yet married. There were lots of us girls, too many for one family. When we left the mill, it was hard to keep us all straight, to watch what we were doing.”

It's as though we're our own country, here in our corner. The girl's voice fills me up so I can see the grain she would have ground, the road she would have taken when the woods came, and the blanket she would have carried, bundled tight with pots and food and clothes.

She says, “The one closest to my age, she was Nerida. She fell in with a boy that was running with his family too. We'd all gone to the camps round the king's city. There were so many people there. It was a year ago now, wasn't it? I can see them still, the people spread out all over the ground on rugs and in makeshift huts. And the fear—you wouldn't believe it.”

“I believe it,” I say.

Her eyes gleam my way. “Would you—and you the dragon's daughter?”

“Wasn't always,” I say. “I was there then.”

“Well then, you know how every moment we thought the land might vanish, the sun might get wiped away, the city might crumble. And what do people do then but all the things they might never get to do? What do they do but grab hold of all the things they're worried will disappear?”

“Nerida,” I say.

“She up and had herself a baby.” The girl shakes her head, looking up into the dark. “Not for months and months, of course, and we were back home by then. The woods were on their way out. But the boy was gone too, wasn't he? And my father, it's not that he's mean, exactly, but there were so many of us. So he told her, he said she'd have to go off and find this boy of hers, and now it was winter, and the snow was three feet deep. They said she should wait; they said she could stay until the spring, but she wasn't about to stay where she wasn't wanted, and she left anyway.

“I tried to go with her. She'd have none of it. I watched her and her baby boy walking off into the snow, her dress fading into the gray of the sky until there was nothing left of her.

“Never heard from her again.

“When the sun came up in the spring, I went out searching. They told me to stay home, said there was no point.”

The girl stops. She says, real slow, “There was no point in anything else, was there? Nerida had gone and melted away into the snow, and nothing else mattered anymore. But I didn't find her, and I didn't find her, and I knew they'd be right in the end. We'd never get her back again.

“And when I went with my mother to visit the flower man, and that voice came creeping out of the woods like the only real thing in the world, and there was that lady, holding out that hand, it was the easiest thing to do. It was the only thing to do. And here I am.”

“You went to visit the flower man,” I say.

“Yes.”

“In a hut by the woods?”

“Yes. He came back, too, when the woods went back. I reckon he got pushed out, just like the rest of us.”

She doesn't know. She really doesn't know me, or her voice couldn't be that calm. I am used to transformations these days, but this is something else. This is the world, the whole of what I know, changing all about me while I stay put.

When I can breathe, I say, “Wasn't there a girl that used to be there too?”

She has to think about it. “I guess there was,” she says. “You lived round about there?”

“Round about, yes.”

“She's not there now. Maybe she got herself a family, something more than that old man.”

I can't help but mutter, “You mean that old man who was the
king
.”

“There's a girl who comes down from the castle at times, though she's a different one. She helps with the gardening. Emily? Emma?”

“Emmy,” I say.

“That's the one. How would you know that, then?”

“Just a guess,” I say.

“She called out to me, she did, when I was running back through the flowers, over the wall. She said,
You take a message to my lady! You tell her we've not forgotten her—you tell her to come back home!
I didn't say nothing back. I was just running and running then, you know?”

“Yes.”

“Not that I'd know her lady if I saw her.”

“No.”

“Anyway, that's what happened. That's how I ended up here. That's how I found myself a dragon and turned myself into a—a griffin, I guess.” She's trailing off. Her story's done; her words have all run out. Come the morning, she won't even remember we spoke, I reckon. “That's how I flew so high my feathers near touched the clouds . . .” Her eyes are closing now. Her breaths are evening out. She stiffens, looking straight at me. “Is it a dream, dragon's daughter? Will it disappear tomorrow?”

I shake my head. Could be she'll see it even in this dark, with eyes grown already sharp. “It won't disappear,” I say, and I know it is true. “It'll be here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until you don't even remember what tomorrow means, until tomorrow won't exist.”

She breathes in, out. “Good,” she says. “That's what I want.” She murmurs, “Good night, dragon's daughter.”

“Good night, Thea,” I say, because I've remembered her name now, the yellow-haired child her mother brought on her visits to me and Gramps. She had a pack of sisters, true, but she was the youngest, and the best loved. Her mother's whole face lit up when she looked at Thea. The little girl used to sit on the porch steps, just behind her mother's skirts, and she'd hold a daisy in her hand, and she'd pluck the petals one by one and watch them drift away on the breeze. Gramps gave her the flower so she could do that, never charged her nothing. Thea. I used to watch her, wonder what it would be like to have her life.

She doesn't answer me back. Could be she's asleep already. Could be she doesn't realize she never told me her name. Could be she's started to forget, already, that it's hers.

 

Something makes me turn my head only a few moments later. It's a silence that wasn't there before, a heavy presence. Thea sleeps, but there, in the center of the cave—the dragon watches me. We are the only ones awake, and I hear, as though I'm dreaming it, a voice, harsh, low:
“Tulip.”

It's what they've always called me, the ones who don't want to remember who I am, and the ones who don't care.

The dragon lifts himself up, scales glinting darkly. He pads, careful, about the piles of girls toward the entrance to the cave. He looks back at me.

I know that look. It's the one he gives me in the morning when he's of a mind to take me flying. It's a look that sends a thrill right through me, makes me think of the glorious hours to come.

I've never denied that look.

But I'm frozen. Thea's face, her childhood face, peers at me from behind my eyelids, and the petals of those daisies drift and drift through my mind, and a voice, a voice I know as well as anything, as the taste of rain, as the language of wolves—is saying something through them, something about me. My left wrist quivers, and the voice seems to flow up my arm to my ear:
My Marni, I'll love you always. Be safe
.

I shake my head at him.

He blinks, and blinks again, then swings his head away. I hear a great, frustrated snort, and then he leaves the cave and flies off into the full white moon without me.

I
T DOESN'T WORK
anymore.

Tomorrow won't exist
, I told her, and for me it had been true. You get so you'll forget there was a yesterday, that there's anything beyond this moment. In the sun, you forget the touch of a shadow; in the rain, you forget the brush of the sun. It's a merging, a becoming part of everything so that you're never separate anymore.

But it isn't working now.

 

Thea doesn't talk to me again. I'm not expecting her to. She sleeps nearby, as Annel does, so could be she's still holding on to who she was, at least a bit. Or maybe it's only habit.