A Creature of Moonlight (24 page)

In any way that matters, she's gone; she's lost; she's buried all her yesterdays and doesn't care about the tomorrows. She is free.

Around me, it's closing in again.

They run through my head, the memories, the questions. I can't get rid of them anymore, not even for a day or an hour. Now, whenever I glance down at my hands, I think I see my moonlight creature looking back from my left wrist, gleaming, asking me what I want, murmuring the words from that note I fed it, over and over again. I hear his voice, my Gramps's voice, and I know he is alive. But I don't know why he left me, and I don't know what it means for me, and I don't know what I am to do about it now. And the memories rush, and the questions do not stop.

 

I'm sitting at the entrance of the cave, perched upon a rock, looking out over the woods. The dragon flew off this morning and made no offer to take me with him. I'm relieved, somewhat. A week ago now is when Thea arrived—I've been counting the days again, as I've not in months—and I've not gone flying since.

I've not been running thoughtless through the woods as all manner of folk, either. Not for more than a bite to eat, a wash in a spring. I've been sitting here watching the sun move across the rocks, watching the shade dance under the trees down the slope.

I've been thinking, or trying to. Whenever I shut my eyes, I see my Gramps's face looking back at me, and my heart flips over to think he's yet alive. And when I open my eyes, my heart drops all sudden, as though I've lost him again.

The lady's down at the edge of the woods, sitting and singing on an old black stump. The wind drifts her notes up the mountain slope. They play through my head, twisting this way and that. I shut my eyes to see his face again, and I think on the way the world has shifted, and I almost know what that shift means for me. And then the lady's tune darts into my head, and that knowledge slips away, and I open my eyes and gasp again at the loss.

Again: closed eyes, my Gramps's face, what it means for me. The lady's music floats through my mind again, emptying it, and my eyes snap open. And I try to grasp the thought again, and again. It itches at me.

By the time the griffins and the phoenixes fly in, I'm all over nerves. I watch them come, watch them settle into their old selves, file into the cave. Soon after, the dragon comes, and he gives me half a look before going inside as well. I've not slept deeply the last few nights, and my bones are weary, my mind all eager for a break.

Still, the lady keeps on with her song, and I can't bring myself to go in yet. There's something waiting, I think, some idea, some purpose just beyond my Gramps's face. But every time I shut my eyes to think, the lady's song twists, and my mind empties, and I'm left holding back my tears.

The moon rises. I bunch over myself, rocking to and fro.

The dragon comes out as a man and sits next to me.

“Tulip,” he says, “what's troubling you?”

I let the question settle inside me, and I find another coming out to meet it. “What troubled my mother, then?” I say. “When she sat with her flower and looked off south, what troubles picked away at her mind?”

He is intense; he always is, in whatever he does, and now he is intense in his frown at me. “She was thinking on you, inside her, I reckon.”

“Oh, yes?” I'm feeling my way, searching for the thing that seems best, the right thing to say. “And nothing else? Not the father she left behind, not the girls she might have known from that life who'd run to the woods and, when she found them here, wouldn't speak a word?” I'm thinking of Annel, of course, and maybe Thea. “Could be she had a friend here, one she'd loved. Could be she couldn't stand it, the space between them now.”

I stop to pull in a breath, and it gets caught in my throat.
My Marni, I'll love you always
. I shut my eyes.

“Is that it, then?” the dragon says. “It's that girl you knew, the one who's here?”

I open my eyes, focus on him. “Annel,” I say, remembering.

“Annel,” he says, and it's scarce a human word, how it trips on the way across his tongue. “You'll be missing her.”

I shake my head, not to say no, but because I don't know if that's it. “I guess,” I say. “Yes, sure, I miss her.”

Then he laughs, a great, warm dragon laugh. He slings an arm around me. I can feel my face at once going pink from the heat. “
That's
easy,” he says. “I'm not surprised you're lonely, Tulip. You're the only one of your sort up here.”

“So are you,” I say.

“Well now, and I've got you, haven't I? I've got the dragon's daughter.”

I look up at him from the crook of his arm. The lady's music is drifting over still. She's having herself a right long concert. I frown. “I guess,” I say again at last.

“Well, and I know how to fix this for you, don't I?”

“Do you?” It seems impossible.

“Yes,” he says. “I would have ages ago if you'd said the word. Just you sit right here and wait.”

He slips away from me. The lady's song is getting louder, if anything, faster and more insistent. The dragon moves back five paces, shakes himself all down, and stretches up, slides into his beast shape. I find myself looking straight into his bottomless eyes.

“Hold still.”

It's that harsh, deep voice again, but I haven't the mind to decide where it's coming from, because I'm prickling all over; my hairs are lifting, my breath coming fast.

The dragon takes a breath. I see his wings lifting out and coming close to fold around me, and I remember the morning Thea arrived, how he seemed to envelop her before—

I lurch to my feet. There's a ringing in my head, so I've scarce the balance to look behind, to see how the space is closing in, caught between his wingtips. He's beginning to breathe out now. The tips of my fingers and the point of my nose are shivering, twitching as I've never felt them before, and it's spreading—to my cheeks, along my hands, lighting on the ends of my toes. I hear the cry, the dragon's cry, piercing, unforgettable. I'm beginning to lift. I'm beginning to melt, to turn into just what he wants me to be—a dragon or a griffin or a phoenix, I don't know. Something to make me more than one of a kind.

And I've wanted this, yes, with everything I am. But there are thoughts I have to think first, and there are questions that need answering, and I can't let him do it.

If I were an ordinary girl, I'd have no way of stopping him. I would be caught, and by the time it was over, I'd be lost forever. I'd be exactly what he wants.

But I'm not an ordinary girl, am I? His wings are near around me now, but they're not yet touching me. His spell is turning me away from myself, but I use that urging, I use the twitching through my skin, and I throw it in a different direction, down, into itself, smaller and smaller.

When I look up again, the pebbles are boulders. I scamper, squeaking, out from under his scales and race down the mountain.

I
RECKON
I've come through this place a hundred times in the past year and a half. I reckon I flew right over, or jumped past these tumbled walls, or darted under the old leaning table in the center of the clearing, and I never once saw it for what it was.

I was gone then, lost in the flying and the jumping and the darting. I didn't have my thoughts to catch me up, to snag on the quiet that settles here, strange and stagnant. Nowhere in the dragon's woods is as quiet as this. I don't mean the quiet of animals sleeping or the wind dying down. I mean that the very leaves, which crunch so deliciously in the woods, are muted here. I mean that the air here is dense and colorless. The tingle, the heady scent of magic, is nowhere here.

The trees lean in all around, but the ruins of this cottage and its garden aren't part of the dragon's woods.

I'm down off the mountain, on the northern edge of what was once the king's land, almost to last of the dragon's retreating woods. It's been two or three days since I first ran from the dragon—two or three days I've spent at the edge of my ability to outrun, outtrick, outscamper, and stop quite still in a burst of sunlight, a speck of shade, so that for a moment I'm near invisible to passing eyes. I've been leading the dragon's folk in a merry chase.

Could be that's another reason I see this place today. I've been paying so much attention to the fairies and the spirits and so on that their sudden absence shocks, like a bowl of ice water splashed in my face, like a great hand that reaches down and trips me up, leaving me sprawling on the ground, nose just inches away from something glinting, half buried in the dirt before the square rock that I now see that was once the step to this place's front door.

I sit up. I've been jerked out of a lynx shape, and my eyes are straining, missing the cat's precision.

It's been a long while since anyone lived here, longer than before the woods started moving in two years ago, I'd guess. There are plenty of abandoned homes and farms all through what's left of the retreating lowland woods, but none of them has crumbled the way this place has. And none of them stands separate from the trees, in its own spellproof clearing.

Over there, that would have been a shed for the chickens or a cow, now just a pile of boards rotting. That heap of stones up the hill a bit would have been the well, with a footpath running back through the garden. And here where I am, there would have been a road, or a trail at least, going off toward the farms and the villages in the valleys a hill or two away. They would have come up to this exact spot, whoever visited this hut, and they would have stepped up onto that rock and rapped on the door that stood just there, and passed into the room beyond, an entryway by the look of it. Not a hut, then, but a house. Someone would have lived here, milking the cow, chasing the chickens, drawing water from the well, and helping up whoever was clumsy enough to trip themselves at the front door.

I reach out and grab the sparkly thing just in front of me in the dirt. I shine it with my fingertips.

Someone must have lived here or come visiting who had some money. This isn't a fake metal thing you might buy at a market. This is gold.

I know I ought to be leaving straightaway. I've almost made it through the woods. One more quick dart and I'll be in the king's land, and the dragon won't be able to get at me there.

I'm even picking myself up, brushing myself off, but now, as clumps of dirt fall away, this gold ring is beginning to shine, and the words wrapped around the band stand out, black from the bits of earth still wedged in their grooves. I've not forgotten my letters, not even after all this time, and I lift the ring to read it.

 

Sometimes, when a person is about to tell you something that's going to change your life, or make you cry, or make you leap for joy—sometimes you know it before they say a word.

It's in the way they look at you and in the way they open their mouth. It's in the tilt of their head, the tension in their hands, or the slump of their shoulders.

Times are, you don't need words to hear a thing.

 

I look at this ring, and before the letters fit together, before they sound inside my head, I know what I'm going to see, and I start trembling all through me.

“
To my daughter—”
it says. My hands are shaking so, it's hard to keep the ring turning, to keep squinting at the words: “
a darling princess.”

And who else would have had a golden ring out here at the edge of the world? Who else would have come to this isolated place, and her a princess?

Who would have lost her ring and never returned to find it?

I fold my hand tight around the ring and turn my back to the woods. I walk around the ruins of the house, not through; it doesn't seem right to go through. I step across the garden, where I figure the paths might have been, looking here and there, always searching.

At the back, near the tumbled well, I find the stones. Two of them, grown over with grasses but still unmistakable in their meaning. On one, there is carved a woman's name I don't recognize. On the other, there is the name of my mother.

To my daughter—

I wonder, I can't help but wonder, who put them here. My uncle? Villagers? The soldiers who showed up on that very doorstep, who knocked with their leather gloves and made the baby inside cry, so that they knew they had come to the right place after all?

And I wonder, did her ring fall off when she rushed out, trying to get away, or trying to reason with them or to beg for her child's, her servant's, lives? Did she lose it in the struggle—grappling with the men, with her own brother? Did it jerk its way down her skin and drop to the floor of the house and roll, unnoticed, out the open doorway into the dirt?

Or did it slip from her trailing hand as they dragged her out to her grave?

Yes, I am trembling. My very thoughts are trembling. Somewhere above me the dragon flies, and here in this corner of the world, in this bit of space that doesn't belong to him somehow, that doesn't belong to anyone but the ones underneath these stones, I am trembling, and my thoughts are running wild, and there's nothing here to see or hear me.

 

My mother was here. She stood in this garden just like me. She held this ring in her hand; she looked off into the woods. She thought about the dragon and she thought about my Gramps, who wouldn't have known where she'd gone.

But there the sameness between us ends. She had a baby, first small in her arms and then crawling about, getting itself into the vegetables or the flowers no doubt, maybe rolling a ball across the floor of the house. She had someone else, too, her old servant who she would have talked to about things, who she would have worried about late at night when she'd put the baby to bed and couldn't keep from remembering that half the king's army was on her trail.