A Creature of Moonlight (30 page)

It's the way it is, and all you can do is keep on going, keep on choosing the best that you can. So I know she's there, against my Gramps's heart, but I don't say a thing about it. Instead, I go back over to the other chair, and I sit there with him all through the perfect summer afternoon. We talk about little things, things that we forget the next moment, and the day slowly fades away until we're watching the dark move in, seeing the fireflies flitting, smelling the night wind, cool and wonderful.

She's still there. She always will be. Yet there's no need to do anything about it but let her be, just as she is, running all through our hearts.

See, sometimes my Gramps understands things.

And sometimes I do too.

T
HE WOODS DON'T
whisper to me anymore. But they're there, beyond our garden wall, waiting. The lady doesn't call to me anymore, but she's there too, sure and certain. Just beyond the first line of trees, knitting away on her log, singing her dark lullabies.

As the days become weeks and the weeks become months since I came home, Gramps doesn't ask if I ever go back to walking off into the woods.

Could be I don't. Could be I've had enough of such things and I spend the afternoons when I'm at our hut working with the flowers or soaking in the sun with my Gramps.

Or could be some days I do. It would be easy to slip out over the wall when my Gramps is sleeping the day away. Could be sometimes I turn myself into whatever creature I'm yearning to be, and I run and fly and forget the drama of my uncle's court, and what I do or don't think of the Lord of Ontrei, and all the complications of being human for a time.

I wouldn't tell my Gramps if this were so. He's had enough to worry him. It's enough for him that I've come back home, that despite it all, we're together again.

But he knows as well as I do, too, that we'll never fully be rid of the woods. Oh, they come and they go these days, like the wind, like the sun, like the seasons. Folks don't fret about them that way, not fearfully.

But there are still one or two who go, now and again, not every year, but enough that the farmers and the villagers keep a watch on the woods, and a watch on the girls who seem too drawn to them, for fear they'll disappear one bright night. I reckon there's not much they can do to stop them, though. Look what my Gramps did trying to stop me—it doesn't matter, once the woods get into a girl's head.

After all, as our folk will tell you, it's not just the creatures of the woods that require wariness. It's not just the obvious: the lights and the voices and the speaking owls, the faces in the branches.

It's the trees themselves.

There's something there, they'll say, whispering through the leaves, sleeping in the trunks. There's something that seeps through the spongy ground but never shows itself in any way you would recognize. If you walk enough in these woods, you'll start to understand its language. The wind through the trees will murmur secret things to you, and you'll be pulled by them, step by step by step, out of the human realm. You'll be drawn to the shadows, toward the soft flashes of moonlight through the branches, into the hidden holes and tricky marshes.

The villagers won't let their children go into the woods, not even to the very closest edge, not even when the wind is silent and the sun shines full through the trees. It's an insidious thing, they say, the soul of these woods. It will rock you and soothe you until you've nothing left but trust and belief and naivety. It will fold itself into you, and you will never know it's there, not until you're ten nights out and there's not a thing that can bring you back again.

And despite what I said to the dragon, I wouldn't dare try to stop the girls who go. If he sends his trees too far into our land, yes, then I'll fight him back. But the woods are his, and the girls he takes choose it with some deep part of them.

And could be at times, in some deep part of me, I miss it. It's not a thing that leaves you fully, is it? Out here, out where the shadows drift across the wall and the flowers grow more brilliantly the closer they are to the trees—out at our hut, we find the woods harder to forget than most.

Especially when we've got a certain small blue blossom growing all throughout our garden.

You wouldn't notice it, maybe, among the stunning roses, the bright lilies, the elegant irises, but it's everywhere. I don't try to prune it back or tear it up. I doubt it would make any difference; it never did before. It doesn't kill the others, anyway. It creeps up their stalks; it burrows under their thorns. But it doesn't stop them from growing, not as it used to do.

Besides, I've no wish to get rid of it. It makes me think of Annel, of my friend, off screaming her heart out into a wild wind. It makes me think of what she said about there being some things, some parts of you, that won't ever go away unless you reach deep down inside and rip them out.

She wouldn't do it; she wouldn't tear out half her heart, and I guess I won't either. I'll let the flowers stay, and I'll let myself look off north toward the mountains sometimes and think on the ones who run and fly free there, and remember what those days were like—what it's like for them still, the ones who never come back, the ones who give themselves up to the woods.

First, many thanks to Reka Simonsen, for saying yes to this story and for always managing to ask just the right questions. Thanks also to the members of the Semi-Secret Society of Alien Meese; may you sound your varied calls and grow your deciduous leaves most joyfully. And thank you to my family—to Mom and Dad, to Matt, Ben, and Jonathan—for everything.

R
EBECCA
H
AHN
grew up in Iowa, attended college in Minnesota, and soon afterward moved to New York City, where she worked in book publishing and wrote
A Creature of Moonlight
on the side.

She now lives in Minneapolis, with the cold winter, the wide sky, and many whispering trees. This is Rebecca's first novel.

 

www.rebeccahahnbooks.com