A Creature of Moonlight (10 page)

I hold my Gramps's note, tracing each letter until my finger knows their every curve and line, until when I close my eyes, I think I hear them, leaping from the paper to whisper in my ear in that voice I'll never know again:
My Marni, I'll love you always. Be safe
.

I'll learn the knitting. I've been sewing Gramps's and my clothes all my life, and I reckon I can figure the right stitches for a vengeance if I put my mind to it. No doubt the queen and her ladies do needlework. I'll practice with them until I've relearned all I've forgotten, until these needles know my will, until they're nothing but tools for getting my heart's first wish.

O
VER THE NEXT
few weeks I discover what life is like at my uncle's court.

There are buildings enough here to house all the ladies and the lords, and their children and their servants and their servants' children, and still to have room for dancing floors and dining halls and kitchens and stables.

The lords and the ladies spend half the day getting dressed and the other half tittering to one another, going for walks along the river, sinking deep in bows and curtsies if my uncle ever saunters by. The gossip here flows as free as air. They talk of my uncle and his barren wife. They talk of the woods moving in, and whether or not that is the villagers' and farmers' fault—though where they got a notion like that, I haven't the slightest idea.

My uncle's attitude does nothing to keep them from seeking me out. We socialize in the main hall. I take tea with them sometimes or join a whole group for games and a luncheon out by the river again. They seem to expect me to laugh at their jokes; they seem to expect me to smile.

It seems they've forgotten the flower girl, the one who stands against the side of the flower man's hut and never speaks, and hardly looks at them. They think now that I've come to the castle, I'll be different. I'll play their court games, abide by their rules. I'll forget those years, the guilt in their eyes, their awkward questions:
How's our Tulip?
I'll forget digging for bulbs and shivering in the cold, tucked beneath too few blankets, sipping broth with too much water, hoping, only hoping that when Gramps got sick, he would recover on his own, because no one would come to help us, not when a death like that would make the king happy.

They don't talk of it, who I was before, and none of them even hints at a mention of my mother. It's as though she never was. As though she never walked these halls. As though she never wore dresses just like mine, and had a maid, and slept in a feather bed, and watched the geese on the river arrowing in from the north. As though they never fell all over her as they're now falling all over me.

The queen, especially, seems well and determined to befriend me. She finds me at least once every day and takes me into town to buy more material for dresses, or walks with me about the palace grounds. When I am lucky, we sit by a window in her rooms and practice our needlework. She, at least, is a pleasant enough companion. She tells me of the countries beyond the woods, especially the country she comes from. She tells me things I've never heard before, not even in Annel's stories.

“Are you sure?” I'm asking her one day, almost a week after I've arrived. “It's just—I can scarce imagine such a place.”

“I'm sure, my dear.” We're knitting woolen hats for the children of the castle. We're in her sitting room, the same room where I found her and the king that first night. Even the same dog is here, sleeping in his spot before the fire. “Magic isn't viewed there as it is here. In my country, old superstitions have been replaced by carefully controlled powers, and a person who uses magic for ill is held to account by the highest judge in the land.”

“You do have woods, though.”

“Yes, some, the hard sorts of trees that can grow in our rocky dirt.”

“And they leave you alone? The voices, the creatures—they don't lure away your girls?”

She puts down her needles and yarn and sighs. “Oh, Marni, in my country there is no fear of—of little people or twinkling lights. We've moved beyond the old myths of forests filled with sorcery. The power in our lands lies with the people, as it should, as it always will if we've the courage and the intelligence enough to grasp it.”

I lower my own half-finished hat as well. “You don't fear magic, then.”

“Not at all, not when it is used correctly. It can be a greatly useful tool. There is nothing inherently wicked or tempting about it. No more than any power.”

“Your sorcerers use it without any urgings to run to the woods.”

“Marni,” she says seriously, leaning forward with her little hands tucked fast in her lap, “you needn't believe anything they've said about your birth. The woods are only woods. Your mother was only a frightened girl who did something she oughtn't have.
You
are only the king's long-lost niece, restored at last to your rightful place by his side. All else is nothing, a fairy tale, a country's collective imagination run amok. Hmmm?” She nods at me, and somehow I nod back, though I imagine I look somewhat odd with my mouth hanging open. She picks up her work with a quick little motion, shifts it into place between her fingers. “Let's keep on with these; we have ten more to finish by tomorrow.”

I obey, swallowing my sigh. The dog is snuffling in his sleep, maybe dreaming of something tasty. The sun is high in the sky, so there's no danger of being called to dinner for hours yet. There's nothing quite as tedious as knitting children's hats, but at least it's good practice. I'm using my own needles, the needles I made; the queen doesn't know the difference, and they slide themselves into whatever shape I need, swiftly, quietly, so that she never notices.

While we're knitting, I listen to them, to the murmurs they send up through my skin. All this past week I've been remembering, slow but sure, how the lady taught me thus, to let the needles guide me, to feel that they are extensions of my fingers, doing my bidding as my true hands do. I murmur a song to them as we work, and it is an eerie, lilting tune, just as the lady used to sing. The queen shivers as she listens to it, but she doesn't tell me to stop. I even catch her murmuring along with me, adding a harmony, weaving a descant into my melody.

I'm not telling the needles to add in curses, not yet. I'm telling them to wait, wait. And to practice. The designs we make in our children's hats aren't as elegant or well stitched as the queen's bright patterns, but they're the sorts of designs that could easily contain a spell. Looking at them sends my head spinning off into places I half remember, and when I close my eyes against their twists and turns, I hear the far-off echo of a cry, the sort of cry that makes my bones shudder and my shoulder blades twitch, as if hoping for wings.

 

It's not just with the queen and her pretty yarn that the needles and I practice.

Soon after I've arrived, the queen moves me to a tower room, a suite really, filled with inch-thick rugs and rare oaken desks and chairs. She says it's a room meant for princesses, and though she doesn't say it straight out, I think she means my mother lived here once. My bed could fit eight village lasses, and my fireplace seems as if it could warm the whole castle. From my window I can see all across the land: past fields and villages, all the way to the mountains, which are orange now, and red and gold and every shade of brown.

At night, when the lords and ladies start yawning and crawling up the stairs, I go to this room, and after Sylvie's changed me into my nightgown, I sit up before the fire and stare into it until I can see how it weaves together, the separate flaming strands.

I think as little as possible, and I reach out a hand to grasp these strands, pull them out straight and thin. I wrap them around my needles. I listen to them murmur, and they listen to me sing.

We knit a thing with wings and a beating heart and six sharp talons. It roars and leaps away from us, across my room, out through the window. It flies off, always north, and always I watch until I cannot see it shrinking against the mountains. It's not a vengeance yet, just a creature of flame, and I reckon it flaps itself into nothingness before it reaches the woods.

I am not sure who I am on these nights. Part of me is that creature, the one I've knit from fire and song. It's flying free, as I long to fly free. It's sweeping through the air, as bright as a dream, and it knows nothing of mothers or Gramps or any king.

It's my father in me, I guess, though
father
is such a people word, and that thing—that fire, that longing—is everything people aren't.

And the other side of me, the side that puts her hands on the windowsill and feels the indents of other hands, from years ago, and hears another sigh from another girl who watched these same mountains—that side wants only to stay forever, to feel close to that other girl, to know her in a way I never will.

That part turns from the window when the thing has gone, searching through the trunk against the wall, reading the spines of the books above the fireplace, and lying in bed wondering about that girl. I never find anything in the trunk but my own clothes, and the books on the shelf are only the ones the lords and ladies hand to me as gifts, and all my wondering solves no mysteries.

Then, just before I fall asleep, the two parts come together in a fiery rage at the man who took that girl from me, and I'm certain again of who I am and what I'm doing here and how delicious it will be when the many-taloned thing looks up at me and sees the purpose in my eyes, and screams, and goes at last to take our lovely prize.

 

But the king is gone more often than not since I've moved in, and I would have little chance to send my magic his way even if I had figured out how to knit my vengeance. He rides around the kingdom, chopping down the advancing trees. He takes some lords with him, the ones who've learned to do more than gossip and scheme. Always he takes the Lord of Ontrei.

As one week turns to two, and two to three, I never once trade words with that lord. He comes with the king whenever he rides in, and he talks to the other nobles, sure enough. It's not as though I'm seeking him out, but I do wonder at the way his face never turns my way. I know now what it means that the Lord of Ontrei has offered me his hand. There are three great noble families: Cavarell, from which the disdainful Lord Beau has bought his way to the top; Handon, led by a tottering old man twice the age of my Gramps who scarce can hear a word these days but nonetheless kicks his many grandchildren from here to the woods and back; and Ontrei, the oldest, most powerful house, the house the king keeps at his right hand always, the house he trusts above all else.

I know the lord's name now, his own name: Edgar. And I know how the other lords and ladies speak of him: in hushed tones, not from fear, but from respect. Three years ago, a rare company of bandits found their way through the mountains, down the solitary road to our fields and villages, and laid waste upon the farmers and the townspeople. Edgar of Ontrei, whose holdings are in the north, led a host of soldiers against them, and him only nineteen. He slaughtered them to a man.

In a country like ours, where there's little risk of war with other nations, such an act carries everlasting honor.

I needn't explain, no doubt, how the single ladies dream of him, nor how the gossip turns his way more than his fair share.

When the king is in, the lord trains with his own men in the empty fields across the river, and the courtiers on the castle banks sit on blankets and wear their gloves and hats, braving the chilling wind to catch sight of him fencing or wrestling or riding in formation with his soldiers.

I don't join them. There's some would say I'm a foolish girl not to fall for him now that I know his status. He offered me help before anyone else; he talked in the dead of the night of protecting me, of seeing me through all these changes; and some would say I'm downright dumb not to seek him out, not to tell him I'm of a mind to marry now.

In truth, though, the thought of giving him his kingship, of spending my days fluttering like these ladies, of carrying my uncle's wife's glittering smile—it makes my throat close up, and I long to dash for the woods, and take the shining hand of the lady there, and run and run.

 

Still, as the weeks go by and the bushes around the castle turn brown and then bare to the wind, I'm settling more and more into my uncle's court. Every night I stitch away, trying to make a vengeance, but every night there's something still missing from my creature, some breath, some purpose. I keep on with it, but I'm giving it up earlier every night. With my uncle scarce around to remind me of my intention, and all the comforts of his court to turn me soft and slow, I've not the same will for it that I did when I arrived.

Well, and I've not the same misery, either, have I? My Gramps's absence is a jagged hole inside, deep and unhealing, but the lords and ladies are pleasant enough—and in truth, I look forward to seeing the queen each day. For all that she's my uncle's wife, I've come to like the small, bright woman.

I think sometimes that she was lonely before I arrived. She doesn't speak at dinner, except when the king or a noble says something to her first. She flits around the court with the ladies, laughing and being witty, but she's not best of friends with any.

And one chilly day when we're out walking in the meadows on the far side of the river, she says, out of nowhere, “You know, Marni, you shouldn't expect that everything will become rose petals and rainbows when you are queen.”

We're bundled up against a cold breeze. The last dregs of warmth have slipped away overnight, and we're left a bitter, hard day. I smile at the queen. “I don't expect nothing, Aunt.”

“Anything
.
”

“I don't expect anything. I don't expect even to become a queen.”