Free A Creature of Moonlight by Rebecca Hahn Page A

when your ally is the king’s only heir.”
    There’s a silence again, and I can feel the flowers shuddering still, but I can feel my needles thrumming, too, and it eases me, sets my mind to its purpose.
    The lord says, “What would you expect out of such an alliance?”
    â€œThat you’d have my back while I’m at court. That you’d support me in front of the other lords if the king took an idea to move against me.”
    â€œAnd what would you offer in exchange?”
    â€œWhen the king is gone,” I say, “there’ll be many lords thinking on what they did while he was still around, regretting things, no doubt. I guess there’ll be time enough then for offering rewards to those loyal to me.”
    â€œI see.”
    I reckon he does. It’s a dangerous game we’re playing, him and me. We’ll both be hoping for things we’ve no way of guaranteeing. Could be he’ll step away right now, leave me to figure my own way out. Could be it’s not worth the risk for him.
    But the next minute he says, “It’s growing late. Don’t you think it’s time the king was told you’ll be coming to court?”
    And he’s offering me his arm—me, with my old ragged dress and my dirt. I take it, holding my needles in place with my other hand. We walk through the garden, around the hut. I’ve nothing I wish to take with me. Just my Gramps’s drawing, and the needles, and the memories of the woods burning a fire through me, telling me things that make me think I’ve a power greater even than the king, goading me on to use it, to finally bring him down.
    Out front, the lord unties his horse from the porch railing and he lifts me up across the saddle before hopping on behind. And then we are stepping away from the hut, past the bushes, up the hill. The stars are coming out, and I imagine my garden glowing, our windowpanes sparkling in their light. But before long we’ve come out onto the road toward the city and are cantering north through the meadows, and I’m looking only straight ahead, never turning round to see what I’m leaving behind.

 
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PART TWO

One
    T HERE ARE a thousand stories about how the first dragon died, leaving the woods to shrink in on itself, leaving the humans, us, to blink in the open sunlight for the first time, and to plant crops, and to build cities, and to feel safe from all manner of luring voices.
    There are a thousand stories.
    Some ways it’s told, a brave young knight searches out the dragon in his lair and chops off his head, chip-chop, just like that, and it’s done.
    Too simple, that one, I think.
    Some ways, a brave young maiden lets the dragon carry her away, and just when he’s fallen asleep, she slips a poison twixt his jaws, and he shrivels up and dies there while she watches, and it’s done.
    Too unlikely, that one. Where’d she have gotten the poison after the dragon took her away? And what chance of a human poison working on a dragon anyway?
    Dragons, they’re not killed by swords or poisons.
    Takes something else entirely to worm its way in past a dragon’s tough skin into a dragon’s heart. Takes something else to burn it until it screams from agony. Takes something stronger, something truer, something much more terrible.
    Something like a wish. Something like a dream that comes back again and again, every night, every morning before you wake, one that flits at the edge of your great dragon eyelashes all through the day, something that consumes you, scale by scale and tooth by fang, until you’re nothing but it, nothing but the pain, the unflinching, unyielding reality of this yearning, this dream.
    Some say the dragon took one girl too many from the woods to his cave, and one day he fell for his latest catch, not with a momentary passion, a passing infatuation with her beauty. No, this was deeper than the dragon cared to admit;