Veiled Rose (25 page)

Two months slipped by. The sweltering heat of summer passed its most vicious point and slowly began to dwindle toward autumn. Rose Red’s work continued as it had for the last year. She cleaned the prince’s chambers. She mended his stockings and swept his hearth and ran a thousand little errands for him that he never noticed. The household staff wanted nothing to do with her, and even the head housekeeper, an imposing woman of military heritage, spoke to Rose Red only when necessary. So Rose Red kept to herself and gave herself her own assignments, and worked harder than any two maids on staff.

Only now she cleaned Lady Daylily’s chambers as well as the prince’s.

But she saw either of them only when she might happen to glimpse them together out on the grounds.
He ain’t asked her yet,
she told herself every time she saw Prince Lionheart walking beside that tall beauty.
Not yet.

But he would. As surely as she knew what she would have to clean from the chamber pots every morning for the rest of her life, Rose Red knew Lionheart was destined to marry the Baron of Middlecrescent’s daughter. Everyone in the household knew that.

Except perhaps Prince Lionheart.

He knew what everyone expected of him. Expectations pressed in on him at every turn. Nevertheless, though already past his seventeenth birthday and beginning to look toward his eighteenth, he never made the proposal, never announced the betrothal. The Baron of Middlecrescent and his doe-eyed wife had made their annual visit to court in midsummer, hoping for good news, but they returned to Middlecrescent with deflated hopes. Or rather, the baron left deflated, while his wife, who never did quite catch on to the Plan, was full of prattle about how well their dear ducky looked, and wasn’t Prince Lionheart growing into a fine and handsome young fellow, and well, come to think of it, wouldn’t it be just darling if those two were to fall in love someday?

“What would you say to that, husband?”

The baron had not answered.

Daylily herself, when questioned on the subject by her friends and attendants, merely laughed a bright laugh, saying, “Oh, Lionheart and I are such good friends!” Nothing more, nothing less. Her ladies weren’t fooled for an instant.

Neither was Rose Red.

One morning, just a few weeks after the baron and his wife had departed for home, Rose Red entered Lionheart’s chambers to clean as usual. She began in the main room, shoveling out the grate with practiced, methodical motions, focusing on her work and thinking of nothing. Just scrape, scoop, and dump, over and over.

Lionheart stepped from his bedchamber. She turned, surprised, not having realized that he was in there. He smiled when he saw her, giving a two-fingered salute. “Top of the morning, Rose Red.”

He strode over to sit in a chair near the fireplace where she worked. She reached up quickly to adjust the veil over her face, but Lionheart was not looking at her. An attendant carrying a pair of riding boots followed him into the room. The prince held out a hand for them. “Thank you,” Lionheart said. “I think I can manage to put on my own boots.”

The attendant handed them over and stood back, folding his hands neatly before him.

Lionheart arched an eyebrow at him. “I mean to say, you’re dismissed, Turtlebreath.”

“Tortoiseshell, Your Highness.”

“Yes, you. Begone. Hence to the place from whence you came!”

The attendant blinked a long, meaningful blink. Then he bowed and scuttled off, and in his scuttling managed to convey a world of disapproval.

Lionheart snorted as the door shut behind him. “The man thinks less of me because I want to put on my own boots.”

Rose Red smiled behind her veil. She was uncertain whether or not to continue her work in the presence of the prince, and since he did not bid her one way or the other, she chose to stand quietly, saying nothing.

Lionheart began the process of shoving his feet into the fitted riding boots, a more arduous task than one might have expected. Rose Red began to suspect that perhaps he couldn’t do it without aid, when at last something popped, and the first boot slid up over his calf. He buckled it across the top, then paused, as though tired from a great labor. Rose Red noticed, with some surprise, that his breathing was quick, and she wondered just how much exertion outfitting oneself in boots required.

Then Lionheart, taking the second boot in his hands to repeat the process, said, “You know what, Rose Red? I think I’m going to ask her today.”

The shovel in her hand became unbearably heavy. She grabbed it with her other hand and just managed to keep from dropping it.

“It’s as good an opportunity as any,” the prince continued, grimacing in his struggle against all the laws of physics and tight leather. “Foxbrush cannot ride with us due to some meeting with Hill House’s steward. It’ll just be the two of us, and we’re riding all the way out to Swan Bridge today, perhaps even across if the weather holds. It seems best to ask something like this in private, don’t you think?”

She couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t even nod.

“Gah!” he gasped, and his foot at last wiggled its way into place, and he fastened the buckle. Then Lionheart stood up and stamped a few times. Wiping perspiration from his forehead, he shook out his arms and took a deep breath. “Everyone expects me to be betrothed by the time I’m eighteen. My father was. And my grandfather. And probably his grandfather before him as far back as history goes. Seems to be a tradition of some kind. Granted, I’m not one to kowtow to tradition for tradition’s sake . . . but then again, a girl like Daylily isn’t exactly kowtowing. She’s nice enough, pretty enough, and she’s a good rider. Fact is,” he crossed his arms and studied the half-cleaned fireplace, “fact is, I think it’s time I did something right. Something expected of me. Just to take them unawares, know what I mean?”

Rose Red hoped to goodness he didn’t expect her to answer. This was how he usually talked to her these days, the way he would talk to a mirror. As though he simply needed to hear his own thoughts out loud to make certain of their clarity, and she was as good an ear as any to hear them.

Lionheart lifted his gaze from the fireplace and smiled at her, an uneasy sort of smile. “I’m scared to death. But don’t let on that I told you. Who’d have thought a girl could be so frightening? I mean, what if after all this she says no? It’s not impossible . . . I mean, not everyone wants to be queen.”

Rose Red tried to give an encouraging smile but suspected it came out ghastly, and was thankful yet again that he could not see it.

Lionheart reached out suddenly and, to her great surprise, patted her shoulder. “Wish me luck, Rosie. There’s nothing for it now.”

He turned and strode from the room, leaving her alone with her shovel and her bucket.

She dropped the shovel with a clatter and let it lie where it fell at her feet. Her hands limp at her sides, she stood there in the silence of the room until she heard outside his window the clop of hooves on the cobbles. Then, as though shot with life once more, she rushed to the window and looked out. The wind caught her veil and pulled it across her eyes, and she yanked it viciously back into place to watch the scene below.

Master Whipwind, the stable master, held the heads of the prince’s red mare and Daylily’s charcoal gelding, a handsome pair when next to each other. Lionheart and Daylily appeared a moment later, and Lionheart assisted the lady into her saddle. Then he swung up onto the back of his mare, let out a merry whoop, and led the way at a brisk trot from the courtyard.

Rose Red’s quick eyes saw it all. She saw the significant looks the stable hands gave the guardsmen. She saw movement from a window in a wing across from her, and knew that Queen Starflower watched the goings-on with satisfaction. She even saw a forlorn figure with oiled hair standing in a darkened doorway, and though she had little use for him, her heart went out momentarily to Foxbrush.

The horses disappeared from her view.

Rose Red leapt away from that window and rushed across to the study. There she peered through a window that looked toward the Eldest’s southern gardens, across the stretch of land that led at length to Swan Bridge. As she watched, she saw Lionheart and Daylily appear. They urged their horses into a gallop and thundered across the turf, Daylily’s superb red hair billowing behind her like a flag, matching the flap of Lionheart’s scarlet coat.

“You fool!” Rose Red growled aloud. “Oh, Leo, you fool. You’re goin’ to be hurt, you’re goin’ to be miserable, and what will I do for you then?” She shook her head hard, grinding her teeth. “Stupid girl, it’s goin’ to happen, as sure as I’m standin’ here. Get used to it. You’ve known since you came how it would be. You’ve known all this long year. . . .”

Rose Red turned from the window. “Get back to work now,” she muttered. “Get back to your tasks as you was meant to, and let the great ones do as they must. It’s no concern of yours.”

But she could not resist one last look out the window.

She thought she saw far up in the sky a red flame, like a falling star speeding to earth.

Beana stood on the far side of the goat pen, her ears pricked, her nose gently sniffing the breeze.

“I know you’re there,” she muttered.

But she heard nothing.

That was what worried her more than anything. For the first time since she and Rose Red had descended the mountain, the air was still, that trembling murmur from beyond the worlds vanished.

Beana paced. She knew she should be relieved, but she was not. For a year and a day, she had stood almost constant vigil to be certain the Other was never heard beyond its bounds. But this was not a battle to be won so easily; the Other would never give up.

“Trying to lull me into a false security,” Beana muttered. “That’s what you’re doing.”

No answer.

Beana paced up and down, looping the whole pen at last, faster and faster. Then, as the other goats watched, scandalized, she took a running start and leapt the fence, galloping awkwardly through the stable yard and the near gardens, out into the farther stretches of the Eldest’s park. Her fellow goats bleated and cheered in a mixture of horror and admiration before (once she was out of sight) completely forgetting her existence. No one else witnessed her bolt for freedom.

The grass was warm and soft beneath her feet, so different from the hard mountain terrain to which she was used, full of many delectable smells. But the goat did not stop to investigate these. She slowed from a gallop to a trot, eyes focused forward on her destination.

The Eldest’s grounds ended where the gorge cut across the land, sweeping sharply down into those unknown Wilderlands below.

Beana trotted to the edge of the gorge and gazed into that dark forest. The trees watched her and some beckoned gently with leaf and needle-covered hands, but she ignored these. “Bah,” she muttered, searching and sniffing and becoming ever more agitated.

Suddenly she caught a new scent. It was not the one she sought.

Slowly, unwilling to believe her senses, the goat turned her eyes upward, to the sky. “Lights above, shield us,” she whispered.

There, above her, appearing in a flash of fire, was a form she knew all too well. And with it came the stench that still haunted her nightmares, no matter how many centuries since last she’d smelled it! In that moment of recognition, Beana knew that descending terror and the memories it stirred in her heart better than she knew herself.

Don’t be afraid,
sang the wood thrush.

But Beana was running now, as fast as she could for the Eldest’s House, while watching the destruction falling like lightning.