Veiled Rose (9 page)

Perhaps Foxbrush appreciated the time to himself, without Leo’s constant nagging for attention. Perhaps he didn’t. Foxbrush was a quiet lad and had little to say on the subject.

Leo was bursting with life and excitement. Rose Red was not exactly the type of person he would have picked for a companion, and he certainly never referred to her even in his thoughts as a “friend.” But she was a jolly good sport, he’d give her that for sure, and was always brimming with new ideas.

One of those lazy summer afternoons, he and Rose Red were both down by the pool they had made by damming part of the creek. Rose Red had wanted to call it the Lake of Shining Dreams, but Leo had vetoed that notion and rechristened it the Lake of Endless Blackness, which was far superior. They amused themselves for hours on end building stick-and-leaf boats, sailing them to the middle of their lake, and sinking them with well-aimed acorns.

But this particular day they had already sunk an entire armada, and both were feeling too sluggish and comfortable to think up a more exciting game. Leo used his beanpole to stir the hulks of sunken ships around the pool’s bottom. Over the course of the summer, he had dubbed the beanpole Bloodbiter’s Wrath and covered it with carvings of monsters (which tended to look like stick-bugs with teeth) and heroes (which tended to look like stick-bugs with swords). It had indeed become a weapon worthy of his boyhood heroism.

Rose Red sat a little farther upstream, her back against a tree. For once she had not brought her nanny goat along but left her in the cottage yard, though only after swearing that she and Leo would venture nowhere near the cave up the mountain slope. Satisfied that the children would while their time away safely in the woods, Beana was more than happy to take an afternoon off.

Leo contemplated the swirling skeletons of ships, and Rose Red contemplated Leo, thinking of nothing other than perhaps a secret desire to remove her veil in that heat. She always removed it for her Imaginary Friend. She always removed it for her Dream too. And Beana saw her unveiled nearly every day.

But it was different with Leo.

So Rose Red sat covered, despite the summer heat. She tried not to hear the voice of the wood thrush, singing in the branches above her in a voice she recognized as her Imaginary Friend’s.

Won’t you answer me?

She didn’t want to answer. She had a real friend now.

Leo looked up suddenly. “What do you think you’ll be when you grow up?”

Rose Red blinked. “What’s that?”

“What do you think you’ll be?” Leo hooked a piece of a broken ship on the end of Bloodbiter’s Wrath and lifted it, dripping, from the water. “If you could be anything at all.”

She didn’t know what to say. Such a question had never suggested itself to her. So she folded her hands and waited quietly, knowing that Leo could never let a silence go unfilled. Sure enough, he dropped the broken ship back into the Lake of Endless Blackness and went on.

“I’m going to be a jester.”

“What’s a jester?”

“What’s a jester?” Leo repeated, making a face at her. “How can you not know that? It’s only the very best occupation in the world! You get to travel all over and wear loose, comfortable clothing of whatever colors you want. No itchy collars and
no lace.
You write songs too, lots of them, and you sing them for kings and dukes.”

Rose Red considered this. “Like the songs of Eanrin?”

“Dragon’s teeth!” Leo stuck out his tongue and closed one eye, making choking noises. “
Nothing
like those.”

“But the songs of Eanrin are the best ones, ain’t they? That’s what me dad says. Ain’t he the spiffiest poet of all?”

Leo shivered and stuck his beanpole into the mud, then got to his feet. “Sir Eanrin of Rudiobus is the most celebrated bard in the history of the world. And I solemnly swear to you, here and now, before the shores of this dread lake, when I am a jester, I will
never
sing a single song written by Iubdan’s chief poet. Not if my life depends upon it!”

“Why not?”

“They’re lovey-mushy songs; dragons eat them.”

Rose Red shrugged. She was only going on ten years old, but she was a girl all the way through. “I like lovey songs.”

Leo made another face to better express his feelings, sticking his tongue out even farther this time. Then he said, “When I’m a jester, I’m going to write my own songs. Better ones than Sir Eanrin’s. Just wait. And I’ll sing them for all the kings of the Continent.”

“All of them?”

“And the emperors of the East!”

Rose Red couldn’t help but be impressed. “Maybe,” she said shyly, “maybe I’ll come with you?”

But Leo shook his head at that. He was searching around now, gathering stones, testing their weights, discarding some and keeping others. “Jesters always travel alone. It’s part of the job. We are a solitary lot. Watch this!”

Using the stones he’d deemed acceptable, he started to juggle, first with just two, then adding a third, then a fourth and a fifth. They whirled around, faster and faster, and Rose Red’s head whirled as well, like a cat watching birds in flight. Leo began to pace back and forth, still keeping track of the stones, stepping high as a prancing pony. Then he flung up his hands, and all five stones flew out and landed in a nearly perfect circle around him.

Rose Red applauded, and Leo took a bow. “I’ve been practicing that,” he said. “I saw a man do it once. He was a jester indentured to the Duke of Shippening, and the duke sent him down from Capaneus City to perform for my fa—to perform at the Eldest’s House. But when he did it, the stones burst into flame as they landed. All colors of fire! He swallowed fire too.”

“Swallowed fire?”

“Like a dragon! I knew then that I wanted to be a jester, just like the Duke of Shippening’s man.”

He gathered the stones and tossed them one at a time into the Lake of Endless Blackness. But the expression on his face was no longer the bright and eager one Rose Red had seen while he was juggling. Instead, as each stone splashed and sank, Leo looked as though he were watching his dreams plummet. He whispered so that she could not hear, “As if that were possible.”

Then he put another smile on his face and turned to Rose Red once more. “What about you? What do you want to be?”

She shrugged, the safest answer she knew to questions she didn’t quite understand.

“You want to be something, don’t you?” Leo insisted, grabbing Bloodbiter’s Wrath and stirring the lake again.

“I’ll probably just be me,” she said, hugging her knees to her chest. “It’s all I ever thought to be.”

“That’s boring!” Leo stirred with more vigor, tossing the broken ships in a whirlpool of wreckage. “You’ve got to have a dream of some kind. Something you want to become. Maybe a duchess? Or a princess?”

To Leo’s surprise, Rose Red leapt to her feet. Her rag-covered body shivered, and her gloved hands formed little fists at her sides. But her voice was firm and the loudest he had ever heard when she said, “I won’t
never
be a princess. Never. Do you hear me?”

And the next moment she vanished like a puff of vapor.

“Rosie!” Leo jumped up, turning this way and that. He searched the whole Lake of Endless Blackness, but she was nowhere to be found. “Rosie! Rose Red!” he called, to no avail.

Leo did not see Rose Red again the next day or the day after, though he came out to the lake and waited for many long hours.

Five days later he found her again, sitting beside their lake as though nothing had happened, weaving grasses and twigs into a fine ship. He knelt beside her and started work on his own without a word. They sailed their vessels and sank them with skill, then started on another set.

“I missed you,” Leo said.

“Me too,” said Rose Red. And that was all.

“The post is due today,” said Foxbrush one morning.

It was late in the summer by then, and he had yet to discover what Leo did with himself in the woods every day. The only time he saw his cousin was at breakfast and supper, and all efforts to wheedle information from him had proven useless. “Mother says she’s expecting a letter from Aunt Starflower.”

“Iubdan’s beard!” muttered Leo, downing his milky coffee in a gulp before fleeing the table. Foxbrush was left blinking, a piece of toast in his hand. He’d long since decided that his cousin was a few turrets short of a castle, but this was erratic behavior even for Leo.

“What did I say?” he inquired of the salt shaker. But the salt shaker would venture no opinion.

Everyone in Hill House and the lower village of Torfoot looked forward to the advent of the postmaster every second week of each month. All, that is, except young Leo, for whom the occasion meant a certain amount of hassle. Stopping only to grab Bloodbiter’s Wrath from his room, he bolted out the back door, across the garden, and off into the woods as fast as he could go.

The deer trail he had followed at the beginning of the summer now led off into other trails at intervals, according to his and Rose Red’s various games. The most noticeable of these trails was that which led to the Lake of Endless Blackness. Leo found Rose Red beside the lake, working on a stick ship, this one double the size of previous efforts. Beana browsed the underbrush nearby and did not even raise her head as Leo approached.

“Hurry, Rose Red!” Leo cried as he burst upon the scene. “Danger!”

“What?” Rose Red was on her feet in a moment, her stick ship crumpling to pieces as it fell from her hands and down her skirt. “What danger?”

“The postmaster is due today!” Leo panted for breath, supporting himself on Bloodbiter’s Wrath as he spoke.

Rose Red’s tense body relaxed, and she placed her hands on her skinny hips. “Well, ain’t that cause for fear and tremblin’?”

“Oh, but it is!” Leo struggled to get the words out fast enough. “He’ll send a boy up to Hill House with our letters. There . . . there might be one from my
mother
!”

“Bah,” said Beana, twitching her ears, several long grasses sticking from the corners of her mouth.

Rose Red nodded. “I agree. Bah! You scared me, Leo, and now look at my—”

Leo flung up his free hand and brandished his beanpole with the other. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed Rose Red’s arm, exclaiming, “Dragon’s teeth, Rosie, you’ve got to—”

And the next moment he lay staring up at the leaf-edged sky.

His head spun so hard at first that Leo didn’t notice how badly it hurt. But that sensation didn’t last long, and he cursed the pain and shut his eyes, waiting for the spinning world to settle back into place. When at last he sat up and looked around again, Rose Red was gone.

Growling to himself, he got to his feet. Beana gave him a mild look, as if to say, “You asked for it.”

“Did not,” Leo snapped at her as though she’d really spoken. “You girls are all such . . . girls!” Then he called to the wood in general, “Fine, Rosie! I was just going to say that if Mother writes to my nursemaid and tells her to force me back into algebra and history and economics again, it’ll be the end of our fun. But obviously you don’t care!” He rubbed the place on the side of his head where he felt a lump rising. Iubdan’s beard, that girl had a right swing like a club!

Back through the wood he stalked, more slowly now because of his whirling head. He avoided Hill House on the way down, taking a long circle around it to the road that led up from Torfoot Village. The same road any village boy the postmaster hired must take to deliver his bundle of messages.

Still gingerly feeling the side of his head, Leo settled into a hollow off the road from which he could see anybody coming and going. Bloodbiter’s Wrath lay ready at his side, and he thought himself something of a bandit prince, ready to do or die for the cause of freedom, or at least for an academics-free summer.

“What’s alger-bruh?”

Leo yelped and tried to grab Bloodbiter’s Wrath, but Rose Red stood on the end of it, her arms folded and shoulders hunched, the picture of contrition. “So you’re back, are you?” Leo growled. “You’ve got to stop hitting me like that!”

“You hadn’t ought to—”

“I know, I know, I hadn’t ought to grab at you! Get down before he sees you.”