Veiled Rose

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  “Dragons eat these dragon-kissed flies! Die, blood-sucking fiends, die!”

  Beana baahed, but Rose Red leapt from her rock and splashed across the creek, crashing through the underbrush on the far side. The slope of the mountain was steep here, and she caught hold of a tree to keep herself from falling. The deer trail that led from the main road wound down below her and, sure enough, she saw the boy hacking his way through the thicker growth with his beanpole, smacking at bugs as he went. His face was sour and his hair stood up in black tufts all over his head.

  Rose Red wondered if she should call out to him. But her natural inclination to hide held her tongue, so she stood there clutching the tree with one hand and removing the floppy hat from her head with the other, watching his progress up the path. He must have felt her eyes on him, for just as he passed underneath her, he looked up.

  “Iubdan’s beard!” he exclaimed, immediately smacking at another fly. He missed and succeeded only in reddening his own cheek. “There you are. You do creep about, don’t you?”

  Rose Red shrugged. Then she held up his hat. “I found this for you.”

  “Oh, right,” said he. “Wait a minute; I’ll come up.” Using various tufts of growth for leverage, he scrambled up the slope to her. The top of the rise was bare and steep, however, and Rose Red could see the boy dithering over how best to scale it.

  “Pass me your stick,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Pass me the end of your stick. I’ll pull you up.”

  Leo gave her a once-over. He wasn’t certain of her age but didn’t think she was nearly as old as he, and beneath all her wrappings she was hardly thicker at the wrist than his beanpole. And she was standing precariously on the edge of the slope.

  “Unlikely,” Leo said. “I’d pull you down.”

  “No you won’t,” she insisted. “I’m much stronger than I look.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  “Come on. Pass it to me.”

  He wished he could see her face under that veil, could read whether or not she was teasing him. But she kept beckoning with her extended hand, so at last he, still gripping a clump of long grass with one hand, lifted the beanpole with the other. She took it, and the next thing Leo knew, he was being dragged up the rise and onto her level, his ribcage scraping rather painfully on the exposed roots of an old tree as he went. It was over before he had a chance to think, so he lay there a moment, letting his thoughts catch up with himself.

  “Lumé’s crown,” he said at last. “You are strong!”

  Rose Red let go of his beanpole and backed up. “Told you.”

  “I mean,” said Leo, getting to his feet, “I mean, you’re really strong! How much can you lift?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you could move a boulder?”

  She shrugged again and started moving back toward the creek and Beana. Leo followed behind, crashing through the underbrush like an avalanche and talking all the while.

  “Because I was thinking, if we could figure out a system of pulleys and levers—and, seriously, how hard can that be?—we could pile up a bunch of boulders. But I wasn’t sure how we’d move the boulders, unless we stole one of Leanbear’s carriage horses, and they have a lot of teeth, so I thought maybe we’d have to steal some carrots to tempt them, or maybe some sugar, but that means raiding Mistress Redbird’s larder, and she’s got a lot of teeth too. But we won’t need horses at all if you’re as strong as all that! I bet you could move a boulder, at least a small one, and a bunch of small boulders would work just as well as a big one, don’t you think?”

  They came to the creek, and Beana raised her nose from her browsing and flapped her ears at them, giving Rose Red a look that said, “What is he going on about?” Once more, Rose Red shrugged.

  “We could tie them up in a net—can’t be that hard to make a net. We could weave it with grasses or something. It doesn’t have to be strong since it’s got to break when the trigger is pulled, and— I didn’t know this stream was here!”

  Leo stopped prattling long enough to look up and down the creek. Then he stepped onto a rock in its middle, planting his beanpole for balance. Running water suggested all kinds of possibilities to his active mind, possibilities of a nautical nature that would inevitably lead to muddy stockings. His eyes sparkled as he gazed about. He turned to Rose Red and said eagerly, “As soon as we’ve caught the monster, we should come back here and build a dam!”

  Rose Red stared at him for a moment. Then she folded her arms across her chest and turned away. “We ain’t goin’ to hunt the monster.”

  “We’re not?” Leo stared at her hunched back. It was uncanny, but somehow she almost vanished even as she stood there in plain sight. If he focused, he could still see her standing there, but if he let his attention wander at all, she simply disappeared. “Why not?”

  She didn’t answer as she continued to vanish from his vision more and more. Afraid he’d lose her altogether, Leo stepped back onto the bank and hurried over to the spot where he was fairly certain she still stood. Even standing right beside her, he had to force his mind to believe that she remained present. “Why aren’t we going to hunt the monster?” he asked, putting out a hand to grab her shoulder.

  He never touched her. Instead, he found himself lying flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him.

  By the time Leo was able to sit upright and look about, Rose Red was gone. The goat was standing in the same place, however, roundly chewing leaves and blinking complacent eyes at him.

  “Rose Red?” Leo called, putting a hand to his chest as he labored to breathe again. “Rose Red? Where’d you go?”

  She was standing right next to him and perhaps had been there the whole time. Her head was bowed between her shoulders. “You oughtn’t to have nabbed at me,” she said.

  He shook his head and puffed, “Now you tell me!” The world still spun a little, but he closed his eyes and shook his head, and things began to reorient themselves. “Why aren’t we going to hunt the monster?” he asked again as he got carefully back to his feet.

  “Beana don’t want us to.”

  “Beana?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who’s Beana again?”

  “My nanny, like I tells you!”

  “Your—” Leo broke off and turned with a laugh to look at the old nanny goat. “Oh! Your nanny! That explains a lot.” Then he made a face. “Why does your nanny care?”

  “She just does.”

  “Oh.” Leo licked his lips. The fact was, after all that tramping through the woods, the idea of climbing up to the cave lacked its former appeal. Besides, most of his ideas for monster hunting were not the stuff of legends. And the creek really was too full of possibilities to pass up.

  “You don’t want to play with me no more, do you?” said the tiny voice of Rose Red, and he realized that she’d almost disappeared again.

  Stopping himself from reaching out to her, since that had proven disastrous, Leo quickly said, “Yes, I still want to play! Monsters are silly; besides, they don’t exist. We should build a dam, like I said. Make a lake over in that hollow down there. Do you think you could lift some of those bigger stones if I helped you?”

  Rose Red nodded, and though Leo couldn’t see it, she smiled underneath her veil.

  So began a friendship such as neither child had ever before experienced. And that first day, as they rolled stones and sticks into the creek despite Beana’s disapproving bleats, all thoughts of monsters and algebra forgotten in the pleasures of mud and running water, they could never have predicted how far that new friendship would take them.

  6

  You have forgotten me.”

  “You’re pretty hard to forget.”

  Rose Red kneels at the mouth of the cave, her back to the dark pool. She does not want to meet the gaze of the one in the pool. Her eyes drift across the high mountains, across the landscape of the kingdom that, in her dreams, is visible from here
all the way to Bald Mountain in the north.

  “Shall I take that as a compliment, princess?”

  “You take everythin’ as a compliment.” She spares him no more than a quick glance over her shoulder before returning her focus to the landscape. Although she can see to any corner of the kingdom at any moment she wishes, it is a particular gabled room at Hill House that draws her eyes. A room in which the lamplight has long since been extinguished, and a boy dreams certain dreams that do not connect with hers.

  The one in the pool sighs, and his eyes are full of longing as he looks upon her unveiled face, so pensive in the silver light.

  “Am I no longer your friend?”

  Her shoulders heave as she draws and releases a great breath. “Of course you’re important to me. You’ve been here all my life. But you’re nothin’ but a dream!”

  “I care for you as no one else does.”

  Rose Red wraps her arms about herself as if cold, yet still she avoids his gaze. She feels him reading her face, however, and without her veils she feels vulnerable. “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop lookin’ at me uncovered like this. I don’t like it.”

  “Your face is so beautiful, princess.”

  She grinds her teeth and presses the heels of her hands over her eyes. “You’re a liar.”

  “Never. Never, my lovely—”

  “Shut up!” Rocks scatter and fall silently down the side of the mountain as Rose Red leaps to her feet. “Shut up! I cain’t bear it no more. I’m a big girl, and I don’t need your pretty stories! I have a real friend now.”

  The one in the pool smiles sadly, or perhaps it is more an expression of pain. “He has not seen your true face.”

  “He’s still my friend. He comes to play with me every day that he can. And we have fun! We don’t just sit and talk; we have real adventures.”

  “What kind of adventures, princess?”

  “We sail ships on the Lake of Endless Blackness. We storm the strongholds of evil magicians. Today there was this Dragonwitch what kidnapped Beana and turned her into a goat, and we rescued her, though we couldn’t undo the goat spell, so we found her a good home and cared for her to the end of our days. And we—”

  “And you hunt the monster, don’t you?”

  Rose Red feels him trying to draw her back into the cave, back to the pool. But she won’t move.

  “Princess, have you told him?”

  She shakes her head.

  “You should bring him to me.”

  “Hen’s teeth!” she growls. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You must let me meet this boy. This so-called friend of yours.”

  She leans a shoulder against one of the jagged stones, her face lifted to the moonless, starless sky. “You never wanted to meet Beana.”

  “Why would I want to meet a goat? She is no rival to me.”

  “He ain’t no rival neither.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “You ain’t real,” whispers Rose Red. “So there ain’t no rivalry.”

  “Princess—”

  “Stop callin’ me that!”

  “You know he will never care for you when he truly knows you. But I know you better than you know yourself. And I long for nothing so much as to kiss you. Do you hear me?”

  She looks over her shoulder and sticks her tongue out at the pool. “Ain’t never goin’ to let you kiss me.”

  Then she begins to make her way back across the dreamscape. Yet the one in the pool calls after her. “You’ll come see me again, won’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you shall bring the boy to me,” says the Dream.

  As far as Leo was concerned, it was the best summer of his life. His mother had sent express orders with his nursemaid to make certain he “applied himself admirably to his studies” throughout the holiday months, but his nursemaid was so caught up with writing love notes back and forth to her young man at home that she paid no attention to Leo’s lack of academic pursuits. His aunt could scarcely care less what he did with his time, and since for the first two weeks of the summer the household staff had found him annoyingly underfoot, they were happy to see him traipse off into the woods every day. He returned in relatively decent shape (except the holes he kept wearing through his stockings, which his nursemaid grumbled over mending each night), so they let the boy have his fun.

  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.”