by S. L. Huang
Hou Yi made an angry sound in her throat.
“After so many years, I know she no longer considered this place her home,” Rosa continued. “Not a surprise, is it? But I suppose I came here because … I had to run somewhere. And it makes me feel closer to her than I am.”
“Or you wish to keep tearing your pain open anew,” Hou Yi said.
Rosa was thrown. “What? I’m not—”
Hou Yi’s hand thrust out, blocking Rosa’s path.
Rosa was about to protest, but her friend’s attention had flown elsewhere, her bow unslinging in the space of a breath with an arrow slipping onto the string. She flashed Rosa an impish smile and said, “Look. Lunch.”
Rosa looked. A hare, one of the largest hares Rosa had ever seen, had come unnoticed not six strides from them. It sat on its haunches gazing in their direction, and seemed oddly unafraid of them, for a hare …
Hou Yi’s bow whipped up.
The realization collided in Rosa’s head with the speed of a rifle blast, but even that was too slow. She tried to push Hou Yi’s arm aside, but the woman had already loosed, sending an arrow directly at the heart of the grundwirgen hare.
But somehow, impossibly, between the twang of the bowstring and the arrow’s near-instantaneous flight, the hare stepped aside. Slowly, calmly, as if it had all eternity to scoot its haunches a few handspans over. The arrow whistled through where it had just been, skimming harmlessly into the grass behind.
Hou Yi sucked in a breath and then said a word Rosa didn’t know, but it sounded like a curse.
The two of them stared at the hare. The hare stared back.
Hou Yi had nocked another arrow—so fast and fluidly Rosa hadn’t seen—but she kept her bow only half raised. Rosa touched her rifle, lightly, the polished wood of the stock reassuring on her fingertips, but did not unsling it. Yet.
“Do you think—Feng Meng?” Rosa asked. She wasn’t sure whether she meant the hare itself might be the man transformed, or whether it was more likely the beast had been sent to do his bidding somehow.
“Unclear,” Hou Yi answered. She sounded unnerved.
The wind rustled through the surrounding vegetation. The hare’s nose twitched lightly, only emphasizing its unnatural stillness.
“Who are you?” Hou Yi called. “What do you want from us?”
The hare sat silent. Nose twitching.
Rosa repeated an approximation of the same question in her own language, just in case—not that she expected it to have any result here. The hare didn’t seem to hear either of them.
“What do we do?” Rosa said.
Hou Yi took a moment to think. “We walk.”
But she kept her arrow nocked as she led a wide berth around the animal. Rosa followed, sidestepping so the creature never left her vision.
As soon as they were past, the hare hopped twice, following.
They stopped. It stopped, too. Hou Yi took one more experimental step. The hare scooted forward again, just once.
The light breeze seemed suddenly chilling.
Every cautious step forward they took, the hare matched exactly. Rosa and Hou Yi eventually resumed their steady pace, but now always with an eye behind them. The hare never approached any closer, always keeping itself the same six strides distant.
For a luncheon, they dug roots beside a stream, unwilling to hunt the hare’s kin in front of its watchful eyes. Hou Yi was visibly disturbed, shifting where she’d crouched to rest, her hand always hovering near her bow.
“Why doesn’t it speak?” she murmured.
Rosa couldn’t help but suspect it was waiting for them to turn their backs. But she wasn’t sure if it was a true apprehension or her old biases, so kept her own counsel.
“Perhaps it can’t,” she said instead. She tried a mangled greeting from every people she could remember encountering, but with a similar lack of results. “Do you speak anything else?”
Hou Yi grunted and tried a dialect Rosa didn’t know. “The language of my hometown,” she added, by way of explanation.
It still boggled Rosa that this land had so many tongues, all different village by village, with sometimes only the trade language in common—and sometimes not even that. She’d offered to teach Hou Yi some of her own speech, but Hou Yi had cheerfully refused.
“Your Western tongues are so ugly,” she’d said. “And they insist on calling me a man.”
“No, that’s not true,” Rosa had protested. “Just tell people you’re a woman, and they’ll use the right words for you.”
“Tell them? Every time? That seems so very tiring,” Hou Yi had answered, and that had been the end of the discussion. Hou Yi had gamely tried to master Rosa’s name, but had eventually declared it impossible to say, settling instead on a Rosa-approved translation.
“Keep on with your tale,” Hou Yi said as they began their hike again, wading across the creek. The hare made seemingly impossible leaps between stones to cross the water, its hops effortless. “I need a distraction from this hellbeast. Besides, you have me in suspense.”
Rosa did not like to talk of something so personal with such large listening ears nearby, even though her story would be of no import to anyone here. But that, too, felt like her old prejudice pushing at her, and she shoved back against it.
She did try to keep her voice low, however. “I think I knew it could not end well. We both did.” She gave the hare a sidelong glance, but it made no outward change, and she forced herself on. “We were headed for a precipice, inevitably, even as we dug our heels in against it as long as we could.”
* * *
“And where have you been?” Goldie demanded. “I was getting worried. You shouldn’t scare me like that.” She lounged on a velvet-draped chair as if it were a throne, pouting prettily. Puss was beside her, as always these days, and he looked up from buffing his claws to throw Rosa a look that perfectly expressed his boredom with her.
I have no use for cats anyway, she thought. Why did Goldie keep him around? She’d always chased rumors of the grundwirgen with the same fervor as Rosa, glorying in the planning of their next target, and now suddenly a cat was off-limits? Goldie claimed she liked Puss’s scamming skills, but Rosa had vowed to herself never to turn her back on him—or have her rifle far from hand.
She tried to ignore the squirming question in her gut that asked why Goldie delighted so much in Rosa’s hunting, if she did not truly believe it was the only possible justice.
“You better not be making messes without me, Red,” Goldie said, interrupting Rosa’s uncomfortable train of thought. “If I have to clean up after you without getting any of the fun parts, I’m going to be m-a-a-ad.”
“When have you ever had to clean up after me?” Rosa said.
Goldie stretched. “Puss and I have a party tomorrow night. You’re welcome to come, but only if you’re not going to poop all over it. You’re always in a mood these days.”
“Are you working it?” Rosa asked.
“Of course.” Goldie rolled her very blue eyes. She’d grown up to be the type of woman every man stared at, tall and willowy and all slender curves, and that hair of spun-gold curls. And she used her looks to every advantage. “I hear there will be an earl there. Maybe he’ll take pity on a poor baron’s daughter whose father has gotten himself into a wee spot of trouble.”
Rosa could tell Goldie wanted her to ask the rest of the planned game. Feeling contrary, she refrained. “I’ll pass.”
“What is with you?” Goldie asked crossly. “You never want to do anything fun anymore.”
“She has a lover,” Puss said, in his bored cat hiss.
Goldie sat bolt upright, as if she’d been shocked into straightness. “Red! How could you?”
Rosa turned away and busied herself with shucking her cloak and properly stowing her rifle. Her immediate defensiveness wanted to demand why Goldie should care one way or the other. But somehow she’d known Goldie would care. She’d known every time she went to see Mei and lied
about it.
“What do you mean, how could I?” she settled on saying. “You jump through more beds than I can count.”
“Yes, but I don’t love any of them.” Goldie pushed her bottom lip out in a pout. “Well, get rid of her. It’s just supposed to be you and me. Can’t have some floozy hanging around.”
Rosa very much wanted to give Puss a pointed look then, but didn’t.
“Lovers just interfere,” Goldie added, with finality, as if that settled matters and it was time to change subjects. “How’s the dragon coming?”
She has a name, Rosa didn’t say.
As relieved as she was to escape interrogation about Mei, Rosa would have chosen any change in topic but this. She didn’t know why this hunt had started to disturb her so. Of all the grundwirgen she’d brought justice to, Bistherne warranted it more than any—she had been such a terror to the countryside that there was a great reward for her death.
And she’d been the first Rosa had failed to kill.
Bistherne had been amused by this. And more amused by Rosa’s second try, and third.
“You’re more interesting than most humans,” she had said. “Usually I eat the ones who come to slay me. It seems only fair. But I think I’ll let you try again.”
By rights Rosa should have wanted to kill her more than any other. It was an affront to her pride.
“Do you know what they call me?” she’d demanded of Bistherne once, and the great serpentine creature had only laughed a great serpentine laugh, smoke puffing out of her nostrils.
“What do they call you, little one? Enlighten me.”
Rosa hated being condescended to. “I’ll be back to show you.”
But the dragon had only laughed again, and the months had passed, and Rosa had made every excuse to herself not to return.
It was easy, when Mei didn’t want her to.
“She’s toying with me,” she had complained to Mei. “But she’s interesting. I almost don’t want to see her go. Why should I care if she’s wreaking havoc among the King’s Men? I hate the king.”
“So don’t kill her,” Mei said. “If you don’t want to kill her, don’t.”
“It’s who I am,” Rosa said.
“It doesn’t have to be.”
Mei had never asked her to stop hunting, but Rosa knew.
* * *
“I suppose it had started to feel pointless anyway,” Rosa said to Hou Yi. “I was changing. She changed me.”
“Love can do that,” Hou Yi agreed.
“Hunting had been my all. And every kill, Goldie egged me on, toasted me in stolen wine. It had become my reason for living. Until it wasn’t anymore, and I started to see … I started to look at myself with new eyes.”
With Mei’s eyes.
* * *
She’d stood there one day, Goldie laughing at the bear they had cornered and killed, and as he lay dying, he turned back into a man, his human eyes filled with fear. “No mercy. They all said you … no mercy,” he choked, his eyes rolling first over Goldie’s pale form and then Rosa’s dark one. “The ice queen … Ice White and Blood Red…”
Blood Red, they all called her, Rosa knew. Those whispers in the dark, the men and grundwirgen who rightfully feared her. The name she’d promised the dragon she would know, on the other end of Rosa’s rifle.
But now all she could see was Mei’s face as she took a scarlet blossom out of her hair and offered it to Rosa, laughing, saying, “Have one of your kin.”
Not Blood Red, she wanted to say. Rose Red.
PART FOUR
“I’ll take first watch,” Hou Yi said, her eyes on the hare that still insisted on haunting them. They hadn’t spoken since Rosa had left off her telling; the memories had bloomed leaden in her chest until she needed time away from them, and Hou Yi seemed to understand.
Rosa was exhausted—wrung dry of both energy and emotions—but she wasn’t sure she could sleep with … that being … watching. Still, she nodded at Hou Yi’s offer and attempted to bed down on the ground. Despite her misgivings, she dropped off almost instantly, Hou Yi standing vigil in the night and locking eyes with the nose-twitching hare who stayed just on the edge of their firelight.
And Rosa dreamed.
She dreamed she was with the people she loved. But not Mei and Xiao Hong, not her own wife and daughter. Instead, she was with another woman, one with features that were plain but arresting. A woman, and a boy.
The boy ran up to her, exuberance painted on his face. He was about ten or twelve, his eyes bright, his limbs strong.
“Come see!” he shouted, grabbing Rosa by the hand. “Come see!”
The words were not ones she knew, but somehow she understood.
Rosa felt a smile unfold inside her, even as she kept her expression mostly stern. She let the boy grab her by the hand and followed his delighted steps as he ran. Down a set of wooden steps they flew, across a bridge of logs over a lazy swamp of water, and out into an open field. Large haystacks dotted the far end, with other shapes studding them that were too far away to make out.
“No, not there!” the boy said. He pulled Rosa away from gazing across the field. “The knot. Come see the knot!”
Rosa let him lead her. They hiked around the side of the grass, past where the haystacks stood like bulbous pincushions. Rosa took in the canvas stretched over them, the painted markers, the arrow shafts spiking out in a black forest, and somehow she had known this was what she would see here; somehow this had been her work.
But the boy pulled her past, onto rougher ground, all the way to where the land once again merged into forest. He dragged Rosa over to one of the tallest trees—a pine that spiked high and straight, its branches sparse until the very top, where it pierced the autumn blue like an arrow itself.
“There!” the boy cried. “Up there!” He jumped, pointing.
Rosa cast her eyes up. High, high on the tree’s rough, sticky trunk, so high she could barely see it in the brightness, a scarlet flag fluttered merrily. The shapes gradually outlined themselves for her—the scarlet marker was tied to an arrow, protruding proudly from a broad knot high up on the tree, and just below it, striking nearly the same spot … a second arrow.
“I did it right,” the boy promised. “All the way from the line. Not one step closer!”
And somehow, in emotions not her own, pride exploded inside Rosa, a delirious mixture of love and joy so strong it hurt. She allowed it to fill her, to straighten her spine and burst out into an unstoppable grin, and the boy beamed up at her like her approval was all he hungered for in the world.
Then something made Rosa glance up, and in front of them was Hou Yi, with an arrow nocked but not drawn, and an expression like she had just seen a ghost.
* * *
Rosa jerked awake. She was no longer bedded down on the ground, but standing, her hand extended as if to an imaginary child. But Hou Yi still stood before her, just as she had in the dream, the red firelight from the embers fluttering across her shock and horror.
“You saw,” Hou Yi said.
“I…” Rosa spun, groping for the rifle that was back where she had slept. From exactly the same spot where it had crouched before the sun set, the hare twitched its nose at her.
The coals reflected in its eyes, transforming them to a crimson demon’s eyes. Rosa jolted back.
Hou Yi whipped around to the hare as well, stumbling to Rosa’s side, her usual predator’s grace off-kilter. “I looked away from it,” she said, sounding more shocked than guilty. “I was watching, and I looked away…”
Rosa raised her voice to the animal. “Did you do this? You sent us this—dream?”
It said nothing.
“Feng Meng, wasn’t it?” Rosa said more softly, when long moments had passed with no change.
“It was,” Hou Yi answered. “Many years ago.”
Rosa did not know what to say. The pride and devotion from the dream kept echoing through her—Hou Yi’s emotions. Rosa recognized it: The love
of a parent was so strong it had terrified her sometimes.
“I can take watch,” she offered finally. “If you can rest.”
“I will not be able to sleep,” Hou Yi said.
Rosa didn’t blame her. It seemed certain now, that this hare was involved with Feng Meng.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She’d known Hou Yi’s past would be exposed to her, this journey, but this … some other being stealing her memory out of her head and baring it to them both … this was too much. A violation, with Rosa a forced witness.
Hou Yi pressed her lips together and began gathering their things to leave, never turning wholly away from the hare.
They hiked in much the same pattern for most of the night, keeping on in the same direction, because what else could they do? And as the sun rose over the dew-covered brush, they broke out onto a bluff above the sea.
“Oh,” Rosa said, and cursed. Then she cursed again so Hou Yi could understand her.
“Yes,” Hou Yi said. “That seems appropriate.”
At least seven or eight sunbirds dove and bathed just out past the shallows of the ocean before them, flaming and quenching, their fiery reflections dancing across the waves and making them molten gold.
Beyond them, an island rose out of the mists, a fantastic emerald specter almost glowing in the dawn light.
“That’s our destination?” Rosa said.
“It is.”
“How will we…” Her eyes trailed to the hare, sitting unconcerned, as usual. At least maybe they’d lose the animal in the crossing, although if it had been sent by Feng Meng, it would have planned on such a thing.
“I have a way.” Hou Yi touched her collar. “It is … I should have told you. I suspected from the first that you might reject it, and now that you have told me everything you have … if you decide to turn back, I understand.”
It must be magic—some breed of enchanted item. “I didn’t come this far with you to desert you on the doorstep,” Rosa scoffed.
“As you say. But you may change your mind. Finish your story, and I shall finish mine, and we shall see.”