“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.”
“Who sees me? The alger-bruh?”
“No, the postmaster’s boy.”
Rose Red knelt beside Leo, peering through the branches, which caught and snagged on her veil. “And he’s bringin’ the alger-bruh?”
“More likely a letter from my mother telling my nursemaid to get me back to work, and by Lumé’s crown, that’s the last thing we want!”
“Is it a kind o’ snake?”
“What?”
“The alger-bruh.”
Leo gave her a look. “Don’t you know anything?”
Before she could answer, their attention was arrested by a high, tuneless whistling. Leo crouched a little lower. “That’ll be him now. Here’s what we’ll do: I’ll jump down in front and distract his attention; then you sneak down behind and nab his sack. Find the letter from my mother while I keep him busy, then make for the Lake of Endless Blackness as fast as you can!”
“Leo, I—”
“There he is!”
A scruffy boy a size or two smaller than Leo came up the road, whistling like a tone-deaf cicada, a satchel over his shoulder. His face was blissfully ignorant of his impending doom.
“On the count of three,” said Leo.
“I cain’t—”
“One, two . . .”
“Leo, I cain’t—”
“THREE!”
Leo burst from his hollow, tripped on his
beanpole, and rolled down into the road with much scraping of hands and knees, but was on his feet in a trice and bolting after the boy . . . who by now was making good time up the hill as fast as his skinny legs could carry him. But Leo had the threat of academics to motivate him, and he overtook the lad and barred his way with Bloodbiter’s Wrath. Leo looked quite the sight with his hair all on end and adorned with sticks and leaves. The boy gave a squawk, froze in place for a moment, then suddenly darted to the left.
“No you don’t!” Leo cried, blocking the path with Bloodbiter’s Wrath. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Oi gots me some mez’ges ter deliver!” the mountain boy declared, his face a mask of outraged dignity. “Oi weres promised a coin fer me troubles.”
“Not until I see them first,” Leo said. “All right, Rose Red! Come on out!”
Nothing happened.
The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Oi’s goin’ ter be late. And Oi ain’t suppose ter let nobody sees ’em save Mistress Redbird.”
“Now’s the time, Rose Red!” Leo didn’t take his eyes from the boy as he kept his beanpole up and ready. They sidled back and forth, but the mountain lad didn’t dare make a break. “Like we planned!”
Rose Red didn’t appear.
“Oi ain’t s’pose ter stop fer bandits nor bears nor nobody,” said the boy, and Leo could see him gathering his bony person together for another burst.
“Rosie!” he called.
The boy broke into a run, and Leo was hard-pressed to catch him, though he still couldn’t wrest away the satchel. The best he could manage was to keep the boy from progressing up the hill, and once more they stood facing each other. Leo panted, his sore head throbbing, and the other boy’s face hardened into something like war.
And still no Rose Red.
Leo puffed, exasperated, and planted his beanpole in the dirt. “I say, look here, let’s come to an agreement. Why don’t you let me just look through your bag and take what I need?”
“Not fer bandits, nor fer bears, nor even fer the mountain monster!”
Leo rubbed a hand down his face, hating himself for what he was about to say next. “Look, boy, don’t you recognize me?” And he smoothed down his hair, straightened his shirt, and struck a profile pose with his beanpole extended.
The mountain boy gasped. “Oi! Oi! Silent Lady save us, Oi dern’t recogg-er-nize yer, Yer High—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Leo shook his hair back out and extended a hand to the boy. “Pass them over.”
The satchel strap was looped over the boy’s palm, and Leo hastily dug inside. He found the envelope sealed with a panther and starflower, his mother’s emblem. It was addressed to him, so he did not feel quite as guilty as he might when he slipped it from the sack and into his pocket. No other missives with the panther and starflower symbol were inside, and he handed the lot back to the mountain urchin. The boy bowed several times, then scurried on up the hill and out of sight.
Rose Red appeared at Leo’s side. “Why didn’t you ask him for it from the start?”
Leo glared at her. “Some help you are. You wouldn’t mind if I got swallowed by studies the whole rest of this summer, would you?”
She bowed her head. “I cain’t read in no case.”
“Excuses.”
“And I cain’t . . .”
She shivered and went silent for so long that Leo guessed she was done saying her piece and started marching up the hill again. He was too busy anyway, opening the letter from his mother, finding the passages that would certainly have led to trouble had his nursemaid come across them, and carefully tearing the whole into pieces.
He passed the mountain boy already on his way back down, now richer by one bright coin, and Leo did his best to ignore the sniveling reverence the boy made as he went. All Leo’s adventurous spirit was sapped, and he figured he’d spend the rest of the day at chess or something just to show Rose Red what was what and who was whom. Friends didn’t leave other friends in a lurch while ambushing unsuspecting strangers! That sort of thing wasn’t—
A high scream ran up the road to Hill House like a cold chill up a spine. Leo startled and whirled around, brandishing his beanpole and staring down the way he’d just seen the mountain boy go. He told himself to move, to run, but that scream was too terrible, and he remained frozen in place even as Leanbear and old Mousehand barreled past him down the hill, armed with clubs and knives.
They found the mountain boy curled up in a ball in the middle of the road. When at last they could get him to speak, all he would say was, “The monster! The monster!”
7
SO THE MONSTER DID EXIST. There was no denying it now. Leo had seen the messenger boy’s face when Leanbear and Mousehand carried him back up to the kitchen. He had heard his babbling terror, and Leo knew beyond doubt that nobody could invent that kind of fear.
So the monster was real, and much closer than he would have imagined.
Leo was not allowed outside for a week following that event. The weather turned sour in any case, but this did not help Leo’s feelings of pent-up frustration. He worried about Rose Red and her fool goat, somewhere out there in the wilds in the almost constant downpour, with that creature on the loose.
“What did you see?” Mistress Redbird had asked the messenger boy.
“The eyes!” the boy had babbled. “The big, turr-ble eyes! And teeth, so many teeth!”
Leo shivered as he remembered. He’d stood in the kitchen doorway, looking in on the scene as Leanbear and Mousehand stood on either side of the dirty child and Mistress Redbird tried to force something strong down his throat with a spoon. Leanbear knelt before the boy just as he spat out what Redbird had given him, right into the carriage man’s eye. Leanbear backed away, cursing, and Mousehand stepped in to take his place.
“Listen carefully, boy,” said the old gardener. “I need you to answer a few questions. You say you saw big eyes and big teeth. But don’t you think it might have been a fox you saw? Maybe a wolf? They say there’s been somethin’ preyin’ on the flocks these days, and maybe—”
“It were the monster!” The boy’s face went red as he screamed at Mousehand. “Oi knows what Oi seen! It weren’t no wolf, an’ it weren’t no fox neither. It were like nothin’ else ever there was, and it’s goin’ to eat me!” With that, he succumbed to a fit of hysterics that, Leo thought, disgraced the whole race of boys.
But then again, Leo admitted to himself now as he sat in the library and watched the rain beating down on the windowpane, he hadn’t seen the monster for himself. How would he have reacted in the messenger boy’s place?
“Silly, isn’t it?” said Foxbrush from his desk. Leo had done his best to ignore his cousin while cooped up in the house with him these past several days. But Foxbrush, for all his studious ways, was not always one to be ignored. “All this fuss over the monster, I mean. I’ve never seen Leanbear in such a jumpy state, and Mistress Redbird won’t even put the cat out at night.”
Leo leaned his forehead against the window frame, watching droplets chase each other down the far side of the glass. “It’s been raining. That’s why.”
“Huh,” said Foxbrush. “Mistress Redbird would toss that cat out in a cyclone.” He scratched away at the long essay he was composing on how the literary norms of olden days might have affected historical documentation of such infamous figures as the last Queen of Corrilond. Foxbrush found it fascinating, but it was the kind of stuff that gave Leo a strong urge to push his cousin out the window.
Nevertheless, after penning a few more lines, Foxbrush turned to Leo once more, a small smile on his face. “So is it the rain that’s keeping you from your silly games in the woods?”
Leo shrugged.
“A little bad weather has never stopped you before.”
Leo shrugged again. Old Mousehand was out in the garden working away despite the rain, his narrow shoulders covered only with a short cloak, which, as far as Leo could tell from the library window, was not
waterproof.
“They’re scared you’ll get eaten by the monster, aren’t they?”
Still Leo made no answer. He watched the gardener moving arthritically about the garden, covering certain blooms with protective sacking, tying back trailing vines, replanting fallen beanpoles.
“Are you scared of being eaten, Leo?”
Leo whirled on his cousin then, his fists clenched. “Dragons eat you, Foxbrush!” he growled and stormed from the room. Foxbrush’s laughter trailed behind him as he went.
He was not scared of the monster, Lumé help him! Neither was Leo scared of bad weather, or even of his nursemaid’s wrath. He pounded up a flight of stairs to his bedroom, retrieved Bloodbiter and his rain hat, then galloped all the way back down to the lower floors. Sneaking like a ghost so as not to be caught by the household staff, he slipped out into the wet of the garden. The brim of his hat immediately flopped to his ears under the heavy torrents.
He slogged across the wet garden until he found Mousehand tying up some drooping starflower vines. The gardener did not notice the boy until Leo burst out with, “Is there really a monster?”
Mousehand cast a sideways glance Leo’s way but continued his work. His gnarled fingers didn’t want to twist the twine the way they once had, and he had to be methodical to accomplish his tasks. So he let the boy stand there, breathing hard and getting more drenched by the moment, until Mousehand was quite done. Then he brushed his hands on his trousers and turned his sopping beard to look down into Leo’s pale but determined face.
“What do you think, young master?”
“I think you know,” said Leo, clutching his beanpole with both hands. “I think you’ve always known. I think you know more than anyone else on this mountain.”
Mousehand stuck out his chin, and rainwater dripped heavily from the end of his beard. “I don’t know ’bout that. What I know is just different from what everybody else knows.”
“There is a monster, isn’t there.”
Suddenly the gardener’s face went dark, as though all the storm clouds flowing in from the ocean were gathering just above his face. His eyes flashed like lightning, and he glared down at Leo.