Suddenly it was blinding. Leo put up his arm to shield his face as the light burned away the shadows in a brilliant flash. Then it was gone, replaced by a glow that gleamed out of the water to illuminate the walls of the cavern. Leo lowered his arm and looked in the pool.
He saw the monster.
The next moment, Leo was on his feet and storming from the cave as fast as he could in that semidarkness. It wasn’t fear that drove him, breathless, out through the cave mouth and into the biting cold of the mountain air. It was anger. Blinding, unreasonable anger.
He stood panting with his back to the cave, grinding his teeth and twisting his beanpole in both hands. He heard Rose Red’s soft footsteps behind him but wouldn’t turn to look at her. His hands strained as though he would like to break the pole in half.
“Leo?” Rose Red spoke softly.
He smashed his beanpole against the nearest rock, and it rang through the bones of his hand. “Dragon’s teeth!” he swore and smacked the rock again. “Dragon’s teeth! Dragon’s teeth and fire and tail! Why did you do that to me, Rosie?”
“You wanted to see—”
“A reflection. That’s all there was! After all that, dragging me all over this dragon-kissed mountain, scaring me to death with caves and spooky voices . . . Just a reflection!”
“Leo, I—”
“This was the rottenest idea you ever had, Rosie, and it’s not funny! You should have told me there was nothing to see, not run me ragged just for a glimpse of . . . of my own fool face!” He started walking then, hardly caring where he went, scraping his beanpole on the rocks behind him as he went. “That was rotten, and now I’m going to be in more trouble than you can imagine, being out so late. They’re probably worried sick, and they’ll never let me out of their sights again. And for nothing! Nothing, you hear?”
“I hear you, Leo,” Rose Red whispered.
Without a word, she guided him back down the mountain, listening to his rants all the way. Then she led him through the forest, seeing him all the way to the road, for it was too dark for him to make his own way. He did not say good-bye to her, only waved an arm angrily and burst into a run, as though the Black Dogs themselves pursued him, all the way to Hill House’s gardens.
He was scolded soundly and sent to bed with threats of all kinds hanging over him. Yet Leo didn’t care. He was too furious as he crawled under his covers that night. But as soon as his head touched the pillow and he’d pulled his quilts up over his face, he became angrier still.
For he started to cry.
“Dragons eat her,” he growled and dashed the tears away. “Dragons eat her to pieces!”
They did not let him out of their sight, just as Leo predicted.
He didn’t care. His aunt wrote a letter to his mother and sent it off posthaste, and even that didn’t bother him. Foxbrush dropped snide remark after snide remark, impressing himself with his own witticisms. Yet Leo couldn’t even work up the ambition to knock his cousin over the head. He remained in his room most of the time, practicing juggling and headstands, sometimes even working on the bits of reading he had been told to accomplish over the course of the summer but that he had not even looked at yet. There were several essays he was supposed to have begun as well, and he was irked to find that his nursemaid had used up most of his parchment and ink on love letters to her young man . . . irked enough to threaten reporting her to his mother, but not irked enough to follow through.
The reply arrived from his mother. Just as expected, that fine lady was shocked to discover that her son had run off against orders and caroused all over the dangerous mountain well after dark, scaring everybody in Hill House out of their minds. He was to return home immediately.
The packing began. Dame Willowfair dithered over whether or not to send her son along with Leo. Foxbrush usually spent his autumns with Leo’s family down in the tablelands, but it was early for him to go away, and what if Leo’s corrupting influence began to get the better of her angel boy?
And still Leo kept to himself. He sat at his bedroom window, gazing out at the mountain country that had become so familiar to him. One tree in particular rose above the rest, a lordly grandfather oak, and he wondered idly what it would be like to sit in its topmost branches and survey all the world below.
He’d be leaving Hill House the following day. Likely never to return.
Leo pressed his forehead against the window glass, warring with himself. He was still angrier than he liked to admit. How could Rose Red do that to him? After a whole summer together, knowing as well as she did how much he wanted to hunt the monster, how could she show him . . . that?
Suddenly he got to his feet and swept up Bloodbiter’s Wrath from where it had lain untouched since that night at the cave. He had to pass the library door, which was cracked open, but he didn’t stop to see if his cousin was inside. Everybody was busy in Hill House, packing and making arrangements for his journey back home, and nobody noticed him as he made his way to the back garden. Nobody except perhaps old Mousehand, who was trimming the starflower vines and said not a word to anybody when he saw Leo pass through the garden gate and up the mountain path.
Leo’s anger cooled as he walked that familiar way and took the turn at the sapling tied with a red scarf. The deer trail was more comfortable even than the hallways of Hill House, the trees friendlier than the household inhabitants. Even the air was easier to breathe.
He climbed to the Lake of Endless Blackness. The dam had fallen into disrepair, and the lake was mostly gone, leaving behind the litter of dozens of broken ships. Leo knelt beside the little dam wall, inspecting the places where the mud and pebbles had broken free, but he did not try to repair them.
“Bah.”
He looked up. The goat stood on the other side of the stream. She blinked her yellow eyes at him, twitching her long ears.
“Hullo, Beana,” he said.
She put her nose down to drink. When she raised it again, droplets falling from her snout, she solemnly said, “Bah.”
“Where’s Rose Red?”
The goat shook her head and stamped her hind hoof.
Leo stood up, leaning against Bloodbiter’s Wrath like an old man weary from a long journey. “I was hoping she’d be here today. But she probably doesn’t want to see me anymore, does she?”
“Baaaaah!” said the goat.
“I was pretty mad. I was . . . it was so . . .” He couldn’t finish, for he didn’t know what he was trying to say exactly. It was difficult to think with the old nanny giving him that no-nonsense stare of hers. “You shouldn’t be so far from home, Beana,” he growled. “Liable to get picked off by wolves or something. Shoo now, girl, shoo!”
“She ain’t alone.”
Of course, he thought as Rose Red emerged. She had been standing beside the goat all along; he had simply not seen her.
Leo hung his head in shame or sorrow; he wasn’t certain which. “Hullo, Rose Red,” he whispered.
“Hullo, Leo.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow. Back to the tablelands.”
“So me old dad told me.”
They looked at each other shyly, and Leo rubbed his toe against the back of the other leg. “I don’t think my mother will let me come back,” he said at length. “She was pretty angry in her letter. About me staying out after hours, that is.”
“Beana wasn’t too pleased with me neither.” Rose Red patted her goat’s back and shrugged. “So it’s probably for the best.”
Leo’s face wrinkled and he suddenly found it difficult to breathe, to think even. He didn’t know what emotion it was that clutched at his heart, but it was something like fear. Fear of nothing he could name, but fear as potent as poison. Dragons eat them, why were there tears in his eyes?
“Rosie,” he said, speaking louder and all in a rush, “I don’t want to leave without you knowing that . . . without you understanding that . . . what we saw in the cave . . . What I saw—what you saw—it wasn’t what you think—”
“Leo, what
are you doing?”
The shout shot through Leo’s head like an arrow. He whirled about, brandishing his beanpole, just in time to see Foxbrush scrambling over the rise, his fine clothes disheveled and a few strands of his perfect hair blown out of place.
“Foxbrush!” Leo cried, only just keeping from smacking his cousin across the face. “Foxbrush, why are you here?”
“Do you see?” Foxbrush was pointing, gesturing wildly behind him. Leo whirled again, just in time to catch a last evil-eyed glare from the goat. Then she turned tail and ran into the brush, the sounds of her passage crashing back to his ears long after she left his sight. There was no sign of Rose Red.
“Leo, did you see? Did you see that?”
Leo’s face was red with fury when he turned to his cousin again. Foxbrush, however, was white as a ghost and babbling. “You saw it, didn’t you? That thing? It’s just like they all said! Leanbear and Redbird and the rest. It’s just like—”
“You idiot!” Leo shouted, nearly spitting in his anger. “That was nothing at all! She’s just a little girl with a dumb goat, and now you scared her away! I might never see her again, and you scared her away!”
“A little girl?” Foxbrush was trembling so hard he had to reach out and support himself against a nearby tree. “So this is what you’ve been doing all summer! This is why you never give anyone a straight answer about anything and run off at cursed hours of the night! You’re bewitched, Leo, that’s what you are. Don’t you know who she is? Don’t you realize that she’s—”
He didn’t have a chance to finish. Leo grabbed Foxbrush by the shirtfront and pinned him up against the tree so that his daintily shod feet kicked several inches above the ground. All the muscles in Leo’s scrawny arms strained to keep his cousin in place, but he was too furious in that moment to care. He spoke through grinding teeth.
“Shut your mouth, Foxbrush. Shut it now, and don’t ever open it on this subject again, or by the Silent Lady’s Guide, I swear I’ll choke you with your own tongue.”
Foxbrush couldn’t speak. His collar was pulled up too tightly under his jaw to allow for it. And by the time Leo let go of him and he slid into a messy heap at the foot of the tree, he’d had just enough time to consider his cousin’s words and decide it best to abide by them. Leo careened wildly down the steep incline back to the deer trail, and Foxbrush was hard-pressed (he’d spent the whole summer over books, after all) to keep up with him. No amount of huffing and puffing convinced his cousin to slow down.
He did not hear Leo’s muttered curses. And he did not see Leo’s tears.
The following day, young Master Leo was piled into a carriage along with his nursemaid and all his belongings (save for a certain beanpole, which was placed in the care of old Mousehand, who was told to guard it until such time as its owner might return for it). Leanbear clucked to the mountain ponies, which started down the road at an easy pace. No one in Hill House stood at the door to wave good-bye. Dame Willowfair had not yet risen, and her fine young son was hiding away in the library, hoping that nobody would decide at the last minute to send him with his cousin.
Leo pressed his nose to the carriage window and looked back, gazing into the higher forest as though somehow he thought he might see something in those deep shadows. But he did not think to look in the topmost branches of the great grandfather tree, so he did not notice the veiled figure clinging there, seeing him off until he was long out of sight.
9
Did he see?”
“I ain’t sure what he saw.”
“You are withholding something from me, princess.”
She sinks her chin down to her chest, but she cannot disappear in this place. “I told you, I don’t know what he saw.”
“He did not see me.”
“No, I don’t think he did.”
“But I saw him. This handsome young friend of yours. This Leo, who makes you forget me.”
She turns away from the pool, and her Dream puts out a hand as though to tilt her face back to him. “Would that I had a corporeal body, sweet princess. Then I should be your playfellow, and I would make you forget him as swiftly as he made you forget me.”
She shivers and refuses to look at him.
“Now,” says he, “things will return to what they were. Your Leo left you, just as you knew he must. But I am here still, and though I may not be so fine to look upon, I will care for you just as I have always done. We will talk together, here in your dreams, and you will know that I am the only friend you need. And someday, sweet princess, you will let me kiss you.”
Here Rose Red straightens her shoulders and draws her head up, for a moment as imperious as the princess he says she is. She looks him in the eye when she speaks in a clear, even tone:
“You ain’t never goin’ to kiss me.”
The Dream watches her rise and slip her veil back over her face. Without another word, she leaves his presence, and though his eyes are full of longing, he does not try to stop her. He watches until her tiny frame disappears through the mouth of the cave.
Then he too leaves.
He steps from one dream to another, then another, spreading his shadow far and caring nothing for the sleepers he disturbs. They moan in their sleep as they watch their dreams burn, then wake up in cold sweats, afraid to close their eyes again.
On he progresses, through the realm of the sleeping, until he crosses into the world where dreams come true. There they cease to be dreams and dissolve into nothingness. No color exists in this land, only shades. Even nightmares dare not venture past its borders for fear of losing themselves. It is a solitary world, wherein only one being can dwell.
She is the Lady of Dreams Realized.
The Lady Life-in-Death.
Her brother rarely visits her. He finds her company rather cold and prefers the fiery fervor of worlds where he can move and breathe and work with equal passion. But every so often, he finds it necessary to remember the Lady and to pay her a visit, as he does now.
“Greetings, sister,” he hails her, and his voice carries across the colorless expanse of her kingdom to the center, where she sits upon her throne.
“Greetings, brother,” she replies. At a word from her, the world about her alters, reorienting its boundaries and bearings so that her brother is suddenly before her and she need not raise her voice. “Have you come to play our game?”
He raises his hand. In the palm are two dice. “Only one game this time,” he says.
“One is enough.”
“There is a boy.”
“Boy, girl. Man, woman. I care not which.”
“I want him for one of mine.”
“Roll the dice.”
He smiles. His smile is strangely hot in that land, and the heat of it sizzles the air before freezing into nothing. “You know, dear sister, they all must be mine in the end.” His teeth are blackened from the fire that burns inside him, and his skin is white as leprosy. He rattles the dice in his hand.
She does not return his smile. Beneath the ghostly white mantle of her hair, her face is as black and still as a petrified tree. “Roll the dice,” she repeats.
“It will avail you nothing,” he says as he continues to jangle the dice. “Eventually all of yours come to me.”
She speaks without moving her mouth. “And yet, you have not found the last child for which we played. The princess, Beloved of your Enemy.”
“I believe I have found her,” says he, though the smile turns to a snarl. “The child of Arpiar, hidden in the mountains, guarded by one of his knights . . . she must be the one. My Enemy may protect her from Arpiar, but he cannot keep her hidden from me. Besides, I won our game. I have my rights.”
“Then kiss her and be done.”
“Patience!” he replies, then licks a forked tongue across the jagged cage of his teeth. “These things take time. But give me the life of this boy, and I shall find it far easier to convince her that my kiss is her desire.”
Her eyes narrow, and they a
re cold eyes indeed. “Roll the dice.”
He casts the lot, and they watch them fly across the floor, his eyes empty blackness edged with fire, hers empty whiteness edged with more emptiness. Under their fervid gazes the twin dice roll, a light chipping clatter on the stone, and the mists swirl in their wake.
At last they are still.
He steps forward to inspect the result, and fire flicks across his eyes. The Lady reads what those eyes say. Now it is her turn to smile.
“The game is done. I’ve won.”
Her brother turns on her with a snarl, and for a moment the fire in his throat shines red before the airless chill dissolves its color and heat. “He’s yours, then, sister,” he says. “I’ll not touch him. Yet. But he will be mine. All of yours come to me in the end!”
The Lady makes no reply. But the smile remains fixed upon her face.
1
THE BARON OF MIDDLECRESCENT had only one child, a girl, which many would have considered an inconvenience as far as family inheritances went. But the Baron of Middlecrescent was a far-seeing man, and from the time his daughter was two years old he hatched what he fondly called The Plan.
For his daughter was already beginning to display certain talents.
She sported a mass of curly red hair and a pair of enormous blue eyes, unusual coloring in a country given to darker complexions. Young Daylily of Middlecrescent was, in fact, remarkably fetching.
She also possessed a willful nature that her nursemaids thought dreadful but which, the baron soon recognized, could be found charming when she came of age. So the baron took Daylily and her willfulness in hand and began the work of shaping her into the right sort of person to fulfill The Plan.
“You see, my dear,” he said to his wife, “we are just distant enough of relations.”
His wife, a simple woman with huge doe eyes, smiled at him. “Are we, husband?”
“We are.”
“In what respect?”
The baron had long since given up hope of his wife’s developing anything like a cunning mind. At one time this had bothered him. But as he aged he came around to appreciating her. In the scheming world where he moved and breathed, it was a relief to know that at least one person in his inner circle couldn’t begin to plot.