Until a loud voice cut through the song, chasing it from her thoughts and bringing her scrambling to her feet.
“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.”