“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?”