Rose Red blinked. “What’s that?”
“What do you think you’ll be?” Leo hooked a piece of a broken ship on the end of Bloodbiter’s Wrath and lifted it, dripping, from the water. “If you could be anything at all.”
She didn’t know what to say. Such a question had never suggested itself to her. So she folded her hands and waited quietly, knowing that Leo could never let a silence go unfilled. Sure enough, he dropped the broken ship back into the Lake of Endless Blackness and went on.
“I’m going to be a jester.”
“What’s a jester?”
“What’s a jester?” Leo repeated, making a face at her. “How can you not know that? It’s only the very best occupation in the world! You get to travel all over and wear loose, comfortable clothing of whatever colors you want. No itchy collars and no lace. You write songs too, lots of them, and you sing them for kings and dukes.”
Rose Red considered this. “Like the songs of Eanrin?”
“Dragon’s teeth!” Leo stuck out his tongue and closed one eye, making choking noises. “Nothing like those.”
“But the songs of Eanrin are the best ones, ain’t they? That’s what me dad says. Ain’t he the spiffiest poet of all?”
Leo shivered and stuck his beanpole into the mud, then got to his feet. “Sir Eanrin of Rudiobus is the most celebrated bard in the history of the world. And I solemnly swear to you, here and now, before the shores of this dread lake, when I am a jester, I will never sing a single song written by Iubdan’s chief poet. Not if my life depends upon it!”
“Why not?”
“They’re lovey-mushy songs; dragons eat them.”
Rose Red shrugged. She was only going on ten years old, but she was a girl all the way through. “I like lovey songs.”
Leo made another face to better express his feelings, sticking his tongue out even farther this time. Then he said, “When I’m a jester, I’m going to write my own songs. Better ones than Sir Eanrin’s. Just wait. And I’ll sing them for all the kings of the Continent.”
“All of them?”
“And the emperors of the East!”
Rose Red couldn’t help but be impressed. “Maybe,” she said shyly, “maybe I’ll come with you?”
But Leo shook his head at that. He was searching around now, gathering stones, testing their weights, discarding some and keeping others. “Jesters always travel alone. It’s part of the job. We are a solitary lot. Watch this!”
Using the stones he’d deemed acceptable, he started to juggle, first with just two, then adding a third, then a fourth and a fifth. They whirled around, faster and faster, and Rose Red’s head whirled as well, like a cat watching birds in flight. Leo began to pace back and forth, still keeping track of the stones, stepping high as a prancing pony. Then he flung up his hands, and all five stones flew out and landed in a nearly perfect circle around him.
Rose Red applauded, and Leo took a bow. “I’ve been practicing that,” he said. “I saw a man do it once. He was a jester indentured to the Duke of Shippening, and the duke sent him down from Capaneus City to perform for my fa—to perform at the Eldest’s House. But when he did it, the stones burst into flame as they landed. All colors of fire! He swallowed fire too.”
“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.