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?”