“We should turn around now,” Foxbrush said before they’d gone even ten minutes up the road.
Daylily graced him with no answer. Her red curls escaped from beneath her hat and trailed down her back like some battle standard, and her eyes were sharp as they gazed about the forest. She was no fool; her years in the cunning social circles at the baron’s court had taught her a good deal about reading people, and she could read Leo and his cousin without difficulty. They were both frightened when she mentioned the monster, though for different reasons . . . and the conflict in their emotions led her to believe she had nothing to fear as she progressed up the mountain, while it simultaneously whetted her curiosity. Dancing and receiving attentions from admiring young men were all well and good, but here was a mystery like none she had ever before encountered. Daylily was not one to shy away from a mystery.
She saw the red scarf tied to the silver tree. And she saw the trail, almost hidden, leading deeper into the forest.
Gathering up her skirts still more firmly in each hand, she made the plunge into the wood. Foxbrush and Leo gave each other horrified looks, then darted in after her. “Wait, wait!” they both cried. “You can’t go in there!”
“I see no reason why not,” she replied. “Though if you two keep making that racket, we’ll not find so much as a squirrel, much less a monster.”
How strange it was to walk this path again, far stranger in this company. It was something terrible to watch Daylily in her finery marching through the underbrush like she owned it and, notwithstanding her long skirts, making less noise than Foxbrush, who muttered and cursed and stepped on every crackly stick as he went.
The landmarks were familiar, despite the passage of years. Things change slowly in the forest, and Leo felt as does a man returning home after a long absence. His eyes, when they weren’t following Foxbrush and Daylily, sought out those little haunts and hollows that he had missed without realizing he missed them.
And everywhere he looked, he expected to see Rose Red. But she was not there.
They came to the place where the narrow path passed near the creek, and Leo, who was listening for it, heard the water flowing up above. He paused, watching Daylily and Foxbrush continue on ahead until they had disappeared into the greenery. Even Daylily’s bright hair had vanished from sight.
Still he debated with himself. Did he want to make that climb? Did he truly want to see the lonely spot where he had spent so many happy hours? Did he dare hope to find . . .
“Iubdan’s beard,” he muttered, “be a man, Leo! There’s nothing to be scared of.”
He scrambled up the steep incline, pushing through the thick mountain growth.
He found the creek flowing as it had for countless generations. The water was ice-cold and high enough to flow over the tops of his shoes and wet his stockings thoroughly. He splashed on through it anyway, not bothering to step from stone to stone, for they were too slippery to trust.
All signs of the dam that once created the Lake of Endless Blackness were gone, the sticks of sunken ships long since washed away, and the stones blended in with all the others on the creek bottom. But Leo recognized the spot at once. And his gaze sought those familiar places where a little girl should be sitting, swathed in her veils, hard at work weaving sticks together to form a seaworthy hull, or those spots in the foliage where a goat might forage with irritable bleats.
But they were gone. Only their memories, like ghosts, remained.
Leo sat beside the creek, his wet shoes still in the flowing water, his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Rose Red,” he whispered, and the babbling water drowned his voice. “I’m sorry for what I saw in the cave.”
An awful silence fell.
It was as though deafness struck him, and all the sounds of the mountain went still, even the stream’s murmuring. He felt the strange tension of the forest. For a moment, he sensed the anger that flowed across the mountain, indefinable but undeniable. He drew his feet up from the water, which was suddenly warm, almost hot. The air trembled, and Leo, just in that instant, was afraid.
The moment passed. The silence broke to the sound of birdsong far away. Birdsong that nearly, but not quite, held words:
Beyond the Final Water falling
The Songs of Spheres recalling . . .
“Rose Red,” Leo whispered, bowing his head, “won’t you return to—”
“What are you doing?”
He startled. Daylily stood across the creek, her hands holding her skirts, which were more than a little mussed by now, and her bonnet was crooked on her head. But her face, though flushed from the climb, was as quiet and inscrutable as ever.