But Rose Red began to tremble again, and this time it had nothing to do with tears. She pulled back from Beana, tugging her veil back into place. “No,” she said.
“Now, Rosie, you could at least think about it. Your prince has been kind to you, for sure, but that doesn’t mean—”
“No!”
So that conversation ended. They sat quietly, pressed against each other for comfort, neither speaking. Beana, though her body now relaxed, strained every sense she possessed with listening . . . listening and smelling and waiting for some sign of that Other, whom she knew must be close, but who spoke not a word. If only she could take Rose Red back up into the mountains, away from the low country, away from the Wilderlands! Up to that fresh, high air where the Other could not walk, where its voice could never penetrate. Up where Beana could be certain the girl was safe. If only, if only . . .
Rose Red’s mind whirled with entirely separate thoughts. She could never return to the mountain, to the madness of that dark and terrible Dream! Starvation she could handle; loneliness she could survive. But not that Dream again. For ten months or more, she had been free. True, life was no bed of flowers, but that mattered little. She could serve her prince—her Leo—and do some good. But she could not bear to face that Dream.
Return to me in a year and a day, the voice in her memory whispered. Or I will come for you.
A nightmare, that’s all it was. But one she must avoid.
“We ain’t never goin’ back to the mountain,” she whispered fiercely even as she pillowed her head on Beana’s warm back and closed her eyes to sleep. “Never!”
Two months slipped by. The sweltering heat of summer passed its most vicious point and slowly began to dwindle toward autumn. Rose Red’s work continued as it had for the last year. She cleaned the prince’s chambers. She mended his stockings and swept his hearth and ran a thousand little errands for him that he never noticed. The household staff wanted nothing to do with her, and even the head housekeeper, an imposing woman of military heritage, spoke to Rose Red only when necessary. So Rose Red kept to herself and gave herself her own assignments, and worked harder than any two maids on staff.
Only now she cleaned Lady Daylily’s chambers as well as the prince’s.
But she saw either of them only when she might happen to glimpse them together out on the grounds. He ain’t asked her yet, she told herself every time she saw Prince Lionheart walking beside that tall beauty. Not yet.
But he would. As surely as she knew what she would have to clean from the chamber pots every morning for the rest of her life, Rose Red knew Lionheart was destined to marry the Baron of Middlecrescent’s daughter. Everyone in the household knew that.
Except perhaps Prince Lionheart.
He knew what everyone expected of him. Expectations pressed in on him at every turn. Nevertheless, though already past his seventeenth birthday and beginning to look toward his eighteenth, he never made the proposal, never announced the betrothal. The Baron of Middlecrescent and his doe-eyed wife had made their annual visit to court in midsummer, hoping for good news, but they returned to Middlecrescent with deflated hopes. Or rather, the baron left deflated, while his wife, who never did quite catch on to the Plan, was full of prattle about how well their dear ducky looked, and wasn’t Prince Lionheart growing into a fine and handsome young fellow, and well, come to think of it, wouldn’t it be just darling if those two were to fall in love someday?
“What would you say to that, husband?”
The baron had not answered.
Daylily herself, when questioned on the subject by her friends and attendants, merely laughed a bright laugh, saying, “Oh, Lionheart and I are such good friends!” Nothing more, nothing less. Her ladies weren’t fooled for an instant.
Neither was Rose Red.
One morning, just a few weeks after the baron and his wife had departed for home, Rose Red entered Lionheart’s chambers to clean as usual. She began in the main room, shoveling out the grate with practiced, methodical motions, focusing on her work and thinking of nothing. Just scrape, scoop, and dump, over and over.
Lionheart stepped from his bedchamber. She turned, surprised, not having realized that he was in there. He smiled when he saw her, giving a two-fingered salute. “Top of the morning, Rose Red.”
He strode over to sit in a chair near the fireplace where she worked. She reached up quickly to adjust the veil over her face, but Lionheart was not looking at her. An attendant carrying a pair of riding boots followed him into the room. The prince held out a hand for them. “Thank you,” Lionheart said. “I think I can manage to put on my own boots.”
The attendant handed them over and stood back, folding his hands neatly before him.
Lionheart arched an eyebrow at him. “I mean to say, you’re dismissed, Turtlebreath.”
“Tortoiseshell, Your Highness.”