“Princess!”
The growl of his voice rumbled through Rose Red’s body. She thought her bones must break. The face above her was different from that of her Dream, yet she recognized it. And the sight did not so much frighten as enrage her. How dare he? How dare he be real?
She shook her fist at the monster, even as he blew at her veil. “Don’t you hurt him!” she cried. “Don’t you even try!”
The Dragon lowered his head, and Rose Red cringed away from his eyes but remained in her protective crouch over the prince. “Sweet princess,” said the Dragon, “I warned you, didn’t I? I warned you to return to me in a year and a day or suffer my wrath. You see now that I always keep my word.” Then his voice became purring sweet behind the fire, compelling obedience. “Why do you wear that veil before me? I know your true face. You should not hide from me.”
Yet Rose Red remained unaffected by his poison. She gnashed her teeth behind the veil, spitting her words as she cried, “Go away! Go back to the mountain, go back to your cave! I don’t want you, you nightmare. You don’t belong in this world. Get you gone, and leave us alone!”
He smiled. “I think not. Not until you let me kiss you.”
“No chance of that!”
“I could kill him. What would you say then?”
Rose Red stared into those eyes, twin infernos boiling brimstone ready to burst upon her. But though the Dragon was more horrible than words, she was not afraid, not quite. “I won’t let you hurt him,” she said.
“And how will you stop me?” the Dragon demanded with a laugh.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I will.”
He snarled, spitting flames, and she threw her body across the prince’s to protect him. Sparks rolled off her back and sizzled on the ground. The Dragon swung his head about. The people of the Eldest’s House quailed beneath his scrutiny. He turned back to the maid, but it was to the prince sheltered beneath her that he spoke.
“Perhaps, oh you brave, lionhearted man, you are not for the snacking after all? I think you may prove more useful alive. You will help me, won’t you?”
“Don’t talk to him,” Rose Red said.
The Dragon backed away from the two, and the swirling smoke surrounded him so that his awful size was hidden. “Get up, little prince,” he spoke as he retreated. “Get up and journey into the world. I send you to your exile. But we will meet again, Prince Lionheart, and perhaps you’ll find your throne after all?”
Then he vanished from sight, and all Rose Red could discern were screams beyond the wall of smoke and flashes of fire through the gloom. Lionheart, though apparently conscious, was aware of nothing, and his skin was hot to the touch. With extraordinary strength for her size, she heaved him upright, pulling his arm over her bent shoulders, and dragged him back across the poison-filled lawns of the Eldest’s grounds.
4
HE DREAMED OF FIRE.
When the dreams faded, Lionheart hovered in the half-light between waking and sleeping. In that place, he thought he smelled the musk of horse, thought he heard the creak of leather and felt the touch of a supporting hand, sometimes soft and sometimes covered in ragged gloves. Then the fire would claim him again and he’d succumb to the furnace of fever and the poison that roiled in his lungs.
No, a voice repeated over and over in his mind. No, you are mine. He may not have you.
In desperation, he reached out to the voice, like a child lunging from a stranger’s arms toward its mother, heedless of the drop beneath it, caring nothing for danger in its desire for the familiar. “Help me!” he called to the voice.
Tell me what you want, it said.
“I want to escape this fire!”
And so you shall, for you are not his lawful prey!
In an instant there flashed before his mind’s eye a face, black amid the fire, white eyes full of fury.
“Thank heaven, you’re safe!”
The ebony face vanished when a man’s deep voice, hard-edged in relief, spoke from beyond the veil of dreams. More voices spoke, and the gloved hand took hold of him again, and he felt the shifting of the horse beneath him.
Then the fire claimed him once more.
This time the dream continued uninterrupted until Lionheart began to believe with what was left of his conscious mind that he had in fact died and, bypassing the Realm Unseen, his soul had flown straight to this hell. Despair, potent and cold amid the raging flames, slashed across his heart.
“No, no!” A new voice spoke. “No, please! Don’t let him go!”
He felt, as though from a great distance, a kiss upon his forehead, and it was cool, though not cold. Then the voice, low and mellifluous, began to sing.
Beyond the Final Water falling,
The Songs of Spheres recalling.
Won’t you return to me?