“Your Majesty!” Rose Red called again. She felt as though she were moving in a dream. Her feet refused to move as she told them. She reached out, but her arms were not long enough. “Don’t go out there, not yet!”
Starflower turned and looked back over her shoulder. Her black eyes locked with Rose Red’s; it was as if she could see right through the veils. Her lips moved, and her voice carried as though from far away.
“My dreams are dead.”
By the time those words reached Rose Red’s ears, the queen had already stepped over the threshold. “NO!” Rose Red cried.
A flash.
Like lightning but bigger; more like a meteor striking the earth. The Eldest’s House shook to its foundations, and Rose Red was flung to the floor. She lay there with her arms over her head as the silence of a scream never uttered rang in her ears and heat consumed the world just beyond the doorway.
Then it was over. Rose Red uncurled and pushed herself to her feet. She staggered to the doorway, coughing in the smoke, waving it from her face. For an age, it seemed, she stood blinded on the threshold. Then at last the smoke cleared enough for her to see the melted stones that had once been the front steps.
Her nightmare incarnate stood in the courtyard, clothed in a man’s shape.
“Welcome back, little princess,” he said.
7
I’VE MISSED YOU.”
Rose Red stood frozen on the threshold as her Dream drifted toward her like another cloud of smoke, across the destruction he had wreaked. “The last time we spoke hardly counted. No chance for intimate conversation with everyone screaming and running about the place. Hardly the reunion I had envisioned.”
He reached out and slipped the veil from her face. She remained unmoving while his gaze crawled over her features.
“Princess,” he said at last, “how sadly wasted you are here. So different from the child I knew in the mountains. You should have returned to me, and then I—”
“I’ll never come back!” Rose Red snapped. She regained enough of herself to back away from him. But he followed her into the house, and his eyes gleamed red in its half-light. “You cain’t make me come back,” she said. Her voice was lost in the echoes of the great hall.
“Of course not,” said he with a snarl. “After all, you have forgotten me and how once I was your only true friend. Cruel, cruel child, abandoning me for a mortal playmate! But see how my love for you continues despite your faithlessness?”
“You’re despicable.” She spoke with an effort, for his words besieged her senses, trying every possible weakness for an opportunity to break in and overwhelm her. “We were never friends.”
“You have merely forgotten. Forgotten even the promise you made to return—”
“I made no promise!” Rose Red continued backing into the house, and he continued to follow.
“No promise?” His voice was unendingly sorrowful. The awful features, the black teeth, the sickly white skin, even the flames behind his eyes, melted away beneath that sorrow. “What about your promise to the mortal boy?”
Then his voice altered and became a horrible but perfect mimic of Prince Lionheart’s: “ ‘Dearest girl, I will take comfort in knowing my parents have you yet.’ ”
Rose Red swore and turned away from the Dragon, hiding her face in her hands. But he drifted closer, like evening closing in around her. “What a fine job you’ve done with that promise of yours.”
She pulled herself upright and glared in his face. Though all his features were still wrung with sorrow and regret, deep down in the depths of his eyes, she saw a smile.
Rose Red bared her teeth and slapped him.
Though her hand touched his face for only a moment, it burned all the way through her glove and on down through her skin, to the bone. Pain shot through her arm, up her neck, and into her head. But she was angry now.
“You killed her! You demon! Why did you go and do that? You have no quarrel with her. It was meanness; it was evil! Monster!” Rose Red knew she sounded like a child, screaming in his face. She didn’t care. She clutched her burned hand to her chest and yelled so that her voice rang through the Eldest’s House, disturbing the half-light and shadows. “I know who the real mountain monster was all along. You plague people’s dreams, you plague their hearts, you leave them frightened upon their pillows in the small hours of darkness, and they’re terrified to even live. No wonder they poured all that hatred on me. You made me an outcast. You did! If not for my old dad and Beana—”
Her voice broke there. An overwhelming loneliness swept across Rose Red, leaving her panting and empty as she glared up at the Dragon.
He handed her the veil. “Put this on, princess. You are not ready to walk without it in this place. Not until you let me kiss you.”