Moonblood (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #3) (5 page)

“Not yet,” said she.

They stood in the shadows, lit by a solitary candle sconce, two specters in a haunted house. Far away, the music of the banquet continued to play as the people of Southlands celebrated the upcoming nuptials of their prince and his lady.

“Will you return to the hall with me?” Daylily asked.

“I will not.”

The Baron of Middlecrescent’s daughter turned and floated back down the corridor as silent as a shadow, vanishing around a bend. Lionheart watched her go, his mind whirling with too many thoughts to sort through. He turned blindly, continuing up the passage, taking the first turn up a servants’ stair.

He found himself face-to-face with Rose Red.

Moonlight fell from a window in the passage and lit upon her veils, making them luminous in the otherwise dark stairway. She was a phantom, a ghost of some troubled past, standing there in the silver light, her face shrouded, two porcelain pots clutched in her arms. Lionheart startled back. Then he growled.

“Did you hear?”

“Y-yes, my prince,” she whispered.

He pounded a fist against the stone wall, then leaned his forehead against it, sighing. “Rosie,” he said, “I was wrong to ask you to come back. I should have—they don’t understand.”

“They never have,” she replied. “No one ever has. Except you.”

He shook his head. “I’ve been unfair to you. It was wrong of me to have brought you here, to have asked you to leave the mountain.”

“But . . .” Her voice was very small, trembling. “But I’m glad you did.”

Lionheart shook his head. Imprisonment and despair closed him in on all sides. He must struggle for his dream. He must fight. He’d come too far to back down now. “I think I must send you back, Rosie. For your own sake.”

“No!” The agony in her voice startled him, and he took a step back in surprise when she suddenly went down on her knees before him, setting aside her pots and wringing her hands. “No, Leo, don’t say that.” He smiled a little at her use of his old nickname. She never called him that now that she was his servant. It wasn’t right. But somehow, it was natural coming from her, his oldest friend. “Send me away,” she said, “if it’s for your sake. But I vowed to serve you, and I won’t leave unless it’s what you want. I’ll serve you, however you need me to. If that means goin’, I’ll go tonight. Only let me help you, my prince!”

“Rose Red,” he sighed, taking her by the hands and gently pulling her to her feet. When standing, she was still scarcely more than half his size, though he was no giant himself. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. We’ll speak of this again after the wedding week is past. I cannot think now. I cannot make a decision. Try to stay out of sight though, as much as possible. I fear some harm will come to you. I don’t know if I could forgive myself were that to happen.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, her head bowed so that the hem of her veil reached to her belt. The belt was of faded red cloth, frayed with age, though among the frayed ends yet lingered glimmerings of gold. Once it had been a blanket, but years of hard use in the mountains had reduced it to no more than a rag. “Don’t worry about me. You have enough worries as it is.”

“Iubdan’s beard, yes!” Lionheart said. Without another word he stepped past her and continued on his way up the stairs. A cold voice rang in his head, a voice that no one else could hear, and he staggered as he went.

Rose Red watched him go, cursing her ineffectiveness. She looked down at the empty pots she had been on her way to fill with water, intending to arrange more greenery in them. How would withering rose stems lift her master’s spirits now?

She fled the passage, leaving the pots where they lay, and slipped unseen through the back corridors of the House. Rose Red had always possessed a gift for going unseen when she wanted to, and she avoided the other servants with ease. She escaped through a door and pelted across the near garden. In the struggling rosebushes, she thought she glimpsed many white blossoms, translucent under the moonlight. But when she drew near, they vanished.

Beana startled awake at the creak of the door. Other goats lazily opened their eyes, but Beana lurched to her feet and bleated, “Lumé, child! What’s the matter with you? Did you hear . . . Rosie, tell me, did you hear the Fallen One speak?”

Rose Red sank to her knees beside her goat and, wrapping her arms around Beana’s neck, plunged her face, veil and all, into the coarse fur. She began to weep.

Beana blinked. “Oh. Well, maybe it’s not that after all.” She shook her horns, muttered goatily, and knelt down in the straw. Rose Red shifted so that her face was now buried in her goat’s back. Tears soaked through her veil, so she removed it. She sat and sobbed, barefaced, in the darkness.

Beana chewed her cud.

When at last the sobs reduced to sniffs, the goat swallowed and said, “All right, child. If you can manage to talk without hiccups, tell me.”

Rose Red sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. Her face was nothing but shadows in the darkness of the shed, but her eyes gleamed like small moons.

“I need you to talk sense to me, Beana.”

“Do I ever talk anything else?”

“I need you to tell me,” Rose Red said, “that I’m a fool.”

“If it makes you happy. You’re a fool.” Beana gave Rose Red’s ear a slobbery kiss. “Now, why don’t you toddle off to bed? You’ll feel much better after a night’s sleep, though you’ll have a fierce headache after all this weeping and wailing—”

“I cain’t seem to help myself!” Rose Red sucked in a long breath and bowed her head to her knees. “I cain’t seem to help lovin’ him, and I know that she don’t, but she’ll marry him, and who’s to stop her? And he’ll never see!”

“Never see?”

“Never see the difference! Between me and her. He’ll never see how I love him . . . because he’ll never see me.”

A long silence lingered in the goat shed. One of the other goats bleated, and several shifted. Otherwise all was still.

“Oh, Beana,” Rose Red whispered at last. “My mind plays such cruel tricks sometimes. I can pretend out a whole story of a prince who loves a girl, not because of her beauty, but because she loves him and serves him. Because she would give up everythin’ for his sake. And I can pretend his heart is so moved that he finds it possible to look beyond a face like . . . mine.”

Beana said nothing. She nuzzled the girl again, but Rose Red pushed her away.

“It’s stupid, I know. No one could ever love someone like me, and sometimes, well, sometimes I could just eat my own hand off!”

“Don’t do that. It’ll disagree with you.”

Rose Red turned and buried her face in her goat’s fur once more. Beana felt hot tears seeping into her coat. “Please, Beana,” the girl said, “please tell me to . . . to buck up or somethin’! He’s gettin’ married this week, and I’ve got to serve him, and I cain’t do that with all this dreamin’!”

Beana sighed and began to chew her cud again until the girl had finished her second, less stormy cry. When Rose Red sat up once more, snuffling and wiping tears from her cheeks, the goat said quietly, “The dreaming is dangerous, child. You start letting yourself live in dreams like that, and you’ll find yourself open to such evils. I’ve seen it happen time and again to those I loved. . . .” She shook her head violently, clanking the bell about her neck. Then she put out her long nose and licked tears from Rose Red’s face, allowing the girl to stroke her soft ears.

In a gentle voice quite unlike a goat’s, she said, “But I’ll never tell you to stop loving. You see, I believe in hopeless love. Oh yes. I believe in it with all my heart, though you may discount the heart of an old nanny like me. For real love brings pain. Real love means sacrifices and hurts and all the thousand shocks of life. But it also means beauty, true beauty, such as the likes of that brilliant Lady of Middlecrescent couldn’t imagine.

“You say it’s impossible for anyone to love one like you? I tell you otherwise. I know deep down in the secret places of my soul that a person can learn to love someone like you. Someone uglier by far! With a deep, lasting love that would . . . that would dare to stare in the face of Death himself and shout threats and shake fists for the sake of the one beloved!” She laughed a little snorting laugh and smiled.

Then she was no longer a goat. Anyone looking in that dark shed would have seen at its far end a woman clad in brown and white—a mirage of the moonlight, perhaps—her hair wrapped in crowning braids atop her head, and her arms around the scrawny shoulders of a gangly, ill-formed creature in servant’s garb. An awful sight, yet one touched by a certain holiness. And somewhere, beyond the dankness of the stable, a wood thrush sang. Its song filled the night with vast spaces and clarity. In that song, Rose Red’s heart lifted as though releasing a heavy burden, and she breathed in clean air.

“This I know,” whispered the woman. “I know the depths of impossibility. They are dreadful depths when plunged. More dreadful than you yet know. Even so, do not forget him. Do not forget your love. Not for a moment.”

Rose Red raised her face from where it rested against a warm beating heart. But that vision of a tender face, that dream of warm, encircling arms vanished, and she sat nose to nose with a dusty goat.

3

T
HE NIGHT WAS FRIGID
, filled with songs that no one could hear. Or, if they did hear, no one understood the words, no matter how the songs might call to them. Only the moon seemed inclined to listen, and her great eye was dewy with tears.

The moonlight was more unbearable than the cold. Lionheart drew his curtains against it. Someone—Rose Red, most likely—had built a small fire on the grate in preparation for his evening, but its glow did little to ease the gloom around him. He stood awhile with his back to the blaze, drawing deep breaths. His old drapes had been burned and replaced months ago, and some chambermaid had put fresh cuttings in vases and urns about the room. But he still smelled dragon poison.

“Friend of demons.”
Daylily’s voice rang in his head.

He wanted to break something with his own hands, to crush and destroy, anything to relieve the anger that, even now in the privacy of his chambers, he dared not release. No one would understand. No one
could
understand.

He closed his eyes and rubbed a hand down his face. Day after tomorrow, Lionheart would wed the friend of his youth, at last fulfilling the expectations of his dead mother and his half-dead father. With Daylily by his side, he would rebuild his once fertile kingdom, restoring green growth to the desolate fields, reviving life in the ghostly figures of his subjects. If only he could regain their trust!

“Did he fight the Dragon?”

No wonder they doubted now whether or not he was the right man to serve someday as Southlands’ Eldest. How could he have left them for so long! And for no purpose—

“No!” he growled. “No, it was for good purpose.”

Lionheart took a seat in his high-backed chair and drew it near the fire. He felt no warmth from the dull brands. Flames burned brightly in his mind instead.

Softly he whispered a name.

“Una.”

The night stretched before him, sleepless and frozen.

In the darkness before dawn, Beana knelt in the straw of her pen, her eyes wide and alert. Rose Red lay with her head pillowed on the goat’s back, her veil partially falling off her face. Gently, Beana reached out and pulled it back into place. Then she lifted her head again, nostrils quivering, ears twitching.

She listened for those silent songs. Although she could not hear them, she knew they must be near. But the air was chilled into otherworldly stillness. Even the moon had set.

The dawn chorus would not begin for another hour at least, a collision of sounds from all the birds flown to Southlands for the winter. There were fewer than in olden days. No birds had lived in Southlands during the years of the Dragon, and even now the usual migrants, displeased with the unnaturally cold winters in the kingdom, flew on across the mountains out to the sea and the warm islands beyond. The absence of their bright colors and brighter songs was keenly felt in Southlands. Everything had changed with the Dragon.