Read Online Veiled Rose by Anne Elisabeth Stengl - Free Book Online

understand the melody and complex harmonies of an entire chorus. When the trees sighed, she heard them whispering songs of longing, songs of love, songs of sorrow for bygone days.
    And this morning, when the sun broke through the canopy of the forest and fell upon the creek in blinding, sparkling light too bright for her to gaze upon, the wood thrush began to sing, and Rose Red recognized the voice of her Imaginary Friend. His song blended with the sound of water in a harmony beyond description, and she understood the words without quite realizing that she did.
Beyond the Final Water falling,
The Songs of Spheres recalling.
Will you answer me?
    She did not answer. She only listened. But Rose Red listened so hard that soon the other sounds faded away, Beana’s grumbles, the creek’s trickle, the birds’ caroling, and even the mosquitoes’ whining. The gold and silver music filled her ears and warmed her heart so that even her loneliness backed into the far corners of her mind.
    Until a loud voice cut through the song, chasing it from her thoughts and bringing her scrambling to her feet.
    “Dragons eat these dragon-kissed flies! Die, blood-sucking fiends, die !”
    Beana baah ed, but Rose Red leapt from her rock and splashed across the creek, crashing through the underbrush on the far side. The slope of the mountain was steep here, and she caught hold of a tree to keep herself from falling. The deer trail that led from the main road wound down below her and, sure enough, she saw the boy hacking his way through the thicker growth with his beanpole, smacking at bugs as he went. His face was sour and his hair stood up in black tufts all over his head.
    Rose Red wondered if she should call out to him. But her natural inclination to hide held her tongue, so she stood there clutching the tree with one hand and removing the floppy hat from her head with the other, watching his progress up the path. He must have felt her eyes on him, for just as he passed underneath her, he looked up.
    “Iubdan’s beard!” he exclaimed, immediately smacking at another fly. He missed and succeeded only in reddening his own cheek. “There you are. You do creep about, don’t you?”
    Rose Red shrugged. Then she held up his hat. “I found this for you.”
    “Oh, right,” said he. “Wait a minute; I’ll come up.” Using various tufts of growth for leverage, he scrambled up the slope to her. The top of the rise was bare and steep, however, and Rose Red could see the boy dithering over how best to scale it.
    “Pass me your stick,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Pass me the end of your stick. I’ll pull you up.”
    Leo gave her a once-over. He wasn’t certain of her age but didn’t think she was nearly as old as he, and beneath all her wrappings she was hardly thicker at the wrist than his beanpole. And she was standing precariously on the edge of the slope.
    “Unlikely,” Leo said. “I’d pull you down.”
    “No you won’t,” she insisted. “I’m much stronger than I look.”
    “That’s not saying much.”
    “Come on. Pass it to me.”
    He wished he could see her face under that veil, could read whether or not she was teasing him. But she kept beckoning with her extended hand, so at last he, still gripping a clump of long grass with one hand, lifted the beanpole with the other. She took it, and the next thing Leo knew, he was being dragged up the rise and onto her level, his ribcage scraping rather painfully on the exposed roots of an old tree as he went. It was over before he had a chance to think, so he lay there a moment, letting his thoughts catch up with himself.
    “Lumé’s crown,” he said at last. “You are strong!”
    Rose Red let go of his beanpole and backed up. “Told you.”
    “I mean,” said Leo, getting to his feet, “I mean, you’re really strong! How much can you lift?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Do you think you could move a boulder?”
    She shrugged again and started moving back toward the creek and