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

up.
    “You don’t want to play with me no more, do you?” said the tiny voice of Rose Red, and he realized that she’d almost disappeared again.
    Stopping himself from reaching out to her, since that had proven disastrous, Leo quickly said, “Yes, I still want to play! Monsters are silly; besides, they don’t exist. We should build a dam, like I said. Make a lake over in that hollow down there. Do you think you could lift some of those bigger stones if I helped you?”
    Rose Red nodded, and though Leo couldn’t see it, she smiled underneath her veil.
    So began a friendship such as neither child had ever before experienced. And that first day, as they rolled stones and sticks into the creek despite Beana’s disapproving bleats, all thoughts of monsters and algebra forgotten in the pleasures of mud and running water, they could never have predicted how far that new friendship would take them.

6
    Y ou have forgotten me.”
    “You’re pretty hard to forget.”
    Rose Red kneels at the mouth of the cave, her back to the dark pool. She does not want to meet the gaze of the one in the pool. Her eyes drift across the high mountains, across the landscape of the kingdom that, in her dreams, is visible from here all the way to Bald Mountain in the north.
    “Shall I take that as a compliment, princess?”
    “You take everythin’ as a compliment.” She spares him no more than a quick glance over her shoulder before returning her focus to the landscape. Although she can see to any corner of the kingdom at any moment she wishes, it is a particular gabled room at Hill House that draws her eyes. A room in which the lamplight has long since been extinguished, and a boy dreams certain dreams that do not connect with hers.
    The one in the pool sighs, and his eyes are full of longing as he looks upon her unveiled face, so pensive in the silver light.
    “Am I no longer your friend?”
    Her shoulders heave as she draws and releases a great breath. “Of course you’re important to me. You’ve been here all my life. But you’re nothin’ but a dream!”
    “I care for you as no one else does.”
    Rose Red wraps her arms about herself as if cold, yet still she avoids his gaze. She feels him reading her face, however, and without her veils she feels vulnerable. “Stop it.”
    “Stop what?”
    “Stop lookin’ at me uncovered like this. I don’t like it.”
    “Your face is so beautiful, princess.”
    She grinds her teeth and presses the heels of her hands over her eyes. “You’re a liar.”
    “Never. Never, my lovely—”
    “Shut up!” Rocks scatter and fall silently down the side of the mountain as Rose Red leaps to her feet. “Shut up! I cain’t bear it no more. I’m a big girl, and I don’t need your pretty stories! I have a real friend now.”
    The one in the pool smiles sadly, or perhaps it is more an expression of pain. “He has not seen your true face.”
    “He’s still my friend. He comes to play with me every day that he can. And we have fun! We don’t just sit and talk; we have real adventures.”
    “What kind of adventures, princess?”
    “We sail ships on the Lake of Endless Blackness. We storm the strongholds of evil magicians. Today there was this Dragonwitch what kidnapped Beana and turned her into a goat, and we rescued her, though we couldn’t undo the goat spell, so we found her a good home and cared for her to the end of our days. And we—”
    “And you hunt the monster, don’t you?”
    Rose Red feels him trying to draw her back into the cave, back to the pool. But she won’t move.
    “Princess, have you told him?”
    She shakes her head.
    “You should bring him to me.”
    “Hen’s teeth!” she growls. “Why would I want to do that?”
    “You must let me meet this boy. This so-called friend of yours.”
    She leans a shoulder against one of the jagged stones, her face lifted to the moonless, starless sky. “You never wanted to meet Beana.”
    “Why would I want to meet a goat? She is