Vi and Delilah are (hoodedred) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-06 15:39:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: tales, red riding hood, rose red |
Who: Rose. And Red. The other Red.
What: Fires and wolf boy talk.
When: Recently.
Where: Henry's village
The village was not as Red remembered it. The houses were low and they were cramped quarters, built so they hunkered around the warmth of a fire or the gathered heat of livestock, locked in for winter. The roofs were weighted down with the thickened eiderdown of soft, perfect white, white Red knew was cold, was late nights burning bound grass, burning until the livestock’s effluence stank sweet. The village drew itself around the inn, houses clustered in like flies drawn in to honey, and it was there she had pitched her pathway first. The hem of her cloak dragged until the fur was matted-damp, and the soles of her boots had long since begun to seep cold wet, but she did not leave go the bundle, the toboggan behind her bumped over the paths as the rope had grooved deep into her palms beneath the snow-soaked wet of her gloves. She was a small figure beneath the purpling sky, the soft dappling of snow to add to that which lay across the green. Dark hair struggled free and waved madly around the braid that lay along the fur of her back, the face was wind-stung red and the fur was the thickened black of those that lived high among the mountains, that chased down prey with teeth and claw, not knife and arrow. There was no one. She had peered through thickened windows, frost sheening over like icing sugar on her grandmother’s summer cakes, and she had looked for the inn door and the promise of something to drink, something to fill the belly that was not cold meat. Her stomach rumbled, her gut squeezed; if the cursed snow would cease, then she could light a fire with her flint stone but the snow was endless, awful beauty, it trickled over her shoulders and down her neck. Behind the inn, the only door that stood unlocked was that for the livestock, the thickened smell of manure and hay and sweet breath clung to the doors and walls. She shuffled inside, dragged the toboggan beyond the reach of the door and scuffed over the tracks with a degree of care. The dark was an embrace; the snow began to slide from her hood and down her neck. Rose was angry. This was worse than the dead year, and that was saying something indeed. She'd finally managed to clear the midwood after the sun began to go down, and she knew she was close to the village that bordered the Beast's lands. She knew he had gone there to look for Belle and her stupid yellow dress, and she knew she would have a better chance of getting there before nightfall, than she would of getting to the castle itself. And she had no toboggan, no supplies, nothing. It was only the vines that had kept her alive during her trek, and she absolutely hated everyone that ever existed in any place. Rose was a red cloak, the embroidered roses at the hem blood-red and darkened by soaked through damp. The hood on her head was the same red, and it was merely a formality. The fur that lined it was even soaked through, and her copper hair was rusty blood and tangle beneath the paltry cover. She dragged herself into the village with a lurch that repeatedly ended up shin-deep in snow, and she almost made her vines crawl out from beneath the white and choke everyone who slept in warm beds. Rose was very angry. She tried the doors, and she was about to imperiously knock on the last one - declaring herself the fiancee of their FUCKING king - when she heard the noise from the stables. Humph. She stomped that way, and she pushed open the wood-swing door. "Do you have a KEY?" Rose demanded, assuming whoever was inside owned the final house with the barred door. Red had seen no prince and no girl in yellow dress. Of the two, the yellow dress would have been more practical, princes being unaccustomed to snow and to labor. There had been no yellow dresses on the mountain side; hides rubbed clean with a blade and stretched out to dry before being worked until they were supple and warm, that was practical. There had been promises of silks at the summer’s festivals, but silk was very costly, and not practical at all. She had longed for a dress that shimmered like colored water - green perhaps, or blue - but those who wore them traded in things that could be bought and sold all year around, in boats in the harbor, and when her father bought her a ribbon in red, the color of her little girl’s cloak, she had thought herself fine indeed. The ribbon was a slimy snail’s trail against her cheek, draggled red so dark with snow it looked black. The voice was both loud and demanding, and Red crept forward with trepidation, the soaked fur trickling ice-water down her spine and her knife uncovered in her hand. It was a silvering smile of a blade, sharp enough to tease the fur from the flesh without an abundance of strength needed. Her boots slid on the sticky floor, in what, she did not wish to think, when the door swung wide and Red’s blade scythed upward, ready for what manner of demander came. “I have nothing you can take,” she had the pattern of speech from the mountains, the syllables separate and strange, but the fury of fear was hissed through regardless. She was small but the knife was not, and it was wielded as if it might do the work. Rose rolled her eyes. She'd always been stupidly fearless, and nothing had changed in that regard as she grew older. She rolled her eyes, and she settled her hands onto her hips. "Put away the stupid knife. I'm not going to take anything from you." She sounded unimpressed, and she was unimpressed. If she wanted to take the knife from the bedraggled girl, she had only to make whatever roots lived beneath the hard-packed earth slam up and knock her back. It didn't matter how hard or frozen the world was, there was always the potential for something to grow, and she'd become an expert now, thanks to the wretched snow. "I just wanted a roof and a blanket," Rose clarified, because maybe the girl was a little dumb. After all, she was out here in that soaked fur, and that wasn't very bright. "Which is why I asked for your key and not for your firstborn." Rose pushed the hood off her hair, and she shook out the cloak. Beneath it, she was mundane jeans and a warm sweater, boots that reached her knees and a bra instead of a corset. So, maybe she'd picked up a thing or two during her last trip to Fabletown. She was practical, and there was no use in wearing a dress out in that. Hand outstretched, Rose rolled her fingers inward. Key, she mouthed, still under the impression that the stupid girl belonged to the house. The stink of the dirty straw had crept into Red’s nose and settled, but on the rush of snow-heavy wind that swirled in along with the girl, she could pick out the thickened chill of more snow to come in the clean, sharp scent and on the girl, the smell of expensive soap and of laundry. The cloak she wore was thick and it would take much coin to buy, and it was clean too, even if the girl was careless as it dragged along the ground. Her eyes widened and roundened, saucer-bright in the dingy light of the animals’ home as the cloak was cast off the girl’s shoulders and the apparel beneath showed clear. She had seen nothing of that the last summer’s festival, but she had idled up in the mountains this year, longed for the sharp clarity of the white snow and the livid red of a fresh-caught kill, the simplicity of the tent and of fire. She crept forward and the straw barely hushed her arrival, her boots quiet on even this, a truth-teller. She was dirtier than she had any liking to be, the further down the mountain she came, the more the mud rose, and the hides were heavy on her back and shoulders. The mittens she wore bared fingers and thumb, the tanned flesh turned outward and the fur turned in, where it could keep her palms from chill. In what light there was, the tangled skein of her own hair was a yard-long braid along her back, and the furs were dark with damp. “I have no key,” she said bluntly - any girl that did not fright at a blade exposed was simple, or perhaps foolhardy. “And any blanket I have may be soaked through. Are you of the village? I thought you all gone.” "You don't live here," Rose said finally with a groan, understanding. It had taken days to get here, and she was tired enough that she didn't even have the energy to keep up her regular nastiness. "Fuck." The swear word was new, but it was her favorite, and she used it whenever she could these days. It applied in so many situations, and it made Henry laugh. She wondered what he would think now, if he knew she was soaked through in a stable and cursing at a girl who looked like she hadn't had a wash in months. The girl reminded her of Wolf, and she wondered where he was. Hopefully, warm and in the castle stables, but he liked to wander sometimes. And Rose still didn't care about that blade. Life in the Witching Wood had been an experience, and she'd grown up wild and free, magic and swords and so many promises to run anyone through who came near her or Snow. But that was a thousand years ago, and this cold was now. Surviving was something witches were good at; maybe as good as this dirty girl with her fur and knife. Rose rubbed a gloved hand at her forehead, and she looked around the useless space. It really wasn't anything worth mentioning as far as shelter was concerned. It wouldn't keep the cold out. It wouldn't even keep looters out, and she knew the starving men from camps and forests would be heading toward any lights in search of evading death. The air turned crisp and green, the scent overpowering the damp and snow. It was a bright and bitter scent, and it got stronger the longer Rose didn't see a solution to her problem. She couldn't trudge out there in the middle of night, and her hut had been abandoned a full day back. Through the frozen earth, bits of green began to glimmer, like jewels trying to break through ice. "We're going to need to break down a door," she finally said. "We'll knock first." Appeasing. The fricative bloomed on the air like a fractional moment of heat slithering in like struck lightning. Red did not understand the word, curses in the mountains were guttural things, the hock-and-spit of disgust at ropes unloosed, dogs that sickened, the sagging-in of a tent that bellied beneath snowfall. She did not understand it, but the sentiment was clear. The girl whose hair rippled like molten copper was disappointed, perhaps angry. “No,” Red said, confirming her statelessness. Her home was folded up in thirds and packed beneath the tight trammels of hemp ropes. This village did not contain the shack furthest from the line of lit windows, the door carved with the pointed bite of a blade not meant for skinning furthers. She had looked for it, but it was not here. The disappointment had been cold and creeping, like snow’s oncoming from mild fall. Red did not permit disappointment. It was not allowed. It served no purpose. The shelter was neither a shack with the cracks between the boards plugged tight with rags soaked in fat, nor a tent pegged securely with the dogs curled around her for the sweet stench of their shared warmth. Somewhere - somehow - the dogs and she had been parted. She did not know when, either. A small frown indented itself on the dirty parchment of her face; Red lived with too few people to obfuscate, to know how. Incredulousness shivered out of dirty-cheeked suspicion, the blade went slack in her hand as magic, magic from childish stories and summer drinking when the evenings were sleepy-warm and sweet, magic the only explanation for rivulet shoots of green twining upward from the earth, crept inside her nose with the sharp, clean smell of spring oncoming. The black eyes rounded like pennies, the part of her lips paled pink beneath the dirt. “How is it you do that?” The knife pointed, surely at the climbing vines. "I'm a witch." Unthinking words that Rose's mother had cautioned her never to say. But that had been during the Adversary war, when witches reminded people of fairies and death and the Adversary's army. They'd been hunted then, feared and dangerous. The common people feared them, and the Adversary wanted them, and there had been no good place for them in the world. But that war was done now, and being witch wasn't what it had been. Even Henry, who hated magic with all of his being, was tolerant now. The Witching Wood, before these snows, had become a place where villagers came to buy cures and poultices, making payment in food or fur. It was, again, a livelihood, one that ensured she would never go hungry in winter, even if Henry's attention turned elsewhere. No, she said the words without thinking, because she didn't fear them, just as she didn't fear the bedraggled girl before her. And so that was Rose's explanation for the vines. I'm a witch, and that should be enough. "Put the knife down. If I wanted to hurt you, you'd already be dead." Stupid girl, but the thought wasn't angry. She remembered the dead years. She knew this snow wasn't normal, and she knew hundreds had to be dying beneath the pretty-looking white. Not everyone had villages, and there were even fewer castles. And maybe knocking wasn't the best idea. Instead, she looked down at the green that was thisclose to breaking through the packed earth. "You better move back," she said, and just in time. The ground cracked and gave, slumbering earth and impossibly vibrant green broke through and slithered toward the walls. Up and up, until it lined the walls, lined the windows, lined the roof. It covered every crack, filled in every hole, bolstered the roof and defended it from the weight of the snow. The animals that remained complained and cowered, but she knew they would calm. The smell was green, the air was green, and it would cover even the slightest hint of fear. "Do you know how to start a fire?" she asked the girl, a little tired, but nothing worse than that. A witch. They had told tales of witches at the end of the summer markets. Parents to children, threats of bones boiled in water to make soup of babies who didn’t behave themselves, of houses that walked on spiny chicken-legs and looked for young girls to fatten for food. When she had been of age for ribbons and dresses that covered the tops of her boots, not a child’s hideskin leggings, witch-talk burned like embers beneath a conversation. Witches knew how to stop a child, how to make a man love hopelessly and unwittingly until he built a house at the edge of the village and his heart stopped if he strayed, how to bring on the winter before the harvest was brought home, how to steal a breath back from Death. Red remembered fragments of stories like the honeyed taste of the little cakes made at the markets on her tongue, like old things mostly forgotten but never gone. She moved the way a wolf darts in the dark, a crowding back and into the crevasse of wall and supporting beam as the vine thrust upwards, spread like fire over dry grass, like spring sped up, like impossibility. “Magic,” Red said only to herself, as she gazed at the writhing green along the cracks in the roof. The hut was silent now, the wuthering of winter’s wind blowing around the solid shelter instead of whistling along the cracks and crannies. She believed it, that this girl who dressed like she was from a far off place, could kill her before she took a breath. Witches did. Witches could. This one could bring summer’s growth in the middle of a shelter, Red did not doubt she could squeeze her heart to nothing. The blade lowered, was sheathed, but her fingers remained suspicious-close to the handle. “You have scared the animals,” she remarked. Her voice held the flatness of the mountains, the low husk of people who did not call out for fear of bringing down the snows on the outcroppings, who spoke little and who called as the animals did. Her shoulder turned toward the girl, and then the rest of her, and she took one cautious step out from the comfortable shadow. “If I could not, I would die,” she said reasonably. How did the witch think people survived? "They'll be fine," Rose said of the animals. She hadn't grown up in the mountains, but she had grown wild as a weed in the woods. "They don't fear nature, not if it's not prey. They won't fear vines," she said, and that came of life in a wood that had been enchanted to protect the witches that harbored within it. Her tone was dismissive, like it always was, and she'd always been that way. Where Snow had been quiet and sweet and scared of shadows, Rose had been wild and fearless and smart-mouthed. Night and day, and her mother had given them opposing names for that very reason. Warmer now, Rose shucked off the wet cloak, and she tossed it over a low barrier made of loose woods. "Do we need to chop some of these, or is any of the hay dry enough?" she asked of a fire. She was accustomed to a hearth, to a hut, to a fire that was stoked. And even that was a memory. She hadn't built her own fire in a year, and a year wiped away a thousand in the strangest way. In the castle, the enchanted items built all the fires, cooked all the meals, replaces all the rushes. Her hands were calloused from other things now. From potions and collecting ingredients from sap and plants and animals, but none of them would help them now. She and Snow had been curse breakers; they'd never been casting witches, and even the vines were a new development, only a few years old. She could make the trees bend to her, and she could kill or raise anything that came from a seed, but that wouldn't make it warm, and it wouldn't make them dry. "Do you have a name?" Rose finally asked. "I'm called Rose. And don't be stupid and hide. I'm not going to hurt the one person who can build me a fire. The castle is still miles aways, and Blue obviously isn't here yet, or he'd already have a fire burning for me." Her tone was entitled, nothing woodland, and she hugged her arms around herself for warmth. She looked like a Rose, Red decided. She thought nothing of the vines as she looked at the witch-girl. Roses were pretty, and they were soft, and they were of summer; they died easily and were plucked. They had to be cultivated, for pleasure. The girl with the hair like embers was pretty enough that she would be picked for all the dances at a summer’s market, even if she was a witch. It was a soft, pretty name for a pretty girl who sounded like she was used to telling people what to do. Red remembered dancing. She remembered breath hot and tight in her chest with pleasure, she remembered kicking skirts out of her way thoughtlessly, her arms a criss-cross in the pattern in front of her. But dancing was Delilah’s memory, and not Red’s at all. She looked at the animals, the lowing that had calmed to nothing but stray shuffling as the cows backed into the corners of their stalls. They looked all right now, she supposed. It was just as well. There were no cows in the mountains, she would have no idea what to do. She grasped a thick handful of the hay considered with a wary eye for the horse who thought it was his dinner rather than stuff for burning and squatted down, her weight rolling forward comfortably to the tips of her toes and the ragged heels of her boots turned up to the light and the furs trailed in the dust thick on the stable floor. “It can burn,” she said shortly. It didn’t matter if it was a little damp. Her hand dug inside the dirty furs and retrieved a dried hide pouch, big enough for a handful of coppers - or, in this case, a small cloth that rolled together the chink of two stones, and a handful of tallow, white and waxy. She worked her fingers into the tallow, to bind together the hay into a thicker mass and she ignored any talk of hurting at all. Witch-girls who grew vines from the floor did not, Red thought, live in houses with chicken-legs. She wasn’t a baby to boil any more. The flints skidded together and sparks jumped. The hay licked up flame hungrily, and the tallow spat, a sticky sound. “Red,” she said, without looking up from the way the flame curled and danced, sent shadows skittering up the vine-crusted walls. She shrugged off her own damp furs, cast the cloak behind her and let it fall. Beneath, the dress was wool, bought at the last summer’s market she had come down for. It was too short at the wrists and too tight over the fullness of the bust, but it still had wear in it, and was a dark color that could have been brown or just dirt. The leggings were warm wolf-skin hide, and the boots showed their wear; there would be no more mountain without a new pair of boots. “Who is Blue?” "I knew a Red once," Rose said, moving close to the new fire and working on a circle of grass from the newly churned earth. It wouldn't stay, not long, not in this cold. The vines were resilient, roots deep in the earth. Tree trunks, those were just as strong. But grass was shallow and died quick. Still, it would give them a warm place to sit for a few minutes, and that was really all she wanted. The circle complete, and the hay-fire safe in the center, and Rose dropped down onto the green and stared at the flames. No, she lived in no house with chicken legs. Her mother had never been that kind of witch, though she knew they lived deep in the woods. She and Snow had helped Frau Totenkinder escape, after all. Frau, eater of children and builder of candy houses. But even a woman like that hadn't deserved to burn, and Snow had acquiesced and freed her. The woman and Snow had left, taken the one magical route to the mundane world, and Rose had stayed behind. And then the land had died, and she wondered if the merchant was surviving in this cold. The merchant who had taken her in, and the one who had left her for the Beast. She cared for the man, despite herself, and she hoped he was warm. "Blue is a friend," Rose assured her. "He's coming to take me the rest of the way to the castle." She slipped the froze-cold mittens off her hands, and she wiggled her fingers in front of the fire. Her hair was drying, crisp and wild and copper, and she looked like a teenager and not like a girl that was well past a thousand. She wondered, as the jeans dried and the sweater went crunchy, if Belle was in the inn here. If she was at this inn, pretending she ruled everyone and everything. The vines shook, and the grass protested, and Rose groaned. "Stop that!" And they did. The vines calmed, and the grass went back to dying. Red liked fire. She liked the way it leaped up and ate every twig and twist of grass you fed it, the same, the way it spat sparks like an old man coughing. It was warm and it was livid, and the colors were bright and molten, liquid movement curling over fought for twigs. She liked the way it was a barrier and a beacon in the night, and how heat was now sliding into all the frozen parts of her, unlocking tightly clenched muscles and melting them into comfort. She didn’t mind the drip-drip-drip of the snow as it melted too, if she could be warm. She liked fire too much; her father said the best hunters lived the way the wolves did, in the dark and the quiet. Fire altered the vision, blunted it. Fire left you weak. She was not as good a hunter as her father, but she liked fire all the same. She fed this little flame a handful more of hay, and she dusted her hands. The melting snow streaked through the dirt, and left the skin beneath bare. It was warm-toned, olive beneath the dirt and it was true black, her hair, drying in thick tangles down her back. She wondered who it was, this boy, named for a color. Hers had been a cloak, a name that was frivolous for the summer until her own had been lost on a mountain in stain on snow. She was Red now. “What was she like?” Her face upturned from the wavering flames, Red marveled with the visibility of those who did not know to marvel was to show lack of worldliness. She thought the vines more helpful than even the knife hanging freely now at her waist, but the copper-haired girl, Rose, had not even a flint. She supposed if she lived in a castle, she had no need of them. “You live there?” "She hated everything, even more than I do. She hated men. She hated people. She hated everything except ribbons. There was a ribbon once, and she liked that," Rose said of Red, the words memories that tumbled. "She hated wolves most of all. She knew my sister better than she knew me. You could ask Snow." Snow knew everyone better. Snow was the kind to learn things, and she always had been. Rose had trouble staying put. Like the grasses with their flimsy nothing roots, she wasn't made for staying. Dandelion wisps on the wind, and Snow had always been a tree with deep roots, quiet and sturdy. She'd done everything she could to uproot that tree, and that tree had done everything it could to make the dandelion wisps keep from flying. It made Rose smile a genuine smile, copper bright in the fire's glow and framed by tangles of the same color. Rose had to ponder the question of whether or not she lived in the castle. It had begun as a prison, and it had changed to something else. But Henry was right; she kept leaving it behind, and Faust had told her not to take herself out of the running. Since Snow, since Charming, she'd run until her feet blistered from it. Hate and bile had coated her shoulders for years, and maybe it was time to be done with it. She moved her hands closer to the flames, and she regarded the dark-on-dark girl. Rose's eyes were otherworldly, amber, witching eyes, and she stared until she sighed. "I live there." It was a declaration of sorts, her banner in the dead earth, a stand. She hadn't made one of those in over a thousand years, since she'd danced on Snow's table and seduced her sister's husband. She'd been a child then, a real one, not just a bitter girlwoman that looked like one. "Henry is the king there. This is his village." Red did not hate men. There were few of them that she knew; the families in the mountains diverged like tributaries, trickling down the rockside to meet at the summer festivals. There had been a boy at the last festival but one. His teeth had been very white in his sun-brown face when he smiled at her, he had smelled of fish, like the merchant-ships. His hands had been cool as they crossed and crossed again in the pattern of the dancing, cooler than those who lived up in the snowy drifts whose blood ran warmer because it had to. She smiled into the fire at the memory, warm as new furs spread out across an early spring’s bed, and let it kindle as quick and brief as the hay burned up. She liked ribbons too; her dirty fingers rose self-consciously to the drying tendril of ribbon that curled over her shoulder. It was not yet entirely clear what the color was when completely dry, but it looked to be a very ragged silk, perhaps dark red. “I do not dislike wolves,” Red said to the flame before she turned her face to the copper-haired witch. It was a truth, but it was a truth with greater gaps in it than the shelter had had before the vine bloomed. “They are terrible but they are useful. I like fur,” and her teeth gleamed at her smile. It was not a young girl’s smile at all, there was satisfaction in it, and her fingers touched at the sheathed knife once. There were no castles in her village. Red was beginning to understand it was not just the snow that lay in thick drifts everywhere that made it smell different, look different. The pattern of paths twisted the same way but her cabin had not been there, at the edge. She had not missed it, in the snow. “Henry?” She did not know a King Henry. She did not know Kings at all, their images were stamped on coins but she traded fur for useful things. There was no use for coins where no other people lived to take them. “And you are,” Red’s brow creased, like a particularly difficult puzzle put together, “The queen?” she hazarded a guess. It sounded doubtful. Very doubtful. The witch sitting on the ground at her fire was not especially queenly. But she sounded as certain of people doing things for her as a queen might. Rose lifted a copper brow when the bedraggled girl said she didn't hate wolves. The sentence that followed cleared up the confusion, and she shook her head. "You're another version of Red," she said, though she knew all tales didn't know they were tales. She hadn't known, not at first. It was only now that she understood the Homelands, understood how things like aging worked for her people. But the last Red, she hadn't been hers, and this one wasn't either. "The last Red died," she added, though she didn't know how. She only knew that it had happened. Maybe it had been wolves, but maybe it had been other things. This place could be unsafe for people alone, especially girls with ribbons and no magic. "I have a pet Wolf. I ask that you not skin him." Not that Wolf would let himself be skinned, but she didn't want him eating this girl, either. That would just be messy, and she knew that people in the mundane world died when someone died in the Homelands; Max had made that very clear. "I'm just Rose," she said. No queen, and that was less and less likely with each day that passed. She'd conceded that Belle could go to the castle and, if everyone was right, Henry would take one look at her and the world would tilt. She had never known the Belle and Beast in her world, though she knew Snow and Charming did. Maybe it was all set in stone, and there was nothing to be done. But she was ready for it just to come, to happen. If the snow had to come down, let it come. She had her sister and her vines, and the cottage in the Witching Wood. She'd always been a survivor, and over a thousand years proved that fact. "Henry has no queen." Rose concentrated on the dying grass, and she grew more, grew it higher, and let the dead stuff stay and crackle like hay. She flopped onto her back a moment later, and she regarded the vined over roof, a hand draped across her stomach. "When will this stupid snow end?" she complained, but she didn't expect the girl to answer her. "You might as well get some rest. We can't go anywhere until the sun is high." She'd take her to the castle, if she wanted to go. If not, they could part ways at daylight. Blue should be there by then, and Rose missed her friend. Red wondered if the ‘pet’ wolf had killed the last girl, the girl who hated men enough to be wary to keep a hand on a knife. There were no wolves that could be pets; they were not dogs and they could not live alone. “A wolf is always a wolf,” she said, making use of what snow clung still to the damp furs to rub her face until her skin squeaked beneath her fingers. The dirt was gone, but the dirt had helped keep the winds that brought snow from biting, and without it it would sting all the more. She made no promise of pets, and she would keep her knife very close. ‘Just’ Rose explained very little. Red understood from the stories told before the dancing (and those that verged on bawdy, after) that kings had queens and that ‘just’ anyone did not live in crenelated towers and ancient stone. But the girl with fire-lit hair kept her story to herself and Red held her questions on her tongue, to dissolve like snowflakes. It was dark, and the sky beyond the vined roof was purpled with clouds too thick to see the stars. If she could see them, she could see if this was truly where she was meant to be, or a way back to the mountain, whichever was true. But there would be no stars with the snow falling this way. Dribs and drabs of old stories coalesced like soap bubbles, the image of what Red thought a castle must look like shivering invitingly on the surface. It might be warm, in a castle. It would be clean. The tent would not bear up beneath the weight of so much snow and there were no dogs, not a single one. She rustled in her pack, pushed past the bound ropes to retrieve another hide. This one, the skin was thicker, the smell of must and oils clung to it more distinctively. Newer. It was meant for selling, but snow would delay any market and made damp furs unappealing. She threw this one across to the witch, and she hauled out another that smelled even more strongly, before curling nose-to-knees, what precious warmth the fire kindled, kept tightly close. Red yawned, brief, sharp little white teeth shown above a very pink tongue, and fell asleep almost immediately. |