Snow White and Rose Red Read Free

said disapprovingly. “Thou shouldst not listen to her gloom.”
    “She meaneth good,” Blanche said with a reproving glance at her sister, “but thou shouldst not let her overset thee, Mother.”
    “‘Tis not Mistress Townsend’s tongue that’s broken my peace, but my own,” the Widow replied.
    “Hast sent her off at last?” Rosamund said, looking up with a hopeful expression.
    “I have, and with such words as must ill please her. And so I think that for some little while you must do your berrying in the meadow and not the wood.”
    “But Mother!” Blanche said in shocked surprise. “The coriander jar is barely a quarter full; it will not last the winter! And thy supply of more uncommon herbs is lower still.”
    “What matters that, an thee and thy sister are taken up for witchcraft?” the Widow retorted. “You’ve work enough outside the wood to occupy your fingers. ‘Tis not forever,” she added, seeing her daughters’ downcast expressions. “I only wish it seen that you are busy with other things than herbery. There’ll be time for gathering ere winter comes.”
    “A pox on Mistress Townsend and her tongue,” Rosamund muttered.
    The Widow frowned. “Rose! Thou‘lt spend an extra hour with thy prayer book tonight for thy ill-wishing. And in the future, set a better guard upon thy tongue.”
    “But, Mother—”
    “Do as I bid thee! Take thy basket inside and sort it carefully, and in the future stay away from the forest until I give thee leave.”
    Rosamund’s lips set into a stubborn line. Blanche touched her elbow and motioned toward the cottage. Rosamund looked at her sister for a moment, then sighed and picked up her basket. Together, they disappeared into the cottage.
    The Widow watched until the door closed behind them, a tiny wrinkle between her eyebrows and her eyes dark with trouble. She had good reason for her concern. Women had been taken to the ducking stool or worse for words as casually spoken as Rosamund’s had been. The Widow Arden had set on her daughters the most powerful protections she knew, but her skill had no power over the wagging tongues of mortal women. However vague or idle Mistress Townsend’s words had been, the Widow Arden could not afford to take them lightly; the line she and her family walked was already all too narrow.
    For in the forest that backed the Widow’s cottage lay one of the shifting borders of Faerie, and it was in that strange and shadowed land that Rosamund and Blanche gathered the rarest of the herbs their mother needed. Because the girls were maidens and still young, they could cross the border into Faerie with relative safety, but the Widow had charged them not to wander too far on the other side.
    The girls, well aware of the perils of extemporaneous exploration, had always obeyed this stricture implicitly, and it was as well that they had done so. Less than a league from the border they so often crossed, in a stand of ancient oaks, stood the palace of the Faerie Queen herself, and there were those among her court who were not pleased with its proximity to the mortal world.

     
    “I swear the forest stinks of humans all about,” said a narrow-faced man in a short white ruff and a grey velvet doublet. From his sleeve he pulled a handkerchief, edged with pointed lace and smelling of crushed moss and new ferns, and waved it through the air in front of his face for emphasis.
    “You must be newly come to court,” the woman beside him said, smiling slightly. Her gown was the same rusty color as maple leaves in autumn, and she rested one hand against a pillar of ice-blue marble to better display the gold lining of her sleeves.
    “I am,” the first speaker admitted. “But if you mean that I’ll become accustomed to the reek, I doubt ‘tis possible. Can the Queen do nothing?”
    A tall woman standing close by, black-haired and beautiful, looked at him with interest, and the green-gold silk of her gown whispered against the marble-inlay