bun

Rosenrot
Before
Felsnor village

Clem always thinks they’re so sneaky, but Rosenrot spots them from the corner of her eye almost at once: the bright fluttering of their hair and clothes against the green grass. She jumps, anyway, when they fling themself down next to her. Not because they startled her! Just because she wasn’t expecting them to be so… bouncy.

Yesterday, Clem wasn’t allowed out of bed at all, and their breath made weird wheezy noises in their chest when they weren’t coughing instead. Today, they’re bubbling with energy as they cram themself onto the same rock she’s perched on and try to hook their chin over her shoulder. “What have you got?” they ask. Then, with a gleefully scandalized gasp: “What’d you steal?”

“I didn’t steal it!” Rosen shoots back, hunching further over her prize. It was so fresh from the oven that it burnt her hands until she wrapped it in a fold of her skirt, and the heat still radiates now through a couple layers of cloth. “Got it for sweeping the bakery floor. So there!”

“Is that knightly work?” teases Clem, and then laughs, rich and full-bellied, when that makes her ears heat up. Talking to them is never really comfortable, with their poking and riddling and direction-switching, but it’s downright impossible when they’re in a mood. She probably shouldn’t have told them about wanting to be a knight, but then again -- they’ve never told her she can’t be one. Just teased her about wanting to.

Rosen pulls herself together and sniffs loftily. “Knights do whatever work needs doing, and find honor in doing it well and nobly.” True, Silgre Khorsblade probably never spent hours chasing flour and stray bits of straw around the kitchen, and true, she surely never had anybody tell her she needed more meat on her bones, but the point is -- “Not that you would know, you don’t know anything about knights.”

They pull up their knee to rest their head against it and grin sideways at her. “Everybody knows something about knights. They say knights are steadfast… they’re gracious in defeat… they’re tall--”

“I’m still growing!” Rosen lurches sideways to bonk them with her horns. Clem dodges right off the rock, flopping down in a heap of skinny limbs. They don’t look like the fall hurt them any, but -- “What are you doing out of bed, anyway! I was--” coming to see you. Again. No, they’ll laugh at her. “--I didn’t think you’d be up yet.”

“Stay of execution, granted for the prisoner’s good conduct,” says Clem, solemnly. “A brief parole only; they’ll have the twins looking for me by lunch. Why are you out and about so early?”

“Sweeping the bakery, which I just said, thanks!”

“Why were you sweeping the bakery, though?”

Here’s why: Rosen dreamed last night about hundreds of tiny candles that all kept burning down or getting snuffed in a draft, and she kept having to run from one to another with a long match to relight them, almost sick with worry that while she was tending to one, five others would go out behind her back. Her heart was still pounding when she woke, long before dawn, to an empty larder and an empty house. She obviously wasn’t going back to sleep, and Finn-the-baker was pretty easy to chore for: you just grabbed a broom and stared at him until he broke eye contact and let you get on with it. She liked cleaning, anyway. Good and simple work, with results she could see and feel.

It wasn’t until a couple hours later that she noticed Master Finn was making walnut buns. One of Clem’s riddles, yesterday -- a little heart inside a white house, inside a yellow house, inside a brown house, inside a green house, they’d said, and she hadn’t had any idea what they meant -- it’s so frustrating when she thinks they’re just saying nonsense and it turns out they know a secret.

Now, she slides off the rock to plunk down in the grass next to them. “I’ve -- umm, got a terrible untidiness allergy,” she says, watching them sidelong. Her tall tales never end up sounding like theirs, somehow. “If there’s an unswept floor in a league of me, I break out in hives.”

Clem’s eyebrows go up, up, up. “Oh? Maybe you’re right. I think I see one now.”

Rosen hesitates. “You… do?”

They nod gravely, leaning in and peering at the side of her face. “Yes, I definitely see a hive -- it’s right -- there!”

Quick as a flash, they reach out and tweak her ear. She shrieks and swats at them; they immediately try to tackle her. But for all their longer reach, they’re lightweight as a drifting feather! Rosen barely has to put any strength behind planting her hand on their forehead and shoving them back while their arms and legs pinwheel uselessly.

“If you start coughing again because you’re not supposed to be horsing around yet, I am not feeling sorry for you!” she says, indignant. “What has gotten into you today!”

“Eels,” they intone, dead-serious, and then, while she’s trying to figure that one out, they wriggle away from her hand and flop across her lap, peeping up at her beseechingly from behind the veil of their hair. “Would you really not feel sorry for me? Would you not come see me if I was bedridden again?”

“Don’t be stupid! Who’d keep you out of trouble then?” She pauses, fidgets. “And I’d miss you, so. It’d only be punishing myself anyway.”

Clem gives her kind of a funny look, eyes startled and mouth caught halfway to a smile. She takes that to mean she answered wrong, but what else was she supposed to say? Best to move on.

“I figured out your riddle, by the way.” She gives into temptation and combs her fingers through their fringe, tucking their hair away from their face. It’s soft. “You could have just said.”

“I did say.” Their eyes sparkle. “You understood.”

“What if I hadn’t!”

“You always do, though.”

“Just--!” Rosen’s ears get hot again. She carefully unwraps the walnut bun from her skirt and splits it, holding out the larger side. “Do you want to share? I know you sniffed it out already.”

They make that face again, like she’s the one being weird. Or like they don’t believe her, maybe. “Wait -- you don’t have to--”

Of course she doesn’t have to. But Clem never outright asks her for anything; if they were riddling about walnuts, she knows they’re thinking about walnuts, at least. Is that what they meant by the riddle? Is that what they meant, just now, about her understanding them? She plunks the bun into their hand and folds their long, chilly fingers over it. “It’s going to get cold if you don’t eat it soon,” she says primly, instead of anything more complicated. “And you’re going to get crumbs everywhere if you stay like that.”

Their eyes are glued to her face, too-intense and too-serious, but they do raise the bread to their lips and nibble at it. “But I’ve worn myself out already, Sir Rosenrot,” they say, quieter than their usual dramatics. “Won’t you let me rest here a little longer?”

“Hmph!” she says, whole face hot now, and settles down to her own breakfast. But she does lace the fingers of their free hands together, and she doesn’t shove them off her lap even when her legs fall asleep.