The Door in the Hedge (3 page)

Linadel herself was rosy and smiling throughout, and didn't seem to mind being kept awake so long and passed from one set of strange arms to another, and breathed on by all sorts (all the better sorts, at least) of strange people. She continued to smile and to make small gurgles and squeaks, and to look fresh and contented. It was her parents who wore out first and called an end to the festivities.

Linadel grew up, as princesses are expected to do, more beautiful every day; and with charms of mind and manner that kept pace. She didn't speak at all till she was three years old, and then on her third birthday she astonished everyone by saying, quite distinctly, as she sat surrounded by gifts and fancy sweets, and godmothers and godfathers (she had almost two dozen of them), and specially favored subjects and servants, “This is a very nice party. Thank you very much.” Everyone thought this was a very auspicious beginning; and they were right. Linadel never lisped her r's or took refuge in smiling and looking as pretty as a picture (which she could have done easily) when she tackled a comment too large for her. On her fourth birthday she presented everyone with what amounted to a small speech. “And a better one than some I've heard her granddaddy give,” said a godfather out of the corner of his mouth to a godmother, who giggled.

She never looked back, whatever she did. In any other kingdom her parents and friends—and everyone was her friend—would have said that the faeries had blessed her. Here, they said only, “Isn't she wonderful, isn't she beautiful, isn't it splendid that she's ours?”

She
was
beautiful. Her hair was dark, velvet brown by candlelight and almost chestnut in the sun; and it fell in long slow curls past her shoulders. When she was thoughtful, she would wind a loose curl—her thick hair invariably escaped from its ribbons—around one hand and pull gently till it slid through her fingers and sprang back to its place. This habit, as she grew older, made young men breathe hard.

Her eyes were grey. Or at least mostly grey. They had lights and glimmers in them that some people thought were blue, or green, or perhaps gold; but for everyday purposes (and even a princess has need for a few everyday facts) they were grey. Her skin was pale and pure, with three or four coppery freckles across her small nose to keep her from being perfect. Her hands were long and slim and quiet, and a touch from them would still a barking dog or soothe a fever.

But the strongest thing about her, and perhaps the finest too, was her will. It was her will that prevented her from being hopelessly spoiled, when without it—in spite of the intelligence and cheerfulness that were as much a part of her as her dark hair and pale eyes—it would have been inevitable. Her will told her that she was a princess and would someday become a queen, and had responsibilities (many of them tiresome) therefore; but beyond that she was an ordinary human being like any other. It was her position as a princess which explained the extravagant respect and praise she received from everyone (except her parents, whom she could talk to as two other ordinary human beings caught in the same trap); and it was this belief in her essential ordinariness that prevented her head from being turned by the other. She did very well this way; and the strength of this willful innocence meant that she did not realize that the respect and admiration was by it that much increased.

It is all very well to say that all princesses are good and beautiful and charming; but this is usually a determined optimism on everybody's part rather than the truth. After all, if a girl is a princess, she is undeniably a princess, and the best must be made of it; and how much pleasanter it would be if she were good and beautiful. There's always the hope that if enough people behave as though she is, a little of it will rub off.

But Linadel really was good and beautiful and charming, and kind and thoughtful and wise, and while at the very end you must add “and wonderfully obstinate,” well, for a girl in her position to support all her other virtues, she had to be.

But how to find such a paragon a suitable husband? When she was fifteen her parents began reluctantly to discuss the necessity of finding her a husband. They should have done this long ago, but had put it off again and again. The obvious choice was Antin, who was a nice boy, and who, if Linadel had not been born, would have worn the crown anyway; and the thought that he would not disgrace it had comforted Gilvan and Alora through their childless years. But that comfort was fifteen years old now, and Antin was a man grown—and still, really, a rather nice boy. It was not that he was lazy, for as a duke, and one still in line for the throne although now once removed, he had duties to perform and dignity to maintain, and he performed and maintained suitably. He was also a splendid horseman (a king needs to look good on horseback for the morale of his people) and no physical coward. It wasn't even that he was stupid—although he did have a slight tendency toward royal corpulence. But—somehow—there was something a little bit missing. This was perhaps most visible in the fact that he, while very polite about the honor of it, et cetera, wasn't the least enthusiastic himself about marrying his young and beautiful cousin. Both Alora and Gilvan, trying to see behind his eyes, felt that his attitude toward kingship was one of well-suppressed dislike.

The rumor was that he was in love with a mere viscount's daughter, who was pretty enough and nice enough, but not anything in particular herself, and that the only enthusiasm Antin did feel on the subject of Linadel's marriage was that it should happen soon and to someone else; so that he would be free to marry his little Colly. Gilvan and Alora became aware of the rumor, and by that time they were inclined to hope it was true, as the best for everybody concerned.

But it was delicate ground nonetheless, and if Antin were to be discarded as an eligible king, a better reason than his indifference to the post must be found. This proved more difficult than it looked. It was managed finally, after a lot of hemming and hawing on all sides, with an agreement that since everybody in Gilvan's and Alora's families was already related to everybody else, usually in several different degrees, to add further to the confusion by marrying Linadel to Antin was beyond the point of sense.

Everyone involved breathed a sigh of relief. It can be assumed that this included Colly, although no one asked her.

It was true that the royal family of this kingdom, like those of many other kingdoms, had mostly the same blood running through all of its veins; but if Antin himself had not been a specific problem, the subject probably would not have come up. As it was, it meant that Linadel's husband could not be any other member of the family either. It was a relief to have found a way to reject Antin without losing too much face (and the people talked about it anyway: the true purpose of a royal family, as Gilvan rather often observed, is to be a topic of gossip common to all, and thus engender in its subjects a feeling of unity and shared interests); but one still was left to play by the rules one had made, however inconvenient those rules were.

And, as Gilvan and Alora understood in advance and soon proved in fact, the last mortal kingdom before Faerieland had some difficulty in luring an outsider of suitable rank, parts, and heritage to be its king; even with Linadel as bait—or perhaps partly because of it. The ones who were willing were willing because they were fascinated by the thought of all that stealthy and inscrutable magic, sending out who knew what impalpable influences across its borders which lay so near although no one could say precisely where—an attitude which Alora and Gilvan and their people didn't like at all. Such candidates as there were were almost automatically poets or prophets or madmen, or all three combined; and the first were foolish, the second strident, and the third disconcerting; and none of them would have made a good king.

The rest were afraid, afraid to come any nearer than they already were—which, if they were near enough to receive state visits from that last kingdom, was probably too near.

“I'll marry her to a commoner first!” said Gilvan violently after a particularly unfortunate interview with the fifth son of a petty kingdom who fancied his artistic temperament.

“I've only just noticed something,” Alora said wearily; “the only immigrants we ever get—the ones that stay, and seem to love it here as we do—they're never aristocrats. We haven't had any new blue blood in generations. I'd never thought of it before. I wonder if it means anything.”

“That aristocratic blood runs thinner than the usual sort,” said Gilvan shortly. He drummed his fingers on his purple velvet knee. “Besides, there's no room for them. Why should they come? We have more earls per square foot than any other country I've ever heard of.…”

“And we're related to every last one of them,” said Alora, and sighed.

It was a problem, and it remained a problem, and two years passed without any promise of solution. Linadel didn't mind because she had never been in love; the idea of a husband was a rational curiosity only, like how to get through state occasions without treading on one's great heavy robes—and how, in those same robes, heavy and cumbersome as full armor, one could hold one's arms out straight and steady for the Royal Blessing of the People, which took forever, because there were always lots of special mentions by personal request of a subject to his sovereign. She had asked Alora, whose arms never trembled, and Alora had smiled grimly and said, “Practice.”

So Linadel practiced being a princess—it wouldn't occur to her that it came to her naturally—and became wiser and more beautiful, and even more loving and lovable; and she wasn't perfect, but she wasn't ordinary either.

There was a hidden advantage to this preoccupation with finding Linadel a suitable husband; it took her parents' minds off the ever present fear all parents of beautiful daughters in that last kingdom felt. Gilvan doted on his daughter and realized furthermore that she really was almost as wonderful as he thought she was; and with a similar sort of double-think he put out of his mind any thought of losing her to Faerieland. He had occasionally to deal with other parents' losses—even a king is occasionally touched by the thing his people keep the most forcefully to themselves—but he refused to apply the same standard to himself. Once he wandered so far as to think, “Besides, an only child is never taken” and recoiled, appalled that he should come to reassuring himself on a subject by definition unthinkable. And that had been when Linadel was a child of only a few years.

In the same summer that Gilvan avoided reassuring himself, Alora and Linadel, wandering far from the royal gardens, discovered a little meadow whose bright grass was thick with the mysterious blue flowers that the people of that country would never gather, that they called faeries'-eyes. The stems were long and graceful, each bearing several long slender leaves and a single small flower at its tip, nodding in breezes that human beings did not feel, and glowing in the sunlight with a color that could not quite be believed. It was undeniably blue, that color, but a blue that no one had ever seen elsewhere.

Linadel ran forward with a cry of pleasure and plucked one of the flowers before her stunned mother could stop her: and she ran back at once when Alora failed to follow her and held the flower up and said, “Isn't it lovely, Mother? May we take some home?”

Alora, looking down, saw with a terrible pang that deep ethereal blue reflected in her own daughter's eyes. But she said only, very quietly, “No, my dear, these are wildflowers, and they do not like to sit in houses; we will leave them here.” She took the small blue thing Linadel held and laid it in the grass near its fellows, and they turned away from that meadow and walked elsewhere.

Alora dreamed of that meadow, and the blue in Linadel's wide grey eyes, for years after that; but she never remembered the dream when she awoke—only a vague feeling of fear, and of things forbidden; and she did not recall the incident that had begun the dreams.

What she did still recall was her sister's face; and sometimes the young Linadel reminded her of what Ellian had been at the same age. Linadel's coloring was similar to her aunt's, but there the resemblance ended, beyond a chance fleeting expression such as young princesses everywhere may occasionally be caught at. The thing that Alora noticed more and more as the years passed was how much more solemn Linadel was than she and Ellian had been; but Linadel had no sister to help bear the oppressive weight of royalty.

By the time Linadel's seventeenth birthday was the next occasion on the state calendar, she had practiced princessing so successfully that her royal robes never got under her feet any more, nor did her arms tremble; and her mother suddenly realized: “She is preparing to be a queen alone.” She thought of Gilvan and how little her life would have been without him, and her heart failed her. And then a new juggler's trick would make the Princess laugh, or a new ballad make her look as young and lovely as she really was—if less like a queen-to-be—and Alora would think, “She's only a girl. It's not fair that she should have to understand so much so soon.” And Linadel's smile, and sidelong look to her parents to join the fun, would remind Alora of Ellian again.

The poor Queen's thoughts went round and round, and Linadel's birthday came nearer and nearer; and the possible husbands had petered out to what looked to be the final end. Then one night Alora dreamed of Linadel and the blue flower, and she remembered her dream when she woke up: and she also remembered what she had dreamed after: Linadel had grown up in a few graceful moments as her mother watched, still holding a fresh blue flower, till she was almost seventeen; but then she laughed and opened her arms to embrace Alora, and the Queen realized that it was not Linadel standing before her, but Ellian. She woke sobbing, to find herself in Gilvan's arms, and he smoothed her hair and said, “It's only a dream” till she fell asleep again; but she would not tell him what her dream had shown her. When he asked her, the next morning, she did not meet his eyes as she answered that she could not remember.