The Door in the Hedge (6 page)

So these young girls, if they were young girls, approached; and they were carrying a golden veil between them, a veil so light that it was hard to see until they were quite near. They threw it over Linadel, and it settled around her like a fine mesh of fire, and as a delicate gold veining on her white skin. When she shook her head to toss her hair back it ran over her shoulders like water, and Donathor had to squeeze his free hand close to his side to keep it from burying itself in those dark gold-flecked waves.

“Hail,” said the two girls, their eyes shining like the golden veil. “Hail to Donathor and his bride, the next King and Queen! Hail Donathor and hail Linadel!”

And the rest of the people in that glen took it up, and the shout swung through them like music, and they tossed it over their heads like a ball.

Two more girls appeared; carrying long golden ribbons, and handed the two ends to the girls who had carried the veil, who now stood on either side of the little royal group of four: and then the ribbon was unwound, and the happy crowd stepped forward, and many white hands reached out to hold it; and soon a gold-edged path lay before them, stretching straight through the arch where the King and Queen had entered, and on and on, till Linadel could only see the people as blurs of color with two bits of thin gold unwinding swiftly before them, a strip of green between the gold, and greenness behind them. The ribbon stretched so far that she could no longer recognize it as golden; it was a sparkle of light and a boundary, the end of which she could not see. “Hail!” The cry still went near them, and then it was taken up by more and more people who stepped forward to seize the swift narrow gold. “Hail to the next King and Queen!”

Then a silence swept back to them again, from where the gold ribbons must finally have halted, and it was a silence of waiting. The faces turned back toward the royal four, smiling and joyous faces, waiting for Donathor and Linadel to take the first step, so that the cry could be taken up again and thrown before them to where the end of the golden ribbons awaited them. They waited, smiling and expectant, and the King and Queen turned and bowed to their son and their new daughter, and stepped back for the young pair to precede them.

But Linadel turned a troubled face to her love, and she opened her mouth to speak, but could not think what she must say, and took instead several panting breaths that hurt her. “My parents,” she said at last, as if her lips could hardly form the words. “My parents, and my—my people. They are not here.” She could not help a rising inflection at the last, and she looked around at the people before her, not sure that they were not after all whom she meant—her people. They
were
her people—she knew it; and yet … again she tried to conjure up a picture of her mother's face, and again she could not; and even that, now, told her what she did not want to know. “My parents,” she said at last, again, dully. “They must be here, and—I do not see them.” In the silence that soft mournful sentence walked as straight down the goldedged path as any foot might step; and as the people heard it as it passed them their hands dropped, and the golden ribbon drooped. An almost inaudible sigh rose up and pursued the sentence, and caught it, and wrapped it round.

But only silence answered Linadel, and she shook herself free of Donathor's blue eyes and tried to look at him as if his were only a face like other faces and she said: “Where are my parents?” and it was a last appeal. Then suddenly she found herself free of something that had held her till now, although she had not known she was held; and in her new freedom she trembled where she stood. She remembered her mother, and her father, and she remembered herself, and her people, her own people, whom she had known and loved for seventeen years; and she knew they were not the people who held the golden ribbons.

It was the dark Queen who answered her at last: “Child, they are not here.”

Linadel stared at that serene and lovely countenance and saw the serenity flicker, like the shadow of a butterfly's wings over a still lake. Then she asked the question to which she now, terribly, knew the answer, and as she spoke she knew she was pronouncing her own doom: “Where am I?” she said.

The King answered her: “You have called it Faerieland. We have no name for it; it is our home.”

There was a long, long silence, or perhaps it only seemed so because of the way it sounded in her ears, like the heavy air of a long-closed cavern, that seems to thunder in the skull. At last she said, and her words echoed as though reflected off harsh dark walls of stone, “I must go back. I am the only one there is.” And as she said
only one there is
, she felt them all move away from her, as if she were a thief; and another sigh passed over the crowd, but this one was like the rising wind before a storm, moaning and uneasy and warning of things to come.

Perhaps it was only the tears in her eyes that made the golden ribbons heave and tumble and finally fall to the earth, where they lay as still as death, dimming like the scales of a landed fish. She did not know for certain because she turned away as they fell the last way from the hands that had proudly held them high so short a time before; and she put one foot out, and lowered it again till it touched the ground—then the other foot. This land she had determined to leave seemed to fall away from her with even her first unwilling step; it fled so fast it burned her eyes even while she tried not to see. She clasped her empty hands, and heard the last echo of her words flash around her:
the only one there is
.

Two steps gone when she heard his voice, saying, “Wait.” She could not help it. Perhaps she meant to, but she could not. She waited.

He took the two steps after her so that he was beside her again, looking down at the bent dark head with its golden tracery, and he said, “I will come with you.” He took a piece of the golden net in his fingers and gently stripped it away from his love; and she felt it lift away with surprise, for she had forgotten that she wore it. But when he let go of it, it was too light to fall, and hung like a golden cloud between the two of them and his parents and his people; and so he took his farewell of them with his eyes and their faces glinting with gold; but his mother's tears may have been gold anyway.

“No,” said Linadel—“oh no, you cannot.” But she could not stop herself from looking at his face one last time, so she looked up as she spoke and what she saw made her silent, for she saw at once that he was changed, changed so that he might go with her, changed so that he must. And she wondered if he too had shed something that had held him as it had held her; or whether he was now caught who had been free before. She shivered as she looked at him, and the golden cloud shivered a little in the air behind them.

The King and Queen held each other's hands as they watched the son they were losing; but they said nothing, and made no move to stop him. Perhaps they understood: perhaps they had seen the change come over him, or known that it must come. They understood at least that there was nothing to say; the King's face had never been so grave. But just before Donathor turned away for the very last time, his father lifted his hand in a sad sketch of the royal blessing; and a little serenity slipped back to his mother's face among the golden tears, and she almost smiled.

Then Donathor turned away and found Linadel's hand once again, and they walked through the opposite arch in the hedge, the one farthest from that through which the golden ribbons had passed. This arch was low and green, and almost shaggy with drooping leaves, and it seemed very far away.

Neither of them had any idea of where they were going; they each knew that their direction was
away
, and that they were together, and for the moment that was enough. They had won through much to be together, and they had earned the right to rest in that knowledge for a little while. Each recalled that last look on the other's face before they had turned toward the arch in the hedge; and while their eyes remained on the path before them and their feet carried them away, one unconsidered step after another, they saw and thought only of each other.

It was Linadel who had the first separate thought, and that thought was: “I wonder if
away
is enough? I've never heard that Faerieland begins anywhere. Or ends,” the thought went on, “or that anyone from … my side ever crosses that border more than once.” She could not feel lost with Donathor beside her, but her thoughts carried her forward like her feet until she met the worst one of all: “I have forced my choice on him.” This thought grew and towered over all the rest until it almost blotted out that last look on his face; and then a new little one slipped out from the shadows and confronted her: “Could I have left, him? At last … would I have gone?”

She stopped with the whispers of this last thought in her ears, and he stopped too, and looked down at her, and read in her eyes what she was thinking. He smiled a little sadly, and after a moment he said: “We have my parents' blessing. We mustn't linger now; we seek yours.”

Then Linadel realized what he had known since the first shadow fell upon her and she turned away from the golden ribbons: they were going into exile. Her parents would have to give them up as his had; it was too late for any other choice to be made. For the reasons that the Crown Prince of the immortals loved the Crown Princess of the last mortal land, and she him, the shining things they had seen in each other's faces and read in each other's hearts as they danced together; even for the reasons that neither of them had found someone to marry before, they were bound to each other forever. That was done, past; and thus when she remembered that she belonged to a world other than his, he could no longer belong fully to his own. And no one can belong to two worlds.

No one, mortal, immortal, or creatures beyond the knowledge of either, can belong to two worlds. This was the change she had seen in him when he came after her.

And so, when they had her parents' blessing—and she knew now that they would receive it, for it would be the last thing her dear parents would be able to do for their daughter—they would look for a new world. Perhaps it would be a world like the minstrel's she had seen, striding over green hills that were always the same and always different. “How did you find me?” she thought, and he answered: “I saw you in the water of the rivers that flow from your lands to ours; I heard you in the wind that blew in your window before it blew in mine.” “But you did not know my world,” she thought. “No,” his reply came; “I knew nothing of your world.”

They walked on until it grew dark; and Linadel, at last, realized she was tired, and had to stop. By the last rays of the sun they found a tree whose branches hung low under the weight of round yellow fruit; and a stream ran beside the tree. Linadel sat down with a sigh, and they ate the sweet fruit and drank the cold water, and watched the sky over the trees turn rosy, and fade to amber touched with grey; and then black at last, and when Linadel turned her head she could see his profile against the dark trees only because she could remember how it went. She fell asleep sitting up, while he, not accustomed to sleep or the need for it, thought about how he had lived till now, and what would come to him next, and how Linadel had always been a part of everything. Her head nodded forward, and he caught her in his arms as she crumpled to the grass.

When Alora awoke at last, Gilvan saw with a relief that made his knees bend that she was still Alora: her gaze was weak but clear, and she looked around for him at once, knowing that he would be there. He sat down abruptly on the edge of their bed, and when she felt for his hand it was as cold and strengthless as hers. They felt each other's blood begin to flow again in the touching palms; but with the blood came tears: Linadel, their Linadel, was gone.

“We will look for her,” Alora said at last. “We must look for her. No one has ever thought to look.”

Gilvan thought about this; in the long narrow well of their grief, it seemed perfectly reasonable, and that no one had ever sought a faerie-stolen child before was irrelevant. “Where shall we begin?”

Alora sat up. “I will show you. Where are my clothes?”

Her ladies-in-waiting, then the gentlemen of the King's Inner Chambers, then the courtiers, ministers, special ambassadors, Lords of the King's Outer Chambers, Ladies of the Royal Robes and Seals, visiting noblemen and their families—who were a little slower than the rest to hear about anything that happened since they were unfamiliar with palace routine—and at last even the pageboys, the downstairs servants, and the entire kitchen staff, none of whom had ever thought to question their monarchs in the slightest detail hitherto—all protested vehemently, desperately, when the King and Queen emerged from their private bedroom and, pale but composed, declared that they were going in search of their daughter.

They were dressed as though they might be a woodcutter and his wife, except that each wore the gold chain of office that a king or queen was expected to wear (except in the bath) until the day each retired. The Keepers of the Wardrobe, even through their sorrow, were startled that the King and Queen could even find such plain clothes to put on.

“No good will come of this,” all wailed at them, forgetting in their grief that they were daring to disagree, even hysterically disagree, with their sovereigns. “No good will come of anything that has to do with the faeries,” all said, weeping and pulling their hair and patting at the Queen's skirts and the King's knees. “What if we lose you too?” The last was at first a murmur, since these people, like people everywhere, believed that bad luck—which in this land meant faeries—may come to investigate discussions of bad luck; but it took hold, and more and more of the grief-mad palace residents gave up, and spoke it aloud, and it swelled till it might have become a panic.

“There is nothing to suggest that you are going to,” said the King, patiently, or at least nearly so; and the Queen, who perhaps understood despair a little better than her husband, said, “Those who are so upset at the idea that they can't stay home may come with us; but only on the condition that they will be quiet.”