The Door in the Hedge (7 page)

Gilvan gave his wife only one brief weary look at this, but he could follow the sense behind it, so he said merely: “You will have a very long walk of it, anyone who does come.”

But the King's patience and the Queen's tenderness, which were perhaps a little obviously delivered as to a crowd of foolish children, had their effect. There was a pause as everyone looked at everyone else, and Alora and Gilvan resignedly overlooked them all. “Let me at least make you some sandwiches,” said the Chief Cook, at last; and she wiped her eyes on her white apron and disappeared below. Most of her undercooks and assistants slowly detached themselves from the crowd and followed her; and those who remained sat down, and most of them put their heads in their hands. A few spoke to their particular friends in low tones, and several went to the kitchens themselves to ask that they be provided with sandwiches too. A great many of these were made at last, and put in knapsacks with apples and other food that might reasonably survive being banged about in pockets and on shoulders; and some clever person suggested that everybody should bring a blanket—and when the King and Queen finally set out, about twenty of their court, all of whom were excellent walkers, went with them. Alora and Gilvan carried their own bundles, and such was the morale of the party that no one dared try to seek that honor for themselves.

Alora led them to the meadow where she and Linadel had seen the small blue flowers years ago. They startled a small herd of aradel, which fled silently, eyes wide and tails high, veering away from the forest directly ahead of them and entering the trees at the royal party's right hand. Alora stood at the center of the meadow and turned her head first one way and then the other as if she were listening; Gilvan stood near her, hands in pockets, staring at the sky and squinting, but more, it seemed, at his thoughts than at the sunlight. “This way,” she said at last, and led the royal herd into the forest also; but not the way the aradel had gone.

They were deep in the woods when the light began to fail them, and they made a camp of blankets and addressed themselves to the sandwiches. There was a tiny stream that twisted through the trees near where they lay; the water was sweet, and with patience one could fill a water-bottle. The King himself built a fire and lit it—and it burnt. Everybody was impressed, which did not please Gilvan: he knew perfectly well he could build a proper fire that would burn, and continue to burn, and not splutter and smoke, even if he was a king. Somebody produced some packets of tea, and somebody's friend turned out to be wearing a tin pot, suitable for boiling water in, under his curiously shaped hat.

The King and Queen retired a little apart, cupping their hands around the warmth of the tea; the fire was flickering and subsiding into embers, and everybody was choosing a tree to lean against, and roots to get comfortable among, if possible, and dropping off to sleep.

“This is the right way,” said Alora. “I think.”

Gilvan nodded.

“You think so too, then?”

“Not exactly. I feel as though I could tell if it was the wrong one. But I wish I knew where our right way was leading us.”

“So do I.” Alora sounded so young and woebegone that Gilvan told her almost sharply to finish up her tea and go to sleep. They both lay down and each regulated his or her breathing to make the other one think he or she was asleep; but each lay awake for a long time.

It was Gilvan who woke first, in the first thin and hesitant light of dawn; he started another fire with only a very little mumbling under his breath, by which time a sleepy courtier had stumbled up to fetch the water-boiling pot and gone off to the stream to fill it.

Alora was still asleep. Gilvan looked down at her for a moment, then looked up to watch the only-slightly-more-awake-now courtier set up the pot full of water in a fashion that would give it a fair chance of coming to a boil. He succeeded at last, and sat back on his heels to watch that it didn't change its mind and topple over on him. It would take three potfuls to make tea for everybody; he sighed. He had rubbed his face and eyes with the cold water of the stream, but it only made his skin tingle. His brain was still asleep.

Gilvan turned away and for no particular reason made his way to the little brook and began walking downstream. He thought he might waste a little time till the water would be hot, and it was easier not to think about Linadel if he kept moving. His eyes were on his feet, and his hands in fists, dug into his pockets, and jingling anything he might find there—an absent-minded habit he had had all his life, which ruined the cut of his trousers and reduced the royal tailors to despair. They had finally stopped making pockets for those trousers where the royal dignity could not bear bulges. Gilvan, in his woodcutter's rig, was dimly aware of the luxury of having pockets, but even these thoughts he kept carefully suppressed. The stream widened as he walked. He paused at last, thinking he should turn around and go back; and he looked up.

There was a tiny clearing, no more than the space two or three trees would need, beside the stream just ahead of him; and there he saw his daughter, smiling in her sleep, with her head in the lap of a young man. He was looking down at her when Gilvan first saw them; but something caused him to look up: and their eyes met.

Gilvan knew at once what sort of creature it was whose eyes met his. For a moment he stopped breathing, and he felt that his pulse paused in his veins, his hair stopped growing, and he had no sense of the ground pressing against the bottom of his feet, or the sunlight on his shoulders. This was nothing like the sensation he had had once out hunting, when his horse put its foot in a hole and threw him; and he, dazed and full-length on the ground, found that the boar they were chasing had turned and was grinning at him, the foam dripping from its mouth. It was nothing like the feeling he'd had when Alora smiled at him the first time, either; or when he had been alone with his daughter and seen her take her first steps without assistance; or when he was sixteen years old and his favorite godfather died. What he felt now was nothing like any of these, and yet it was those things that he remembered.

He came back from wherever he was and looked again at this young man; only this time he looked beyond the stillness, the pause of time that Gilvan had felt within himself, that had told him what he knew: and he saw the love and tenderness this young man felt for Linadel that he, Gilvan, had interrupted with his presence. And beyond that he saw a flicker of something else, something Gilvan saw was utterly new and strange to this young man: fear. This fear was the oldest fear of mankind, that the present does not last; and with that flicker of fear the stillness wavered too, and a little sense of time, of the passage of days and years, slipped into the gap, and settled on the young man's face; and Gilvan found himself thinking, “This boy is only a few years older than Linadel.” Then Gilvan understood what this meant; and his awful sympathy for someone first learning of time started his breath again, and his heart, and once again he knew the sunlight was warm. The young man, still deep in his new knowledge, saw the sympathy, though he did not yet understand it; and he made his beloved's father a shaky smile; and Gilvan took a step forward.

That step made no sound, yet Linadel was awake at once and flew to her father, and they hugged each other till they could hardly breathe. When Gilvan looked up again, the young man stood a few steps away, hesitating; and Gilvan gave him a real smile, and letting his daughter just a little bit loose from the grip in which he still held her, offered his hand. “This is Donathor,” said Linadel to her father's rough shirt front, and Donathor took the hand; and Gilvan truly meant the welcome, for Linadel's heart beat as it always had, and yet a little more warmly; and her voice was as clear as it had always been, but there was a new undercurrent of joy in every word. Gilvan her father relaxed and was happy in this present moment that had found him his lost daughter; Gilvan the lover remembered Alora's first smile to him, and heard its echo in Linadel's pronouncing the name
Donathor
, as he had seen it in the young man's eyes just a little while before; and for this too he was glad for the present, a trembling, precarious, yet peaceful bit of time, because it had saddened him no less than Alora that Linadel should face her life alone, and be resigned to it.

“
Linadel
,” breathed a voice; and she flung herself from her father's arms only to turn to her mother's. Alora smiled at Donathor, and there was understanding in her eyes, but no constraint; and Gilvan thought ruefully that if she had found them first, she would have felt no difficulty at all. “How easily we welcome her back,” he thought, watching his wife's and daughter's faces and thinking how much they were alike, and how little; “we hadn't lived with our grief long enough to believe in it. We were sure we could find her and bring her back.…” He looked again at Donathor and found him watching Alora with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, as if he groped for a recollection he could not quite grasp. “Puzzled?” thought Gilvan, puzzled in his turn.

“There will be tea by the time we go back,” said Alora, as if the four of them had been for a quiet walk before breakfast and were returning to the palace. “And there are plenty of sandwiches left.”

Linadel thought of the fruit tree that had provided them their supper the night before, and she looked around for it; but it was not there. The rocks that parted the water of the stream lay in different places than she remembered them from the evening before; and the trees around her … were not the same trees. She shivered a little, and knew that she had come home. Then she remembered that it was no longer home, and she hung her head, pretending to gaze at a squirrel that was sitting at the foot of a tree very near them, debating within itself if it dared dash by them. But her parents saw the change of mood in her, and their happiness faltered without their knowing why; and then, before she opened her mouth to begin to explain, they did know why, and their sigh was the sigh of the people who had held the golden ribbons. Donathor stood a little apart from them, the parents and their only child, but she felt his awareness of her, and the strength he tried to offer her through the soft sweet air of that small clearing; and her courage returned, although her sorrow was not lessened by it.

She raised her head and looked at her father and mother in turn, and she knew that they knew already what she was about to say; but that still they waited for her to say it. “I cannot stay here,” she said. “Donathor and I are going away—as far away as we can, till we find a country like neither of those we are leaving; and we know we may not find such a land, but we are doomed to the search. We cannot stay here, as we could not stay in his—his parents' land.”

As she spoke she looked beyond those she spoke to, at the strange tree that stood where the fruit-laden tree had been; and she wondered again how such things as boundaries were arranged, and she heard her own words:
we cannot stay
, and even as she said them she cringed away from them, although she knew she had no choice but to do as she had said they must. And she saw little glints of sunlight through the green leaves of that tree, and she seemed to see the branches bend a little lower, and phantom yellow globes of fruit hanging from them. The trees murmured together as friends will as they make room for one another, and are joined by those who have been absent; and through this shifting, swaying, half-seen wood she glimpsed something else: a tall hedge pierced with arches, arches so tall that the tallest king in his stateliest crown could pass through any without bending his head; and the arches were outlined with flowers. She was not sure of the hedge because she was not sure of the impossible trees and the transparent fruit; but then she noticed one arch in particular, and was certain that the flowers around it were violet, with stems of lapis lazuli; and she saw people approaching that arch, and passing through it, coming toward herself and Donathor and her parents; and of them she was sure beyond doubt. She and Donathor had left them only yesterday.

Alora and Gilvan saw them too. Gilvan took his hands out of his pockets. The royal tailors needn't really have worried, except for their own pride of craft; Gilvan looked like a king even when he should have looked like a woodcutter with baggy pants, as Alora could only be a queen, even in a partridge-colored dress and heavy boots. “Wait,” said the King who approached them, for he was no less obviously a king than Gilvan. “Wait. We shall not lose our children so—and you will help us.” His Queen had suddenly stopped, and stood staring, as humble and innocent as a lost child. Gilvan felt rather than saw Alora take a step forward, and he almost did not recognize her voice as she said:

“Ellian.”

And the Faerie Queen burst into tears and ran to put her arms around her long-lost sister.

Those whom Alora and Gilvan had left behind at the palace spent a long, grim day, pecking at their work and at each other, and trying not to think about anything. The royal party had left quietly, winding its way through the palace gardens—which could go on forever if you did not know how to find your way—slipping out at last through a small ivy-rusted side door; and no one was conscious of having mentioned their departure to anyone else. It was as though the ban on speaking of their elusive neighbors had reached out and instantly engulfed those who dared not only to admit their existence openly but to go in search of them, apparently expecting to find them.

But while the countrymen the King and Queen passed on their way to the Queen's remembered meadow asked no question, and while those in the palace sent no messages, somehow by the time the sun set, there were few in that land who did not know that the King and Queen had followed their daughter into the unknown. It was a very quiet evening; no one could think of anything worth discussing, and everyone went to bed early. Even the retired King and Queen felt in their forest that something was not right, although they spoke to no one but each other; and the flowers in their garden drooped, and the shadows that the petals cast were dusty grey instead of black.