The Door in the Hedge Read Online Free PDF

had also had her first real glimpse of how it was to be where she was as seen from another point of view. This glimpse had left a lasting impression. She had known at once that he wanted no part of her—and known too that his feeling had nothing personal to her in it: it was focused on the position she occupied. And it had come as something of a shock.
    She still knew, as she had always known, that she was an ordinary girl; after Antin she also knew that it didn’t matter. The princess mattered. And the queen who would eventually reign mattered. And so she took more walks alone, and spent more afternoons—when her political lessons allowed it—in dusty disused towers and forgotten wings of the castle, where she could play hopscotch if she felt like it, and sing silly songs that had hundreds of verses to the resident barn swallows, who didn’t mind her in the least. Even this amusement her conscience frequently denied her, or at any rate it took its revenge later by keeping her up late at night studying her country’s history, and geography, and biographies of its great men and women; which she found very interesting, but not very relaxing.
    In the meanwhile Lirrah married a nice young earl who had earnestness enough for two, at least, if not necessarily brains; and a year later they produced a daughter. Linadel thought to herself: “I’ll have to bring her to court when she gets a little older; she may be Queen after me.” The royal family attended the christening, of course; and little Silera became Linadel’s first godchild. Shortly after that, Antin declared his engagement with the Viscount of Leed’s daughter, Colly.
    Linadel’s seventeenth birthday was going to be a holiday the like of which none had ever seen before—not even the day of her christening would be able to compare with it, and those fortunate enough to remember that occasion were still talking about it. Royal birthdays were always splendid fun anyway; and since the royal family only celebrated two a year, no one ever got bored with them. Gilvan’s and Alora’s birthdays were only ten days apart, and the celebration was held on the Queen’s birthday. “I can wait,” Gilvan always said during the annual token argument about it. “I’m twelve years older than you are, what do I care about ten days?”
    Linadel’s birthday came in early autumn, in that breath of time between harvest and the break in the weather that means winter is only weeks away. The King and Queen began planning for it as soon as their own birthday—which came about the time of the first real thaw in the spring, so that the celebrations were occasionally enlivened by the Nerel River, which ran near the palace and through the town, choosing to overflow its banks, usually over the parade route—was safely past. But the plans for the year that Linadel would be seventeen had a certain desperation to them that no one admitted but everyone felt. Everyone knew—Linadel herself included, though she could not remember having been told, and her mother certainly had never mentioned it to her—that the Queen’s only sister had disappeared the morning of their seventeenth birthday; and no one thought it surprising that Alora looked paler than she otherwise ought, that summer before her daughter turned seventeen. She, poor lady, assumed that she hid her fears well enough that none noticed, since none spoke to her of being a little off her looks, and was anything troubling her? And for this kindly conspiracy she was so grateful that she wasn’t quite as pale as she might have been.
    But far from the palace, far enough away that even a wind-borne whisper could not make the journey, people spoke to each other more openly than they had ever dared when it was merely their own or their neighbors’ children that were threatened. “She is our princess—they—they could