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 whereâan attitude which Alora and Gilvan and their people didnât 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 wereâwhich, if they were near enough to receive state visits from that last kingdom, was probably too near.
âIâll marry her to a commoner first!â said Gilvan violently after a particularly unfortunate interview with the fifth son of a petty kingdom who fancied his artistic temperament.
âIâve only just noticed something,â Alora said wearily; âthe only immigrants we ever getâthe ones that stay, and seem to love it here as we doâtheyâre never aristocrats. We havenât had any new blue blood in generations. Iâd never thought of it before. I wonder if it means anything.â
âThat aristocratic blood runs thinner than the usual sort,â said Gilvan shortly. He drummed his fingers on his purple velvet knee. âBesides, thereâs no room for them. Why should they come? We have more earls per square foot than any other country Iâve ever heard of.â¦â
âAnd weâre related to every last one of them,â said Alora, and sighed.
It was a problem, and it remained a problem, and two years passed without any promise of solution. Linadel didnât 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 oneâs great heavy robesâand how, in those same robes, heavy and cumbersome as full armor, one could hold oneâs 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, âPractice.â
So Linadel practiced being a princessâit wouldnât occur to her that it came to her naturallyâand became wiser and more beautiful, and even more loving and lovable; and she wasnât perfect, but she wasnât ordinary either.
There was a hidden advantage to this preoccupation with finding Linadel a suitable husband; it took her parentsâ 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 parentsâ lossesâeven a king is occasionally touched by the thing his people keep the most forcefully to themselvesâbut he refused to apply the same standard to himself. Once he wandered so far as to think, âBesides, an only child is never takenâ 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 faeriesâ-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