The Door in the Hedge Read Online Free Page B

The Door in the Hedge
Book: The Door in the Hedge Read Online Free
Author: Robin McKinley
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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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œThat 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.…”
    â€œAnd 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
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