It is all very well to say that all princesses are good and beautiful and charming; but this is usually a determined optimism on everybody’s part rather than the truth. After all, if a girl is a princess, she is undeniably a princess, and the best must be made of it; and how much pleasanter it would be if she were good and beautiful. There’s always the hope that if enough people behave as though she is, a little of it will rub off.
But Linadel really was good and beautiful and charming, and kind and thoughtful and wise, and while at the very end you must add “and wonderfully obstinate,” well, for a girl in her position to support all her other virtues, she had to be.
But how to find such a paragon a suitable husband? When she was fifteen her parents began reluctantly to discuss the necessity of finding her a husband. They should have done this long ago, but had put it off again and again. The obvious choice was Antin, who was a nice boy, and who, if Linadel had not been born, would have worn the crown anyway; and the thought that he would not disgrace it had comforted Gilvan and Alora through their childless years. But that comfort was fifteen years old now, and Antin was a man grown—and still, really, a rather nice boy. It was not that he was lazy, for as a duke, and one still in line for the throne although now once removed, he had duties to perform and dignity to maintain, and he performed and maintained suitably. He was also a splendid horseman (a king needs to look good on horseback for the morale of his people) and no physical coward. It wasn’t even that he was stupid—although he did have a slight tendency toward royal corpulence. But—somehow—there was something a little bit missing. This was perhaps most visible in the fact that he, while very polite about the honor of it, et cetera, wasn’t the least enthusiastic himself about marrying his young and beautiful cousin. Both Alora and Gilvan, trying to see behind his eyes, felt that his attitude toward kingship was one of well-suppressed dislike.
The rumor was that he was in love with a mere viscount’s daughter, who was pretty enough and nice enough, but not anything in particular herself, and that the only enthusiasm Antin did feel on the subject of Linadel’s marriage was that it should happen soon and to someone else; so that he would be free to marry his little Colly. Gilvan and Alora became aware of the rumor, and by that time they were inclined to hope it was true, as the best for everybody concerned.
But it was delicate ground nonetheless, and if Antin were to be discarded as an eligible king, a better reason than his indifference to the post must be found. This proved more difficult than it looked. It was managed finally, after a lot of hemming and hawing on all sides, with an agreement that since everybody in Gilvan’s and Alora’s families was already related to everybody else, usually in several different degrees, to add further to the confusion by marrying Linadel to Antin was beyond the point of sense.
Everyone involved breathed a sigh of relief. It can be assumed that this included Colly, although no one asked her.
It was true that the royal family of this kingdom, like those of many other kingdoms, had mostly the same blood running through all of its veins; but if Antin himself had not been a specific problem, the subject probably would not have come up. As it was, it meant that Linadel’s husband could not be any other member of the family either. It was a relief to have found a way to reject Antin without losing too much face (and the people talked about it anyway: the true purpose of a royal family, as Gilvan rather often observed, is to be a topic of gossip common to all, and thus engender in its subjects a feeling of unity and shared interests); but one still was left to play by the rules one had made, however inconvenient those rules were.
And, as Gilvan and Alora understood in advance and soon proved in fact, the last mortal kingdom before Faerieland had some difficulty in luring an outsider of suitable rank, parts, and heritage to be its king; even with Linadel as bait—or perhaps partly because of it. The ones who were willing were willing because they were fascinated by the 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.
“I’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.
“I’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.”
“That 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.…”
“And 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.