But only silence answered Linadel, and she shook herself free of Donathor’s blue eyes and tried to look at him as if his were only a face like other faces and she said: “Where are my parents?” and it was a last appeal. Then suddenly she found herself free of something that had held her till now, although she had not known she was held; and in her new freedom she trembled where she stood. She remembered her mother, and her father, and she remembered herself, and her people, her own people, whom she had known and loved for seventeen years; and she knew they were not the people who held the golden ribbons.
It was the dark Queen who answered her at last: “Child, they are not here.”
Linadel stared at that serene and lovely countenance and saw the serenity flicker, like the shadow of a butterfly’s wings over a still lake. Then she asked the question to which she now, terribly, knew the answer, and as she spoke she knew she was pronouncing her own doom: “Where am I?” she said.
The King answered her: “You have called it Faerieland. We have no name for it; it is our home.”
There was a long, long silence, or perhaps it only seemed so because of the way it sounded in her ears, like the heavy air of a long-closed cavern, that seems to thunder in the skull. At last she said, and her words echoed as though reflected off harsh dark walls of stone, “I must go back. I am the only one there is.” And as she said only one there is, she felt them all move away from her, as if she were a thief; and another sigh passed over the crowd, but this one was like the rising wind before a storm, moaning and uneasy and warning of things to come.
Perhaps it was only the tears in her eyes that made the golden ribbons heave and tumble and finally fall to the earth, where they lay as still as death, dimming like the scales of a landed fish. She did not know for certain because she turned away as they fell the last way from the hands that had proudly held them high so short a time before; and she put one foot out, and lowered it again till it touched the ground—then the other foot. This land she had determined to leave seemed to fall away from her with even her first unwilling step; it fled so fast it burned her eyes even while she tried not to see. She clasped her empty hands, and heard the last echo of her words flash around her: the only one there is.
Two steps gone when she heard his voice, saying, “Wait.” She could not help it. Perhaps she meant to, but she could not. She waited.
He took the two steps after her so that he was beside her again, looking down at the bent dark head with its golden tracery, and he said, “I will come with you.” He took a piece of the golden net in his fingers and gently stripped it away from his love; and she felt it lift away with surprise, for she had forgotten that she wore it. But when he let go of it, it was too light to fall, and hung like a golden cloud between the two of them and his parents and his people; and so he took his farewell of them with his eyes and their faces glinting with gold; but his mother’s tears may have been gold anyway.
“No,” said Linadel—“oh no, you cannot.” But she could not stop herself from looking at his face one last time, so she looked up as she spoke and what she saw made her silent, for she saw at once that he was changed, changed so that he might go with her, changed so that he must. And she wondered if he too had shed something that had held him as it had held her; or whether he was now caught who had been free before. She shivered as she looked at him, and the golden cloud shivered a little in the air behind them.
The King and Queen held each other’s hands as they watched the son they were losing; but they said nothing, and made no move to stop him. Perhaps they understood: perhaps they had seen the change come over him, or known that it must come. They understood at least that there was nothing to say; the King’s face had never been so grave. But just before Donathor turned away for the very last time, his father lifted his hand in a sad sketch of the royal blessing; and a little serenity slipped back to his mother’s face among the golden tears, and she almost smiled.
Then Donathor turned away and found Linadel’s hand once again, and they walked through the opposite arch in the hedge, the one farthest from that through which the golden ribbons had passed. This arch was low and green, and almost shaggy with drooping leaves, and it seemed very far away.
Neither of them had any idea of where they were going; they each knew that their direction was away, and that they were together, and for the moment that was enough. They had won through much to be together, and they had earned the right to rest in that knowledge for a little while. Each recalled that last look on the other’s face before they had turned toward the arch in the hedge; and while their eyes remained on the path before them and their feet carried them away, one unconsidered step after another, they saw and thought only of each other.
It was Linadel who had the first separate thought, and that thought was: “I wonder if away is enough? I’ve never heard that Faerieland begins anywhere. Or ends,” the thought went on, “or that anyone from … my side ever crosses that border more than once.” She could not feel lost with Donathor beside her, but her thoughts carried her forward like her feet until she met the worst one of all: “I have forced my choice on him.” This thought grew and towered over all the rest until it almost blotted out that last look on his face; and then a new little one slipped out from the shadows and confronted her: “Could I have left, him? At last … would I have gone?”
She stopped with the whispers of this last thought in her ears, and he stopped too, and looked down at her, and read in her eyes what she was thinking. He smiled a little sadly, and after a moment he said: “We have my parents’ blessing. We mustn’t linger now; we seek yours.”
Then Linadel realized what he had known since the first shadow fell upon her and she turned away from the golden ribbons: they were going into exile. Her parents would have to give them up as his had; it was too late for any other choice to be made. For the reasons that the Crown Prince of the immortals loved the Crown Princess of the last mortal land, and she him, the shining things they had seen in each other’s faces and read in each other’s hearts as they danced together; even for the reasons that neither of them had found someone to marry before, they were bound to each other forever. That was done, past; and thus when she remembered that she belonged to a world other than his, he could no longer belong fully to his own. And no one can belong to two worlds.