Perhaps they did not think of what that open door in the hedge would bring about, or perhaps they put it deliberately out of their minds, or perhaps they recognized that the time of choice had passed with the end of that first meeting in the strange forest, where briefly they had stood on ground that existed as two places at once; and so they resigned themselves to the inevitable. If any of the mortals had any consciousness of what was happening, beyond anyone’s power now to halt, it was Gilvan; for Alora was too caught up in the tumultuous delight of having not only a daughter, but an excellent husband for that daughter, and a sister besides.
It was Gilvan who woke up one night and found himself thinking before he was awake enough to realize where his thoughts were taking him and deflect them in time. And his thoughts said to him: “When was the time of choice? When did you stand at the crossroads and say this way—not that? Could any of us, in that uncanny wood, have said, ‘No—I condemn my child to eternal wandering—I know for certain what will come of it else, and know for certain that it would be evil’?” He lay staring at the starlight, turning his life, and his wife’s, and his daughter’s, over in his mind as best he could; and then, because he was a king, he considered the lives of his country and his people; and at the end he could still only reply, “I don’t know.”
He turned to look at Alora and, as if even in her sleep she sensed some anxiety in her husband, she crept nearer him and laid her head on his shoulder. Perhaps it was the rosy smile on her lips that cured him, but eventually he fell asleep again.
For while the door in the hedge remained open, any could pass through, again and again if they chose, and for any reason; for the door was now always there, near the tree with the yellow fruit, and the thin stream broken by rocks that no longer moved in their places. And the mothers and fathers of long-lost infants, and the forlorn sweethearts of young ladies who had disappeared behind that hedge, went through that door: and many found what they sought. No mortal can remain unchanged after meeting again with a loved one who has been touched by the faeries; and the change is all the more profound for its being little realized. There were some, too, from the far side of the border who came to the near side, to seek what they had lost: for it is only purblind mortals who suppose that they have a monopoly on bereavement. But it was a lesson to the immortals that creatures of so short a life span can sincerely grieve: for only immortals can disregard time.
And so families met again, faerie as well as human; and too much knowledge exchanged hands, though little of it was spoken aloud. No mortal should understand why the babies stolen are always boys, while the girls who are taken have first gained some number of years; no faerie should comprehend what can call a fellow immortal back over the border, once crossed by one originally human, who became a grandmother or grandfather of immortals, and yet passed on some almost mortal restlessness to their descendants. None should: but some ties are too strong for such division, and the families spoke blood to blood, and the lovers heart to heart, and understanding came, and with it, change.
So it was that even after the first fortnight, during the wedding, and the brilliant, giddy, overfed week that followed it, Gilvan could smell a change in the air, a tone in the pitch of the people’s cheers that was different from that which had first rung over the heads of the returning Linadel and her Donathor. If he had been willing to face this sense of change squarely, he could have argued with himself that this was because there were as many faeries present for the celebration as there were of his own people, and they had perhaps different-sounding lungs. But since he did not face it squarely, he did not have to argue speciously with himself, and he was left with the accurate if unspecific sense that something—something—had shifted.
Later he caught that same knowledge looking out of Alora’s eyes; but as soon as each recognized it in the other, each swiftly drew a curtain over it, and they smiled at one another, and raised their wine goblets in a toast that neither uttered but both most sincerely meant.
As Alora and Gilvan knew it quickly, it being their own country, and they as sensitive to everything that moved within it as young birds are to the changing seasons, so Thold and at last Ellian—for she knew both countries too well and neither well enough—knew it too. At first, for them, it was but a suspicion, guarded and held by the same knowledge behind that meeting in the wood that woke Gilvan up at night; but they knew it themselves beyond doubt when the wedding party came back to the Land Beyond the Trees for a second celebration, and for friends to see how each other lived.
The change was never discussed. There was no need and no purpose for it. Linadel and Donathor learned it in their turn, not as their parents had, by a change in their two peoples, but by the growing apprehension, as they traveled back and forth from the land of Linadel’s birth to that of Donathor’s, that the two peoples they had thought they were to rule were not any more to be differentiated. They had become one, as their next King and Queen had before them.
The first faerie-to-mortal marriage that came from the door in the hedge was that of one of the girls who had held the golden ribbons for Linadel. She had dropped the shining ribbon when the beautiful mortal Princess had turned away, and she had wept with her Queen when Donathor and Linadel chose to lose everything rather than each other; and she had followed Ellian and Thold when they followed their son and his bride. And during that meeting in the woods, this golden girl had met one of the courtiers who for love of his own King and Queen had followed them on their despairing journey in search of their daughter. And when these two were married, they asked that the royal blessing that every marriage on either side of the border had always been granted be given by Linadel and Donathor; for they were the living symbol of all that had happened and was happening. And that first marriage was a symbol too: of the love the new changed people had for their new King and Queen.
To her considerable embarrassment, and the great delight of everybody else (especially Gilvan), ten months after her daughter’s wedding, Alora gave birth to a son; and they named him Senan. He grew up green-eyed and musical, and cared very little that he was a prince, for he preferred to tie his harp to his back and wander far over the hills and through the forests of all the lands within reach of his tireless walking; and there were none that were not within reach. Each time he returned to the land of his birth, he sang songs to his family and his people of the wonders he had seen; but no one was ever sure if he had seen them as other people saw, or if it was the music that did the seeing; for no one doubted that he and his harp could speak to each other as one friend to another; and all had heard his laughing claim that there were no bones in his body, only tunes, and no blood, but poetry.