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 undeniably blue, that color, but a blue that no one had ever seen elsewhere.
Linadel ran forward with a cry of pleasure and plucked one of the flowers before her stunned mother could stop her: and she ran back at once when Alora failed to follow her and held the flower up and said, “Isn’t it lovely, Mother? May we take some home?”
Alora, looking down, saw with a terrible pang that deep ethereal blue reflected in her own daughter’s eyes. But she said only, very quietly, “No, my dear, these are wildflowers, and they do not like to sit in houses; we will leave them here.” She took the small blue thing Linadel held and laid it in the grass near its fellows, and they turned away from that meadow and walked elsewhere.
Alora dreamed of that meadow, and the blue in Linadel’s wide grey eyes, for years after that; but she never remembered the dream when she awoke—only a vague feeling of fear, and of things forbidden; and she did not recall the incident that had begun the dreams.
What she did still recall was her sister’s face; and sometimes the young Linadel reminded her of what Ellian had been at the same age. Linadel’s coloring was similar to her aunt’s, but there the resemblance ended, beyond a chance fleeting expression such as young princesses everywhere may occasionally be caught at. The thing that Alora noticed more and more as the years passed was how much more solemn Linadel was than she and Ellian had been; but Linadel had no sister to help bear the oppressive weight of royalty.
By the time Linadel’s seventeenth birthday was the next occasion on the state calendar, she had practiced princessing so successfully that her royal robes never got under her feet any more, nor did her arms tremble; and her mother suddenly realized: “She is preparing to be a queen alone.” She thought of Gilvan and how little her life would have been without him, and her heart failed her. And then a new juggler’s trick would make the Princess laugh, or a new ballad make her look as young and lovely as she really was—if less like a queen-to-be—and Alora would think, “She’s only a girl. It’s not fair that she should have to understand so much so soon.” And Linadel’s smile, and sidelong look to her parents to join the fun, would remind Alora of Ellian again.
The poor Queen’s thoughts went round and round, and Linadel’s birthday came nearer and nearer; and the possible husbands had petered out to what looked to be the final end. Then one night Alora dreamed of Linadel and the blue flower, and she remembered her dream when she woke up: and she also remembered what she had dreamed after: Linadel had grown up in a few graceful moments as her mother watched, still holding a fresh blue flower, till she was almost seventeen; but then she laughed and opened her arms to embrace Alora, and the Queen realized that it was not Linadel standing before her, but Ellian. She woke sobbing, to find herself in Gilvan’s arms, and he smoothed her hair and said, “It’s only a dream” till she fell asleep again; but she would not tell him what her dream had shown her. When he asked her, the next morning, she did not meet his eyes as she answered that she could not remember.
Alora was correct in thinking that her daughter was anticipating being a queen without a king to argue official questions and complain of the humorlessness of ministers with. The Princess found being a princess a heavy task, since—as her parents had long recognized—she couldn’t help taking her royal responsibilities seriously. She was the only one there was. She had often thought, wistfully, that it would be a very nice thing to have brothers and sisters—as all her cousins did—since being eldest, and heir apparent, couldn’t be nearly as bad as being the only one at all. Two years before, when the question of Antin was being discussed, she had also had her first real glimpse of how it was to be where she was as seen from another point of view. This glimpse had left a lasting impression. She had known at once that he wanted no part of her—and known too that his feeling had nothing personal to her in it: it was focused on the position she occupied. And it had come as something of a shock.
She still knew, as she had always known, that she was an ordinary girl; after Antin she also knew that it didn’t matter. The princess mattered. And the queen who would eventually reign mattered. And so she took more walks alone, and spent more afternoons—when her political lessons allowed it—in dusty disused towers and forgotten wings of the castle, where she could play hopscotch if she felt like it, and sing silly songs that had hundreds of verses to the resident barn swallows, who didn’t mind her in the least. Even this amusement her conscience frequently denied her, or at any rate it took its revenge later by keeping her up late at night studying her country’s history, and geography, and biographies of its great men and women; which she found very interesting, but not very relaxing.
In the meanwhile Lirrah married a nice young earl who had earnestness enough for two, at least, if not necessarily brains; and a year later they produced a daughter. Linadel thought to herself: “I’ll have to bring her to court when she gets a little older; she may be Queen after me.” The royal family attended the christening, of course; and little Silera became Linadel’s first godchild. Shortly after that, Antin declared his engagement with the Viscount of Leed’s daughter, Colly.
Linadel’s seventeenth birthday was going to be a holiday the like of which none had ever seen before—not even the day of her christening would be able to compare with it, and those fortunate enough to remember that occasion were still talking about it. Royal birthdays were always splendid fun anyway; and since the royal family only celebrated two a year, no one ever got bored with them. Gilvan’s and Alora’s birthdays were only ten days apart, and the celebration was held on the Queen’s birthday. “I can wait,” Gilvan always said during the annual token argument about it. “I’m twelve years older than you are, what do I care about ten days?”
Linadel’s birthday came in early autumn, in that breath of time between harvest and the break in the weather that means winter is only weeks away. The King and Queen began planning for it as soon as their own birthday—which came about the time of the first real thaw in the spring, so that the celebrations were occasionally enlivened by the Nerel River, which ran near the palace and through the town, choosing to overflow its banks, usually over the parade route—was safely past. But the plans for the year that Linadel would be seventeen had a certain desperation to them that no one admitted but everyone felt. Everyone knew—Linadel herself included, though she could not remember having been told, and her mother certainly had never mentioned it to her—that the Queen’s only sister had disappeared the morning of their seventeenth birthday; and no one thought it surprising that Alora looked paler than she otherwise ought, that summer before her daughter turned seventeen. She, poor lady, assumed that she hid her fears well enough that none noticed, since none spoke to her of being a little off her looks, and was anything troubling her? And for this kindly conspiracy she was so grateful that she wasn’t quite as pale as she might have been.