The Door in the Hedge: And Other Stories Read online

  “That last was my brother,” said the Princess; “he lies on his bed dying even now, if he is not yet dead. He is why I am here.”

  Again Sellena reached across the table to touch the Princess’s hand; but this time Sellena spoke no word, and though the hand trembled, it did not move away.

  “He whom you must ask for our freedom,” said Darin, “will turn whatever is in you against you. The greater your strength, the graver the wound you will receive from the weapon he will forge of it. You must go to him empty, drained of all that is your spirit and your heart and your mind; you must be an empty shell carrying only the question: ‘Will you set the two you hold in bondage free?’”

  The Princess stared at Darin. “Tell me one thing first, and then I will go as you bid me. What happened to my brother?”

  It was Sellena who answered: “He looked into my eyes, even as you did—and as none other ever has; by this I should have recognized your kinship. But as you saw only that my spirit was like unto yours and could see in me a sister, he—he loved me. I, who have never been loved so, for my perilous beauty has blinded all those that look at it: all but Darin my brother, and you, Korah my sister—and that one other. Your brother, who lies dying for it.” And another diamond tear crept down her glowing cheek.

  “He escaped sick and strengthless only,” said Darin, “because for all the strength of the love he suddenly found for my sister, it was of a clarity even the wizard could not bend entirely against him; and so he lost neither his life nor his sanity by it.” Then Darin turned frowning to the Princess and said: “This must have been a great blow to the vanity of this enchanter, who has shattered all who have approached him during our long keeping; and I fear for the sister of him who dealt that blow, for the added malice the wizard will hold toward anyone of the same blood.”

  The Princess shook her head, just a tremor, right to left, for she feared to shake tears over the brink of her eyelids. “Still I will go, and fear no more than I must. The sickness laid upon my brother is a wasting fever that no doctor can halt; and he will yet … die, of that wizard’s work.” She turned her eyes, still bright with tears, to meet Darin’s quiet eyes, seeking comfort, and comfort she found. She let herself sink into their green depths and felt that she could rest there forever; and even as she felt Darin’s spirit reaching to touch hers, she remembered Sellena’s words: He—he loved me; and she shook herself free with a gasp.

  Darin at once covered his eyes with a hand, and bowed his head. “Forgive me,” he said, and his voice was deep with an emotion the Princess chose not to hear; “I—I had no thought of this.”

  “Where is the wizard’s cell?” said the Princess; and her breast rose and fell with her quick breathing. “Will you show me where I must enter? I do not wish to tarry.” She looked at Sellena, and did not permit even the flick of a glance to where Darin sat with his dark eyes still behind his hand.

  “Yes. Come.” The two women stood up; Darin remained motionless as Sellena opened another door in the small chamber in which they had sat, not the one they had entered by. Across this threshold it was very dark. Sellena took the Princess’s hand to lead her. “I know the way and will not stumble. It is better without light, for the walls here are similar to those in the cavern where you met me, but the colors will lead you to confusion if you look at them long.” And down the dark road they went, hand in hand; their breathing and their soft footsteps were the only sounds.

  “Here,” said Sellena at last. “I can take you no farther.” The blackness was perfect; the Princess could see not the vaguest outline of the woman who stood beside her, but she could tell by the sound of her voice that Sellena had turned to face her. “There is no danger here, in this simple dark; but your next step will begin your final journey which will take you to the wizard’s den, and once you have taken that step you will be able neither to stop nor to turn back.

  “Stand here awhile, till everything you are, everything you think and remember and feel, drains out of you. What my brother told you of the wizard’s ways is true. Even when you think you have left yourself like a discarded cloak, wait—search again, into every corner of your being; you must not leave even a shred of your personality for the wizard to seize upon. He will search you like the dagger in the hand of the assassin. What you leave here, I will hold for you in the palms of my hands, and I will wait here for your return and give these things up to you again just as they were when you left them in my keeping. Your heart and your hopes are safe here with me, but you must not take them with you, for he whom you will face will make spears of them and drive them back upon you.”

  The Princess stood awhile, with the blackness standing all around her; and she remembered all of the months that had gone to make up her tally of seventeen years; and each week of those months she remembered. She remembered how she had learned to leave her heart behind her when she was summoned by her father, because his lack of love for her hurt her; and how she had only taken up her heart again gladly, and joined it to her hopes and fears, when she went to meet her brother. And she thought of her brother and how he had never understood the hurtfulness of love, so that when he discovered a great love in the eyes of Sellena he had not been able to lay it aside when he went to face the wizard; and now he lay dying of his weakness, of his simple honesty.

  She thought of all these things, and then she felt Sellena’s hands on her face; and silently she yielded up all of her that was hers to Sellena’s care, saving only the question she must ask the wizard. And she felt her body as dark and empty as the tunnel she stood in, with herself and Sellena the questions who waited their asking, and she took the first step of the last stage of her journey to the wizard.

  She was dimly aware of a roaring in her ears, and heat against her skin that came and went, and a flickering like lightning in her eyes; but she had left herself no thoughts to think, and she did not think of these things. She could not even count the steps she took, but she came at last to a lighted place, a cavern, low and white, and at the center of the cavern was a chair of white rock that seemed to grow up out of the floor without break or joint. The white light, for which there was no source visible, burnt fiercely upon the face of the figure that sat in the chair; and the face and the figure bore the semblance of a man. He wore long black robes that covered all but his long white fingers and pale face; a hood was pulled over his head and low upon his brow, but his eyes glared at her, bright with rage and brighter with power. But she had no names for these things now, and so she did not try to name them; nor had she left herself fear, and so the frenzy in the face before her inspired in her no fear.

  She opened her mouth, and gave utterance to the one thing she had brought with her to the wizard’s lair: “Will you set the two you hold in bondage free?”

  The chair, and the creature on it, and the cavern itself disappeared; silently and seemingly gently, for the Princess felt no shock; it was as though she watched a shape of snow melt in spring sunshine. She blinked, and found herself … somewhere else; and the first thing she knew was Sellena’s hands again on her face, and all that Sellena had held safe for her ran back inside her and made her breathe quickly for joy; for the first thing she then did was turn to Darin, who stood at Sellena’s side, lame no longer, but standing strong on both feet. And Darin and Korah looked long and deep in one another’s eyes.

  Then they turned away to see Sellena’s eyes shining brightly on both of them together; and they all three laughed, and Darin and the Princess blushed, and then they looked around to see where they were. But Darin’s and the Princess’s hands somehow met and clasped, while their eyes were busy elsewhere.

  The grey grim mountain was gone, and they stood on a sweet green plain untroubled by rough stone and starry with flowers, and a stream ran off to their right, and before them was the forest. And the Princess’s chestnut mare came running to greet them.

  “We must return to your city,” said Sellena, and her eyes were shining still, but the thoughts behind them we
re changed. It was only then that the Princess saw the warm beauty of her friend and sister, and knew that she had been healed too. “For as my brother’s leg is whole again, so—so many other things come right.”

  The Princess drew her mare’s head down to her own breast a moment, and whispered in the chestnut ears that flicked forward to listen. “Go,” she said then to Sellena. “Ride my mare; she will take you as swiftly as she may to my home and hers; and we will follow after.” And the Princess bridled and saddled her horse, and Sellena mounted and rode off.

  The forest did not seem wide to the two who followed behind; and though they walked swiftly, it was gaily too, and without thought of weariness nor any desire that the journey come to an end. But the dense undergrowth that had stretched on and on almost without measure when the Princess had followed the Hind gave way now to tall easy-spaced trees and frequent meadows full of singing birds; and the two that walked on had not by any means come to the end of all they had to say to each other when they found they had come to the end of the frees. They emerged from the forest just in time to see the party that was setting out from the city to meet them. In that party rode the thirteenth hunter, who reined his horse so close to his wife’s that he might hold her hand as if he would never let it free again; and at their head rode the Prince, who was perhaps thinner than he should be, but he rode his tall stallion with his old grace and strength, and at his side rode Sellena. And behind the two that stepped out of the forest stepped several more, eleven in all, whose presence had not been suspected even by themselves, for they had thought themselves long dead in a wizard’s cave. But now they strode forward to bow to the Prince and ask the way to their homes and countries, barring the two who belonged to this kingdom, and who wept for joy at finding themselves in it again; and they all did homage to her who had rescued them.

  The Twelve Dancing Princesses

  PROLOGUE

  ONCE THERE WAS a soldier, who was a good man and a brave one; but somehow he did not prosper in a soldier’s life. For he was a poor man, the son of a poor farmer; and when he wished to join the Army, at the age of eighteen, bright with hope and youth and strength, the only regiment that would have him, a poor man’s son, was a regiment that could not keep its ranks filled. This regiment was commanded by a colonel who was a hard man; he bullied his men because he was himself afraid, and so his regiment was shunned by the best men, for none wished to serve under this colonel, but because he was a very wealthy man, none could seek to replace him.

  But the young farmer’s son knew nothing of this; and so he signed his name to the regiment’s papers, freely and joyfully, waiting only to be asked to do his best.

  But twenty years passed, and the farmer’s son became an old soldier; he lost his youth and much of his health and strength, and gained nothing worth having in their place. For his colonel had soon learned of the fineness of the new man under his command; and the colonel’s pride and weakness could not bear the sight of such strength in a farmer’s son. And the colonel sent him on the most dangerous missions, and made sure that he was always standing in the first rank of his company when it was thrown into battle; and the farmer’s son always did his best, but the best that he was given in return was his bare life.

  And so at the end of twenty years the soldier left his regiment and left the Army, for he was stiff with many wounds; and, worse, he was weary and sad at heart, with a sadness that had no hope in it anywhere.

  He shouldered the small bundle that held in it all that he owned in the world; and he walked down the first road he came to. And so he wandered aimlessly from one week to the next; for his father had died long ago, and his brother tilled the farm, and the soldier did not want to disturb his family’s quiet happiness with his grey weariness.

  As he wandered through the hills, he found himself going slowly but steadily downhill, like a small rivulet that searches for its own level, seeks a larger stream that will in turn spill it into the river; but where the river flowed at last into the sea stood the tall pale city of the King. And the soldier, as he bought himself meals and a hayloft to sleep in by doing small jobs for the people he met—and he found, however slow the last twenty years had made him, that his hands and back still knew how to lift and heave a pitchfork, how to back a skittish horse to a plough or a wagon—he found in him also a strange and rootless desire to leave the mountains for the first time in his life, to descend to the lowlands and go at last to the King’s city at the mouth of the river, and see the castle of the man for whom he had worked, nameless, all the years of his youth. He would look upon the King’s house, and perhaps even see his face for a moment as he rode in his golden carriage among his people. For the soldier’s regiment had been a border regiment, patrolling the high wild mountains beyond the little hill farms like the one he had grown up on; and the only faces of his countrymen that he had seen were those of other soldiers; the only towns, barracks and mess halls and stables.

  As he went slowly downhill he began to hear bits of a story that told of an enchantment that had been laid on the twelve beautiful daughters of the King.

  At first the tale was only told in snatches, for it was of little interest to farmers, who have enough to think about with the odd ways of the weather, of crops, of animals—and possibly of wives and sons and their own daughters. But in the first town he came to, big enough to have a main street with an inn on it, instead of the highland villages which were no more than half a dozen thatched cottages crouched together on the cheek of some gentler hill: at this town he stopped for a time and worked as an ostler, and here he heard the story of the Princesses in full from another ostler.

  The King had twelve daughters and no sons; and perhaps this was a sorrow to him, but perhaps not; for sons may fight over their father’s crown—even before he is decently dead. And these twelve Princesses were each more beautiful than the last, no matter how one counted them. The Queen had died giving birth to a thirteenth daughter, who died with her; that was ten years ago, now. And it was only a little after the Queen’s death that the trouble began.

  The youngest Princess was then only eight years of age, and the Princesses’ dancing-master had only begun to instruct her; although truth to tell, these girls seemed to have been born with the knowledge of the patterns of the dance written in them somewhere. A royal household must have a dancing-master; but the master who taught these twelve Princesses had the lightest labor of anyone in the castle, although he was a superb artist himself and could have taught them a great deal if they had needed it. But they did not; and so he smiled, and nodded, and waved his music-wand occasionally, and thought of other things.

  Sometime during the youngest Princess’s ninth year it was observed that during the night, every night, the dancing shoes of the twelve Princesses were worn through, with holes in the heels, and across the tender balls of the feet. And every morning all the cobblers of the city had to set aside their other work and make up twelve new pairs of dancing shoes by the evening; for it was not to be thought of that the Princesses should do without, even for a day. And every morning those twelve new pairs of delicate dancing slippers were worn quite through.

  After this had gone on for some weeks the King called all his daughters to him at once and looked at them sternly, for all that he loved them dearly, or perhaps because of it: and he demanded to know where it was they danced their nights away till they wore their graceful shoes to tatters that could only be tossed away. And all but the eldest Princess hung their heads and the youngest wept; the eldest looked back at her father as he looked at her, but hers was a glance he could not read. And none of them spoke a word.

  Then the King grew angry in his love for them which made him afraid: and he shouted at them, but still they gave him no answer.

  And then he sent them away, dismissed them as he would servants, with a flick of his hand, and no gentle words as he was used to give them; and they went. If they dragged their feet at all, in sorrow or in shame, the soles of their shoes were so s
oft they made no sound. Their father, the King, sat silent on his throne for a long space after they had left, his head bowed in his hand, and his eyes shaded from the sight of his courtiers. The courtiers wondered what he might be thinking; and they remembered the Queen, for she was then but recently gone, and wondered if there was anything she might have done.

  At last the King stirred, and he gave orders: that the Princesses henceforward should all sleep in the same room; and that room would be the Long Gallery. And the Long Gallery should be fitted at once with the Princesses’ twelve beds and thirty-six wardrobes. And that the windows should be barred in iron, and the door also; and the door fitted with a great iron lock to which only one key would be made; and that key would be hung around the King’s neck on a long black leather thong.

  This was done; and although the carpenters and iron-mongers were well paid, they had no joy in their work; and the blacksmith who had made the single heavy lock for the door and the key for the King’s own neck would take no payment for them whatsoever, and he went back to his own shop on the far side of the city with a slow tread, and spoke to no one for three days after. There were rumors, whispered uneasily, that the castle had shaken underfoot with more than the blows of the craftsmen’s hammers while the work went forward; but no one quite dared to mention this openly, and no one was quite happy with the idea that they were imagining things.

  And still the Princesses’ shoes were worn through every morning. And it was seen that the Princesses grew pale and still paler within their imprisonment, and spoke rarely—even the youngest, who had been used to roll hoops down the long, echoing Long Gallery when it was still an open way, and chase them laughing. The Princesses laughed no longer; but they grew no less beautiful. The eldest in particular held the dignity of a lioness caged in her wide deep eyes and in her light step. And the King looked after his daughters with longing, and often he saw them looking back at him; but they would not speak.