“Why?”
“She needs help!”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“She’s blind!”
“Not my problem.”
“Felix.” She huffed. Then a sudden inspiration struck. “She’s the Flowing Gold, Felix. Don’t you see? The gold fur . . . the flowing, um, tail?”
Felix rolled his eyes, but this persuasion worked its magic. He swung down from the bridge into the stream and waded across to the cat. It raised its nose, gave a polite “Meeaa,” and made no protest when the boy scooped it up. “He’s heavy,” Felix grunted, splashing back across to his sister. “And his claws are in my shoulder. Right to the bone!”
“She needs help,” Una declared staunchly, holding out her arms.
“The Flowing Gold to save your fair kingdom, my lady.” Felix deposited the cat into her keeping. It began purring as soon as she held it – a loud purr that Felix declared obnoxious but Una thought sweet.
“We’ll take her home,” the princess said, turning and beginning the long walk back up Goldstone Hill. “I’ll brush her fur and give her a good meal – ”
“He doesn’t need a good meal. He’s heavy!”
“She’s blind and lost,” Una snapped. “She needs a good meal. Isn’t she lovely?”
“He’s ugly.”
So with the cat draped over the princess’s shoulder, the children returned home, leaving the Old Bridge uncrossed and the far forest unexplored.
Goldstone Wood watched them go.
1
Five Years Later
"Do you think they will come before the year is out?” Princess Una asked her nurse.
“Who will come?” her nurse replied.
“Suitors, of course!”
Though the sun was bright, the air blew chill through the open window that spring morning, and Una wrapped a shawl around her shoulders as she sat waiting for Nurse to finish the awful business of preparing her for the day. Nurse, who had long since ceased to function as a real nurse and these days played the part of maid and busybody to her princess, wielded a brush with the tenderness of a gardener raking last year’s dead leaves, making every effort to tame Una’s honey-colored hair into an acceptable braid. One would have expected that, with many years’ practice, she might have acquired rather more gentleness. Not so Nurse.
She paused now, mid-tug, and scowled at Una’s reflection in the glass. “What brings on this fool talk?” She raised a bushy eyebrow and gave the braid an extra tug, as though to wrest all the unruliness out of it in one go. “You keep your mind busy with your lessons and deportment, just as always, and leave that messy business of courting and arranging marriages to your father, as is right.”
“But I’m of age!” Una winced again and tried not to pull away from the vicious brush. She twisted her mouth into an unattractive shape as pain shot through her scalp. “Papa always said that he wouldn’t accept a single inquiry from a single prince or single dignitary in a single realm of the whole Continent until I came of age.”
“As is right.”
“Well, now that I’m eighteen, shouldn’t he start receiving them? When will they come to pay their respects?” To pay their respects, according to the definition given the phrase by the courtiers of Oriana Palace, was a tactful way to say, investigate marriage possibilities with the resident princess.
“That’s not for you to be speculating, Miss Princess,” said Nurse. She pronounced it “speckle-ating.” Una dared not laugh. Though Nurse had not been brought up to speak an elegant dialect, her ideas on what was and was not proper behavior for a princess went far beyond anything Una had ever learned from her decorum instructors.
“Suitors indeed! Why, in my day, a girl never put two thoughts together concerning a boy – not till her father gave her the go-ahead.” “Never?”
“Not once!”
“Not even when – ”
Nurse whapped the top of Una’s head with the back of the brush. “No more! There, you’re tidy as mortal hands can make you. Get you gone to your morning tutorials, and I don’t want to hear another word of this romantic drivel!”
Rubbing the top of her head, Una gathered herself up, grabbed an armload of books, and made her way to her chamber doors, muttering, “I like romantic drivel.” She stepped from the room and, just as the door swung shut behind her, called over her shoulder, “Your day was a singularly unromantic one, Nurse!”
The door clunked, and Nurse’s voice came muffled from behind. “You’d better believe it!”
Una glared at the closed door. A demanding “Meeeowl?” at her feet drew her gaze, and she looked down at her cat, Monster, who sat before her, his tail curled elegantly about his paws. He seemed to smile all over his furry face, despite his lack of eyes.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Don’t look so smug.”