With that, she turned on her heel and marched down the corridor, the blind cat trotting behind, unlike a dog in every way because, of course, he wasn’t truly following her. He merely happened to be going her way.
“Nothing in life is as romantic as it should be, Monster,” Una said as they made their way along the white hall and down a graceful staircase. She nodded civil acknowledgements to members of the household who greeted her as she passed. “Here I am, a princess, of age to be courted and married, and where am I? On my way to another history lesson! Then there’ll be a tutorial on the proper ways to address ambassadors from Beauclair as opposed to dignitaries from Shippening. Then dancing. And not a single respects-paying gentleman of certain birth as far as the eye can see.” She sighed at the heaviness of the world. “Nothing ever changes, Monster.”
“Meeaa?” the cat said.
Una looked down her nose at him. “You’re not just saying that, are you? Trying to make me feel better?”
“Meeaa.”
“I knew it.” She sighed again. “Someday, Monster, won’t you express an original idea? For me?”
Felix waited for her in the large but nonetheless stuffy classroom they shared, doodling caricatures of their tutor in the margins of an essay he was supposed to be composing. He scarcely looked up when Una entered. Monster took a moment to rub a cheek against the young prince’s knee before dodging Felix’s backhand and arranging himself on the windowsill to catch the sunlight.
Una took a seat and opened her book just as the tired-eyed tutor shuffled in. He fortified himself behind his desk, attached a pair of spectacles in place – which made his eyes seem still more tired – and looked upon his students with the air of a man resigned to his fate.
“At what are you so diligently working, Prince Felix?” he asked. His voice never varied from a mournful drone.
Felix held up his essay full of doodles.
The tutor winced. “Most amusing, Your Highness.”
“See how big I made the nose on this one?”
“A remarkable likeness, Your Highness.”
“Doesn’t look a thing like him,” Una said.
Felix made a face. “Not supposed to. This one’s you.”
The tutor closed his eyes during the ensuing argument and let the storm pass. When at last calm returned, he slowly creaked his eyelids back up and dared face the world again. “Prince Felix, do you recall at what passage we left off our reading yesterday?”
“I do,” Una said.
“He was talking to me!”
She continued, “We were studying the rise of Corrilond in the year of the Sleeper’s Awakening during the reign of King Abundiantus IV – ”
“Know-it-all!”
The tutor shoved his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. It was a day like all others, a mirror of yesterday and a foretelling of tomorrow: The prosperous sameness and drudging boredom of lives placidly spent proceeding as endlessly as the mind could conceive.
Nothing ever really changed, and as far as anyone in Oriana Palace could surmise, nothing ever would.
But then, something did.
__________
For two hundred years they had not been seen.
They first appeared as deeper shadows among the shadows of the Wood, all staring eyes and sniffing noses, as wary as children dipping a toe in deep water, fearful to take a dive.
Then one stepped forth, and he, with a smile, beckoned to the others. A huge creature with eyes as wide and white as the moon and skin like craggy rocks followed with a strange grace of movement; behind him walked another who was black as a shadow but whose eyes shone like the sky. After these came the others. Out of the Wood they streamed in parade – carrying with them the scent of dusk, the sound of dawn – and they arranged themselves upon the lawn outside the walls of the city of Sondhold, in the shadow of Goldstone Hill.
A shepherd boy saw them first. His heart leapt with fear at the sight, though not because of their strangeness, for such strangeness he had witnessed a thousand times in dreams. Rather, he feared that he dreamed them now and that, as soon as his old dad caught him snoozing at his watch, he’d fetch a hiding and perhaps be sent to bed without supper. So he pinched himself, and when that did not work, he pinched himself again.
His lazy flock all lifted their heads, regarded the oncoming throng a moment, and then returned to their grazing. But the quick-eyed herding dog let out a joyous bark and left the shepherd, left the flock, and ran to greet the strangers as though welcoming long-lost friends.
Then the boy jumped up and ran as well, shouting as he went. But he ran the opposite direction, down the dusty path toward Sondhold. Though he had only ever seen them in dreams, he recognized those who came.