The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley Read Free Book Online

thought, more or less as it usually did; but she had nothing to put it up with. She shrugged, and it rippled down her back and mixed with the folds of her skirt.
    Then she walked, slowly, still half in her dream and half somewhere else that she could not remember, toward that arch in the hedge through which she saw the people. Just as she reached it she paused to pluck a flower, a white one, to give herself something to do with her hands besides hiding them in her skirt. She twirled it by the stem and its perfume fanned her face. She took a deep breath and stepped through the door of the hedge.
    The people turned their faces toward her at once: and yet there was nothing abrupt about their gesture, nothing of a group startled by a stranger, nothing suspicious or hostile in their wide and serene gaze. Several of the women curtsied; some were standing already, others rose to do so; and some of the men bowed. And again there was so much grace in their movements, and their greeting was so spontaneous, that Linadel no longer felt alone, or even uncertain: she was a member of this kind and courteous group. She did not know these people, and yet there had never been a time when she was not a part of them.
    She smiled back to their smiles, and then looked around her, as she was perfectly free to do because she belonged here. She had stepped through the opening in the hedge to find herself in a clearing surrounded by another hedge; and this hedge too was pierced with doorways into more meadows, green with grass and trees and bright with flowers and fountains and warm sleek rocks. In the meadow in which she now stood there was a ring of trees even taller than that which she had just left; and again their branches met and mingled high overhead so she could not see the sky except as scattered bits of blue, irregular as stars in a green heaven.
    This meadow was several times larger than the one which she had left; so while there were a number of people in it, and all of them well dressed and proud, and each of them an individual to recognize and respect, the effect was still of peace and quiet and space.
    She had walked a few steps forward as she looked, and she realized that more people were entering this ring of trees through the several arches in the hedge; no one was either oppressively still nor visibly restless, but as the minutes passed, Linadel felt that they were waiting for something; and that she was waiting too. Unconsciously she tucked the flower she held into her bodice; and her hands fell peacefully to her sides.
    No one had spoken a word, to her or to each other; but the silence was so easy she had thought nothing of its remaining unbroken, despite the slowly increasing numbers of these handsome clear-eyed people. But now a group of musicians had collected at one edge of the clearing and begun to play a high thin tune on flutes and pipes and strings, a tune that seemed somehow woven of the silence that had preceded it. The tune wandered over a wide and many-colored countryside, as the long-eyed bard who must first have played it wandered. Linadel could almost see him—almost—in his grey tunic and high soft leather boots wound round and crossed with long leather laces. Even more clearly she could see the country he traveled: it was a broad, rolling, welcoming country; and every dip of meadow, every small grassy hollow held small blue flowers that nodded and tossed their heads from the tops of their long slender stems.
    As she listened, what the music showed her lost her for a moment from the ring of trees and the people she stood among; and so he was only a few steps away from her when she shook herself free of the green-eyed bard and saw him.
    â€œWelcome,” he said, and smiled: it was a smile he had never offered to anyone before, a smile he had saved only for her, knowing that someday he would find her; and he held out his hand.
    Linadel understood that smile at once, and put her hand in his; and the music