Chapter Five: The Door
She did not run. She was done running from things.
She turned and walked — steadily, unhurried, her white dress moving against the stone floor — back down the aisle she had come up, past the rows of frozen faces, past the doors held open by pages who stood aside without being asked, and out into the winter morning.
The air outside hit her face, her actual face, skin against cold wind, and she stopped on the cathedral steps and breathed.
Behind her she heard the sound of the cathedral erupting — voices, movement, the kind of noise a crowd makes when a long-held stillness finally breaks. She heard, distantly, her father’s voice, and the priest’s, and then another set of footsteps on the stone.
She didn’t turn around. She knew the step.
Richard came to stand beside her on the cathedral steps. He didn’t touch her. He looked out at the winter city below the palace hill — the rooftops, the market square, the river catching thin winter light — and was quiet.
After a moment: “I’m not going to ask you to go back in.”
“Good,” she said.
“I’m also not going to pretend I know what the right thing is.”
She looked at him sidelong. He was watching the city with his hands clasped behind his back, and his expression was the same one she had come to recognize as honest thinking — not performing, not managing, just actually working something out.
“I want to leave,” she said. “The palace. The kingdom. All of it.”
“I know.”
“You couldn’t have known that.”
“You told me, the first time we spoke, that what you wanted was to walk somewhere in an ordinary way.” He glanced at her. “This is not an ordinary place.”
She was quiet for a moment. Overhead, a crow landed on the edge of the cathedral roof and regarded them both with professional indifference.
“Come with me or don’t,” she said finally. “That’s not something I can decide for you.”
“I know that too.” He unclasped his hands. “I’ll come.”
“You’d be walking away from a kingdom.”
“I’d be walking toward something more interesting.” He said it plainly, without drama, the way he said most things. “That seems like a reasonable trade.”
She didn’t smile — not quite, not yet, that particular muscle having been in long disuse — but something in her face shifted, something that had been very tightly held releasing by the smallest possible increment.
“I play the piano in the mornings,” she said. “When I find one.”
“I know. I’d like to hear it.”
“You said that before.”
“I meant it before.”
Below them, the winter city went about its ordinary business — market stalls, cart wheels on cobblestones, smoke rising from chimneys, people who didn’t know and wouldn’t know that a princess had just walked out of her own wedding. A woman hanging washing from an upper window. Two boys arguing over something in the street. The river, as always, indifferent and continuous.
Elina looked at it all, with nothing between her eyes and the world. No iron. No slits. Just light, and air, and distance.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They walked down the cathedral steps together, into the ordinary morning, and no one stopped them.
