Page 64 of The Princess Tied

She chuckled. “I call that a lovely habit.” Po shifted her head into a better spot. “You know, John thinks he has no heart inside him. Really. But I am sure I can hear it.” Her words drifted into quietness as she stared at the clouds wandering by above. It was peaceful here.

“If you believe that then I believe it has to be there. Hang onto that belief.”

“Okay. I will.”

“True love can be like lightning, Po, but to keep it you need the other things to come along, and often you need to make good choices.”

That was getting too vague for her. Choices? She had no idea what that meant though she had been thinking about choices herself, lately.

“Such as, I have noticed how you have changed, how you and John act together. You made a choice there?”

Po felt herself blushing. She really should train herself not to blush.

“I suppose I did.” And she was definitely not telling Ruth about the choice she’d made in the wagon the night he deflowered her.

“I have decided that no one is ever free, not even, or especially not even, a princess.”

And then she remembered she had never quite told Ruth she was a princess, had she? Everyone seemed to have figured it out, though.

“However.” She held up a finger. “One can choose to be free-er. And I believe I have done that.” Partly by choosing this journey. “But a princess must always acknowledge her responsibilities.”

“Very good thinking, Po. If a ruler doesn’t do that, bad things happen.”

“Yes. You know that cloud up there looks like a dragon.”

“It does. Have you been writing in your diary?”

“I have.”

They discussed the pros and cons of writing things down and other important matters, while John, Shades, and Ruff climbed to the next highest point and looked out, no doubt trying to see where they must go.

When they descended, they urged her and Ruth to rise and come with them.

Having packed up everything, and with the horses on a lead, she followed them to the ridge.

When she crested the top of it, the view robbed her of breath.

“Beautiful.”

The sky was blue before them, clear for many miles apart from those fluffy white clouds. In the far distance, past a terrain of rocky hills, then past a checkerboard of farmlands, was a city that nestled at the edge of a sea.

But most remarkable of all, to her, was a slim white tower with a blue roof that sat on a hill a mile or two lower than them. It perched on rock, which seemed a strange place to build such a perfect piece of isolated architecture.

“I knew this mountain range was close to where I was born,” Ruth said in a hushed voice, from where she stood to Po’s right. “This is my homeland. There was no volcano here then. I’ve not been back for over a hundred years.”

Ruth was that old? “You lived here? There are no houses.”

“We lived beneath the ground, as some dwarf tribes do. That tower sits above a most sacred place. The Doors of Derayagungun. Where they stand lies far underground.”

The name seemed to echo in Po’s mind. Mayhap she needed a hearing test. “What are those?”

“Some say magic. Some say an unknown science.” Ruth shrugged. “What I do know is that the day I crawled to a place that was forbidden to all dwarfs, only two of the ten doors still worked. I ran through the one with an inscription in dwarf, even though dwarfs did not make the doors: Enter and beware. Your greatest weakness will become your strength. Your greatest strength, your weakness.”

She’d just told them, Po realized, how she had become a giant. An innocent adventure and the terrible mistake of a child playing.

Though John turned to study Ruth, and he clearly saw the significance of her words, Shades was preoccupied.

“That tower,” Shades said, “is well within the range of my eye. The windows are devoid of glass and nothing obstructs my view. No trees. No rocks.”