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They say there’s a princess in a tower, held captive by a horrible dragon. Every day, she sits at the window and stares out at…
I first met her when I was six, a wobbly-legged child still learning to tote a pail of water back from the well and struggling…
I first met her when I was six, a wobbly-legged child still learning to tote a pail of water back from the well and struggling to sound out words from the books on my parents’ bookshelf. She seemed to come from out of nowhere, her hair in braids, missing her two front teeth. I’d never seen or even imagined clothes like what she was wearing: a skirt that barely reached her knees made of some kind of stiff blue cloth, a shirt covered in sparkly things I’d later learn were rhinestones and not jewels, knee-high socks, and pink-and-white shoes held tight on her feet with a magical substance she later told me was called Velcro. I felt more ordinary than ever in my homespun tunic and trousers, with worn-out boots and smudges of dirt on my face. But she looked at me like I was the strange one, like I’d just appeared in her totally ordinary world. Somehow, I got over my shock enough to smile at her and introduce myself.
“My name’s Alexis,” she said. Then, after a moment’s pause, she asked, “Where am I?”
~
She didn’t stay long, that first time. Just long enough to drag me into a crazy mission to retrieve a magic crystal and save the land from an evil sorcerer. Just long enough to leave both of our families frantic with worry about where we’d been. Just long enough to hug me and promise we’d be friends forever before she slipped away as quickly as she’d come, leaving me to wonder if she’d ever been real to begin with.
But she had been. I knew she had, even as the kingdom started to wonder, even as she slowly shifted from memory to legend to myth in the span of only a few short years.
In her world, she said there was powerful magic that let people from hundreds of miles apart talk to each other as if they were in the same room, but here, we get our news from a herald or a traveling bard, and the lines between truth and fiction blur with each exaggerated story they tell. She once showed me pictures of her mother and sister that captured far more detail than any artist could paint. You’d never forget someone you could see in a picture like that.
But our world is not so strong in magic. We only have the weaker kind, used to brew potions and stir up storms and make objects float in midair. I had nothing that could prove to people who never met her that Alexis ever existed in the first place. Nothing but a pink-and-white shoe held together by Velcro.
~
She came back when we were ten, and it wasn’t the same as before. There was no wicked sorcerer, no magic crystal, and no easy childhood friendship. She had cut her hair as short as a boy’s and traded in her rhinestone shirt for what she called a school uniform, and I was now a page at the castle, working hard for the honor of one day becoming a knight. It was a rare privilege for a commoner to be granted such an opportunity. But the king and queen remembered, even as their people started to whisper that our story was just a myth. They remembered the brave farm boy and the girl from another world who had kept their kingdom safe, and they gave me what I wanted most: the chance to keep doing it.
That was the year we were invaded by our northern neighbors. Driven by greed, envious of our lush farmlands and bustling port cities and spices and silks, they took town after town, claiming it all for themselves. Their army of monsters with sharpened icicle claws and hearts as cold as winter itself seemed to be unstoppable. No one believed that a pageboy and a strange little girl from another world could do anything to help.
But Alexis was not just an ordinary girl. She claimed that her world was without magic, but I doubt that. She was a prodigy. Before the war was over, she mastered a difficult, dangerous fire spell and stood side-by-side with our most powerful magicians, driving back the ice queen’s forces.
Still, they came and came. It wasn’t until that moment, when an arrow flew her way and I dove in its path to push her to safety, when its sharpened ice tip pierced my shoulder and her tears dripped down into the wound as hot as flames, that anything started to change. Then the ice monsters melted where they stood. Then the enemy queen’s own icy heart softened to see two children sobbing and bleeding on the ground. Then then the haze of greed and hatred started to thin a little, and people looked across the field and saw not enemies but fellow living creatures.
That was when I realized just how powerful her magic was.
~
Sixteen years old, we danced under the stars and waited to see what she’d been brought here to do. We had a theory, see, that she came for a reason. She came because we needed her, somehow. And maybe we were right, because she saw what none of us could: the hand of the king’s trusted advisor slipping over his glass one night.
When he refused to listen, she drank from the cup herself.
It wasn’t poison. The glass contained a curse. An uncertain squire I may have been, but I wasn’t about to let her lay there forever, locked inside her own body and mind, trapped in an eternal nightmare.
I rode off to scour the land for a cure. I fought a dragon and saved a village. I consulted with sages and scholars and sorcerers. I returned a failure, knelt down by her side, and sadly kissed her forehead.
Magic kisses are a figment of children’s stories, but perhaps they work in her world. Or perhaps her own magic is just that strong. Perhaps she was fighting from the inside. She never did tell me, but it’s enough to know that she woke up.
She wrapped her arms around me, and her lips met mine. Another kiss, and no less magical.
That night was the happiest of my life. But in the morning, she was gone.
~
Years passed by. I trained. I fought. I bled and healed and fought again. Each time somebody asked me when I planned to settle down and start a family, my mind drifted to that night of dancing and that magic kiss, and I shook my head. I was still waiting for a girl from another world, a girl who vanished almost as soon as she appeared.
But when we were twenty-three, she came back. We met in the woods beside a frozen lake, and I dismounted from my steed, got down on one knee, and asked her to be my wife. And she, as you might guess, agreed.
It was a simple wedding. A few close friends and my family. She told me about her world’s traditions, a white gown and something borrowed, something blue. I told her about birdsong to bring good luck and flame blossoms to keep the flame of love burning all our lives. As she walked down the aisle with a blue necklace at her collarbone and flame blossoms in her bouquet, our worlds met, and this time they blurred together rather than colliding. The boundaries remained. Her telephones and photographs remained far-flung fantasies to me. But between the two of us, we had bridged an unreachable gap. Or so I thought.
She stayed longer that time. So long that I wondered if she would stay forever. There were no wars to fight, no spells to break, no childhood villains to defeat. Neither one of us put it into words, but I think we both hoped that she was here this time simply so that we could be together.
We had children. Two girls and a boy, all of them with their mother’s dimples and their father’s eyes. They inherited her magic and my skill with the sword, and when Alexis saw that, she started her several-year-long campaign for the king and queen to let women train as knights.
She was their hero, the girl who’d saved their kingdom three times over. What Alexis wanted, Alexis got.
~
We loved and we lived. We laughed and we cried. We taught our children to read, nursed them through long illnesses, and sang to them as they fell asleep. We danced together under the stars. She taught me about her world, and I taught her about mine.
Then, one day, when our youngest was eight, I came home to find that she was gone. Everything else was still there: her clothes and her jewelry, her diary, the children, the dog, the blue necklace that had once been her mother’s. No sign of a struggle, no goodbye note. But she had vanished without a trace, and I knew, with a sinking feeling in my heart, that she was no longer in this world.
~
“It’s easiest for children,” she told me once. “At least, I think it is. I’ve met others, back home, who’ve found their way here – or to another world. But when they get older, they can’t find the gateways as easily. Sometimes they even start to forget, like it’s just a dream they had or a game they used to play. You have to keep looking, and keep reminding yourself it was real.”
I held her close and told her it’s like that here, too. People forget. If you want to remember, you have to write it down, carve it into stone, paint it on a canvas, run your fingers over the Velcro every morning and every night to remind yourself it was real.
“Eventually, the gateways stop opening altogether,” she said. “You have to decide where you’re going to stay. You can’t live in two worlds forever.”
I thought she’d chosen to stay here. To stay with me. But maybe I was wrong. Or maybe she meant to, when she first said she’d marry me, only to grow homesick later on. Maybe she missed her parents and friends and the life she’d had before she came here. I could understand that.
What I couldn’t understand is why she didn’t say goodbye.
~
Decades have passed since then. Our children have grown. The eldest girl is a knight, the boy a magician as powerful as his mother, and the youngest a lady-in-waiting to the queen. I’m getting older, my eyesight and hearing aren’t what they once were, and even my memories are starting to fade. But when my grandchildren gather round and beg for their grandmother’s story, this is how I always end it:
“She didn’t want to leave us. But somehow, she stumbled upon a gateway, and there she was, back in that other world. She’s still out there now, searching every hill and valley, every door and mirror, every pool of water, looking for a way back. Just wait and see. Someday, there will be a knock on the door, and we’ll go to answer, and there she’ll be.”
I don’t know if it’s true. But I’ll never give up hoping.
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