Princess Academy By Shannon Hale

Chapter 14

She's as lovely as a girl with flowers in her hair
The mountain, my lady
She's as bright as spring sun drying rain from the air
Mount Eskel, my lady

  By a week following spring holiday, all traces of winter had vanished from the mountain. The last hard patches of snow melted into the mud, then the mud hardened and grasses grew. The miri flowers sprang up in the rock cracks, faced the sun, and twirled themselves in the breeze. On breaks, the girls spun the pink flowers and made wishes.

  Miri found herself again on a hill, watching the last miri petal fall. She touched the linder hawk hidden in her pocket and thought of one wish she could make. Then she turned west, away from the village, toward the pass and the lowlands, and thought of a different wish. She dropped the flower stem and laughed before she could even form the thought. Of course she did not wish to be the princess. How could she wish to marry someone she did not know? Katar's talk about being special and doing great things had lodged in her head, Miri decided, and she just needed to shake that nonsense loose.

  But her eyes flicked back to the west. What wonders waited in the lowlands? There was, of course, that beautiful house for Pa and Marda, but whenever she thought of giving them that gift, she could not imagine herself actually wedded to a prince. For a moment she let herself wonder how such a future would change her.

"Princess Miri," she whispered, and surprised herself by feeling a thrill. The title added weight to her name, made her feel more significant. Miri was a scrawny, hopeless village girl, but who would Princess Miri be?

  Other girls on the hill watched the last petal on their miri flowers tick off and float away. Miri wondered how many were wishing to wear a silver gown and how many were wishing for a title before their name.

"I used to think that was the whole world," said Esa, sitting beside Miri with Britta and Frid.

  Esa's eyes sought out the swells and slopes of the mountains dimming from green to gray on the northern horizon. "Now I feel so small, perched up here on our isolated mountain."

  Miri nodded. That morning a lecture from Olana had shaken a dreary spirit over their heads—linder represented a tiny fraction of the Danlander economy, less than the sale of pig ears or cloth flowers for ladies' hats,- the entire population of Mount Eskel was smaller than the number of palace stable hands,- the wooden chapel doors, so loved and prized by the village, were smaller and less ornate than the front doors of any Aslandian merchant.

"The lowlands aren't so different from here," said Britta. "Just bigger and . . ."

"A lot bigger," said Frid.

"It's hard to feel like I matter at all," said Esa.

  Katar strolled by, twirling a bare miri stem. "A princess matters."

  When no one argued, Miri knew she had not been the only one contemplating the western horizon when making her wish. The world had never felt so wide, a great gaping mouth that could swallow all of them whole. It made Miri wish she could bite back.

"It doesn't seem to matter what we think," said Miri. "The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do."

  Her eyes found Katar walking down the hill. But I can do something about academy princess, she thought. It would be harder than she had hoped. The older girls had been spooked by Miri's tie with Katar after the first exam, and Bena, Katar, and Liana spent all their free time with open books. Miri gazed longingly at spring erupting outside the window but forced herself to study—at least, most of the time. Britta, Esa, and Frid could coax her outside for a nostalgic game of Wolf and Rabbit every so often.