The Forgotten Princess

°•○Two○•°

The journey was long but Leon was too excited to notice how the hours passed, and kilometres added up, how the sun rose then set again, how the city spreading along the road outside morphed into towns, then dwindled into villages, the growing distances between them interspersed with fields, then trees, always more trees. He did not realise how or where he stopped to eat and refill the car until he finally reached the German village he had been looking for encompassed by an infinite, coniferous forest.

He parked his car by a small, cobbled square, then stepped outside into the cold darkness. It was nearly midnight, he noticed as his eyes landed on the clock at the top of the church tower, then skipped to the elegant white palace perched like a snow-white swan on a nearby hilltop. It was artistically illuminated; the multiple beams of light made the building well visible even at night.

Stretching his limbs, breathing in the fresh air redolent of turpentine, and shivering as the cold found its way under his clothes, he observed the building, that... ghost of the past, beckoning, reaching out to him. He still could not believe that he really found it, but there it was, in front of his very eyes.

It was too late to go up there now. The painter turned around, his eyes searching the age-old square for the hotel where he had booked a room online during one of his stops, finding it right behind him. He took one of his bags from the back seat, then walked across the deserted road, his footsteps echoing in the perfect silence of the night.

In the morning, the young artist was one of the first tourists admitted into the castle. The building wasn't as he had imagined it, as he saw it in yet another dream the previous night, but he knew that he was in the right place. He only needed to find that portrait...

He gasped with disappointment when he finally stood in front of it.

"Sir, are you all right?" The guide whom their group had been following through the chambers and up and down the corridors and staircases for an hour now approached him, looking concerned. She noticed the pale guy lingering behind the other tourists the moment he arrived. He looked... suspicious.

"This portrait," he muttered. "The lady... it is not her. And yet it is the correct painting... or at least the frame..."

"Who are you looking for?" she asked, intrigued.

"The young girl dressed in a long, medieval looking gown," he said, closing his eyes as he described the lady from his dreams to her.

When he looked at the guide again, he found her staring back at him.

"How would you know about her? We have not published anything about what happened yet," the young woman said. "Please, wait."

She left him standing by the picture, running his fingers lightly along the antique, gilded frame while she showed the way out to the other visitors.

"Would you follow me, please?" the woman asked, then, not waiting for his answer, walked towards one of the doors leading out of the chamber, then another, leading to an office.

And there it stood, propped against the stone wall, the portrait of a lady he knew so well.

"It's her," he breathed, looking at The Princess, not noticing how two security guards entered the office after them, silent like shadows.

He observed the picture, recognising every smallest detail, barely restraining himself from touching the princess' cheek as he used to do at home, while he listened to the guide's voice reaching him as if through a thick layer of cotton wool, or the cloud of fog he had painted so many times lately.

"The portrait in that chamber is a copy. A perfect copy of the picture we found... painted on top of this one. It took our experts years to clean the layers of paint, obliterating this medieval beauty... What we are thinking is that this painting was taken from the medieval castle that stood here before and was destroyed to make space to build Neuschwanstein in the nineteenth century."

"Who is she?" he asked, voice shaking as he forced himself to tear his eyes off the painting and look at the guide.

"Princess Elisabetta, of the House of Habsburg," the woman said, her eyes boring into his, not allowing him to look back at the portrait. "As I said, no one except us knows about this... and the other painting."

"Which other painting?" Leon asked, confused.

"The self-portrait of her beloved painter. The one that was stolen and vanished without a trace last week," she said, nodding to the security guards he only just noticed. "I'll need you to talk to the police now. Should they decide that you have nothing to do with the theft, I'll be happy to tell you about the legends encompassing the two lovers. They are quite something..." the guide trailed off.

Leon nodded silently, permitting the security guards to accompany him out of the office. He didn't care about the police... He finally found his Princess...

As they all filed out of the office without another word, none of them noticed that the eyes of the painting followed the young artist down the corridor.