Hob
I was so very unhappy.
I had been sitting in the rose garden for a while, just thinking. I was happy in the castle, with him. With him, I could be so at ease, so very much myself and I could almost convince myself that he felt the same way, but I wouldn't see him for whole days, and then as soon as we met again it was as if we had never been apart. I was happy, but he was not. Restless, worried, but he wouldn't say why and I felt constricted, but I couldn't tell him so. If he had been content I would have tried to be so too, but I wanted the world back, not just the little world encompassed by the walls and gates.
He couldn't leave. He wouldn't leave. We had argued, or at least I had argued and he - well, he had been himself. I hoped I could learn to abide.
I heard footsteps on the path behind me, but I was not nearly ready to be civil.
“What do you want now?” I said.
“Hob?” The voice that answered was not his.
“Elizabeth?” I spun around, absolutely shocked speechless.
“Oh, Hob,” she said, and pulled me close. “I thought I would never see you again.” Her face was buried in my hair; somehow I always forgot that she was so much taller than me when we were apart. Belatedly I returned the embrace, but she pulled back, held me at arms’ length and looked me over from head to toe.
“Are you alright, Hob?” she asked. “You look so, so…”
“I’m fine,” I said. “No, really I am, but what are you doing here?”
“I came to find you, of course,” she said.
“Through the forest?” I asked.
“There doesn’t seem to be any other road,” she said.
“But, you…” I said. She was terrified of the forest. She always had been.
“It was the only way,” she said, and that was the end of that.
“I’m so glad to see you,” I said.
“And I you,” she said. “I have worried so much about you. I was frantic after you disappeared. How could you just go like that, without a word to us? Didn’t you know we would worry? Didn’t you care?”
“Of course,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, you know. It happened so fast – one minute I was sitting on the bench, wishing I knew how to find…the castle, and then I was here, but I still don’t understand how you have come here. Father can’t possibly have let you go into the forest on your own.”
“He didn’t know,” she said. “Though I’m sure he does by now. The only one I told was Beauty. Oh, Hob, don’t! I’m sorry about…”
