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Tainaron - Mail from another city { 1 }
by Leena Krohn { 2 }
Tracks in the dust - the eleventh letter { 203 }
{ 203 } |
'You can go in whatever you like,' he said. 'You can ask whatever you want.' | { 205 } |
{ 206 } |
'Not important?' I was astonished. 'Do you just go there as you are, straight off the street, and say whatever comes to mind to the prince?' | { 207 } |
But he did not give me any more clues, and I went there by myself, in my best dress of course, but distinctly nervous. | { 208 } |
The prince received visitors in the tower at the heart of the palace, in the donjon. I saw him from a distance from the dim passageway on whose stone floor my shoes tapped alarmingly noisily. | { 211 } |
The door to his reception room was wide open, and I could not see anyone else in the vicinity. | { 212 } |
{ 216 } |
'Yes, yes,' he interrupted me before I had time to begin. 'It's perfectly clear. You can ask whatever you want.' | { 217 } |
I had prepared many kinds of questions concerning both domestic and foreign policies, trade links and tax reform, but at the moment they all fell out of my head. | { 218 } |
{ 219 } |
Strangely enough, he seemed on the contrary to be engrossed by my question, as if it were completely apt for that time and place. | { 221 } |
And he suddenly shook his head, so that the fluffy blue collar that surrounded his neck hissed and rustled. | { 223 } |
He stretched out two of the downy pincers of his forelimb for me to see: they were almost touching. I looked at them with polite interest and nodded. | { 225 } |
'Because it is all the same to them,' the prince whispered, 'what I do now, where I go or what I say, everything is permitted now. Do you understand?' | { 229 } |
'No, I do not believe it, your highness,' I said hesitantly, but his forelimb crooked and beckoned me closer. | { 230 } |
Their solitude proved to me with complete clarity that no one had visited the room for ages, and that the prince himself had not left it. | { 235 } |
{ 236 } |
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