The High Princess

Clara woke up the next morning, dazed and bewildered from the events in her dream. After Prince Hans had introduced himself and asked her help, he had explained that the youngest princess of Alfide, a Princess Virginia Clout, had disappeared nine years ago. She had been just five years of age when she had disappeared out of her bed one night. He had explained that she was not in this world, but in another called Kedurn. She, as long as she was needed, would help him. He had come to explain that he had his suspicions where the princess was.

"But why me?" Clara had stammered at this point. "I mean ... As much as I would like to ... I can't leave my family. They will worry."

He had looked at her with sympathy, saying that he had already thought of that little problem, and she would only do it, dreaming, at night. "You see ... the enchantment that the person, a witch, that I have my suspicions that took her, will have laid upon her, if I am right that is, will be that only a human girl from the planet Earth can free her from her enchantment. She knows that a human isn't easy to come by- here."

"A witch!" she gasped. Then, the word that he had said, enchantment, triggered the memory of the previous dream. "So this is a dream ... well, then, in a previous dream I had tonight, there was a girl in a tower that must have been, say, ten stories high. She looked about, say, fourteen." Clara looked at Hans. "Was she this princess, do you think?"

Prince Hans had looked at her suddenly, with not the pleasant expression on his face that he had had a moment ago, but with a shocked, blazing look. "Yes, I think she was." he said finally. "Did she have funny, golden-brown eyes?"

"Yes."

"Did she have ginger hair?"

"Well, a sort of dark gingery hair, but yes."

"Was she in a big castle?"

"Yes."

He stomped his foot in fustration. "I knew Circe Foller was the culprit!" he shouted. "I knew it!" Then, he seemed to check himself, remembering that he was in the presence of a girl. "Did she say anything? Please can you tell me all you can remember of her?"

Clara stared at him a moment, a wierd thought coursing through her brain. Is he in love with her? But then, she closed her eyes in an effort to remember totally. "Well ..." she started, "the dream was pretty short. I found myself at a huge castle with a tall tower at its centre, in the setting of wild grasslands."

Hans patiently waited. "Go on," he said finally.

Clara continued. "I had this feeling I should enter the open castle door, and I did. Immediately, I was taken up through the floors to that topmost tower. In it, there was a girl, the one I described to you. There seemed to be a ... a dark aura about her very soul. She was beautiful, but the beauty was hampered by this ... this aura. When she noticed me, she said only, 'Help me. Help me flee my enchantment.' And then I was taken here."

"It is as I thought." Prince Hans said. "She, as the only heir to the witch, has been trained up in the dark arts. That is the dark aura. But, underneath all that, her soul is searching for the setting that should have rightfully been hers. It is likely that she doesn't even know that her soul is searching." He looked at the clouds in the beautiful, blue, sunlit sky. The dream had ended then.

As Clara sat up in her bed on the morn of boxing day, with the sun streaming in (she must have slept in for the first time in ages), she recalled the happenings of that past night, and wondered where this would end.