"That," Emma said, "is an excellent question. She wasn't a princess. She wasn't a duchess or a countess or any of those things. She was just - a girl. A very particular kind of girl. She was clever and beautiful in the way that people are beautiful when they don't know it and wouldn't care if they did. She could sew a seam so fine you'd need a magnifying glass to find it. She could cook a meal that made grown men sit down and feel quietly grateful for the fact of being alive. She knew seven languages, including two that were technically dead."

"Dead languages?"

"Languages that not very many people speak anymore. She'd learned them just because she liked knowing things." Emma felt Lily shift, settling deeper. Good. The questions were slowing - always a sign that sleep was beginning its patient work. "She'd lived in the castle for a long time, this girl. She'd grown up there, really. But the castle didn't belong to her, not exactly. She was there the way some people are somewhere - useful, and loved in complicated ways, and not quite sure what she was supposed to do next."

"That sounds lonely," Lily said quietly.

Emma looked down at the top of her daughter's head. "Yes," she said. "It was a little lonely. But she was good at not showing it."

Silence for a moment. The lighthouse nightlight threw its soft beam across the carpet.

"What about the knight?" Lily asked. "You said there was a knight."

"Ah." Emma smiled into the dimness. "The knight."

"Was he handsome?"

"Objectively, yes. He was tall, and he had the kind of face that made people look twice even when he wasn't trying. He had good hands. Strong. He'd grown up working with them." She paused. "He came from a long way away. A very different sort of place - flat and open and full of fields, not a castle in sight for a hundred miles. His family had fallen on hard times. And he had decided, with the particular determination of a young man who has thought about something for too long and too earnestly, that he was going to make things right."

"By rescuing a princess?"

"Well." Emma's smile shifted slightly. "That was the plan."

Lily heard something in her mother's voice. She tilted her head back to look up. "What happened to the plan?"

"What usually happens to plans," Emma said. "Life got in the way. Specifically, a wrong turn."

"He took a wrong turn?"

"He took a very wrong turn. He'd heard about this particular castle, you see - someone had told him, years and years ago when he was just a boy, that there was a girl there worth knowing. He'd remembered it the way you remember something from when you were very small - not quite accurately, not all the details, just the feeling of it. The sense that something important was that way, past the gray stones and the crooked tower. And so he went."

"But there was no princess."

"There was no princess," Emma confirmed. "Just the girl."