The next fortnight of our new life together was spent in third class cabins onboard a passenger liner slicing its way through the foamy surf of the Atlantic towards the rising sun. Towards home.

I shared a tiny room in the bottom of the ship with three other women. Two of them were Irish sisters who had come to the United States with their brother about the same time I had, hoping to find fortune and prosperity. Instead, they had found nothing but poverty and hunger, and were now returning to their family and their homeland. The third was a young woman of only seventeen traveling to Paris to study art. I told them all I was going home to lead a revolution alongside a prince, and that I was soon to be his queen. They merely laughed.

How strange a phenomenon love is, and what an incredible power it possesses to transform the bleakest circumstances in to the incredible happenings that shape a most glorious life. My first voyage across the Atlantic, burdened by grief and despair, the clouds above had seemed muggy and ominous, the cry of the gulls was like a piercing splinter against my eardrums, and each breath of salty air burned my lungs. Now, once again soaring on love’s lithe wings, the overcast shades of sky were akin to a most exquisite watercolor speckled across the horizon, the call of seagulls was a joyous cry of freedom and exhilaration, and each breath of sea air was fresh and invigorating. With my heart so light, I felt as though all I would have to do was spread my arms and I too would take flight beside the gulls and soar off across that canvas of sky.

The Prince and I spent the days our voyage on board the top deck of the ship, sitting shoulder to shoulder with our fingers intertwined and the sun splashing on our faces. We managed to acquire two books – one a volume of Italian poetry, the other a dog eared copy of Dante’s Inferno – and passed the long hours reading aloud from each until we could both recite passages from memory. Sometimes, when he was reading, I would squeeze his hand, and the word on his tongue would falter, interrupted by a smile.

On the dawning of a foggy morning, a cry was sounded, and we all ran to the rails to see London harbor emerging faintly from the horizon. We all cheered, and the prince wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed the top of my head. That last stretch of sea, with London growing for the waves before us, seemed to last longer than the entire length of the Atlantic.

At last we reached the harbor, and my feet were on European soil for the first time in years. Something seemed to awake inside of me, the hidden passion that had once emerged when I studied literature and art, long ago suppressed by my failed American dream. My spirit felt revived as I returned to the land that had once been full of nothing but agony and grief, now reborn as the paradise I had been dreaming of from a thousand miles away. If London, on this muggy and grey morning, seemed this beautiful to my eyes, how much more glorious would be the beauty of my own Latvia be.

I felt the Prince’s fingers tighten around mine. “Welcome home, mio belle.”

The Prince had sent a letter ahead to his followers informing them of his return to the continent, and as a result we were able to meet up in London with eight men from his revolution, and they immediately began making plans for our return journey to Latvia. Having never before seen the city and so thrilled to be back on European soil, I was desirous to tarry a little longer, but the Prince was anxious to return to his men in Latvia and insisted we depart the next day, only staying the one night in a small in on the bank of the Thames.

That night, as I lay on my side under thin blankets, I heard the door to my room crack open gently, then soft footsteps dance across the floor. I did not roll over until I was sure he was standing over me, so that when I did, his kiss landed on my lips. I reached up, wrapping my arms around his neck and sliding his already unbuttoned shirt off his shoulders and pulling him on top of me.

“My beautiful princess,” he whispered, slipping into the bed beside me.

“My handsome prince,” I replied, smiling. Our noses touched and I giggled playfully, which he quickly stifled with a kiss. When our lips parted, he wrapped his arms around me, and I buried my face in his neck. “Do you love me?” I murmured into his skin.

My question startled him. “You know I do,” he answered.

“Yes,” I replied. “But sometimes it’s nice to hear you say it.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to say,” he responded with a sigh.

I nodded like I understood, but something inside of me twitched with a nervous doubt I had never before felt. “Just…just say it to me,” I said, raising my head from his shoulder so I could look into his eyes. “Tell me you love me.”

He smiled, slightly taken aback. “I love you,” he said, pronouncing each word slowly like they were each a solitary sentence, his inflection rising on the final syllable.

I slid down his body, leaning my head against his chest, letting his hand trickle down my back against my skin. “Thank you.”

The next morning, a train carried us across England to the coast, where we took a boat to France, and then another train across the fertile European countryside. We traveled incognito in third class carriages with false documentation, often pretending that we were not associated with the other men we traveled with to avoid suspicion. We dressed in humble clothes of muted shades, the Prince concealing his ruby ring bearing his family crest on a chain tucked under his shirt, and I was careful to veil my striking golden hair in a scarf. Our precautions, however, proved excessive, for we received no trouble or questions for the entirety of our journey, and traveled unquestioned until we were half way through Prussia. Here, when the train stopped in a small country village, our company disembarked and purchased horses, and continued our trek towards the Latvian border on their backs. It was springtime, and a chilly sun graced travels through countryside that grew increasingly familiar with each passing mile.

Though I knew my heart should be growing light with happiness as we drew nearer to my childhood home, I instead felt a horrible weight growing with every passing mile, for something had inexplicably come between the Prince and I. There was no gradual process of falling away, and at the time there seemed no reason for this curious shift in his behavior towards me. It simply happened once, when I reached for his hand and he pulled away, instead crossing his arms across his chest. Then again, when I went to sit beside him and upon seeing me approaching he stood and walked away to converse with the other men. Then there were the nights, when I asked him if he would like to read a while before we slept and he would shrewdly decline, and when I leaned in to kiss him goodnight, he turned his head so that my lips instead merely glanced off his cheek. We never laughed together or sang the songs of our childhood; I no longer caught him staring at me with a blissful smile, and the few kisses we now shared were brief and stiff. I felt more of a stranger to him than the other men that traveled with us. But I could not bear to let myself believe that something had come between us or I had done something to displease him. So instead I simply dismissed his actions as ordinary, while in truth he had never in all the years I had known him behaved so coldly towards me and it frightened me terribly.

This callous distance lasted until we were nearly at the border of our own country and ready to cross over. It was this stretch of the journey, this secret crossing into Latvia, which promised to be the most dangerous, and a heavy mood hung over our small company as we traveled. The largest man among us traveled a span a head of the group, scouting for trouble, while the rest of us rode behind in silence, following the bank of a dark stream through trees whose branches, still speckled by late snowfall, blotted out the sun above us.

I no longer recall the hour of the day when we heard the foliage around us crackling underfoot, and the Prince called for us to halt. We all sat in silence, tense, scanning the darkness for life. Then from the brush ahead of us burst the scout we had sent ahead, breathing heavily.

This seemed to annoy the Prince greatly, and he snapped at him for startling us so. The scout did not reply, instead he simply stared us down coolly. The Prince took note of this, and inquired as to what was the matter.

It was then that the soldiers leapt from the trees and fell upon us. I felt myself dragged from my horse and thrown roughly to the ground, my faced shoved into the rocky dirt. I cough as dust filled my lungs, the pebbles beneath me drawing blood from my cheek. I tried to turn my head, but a large gloved hand had a strong hold on the back of my neck, pinning me in place, as other hands bound my wrists and ankles with a bristly cord.

The tumultuous cacophony of the melee was too great to pick out individual utterances. My ears strained desperately, searching for the voice of the Prince, but all my senses seemed blurred by fear and panic.

When a voice broke free of the din and triumphantly cried, “It is the prince!” I felt myself dragged upwards by the hair until I was on my knees. Before I had even a moment to breathe, a sack of rough cloth was thrust over my head, darkening my world, and I felt myself flung unceremoniously over the shoulder of one of our attackers. I tried to fight against him, but I was a merely small young woman, and I could feel the sturdy muscles of his shoulder cutting into my stomach and restricting my breath. All my efforts to break free were in vain.

I had no sense of time, lost in that darkness, as each breath came with great difficulty through the hood shielding my face and my constricted lungs. I kept expecting to feel myself thrown into a river to be drowned, or to hear the fatal countdown as I was dropped before a firing squad. For the first time in my life I felt my very existence in danger, and I thought it likely that I would die that day.

When I was finally dropped painfully to the ground, I braced myself for the blow that I thought was about to fall. Surely they had brought us to a dark corner of the forest and were now going to murder us. But instead, I heard the slam of a door, the muffled scrapping of a key, retreating footfalls, and then silence.

I lay curled on my side for a long moment, my ears ringing, afraid to move. When the stillness became unbearable, I called out softly, “Hello?”

I heard a rustle to my left. “Bella?”

Relief swept through me in a rush. “My prince!” Clumsily, I raised my still bound hands and with difficulty managed to remove the hood shielding my face. The light cascading through the small window at my back was but a dim sliver of daylight, yet it burned my eyes, so long encased in darkness, and I quickly closed them, barely catching a glimpse of the bare, barred cell in which I was imprisoned.

“Bella,” I could feel his hands, gentle against my wrists, untangling the knots that bound them until I was free. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” I opened my eyes slowly, and his face, split by the iron rails of a cell, swam into focus. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“So are you,” I reached through the bars between us and wiped a line of blood tricking from beneath his dark curls off his pale skin.

“It’s just a scratch,” he replied, turning his head so my hand fell away from his face.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked softly, casting my eyes around our bare cells.

“No, I was blindfolded as you were,” He clambered to his feet with difficulty and began prowling the perimeter of his cell like a caged lion. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“We will,” I responded, attempting to infuse my voice with false optimism.

“We need to find where they’ve put the others,” he locked his hands around the bars, pressing his face into one of the small squares their grid pattern formed. “I’m sorry for all this, Bella. I knew there was danger, but I never thought there was a traitor among us. I was so stupid not to see it!” He slammed his fist against the bars, sending a muffled thump ringing through the still prison.

I was stayed silent for a time, unsure what to say that would cease his pacing. “We’ll find a way out. God has granted us mercy this far. I cannot imagine he would abandon us now.” He did not reply. I cast my mind about for some form of reassurance. “Come,” I said at last. “Sit beside me here.”

“No,” he responded. The sharpness of his voice and the vehemence of his ‘no’ startled me into silence again, and I cast my gaze downward, staring at my feet.

We remained in silence for many hours longer, the prince prowling, I sitting still, my chafed hands folded in my lap. My stomach began to ache from hunger, and the scrape across the side of my face was burning painfully. I pressed my cheek against the cool iron, hoping for some relief, but found little.

“Your highness?”

The prince and I both jumped. “Did you hear that?” he whispered, and I nodded vigorously. It was the first time he had addressed me in hours. He turned a slow, full circle, searching for the source of the voice.

After nearly a full minute of perfect silence, it came again, nearer this time. “Your highness?”

“I am here!” The Prince cried desperately.

Again, silence for a long moment, then a man’s face appeared at the small window at the back of the Prince’s cell. “Your highness!”

“My friend!” The Prince raced towards the small opening and pressed his face against its bars, barely tall enough on tip toe to reach it.

“I apologize for not finding you sooner,” the man said. “Three of us managed to escape the attack. All the rest are dead. We followed the soldiers that took you, but lost them at the edge of the forest.”

“That doesn’t matter,” the Prince interrupted hastily. “You must free us.”

“Is the princess with you?” the man queried.

“She is in the cell beside me,” the Prince replied, casting a sideways look at me.

“Excellent,” the man replied. “We have acquired some small explosives that should be strong enough to blow a hole through this wall. If we light them between your cells, you should both be able to climb through it.”

“What clever friends I have,” the Prince replied, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “There may be very little time left for us. We must act quickly.”

“With all due respect your highness, it would be most wise if we wait till the cover of darkness is upon us. It will make our escape much easier.”

“We have no time to wait!” the Prince argued.

“Majesty, we must. It is but a few more hours till night is upon us. Do not fear; we shall wait here beside your window, and if anything should happen to you, you need simply cry out and this wall will fall in seconds, and we will be there to aid you.”

I could see the Prince did not like the idea of waiting, but he agreed, as long as the men promised to act the moment it was dark enough.

Now the Prince and I had nothing to do but sit impatiently in the stony gloom, listening to the steady dripping of water down the walls. I was much desirous to speak to him, tell him something soothing that would stop his nervous pacing, remind him that God truly was again looking after us, but for the first time in my life, I could not find the courage to speak my mind to him. I could not bear to hear him snap at me as he had before.

It was an hour at least before the light cascading through our cells began to turn pink with sunset. Nightfall was approaching. With a nervous glance out the window, to my great surprise, the Prince came and sat beside me, leaning against the bars between us, his face turned away from me. I noticed his hands were shaking. I looked sideways at him, inexplicably anxiously.

After a long painful silence, he whispered, “Bell.”

I found my throat to dry to speak after hours of silence, so I merely nodded. He still was not looking at me.

“This is not the time or the place that I wished to tell you this. But perhaps God led me here in order to grant me this opportunity to speak with you alone.”

I wet my lips, still silent.

“Bella,” he said again slowly. “Belle.” He repeated my name, like he was savoring the taste of it in his mouth. “You know that I love you.”

I forced words with difficulty. “Yes, my love.”

He took a deep breath and blew it slowly through his nose. “As long as I have known you, I have loved you, and I spent my whole childhood thinking I knew you were the one I was destined to be with forever. I was so sure I was going to marry you, and that you would bring me all the happiness I had ever wanted in life.” Here he paused, hesitant. “But now that we have been reunited, and now that we are old enough that the prospect of marriage and a life together is no longer a childhood fantasy but instead a very real prospect, I have come to realize that my love for you is not what I once thought. It is no more than the naïve, childish infatuation it has always been, and I see now that it can never be anything but that. There are some girls that men can marry, and some they only love. And as much as I love you…” He tried to look me in the eyes, but couldn’t bear it and quickly dropped his gaze to his own hands, folded in his lap to still their trembling. “I’m sorry Bella. I’m breaking off our engagement. When we are free from here tonight, I want you to go. I’ll send a guard with you to see that you are delivered safely to wherever you choose. He will protect you with his life. You will be safe with him.” Here he paused, and his next words were slow and soft. “I wish you all the happiness in the world…but I hope that we do not see each other again.”

I had never imagined this moment, never prepared myself for a speech such as this. But even if I had, my wildest imagination could not have begun to compare to the true agony of this heartbreak. Even the pain of thinking him dead could not compare to this. Because now, though he stood alive and breathing before me, I could not have him. Everything inside of me was crumbling, falling, breaking, every dream I had ever had, every hope for happiness shattered, and the exquisite picture of the future I had always envisioned and always been sure would be mine was fading back into the mist of childish fantasy.

I was trembling. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t cry, I could only stare at him. Eyes still downcast, He reached out to take my hand through the bars, but I pulled it away sharply. “Don’t touch me,” I snapped.

He looked away, uncomfortable. “Come on love, don’t—”

“Don’t call me that!” I burst out furiously. “How dare you. All these years, all this time, and every word of it has been a lie! I gave you everything I had; my soul, my heart, my love. You are my second self, and if I have ever been sure of one thing in my life it is that I love you more than any other human being who has ever lived, and that you are the only man I could ever love. Those years I spent in America, even though I thought you dead, I knew that I could never love another as much as I loved you, and if I could not have you then I would die alone. Yet now it seems that all this time I’ve loved a man who didn’t exist, because the Prince I loved would never leave me like this.”

He met my eyes awkwardly, and a weighted silence hung between us for a long while, until he broke it with a soft, “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head, the sharp motion releasing the tears from my eyes. “You’re a bastard.”

He nodded. “I know.” He reached out and squeezed my hand gently one last time, then stood and walked away slowly, back to the window of his cell, and stared out.

I watched him for a long moment, then dropped my head in despair, muffling my sobs in my knees drawn up to my chest so he could not hear me cry.

When darkness finally fell, the men were ready. Upon their instruction, the Prince and I retreated to the corners of our cells farthest from the wall, turning our heads away and shielding our faces with our hands. There was an explosion, a flash of heat, a shower of stone, and when I opened my eyes the iron bars were twisted back and I could see a faint crescent moon through the newly formed hole in the stone wall.

The Prince climbed through first, and I followed. The gap was narrower on my side, and I struggled to climb through as my skirt snagged on the jagged iron fragments. I threw out a hand to steady myself, and someone grabbed it.

My heart jumped and my breath tangled in the lump in my throat. For some impossible reason, when I looked up, I thought see him there holding my hand again.

But it wasn’t my Prince. It was a dark haired man with crystal clear eyes who stared back at me somberly and whispered, “Hurry Princess.”

I stumbled the rest of the way through, my vision blurred by tears I had thought I had already cried. The dark haired man did not let go of my hand.

The Prince had already started running down through the shadowy meadow behind our prison, the two other men falling into step behind him. “Come on.”

I was ready to follow, but the dark haired man holding my hand pulled me the opposite direction. “There are horses this way, they will be faster. I’ll take the Princess with me.”

I wanted to say something, wanted to protest. I pulled in the opposite direction, towards the other men, but the dark haired man overpowered me and dragged me away. I turned, the moonlight scattering shadows across the retreating backs of my prince and his guards, hoping to see his face one last time. Perhaps if he simply looked in my eyes again, he would remember, and I would be back in his arms.

But he had already turned away, and our two paths, intertwined since childhood, the two paths I had been so sure were destined to remain side by side forever, separated for the last time, and I ran from the moonlight.