Lace Princess

"No. I'm not doing this Estelle." She had finished packing as soon as the final person left. My parents had put my younger sister to bed, and then slunk into their own bedroom shortly afterwards. Estelle's parents, after much begging and pleading, had left the house, believing that she would be spending the night at my home. But Estelle had other plans for us that night.

She groaned. "Do you want to marry that disgustingly evil Prince Henry?"

Sighing, I shook my head as she continue to pack away a number of clothes into two sacks that we had found buried within a chest that belonged to my mother. I was worried that we weren't going to get very far since we didn't have a lot of room to pack the things that we needed. And once my parents found out that were missing, they would send guards to search the whole time from top to bottom to find us. There weren't many places to hide in the town, unless we went outside of town, but I would never step foot out there.

I had no clue lie outside of the boundaries. My parents had never allowed me to even step out of the castle without any protection, and they had advised me to never go near the edge of town because thieves were always lurking behind every rock and tree. They had told me that the thieves would not care if I was a princess or not, they would steal whatever I had on my person, leaving me with nothing.

"Where are we even going to go? Do you have a plan?"

“Well…” She paused, making eye contact with me for only a second before turning back to the clothes in front of her. “We might just have to see where our feet take us.”

I shook my head, the anger inside of me rising. “No Estelle. We can’t just do that! I refuse to go with you if you haven’t thought about what we’re going to do and where exactly we’re going to go!” I tried to keep my voice down, but my anger would not let me. She had turned to face me with a frown on her face.

“I don’t want to go alone…” she whispered as she pulled one of the bags over her shoulder after wrapping a cloak around her shabby, colorless dress that she had changed into after we left the ball. “You know I’ve never been to town before, that’s the reason why I don’t know where we are going to go; I don’t know where anything is.” She knew that I hardly knew what was in the town, so I couldn’t help her come up with a decent plan that would get us away from the castle, away from my parents, and away from my horrible engagement to the evil prince.

I sighed. “All right Estelle. I’ll come with you, but I don’t want to.” I picked up the other bag and followed the now smiling Estelle out of my room. She looked around before leaving the room, making sure there was no one in the hall to stop us from actually leaving. I couldn’t believe we were going to do this. I’ve never left the castle without having anyone else with me.

“Sissy?” Both of us stopped in our tracks. We had managed to slip through the hallway and down a few of the steps, with the front door in our view. But my sister had found us. I turned to her. She was standing at the top of the steps, rubbing her tired eyes.

“What are you doing up?”

She yawned. “Where are you going?”

I paused, thinking of an explanation as quickly as I could. I couldn’t tell her the truth because she would run off to my parents and tell them where I was going. We wouldn’t get far. “We’re playing a game, that’s all. Now go back to bed.”

The answer seemed to satisfy her for she smiled down at us and walked back to her room where she would quickly fall back asleep. She would wake up thinking that the encounter was a dream, as she so often did. We ran down the rest of the stairs and to the front door. Estelle put her hand on the doorknob, looked over at me, and opened the door. We stepped out and smiled as we began our new adventure.


The town was different than I imagined. I always believed it to be a cozy little place with houses lined to the left and the right of a cobblestone road that ran straight through the town until it hit the border. But it wasn’t like that at all. The houses – the small, stone houses – were scattered around the land, and their sizes varied greatly. Each and every house, though, looked cute and comfortable. Few merchant shops were lined up on the dirt road; I guessed that most of them had gone on to another town. Only a small number of people were walking around at this time of night, and those that were walked quickly to their homes.

No one looked our way as we made our way down the road, looking all around us, hoping to find a place that we could stay for the night. I told Estelle that I didn’t want to travel at night because we had no idea what could be lurking in the dark. I just didn’t want anything to happen to us on our first night away from our homes.

On the outside of one of the buildings, a two story building that was larger than the rest, was a lit lantern. There was a wooden sign that was hanging above it, but I couldn’t tell what it said from the lack of proper lighting. “It looks like an inn,” Estelle said as she stopped in front of it.

I shrugged and opened the door. The main room, a vast and open space with chairs neatly stacked on top of large tables, was lit with many lanterns. There was only one woman that was sitting at one of the tables, and she looked as though she was about to fall asleep.

“Hello?”

She shot up with a start. “Oh, hello there!” she exclaimed with a cheery and loud voice. “What can I do for you two young ladies?” I was confused. Did she not recognize me to be the princess?

“Is this an inn?” I asked the woman. She nodded. “Do you have any rooms available?”

“Of course, dearies!” We smiled as she led us upstairs where all of the rooms were. Everything was quiet, and I assumed that the guests that were there were sleeping. After she unlocked the door, she told us that we could pay for the room in the morning since it was very late. We thanked her before throwing our stuff on the floor. I began laughing as we laid on the beds.

“I can’t believe that we did it. We ran away. We’re free!"