Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

To his credit, Prince Justin swallowed my frankly ridiculous tale of prophecies and quests and the awakening of ancient evils and the rescuing of helpless damsels and hopeless princes whose happily ever afters I’d so rudely ruined with nary a hiccup. Although I guess if he is the sort of guy who thinks that catching a girl after she climbs nine tenths of the way out of a tower all by herself gives him the right to marry her, then I shouldn’t be so surprised.

“And this princess, she has been placed in an enchanted sleep, along with everyone and everything else that was in the castle at the time?” Justin asked, his brow furrowed.

“That’s the gist of it,” I replied solemnly.

“And there is an impenetrable wall of thorns surrounding the place that will surely kill us if we so much as prick a finger on them?”

“There was an impenetrable wall of thorns surrounding the place that will surely kill us if we so much as prick a finger on them. If it’s really been a hundred years, and I see no reason why the Book would have lied about that,” I’d told him about the Book, since he’d already seen me arguing with it, “then we should be able to pass right through no problem. It will be a piece of cake.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” Justin frowned, “but I gather it’s some kind of reference to the ease you expect to complete this task with.”

“You’re a sharp one,” I said with a little more approval and a little less sarcasm than I had intended.

“But from what you’ve told me so far, none of the other quests you have completed thus far have been anything less than spectacular displays of incompetency.”

“Hey!” I snapped, feeling much less well disposed towards him than I had a second ago.

“No offense, but you’re just, well, just an ordinary young woman, and your friends were just a farm boy and a hunter. It isn’t as if any of you had terribly much experience in these matters. Have any of you even been trained in proper sword play?”

I pursed my lips, but didn’t respond. I certainly hadn’t been. I didn’t yield my sword so much as flail wildly with it. Jack hadn’t been a while lot better than me, but at least his height gave him an extra foot of reach which gave him some advantage. Ezu hadn’t been bad, but Prince Justin was right. He’d spent his adult life hunting wolves and game, using axes and bows, not learning combat skills with knights and soldiers and warriors. And things certainly had gone a little off-script in each of our princess adventures thus far.

The last one had gone so badly that they had both left, leaving me all alone to try to complete this insurmountable task which has seemed hopeless enough with their help.

Prince Justin, even though he was sitting in front of my on the horse and couldn’t see my face, seemed to sense the grim mood that had washed over me with his words.

“But of course, you have me to help you now,” he said, his voice a little too loud and heroic to sound entirely natural. “I’ve been champion at every tourney I’ve attended since my sixteenth year. I can unseat a man from his horse with a single sword stroke, and I can shoot a falcon out of the sky with any bow. Even if we do meet with unexpected trouble, we will surely overcome it with ease.”

“And if your head fills with anymore hot air, we might float up into the sky like a hot air balloon and find the castle quicker by searching for it from above the forest,” I added, but if I was being perfectly honest with myself, I did feel a tiny bit better after his bragging. It would be a relief to know that I was at the very least in the company of someone who could flail a sword better than myself. Just in case the need arose. Which I was positive it wouldn’t.

Almost positive.

Mostly almost positive.

Pretty sure, anyways. Reasonably confident, I guess you could say.

“I have certainly never heard of any enchanted slumbering kingdom,” Justin was saying while I doubted. “But I do know a fair bit about the history if these parts, as part of my education. I know that in my great-great-grandfather’s time, there were four kingdoms in this region, while there are only three now. There was my kingdom, Cywith, of course, to the north; Alberny which lays south-east of Cywith with the river Wessen running between the two; Weissland in the south-west, that’s the country Ravena got her claws into; and Rosenberg, which was somewhere between the three and extended a little ways to the direct south, along the border of the Enchanted Forest. There is also Lorcastle further west. Weissland lays in the valley between the Enchanted Forest and the Dark Forest, and Lorcastle is west of the Dark forest. The history goes that Rosenberg fell, probably after some kind of drought or famine, or perhaps giant attacks, and the three remaining kingdoms absorbed its territory. I couldn’t tell you where Rosenberg had been, however. Perhaps if we were back at my castle, I could have dug out an old map from somewhere that might have it marked, but I couldn’t even guarantee that much. It was quite a long time ago.”

I thought about all the information Prince Justin had just thrown at me, mulling it over in my mind. Apart from the fact that there was apparently a lot more geography and politics going on in this world than I had realized, he hadn’t told me anymore than the Book had. Head north-east-ish, towards the eastern border of the Enchanted Forest, and hope that we’d get lucky.

A few minutes passed in silence while the noble steed trudged miserably through the woods, and I tried to think of anything else that we could do that might be helpful. Should I start going around asking woodland creatures for advice until I found one that talked? Should I go try to find some witches and intentionally piss them off so they’d turn me into a bird or something, thereby giving me the means to really fly up into the sky and see if I could see the abandoned castle from above? But what if I got turned into a frog instead? I didn’t suppose they’d really give me an option, would they? And how would I get changed back anyways?

“If you don’t mind my asking, why exactly did your friends leave, anyways?” Justin suddenly asked, breaking me out of my increasingly unhelpful reverie.

“Uh, what?” I stammered, taken aback by the question and still partially thinking about what life as a frog would be like.

“Those Jack and Erik fellows,” Justin said.

“Ezu,” I corrected, though my tongue seemed to have been transformed into a wad of dry cotton in my mouth.

“Right, of course. You weren’t terribly clear on that part of the story. If they have been helping you through so much and for so long, why did they suddenly abandon you know? Surely this is when you are in more need of aid.” He sounded genuinely confused, but then he had to go and ruin it by adding in an affectedly honorable tone, “certainly I would never do such a disgraceful thing to a lady like yourself.”

“I’m not going to marry you, Prince Justin,” I said firmly, and a bit too loudly. A few birds were startled out of a nearby tree.

“I wasn’t thinking about the subject in the slightest,” he lied in a tone of wounded pride.

I thought about Jack, how terribly he’d taken the news that his whole existence was contained in children’s stories from another time and place, how betrayed he had been by the fact that I’d known it all along and hadn’t bothered to tell him. I thought about Ezu, about finally being compelled to admit my feelings for him, feelings that had grown up out of weeks and months of struggling and fighting and laughing and battling together, against each other and alongside each other. And about how he had thrown all those feelings right back in my face. About how he had warned me he couldn’t return those feelings, ages ago, before I even had them. How I’d let myself develop them anyways, thinking that maybe he had been growing them too, and that maybe his stupid rules wouldn’t apply to me, after everything we’d been through. About how much it had hurt to find out I’d been wrong.

“Artistic differences,” I finally answered, coolly. “We wanted to take the band in different directions. Jack now goes by The Artist Formerly Known as Jack, and Ezu is going to be a judge on a popular singing competition reality show.”

Justin was silent for several long moments.

“You’re very strange,” he said eventually.

“Everyone’s a critic,” I replied with a weariness that I couldn’t quite keep out of my voice. “Anyways, we should probably stop to eat soon. And riding like this isn’t the most comfortable thing I’ve ever done. Actually, it’s got to be, what, almost two in the afternoon by now? I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of sleeping out in the open. I don’t think we’d reach the Rosenberg castle today even if we traveled all night, so I vote that we stop for the day, build ourselves come kind of shelter, eat something, and save our energy for tomorrow.”

Prince Justin shrugged. “I have to say I agree with you about not wanting to spend another night exposed to the elements. It’s beginning to get quite chilly in the night, even with a fire.”

“Last thing I need is to come this far and end up dead from exposure,” I said. Justin pulled his horse up short and we both slid off its back. Justin and I stood there awkwardly for a moment, without moving.

“Erm, do you actually know how to build a shelter in the woods out of… sticks and things?” Justin asked me, tentatively.

“Sure,” I replied, with way more confidence than I actually felt. “No problem! I’ve done this before!”

It was a lie, exactly. In sixth grade, I’d gone on a weekend field trip with my class to this sort of summer camp place up in a national forest near my hometown. One of the events the counselors did with us was lead us into the woods and tell us to get into group and build a shelter that would fit us all, out of anything we could find and in any way we wanted. The only condition was that it had to stand up to the counselors attempts to destroy it.

My group had claimed a fallen tree trunk that must have been about three feet tall laying on its side, and we collected the thickest branches and boughs we could find, leaning them up against the trunk at an angle to form a little crawl space. We filled out the gaps between the branches with moss and grass for insulation, and ended up with a pretty decent little shelter that only partially collapsed when the counselors gleefully jumped up and down on it.

Admittedly, it had actually ended up only big enough for one person to fit inside of comfortable, and it had been full of pincher bugs that we hadn’t realized had been living underneath the fallen tree, so the one person who crawled inside soon came hurtling out, shrieking and covered in bugs.

I wasn’t claiming that my one attempt at creating a survival shelter when I was eleven made me Frank Lloyd Wright or anything, but at least I did have something to work with, and the knowledge that here was something I wasn’t totally and completely inexperienced in. If worst came to worst, I was sure I could recreate that little shelter, at the very least.

I instructed Justin to prep a site for a campfire and to work on getting us fed while I focused on the shelter. Unfortunately for me there were no conveniently fallen trees around this time, so I had to try to figure something else out. I gathered as many large branches together as I could, ones that were several feet long and as thick around as my wrist. It wasn’t hard to find them, it was an old forest with large trees, and the limbs they shed were not skimpy. At first I tried leaning them up against each other, in a triangle shape. That obviously didn’t work out some sort of method of tying them together though, and halfway through that attempt I realized I had no rope or string or anything of the sort. I found myself wishing I’d thought to bring some of the corset laces with me from Rapunzel’s tower.

I tried balancing them all up in a teepee shape next, but ran into the same problem, unable to keep them upright reliably without being tied. I knew there was a way to make rope out of grasses and things, but damned if I actually had any idea of how to do that.

I thought briefly about digging a hole in the ground a few feet deep that we could lay in, covering the top with the branches and some moss to keep the warmth in. It wasn’t a bad idea, but after I spent about fifteen minutes digging in the earthy forest floor with one of the sticks, I realized it would take way too long to get a big enough hole prepared for that method to really be practical.

I spent the next half hour walking in circles, sizing up various trees. The only real option was to lean the sticks I’d collected up against a standing tree trunk, in much the same way I’d built that original fort all those years ago. Trouble was, while these trees were certainly old and impressively wide around, they still didn’t provide quite enough width to make a shelter that could encompass both myself and Justin comfortably. Unfortunately, it didn’t look as if there were any other choices, and Justin had begun to cast looks in my direction that made it clear he was rapidly losing confidence in my woodsman abilities. It probably had something to do with the quarter of an hour I spent digging half a hole with a stick for no apparent reason.

With renewed vigor, I set to work, trying to make it look like I knew what I was doing. Justin wandered off, not so far that we ever lost sight of each other, and began fiddling around in some dark leaved bushes nearby.

I chose the tree with the widest diameter, cleared away a wide space around its base, and propped up my sticks, setting them at a wide angle so that maybe, if we really crammed ourselves in there, the both of us could lie down side by side. I thought about making two shelters, one for him and one for me, and even set about trying it that was at first. I ran out of enough suitable sticks pretty quickly though, and had to resign myself to the fact that if I wanted to make the best possible shelter, I’d have to tolerate getting uncomfortably cozy with Justin for at least tonight. It was probably for the best, what with sharing body heat and all that, but I doubted it would help in my attempts to convince him that I was not on the market for marriage. Well, if he used the forced quality time to try to talk me into how great a husband he’d be, I’d just cut my losses on sleeping under cover and curl up next to the horse for the night.

Once my sticks were up, as close together as I could manage, I stomped the ends of them into the dirt a little to secure them in place as best I could. The ones of the end were a little splayed outward, which I’d had no choice but doing to keep them from rolling away along the curve of the tree trunk. That created some larger gaps on either side of the shelter, but it wasn’t so bad. I could fill them. I wandered around, gather moss and handfuls of wild grasses which I packed into the narrowest gaps between the sticks. Then I pulled some low hanging branches out of the trees, the ones that had the most leaves on them, and covered the rest of the sticks with them until the entire thing was just a blanket of green leaves. Not a single gap could be seen, and I stepped back and observed my work with pride.

When I crawled inside, having to go on my belly like an army crawl, I was dismayed to find that there was even less room inside than I’d expected, but as long as Justin and I lay perfectly still side by side for the entire night, we might not knock the entire structure down on our own heads before morning. I thought about my tendency to thrash around in my sleep, and decided I wouldn’t mention this to Justin. Still, the interior was bug free and almost cozy, and I could already tell that while it might not ever be able to be considered “warm” inside, it would certainly be more comfortable than sleeping out in the completely open air. I pulled down some more branches, stripping them of the leaves, and tried to lay out as thick a pile of leaves as I could on the ground inside, to create a slightly softer more comfortable area to lay. It wasn’t anything close to Rapunzel’s feather bed, which I was almost beginning to miss, but I had to say, it wasn’t half bad.

I finally wiggled my way out, and beamed at my handiwork. Prince Justin came up beside me, and stared at it with a concerned expression.

“Is that it?” he asked, sounding plainly disappointed.

“Hey!” I said indignantly, turning to him. “I spent ages on that! It’s really good! We can both fit inside, probably,” the ‘probably’ may or may not have been hidden in a feigned cough, “and it’ll be considerably less cold in there than it will out here. That’s a grade A stick hut you’ve got right there, considering what I had to work with! But if you think you can do better, go right ahead.” I stood there and crossed my arms, but Justin didn’t move. He put his hands up defensively, and had the good grace to look abashed.

“No, no, it’s perfectly fine. I’m sure it will get us through the night comfortably. You’ve been working for almost two hours now though, you should probably come and eat something. There isn’t much, I’m afraid, I’ve already eaten most of my own provisions. I found some blackberry bushes nearby though and was able to collect quite a few that the birds haven’t got to yet.”

Prince Justin had a little more food than I did, but not by much. I pulled out my own loaf of bread from my pack and split it between us, really hoping that we came across Sleeping Beauty’s castle tomorrow or the next day, because I wasn’t sure how we would manage to keep from starving to death if it took any longer than that. It was funny, I hadn’t worried so much about things like eating and shelter when Jack and Ezu had been with me. I wasn’t sure if it had been because I’d been relying on them to figure those things out, or if I’d just been more confident in our ability to get what we needed to survive as a team. Now that it was just me, even with Prince Justin as an unlikely companion, I was suddenly feeling a lot more pressure. It was like waking up one day and suddenly realizing you had to do your taxes all by yourself for the first time, and they were due tomorrow.

I ate stale bread and berries and thought about what was going to happen now, while I stared blankly into the unlit campfire Justin had built. It wasn’t as well made as Ezu’s had been, but he obviously knew how to create one that wouldn’t burn out too quickly. And I’d gotten pretty darn good at lighting fires with just two sticks and some dry leaves, though that wasn’t really an issue since Justin had a tinderbox. We didn’t need to light the fire yet, but the sun was beginning to sink steadily in the sky, and evening wasn’t far off now.

The trees here weren’t crowded so closely together that their foliage completely blocked the sky, so we could see patches of blue overhead, and the occasional passage of a fluffy white cloud. We sat there in silence, eating and ignoring the awkward silence that fills the empty spaces between conversation that you get when you’re spending time with someone you don’t know very well, and a sudden shadow passed over us, so quickly that it was already gone by the time I looked up in confusion.

“Did you see that?” Prince Justin asked, nearly dropping the heel of bread he held.

“No, what was it?” I replied quickly, my hand jumping to the hilt of my short sword.

“I… I’m not sure. I didn’t really see it. It passed overhead too fast, I just caught a glimpse of it.” He was squinting up at the sky, craning his neck as if he might spot it again in the clear blue sky above.

“A glimpse of what?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he insisted. “I have no idea. It was something flying over us, I think.”

“Like a bird?”

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound too certain. “It might have been too big to be a bird.”

“Like how big?”

“I don’t know,” he said, starting to sound frustrated. “Like I said, I barely saw it. I just saw a dark flash pass over us out of the corner of my eye, I wasn’t even really looking. But it seemed big. It had to have been big, to block out the light like that.”

“Well, what could it have been?” I asked.

Justin gave me an incredulous look. “How should I know?”

“Well, you’ve lived your whole life around this forest. Shouldn’t you know what kind of things live in it?” I pointed out.

“I mean, I could make some guesses, but that is all they would be—guesses. It could have been a lot of different things.”

“Well, what’s the best case scenario, and the worst case scenario?”

“Best case scenario? A really big goose or something. Worst case? A dragon.”

I shuddered. “Seriously? A dragon? Dragons are real?”

Again, Justin looked at me as if he couldn’t quite decide whether I was intentionally screwing with him, or just stupid. “Yes, of course they are real. They are fairly rare, especially these days. They have been hunted nearly out of existence, and since they only breed once every few hundred years, they had a hard enough time keeping their population up even in the old days.”

As terrifying as the prospect of potentially having to fight a dragon sounded, the animal lover and environmentalist in me reared its head at Justin’s words. I had to remind myself that this was a fairy tale world, and before I started championing anti-dragon cruelty causes, it would be wise to learn a little more about the creatures first.

“What are dragons like, exactly? I asked, cautiously.

“Highly unpleasant,” was Justin’s response. “They terrorizing towns, pillage kingdoms for treasure, burn down farms and cities, steal cattle and occasionally princesses, and are generally arrogant to the point of being obnoxious, on top of all the plundering and murder.”

“Ah,” I said. “They don’t sound very nice.”

“Indeed not,” Justin agreed. “Though I can’t say I’ve ever met one face to face myself, but there was a dragon who became a serious problem for a while in my kingdom when my father had only recently ascended to the throne, before I was born. Sometimes you can bribe the creatures off, which is what he tried initially since antagonizing a dragon is a risky business. It didn’t go well, and it took a half dozen knights to chase it out of the kingdom.”

“They didn’t kill it?” I asked, worriedly.

“They have to land to be able to kill them with a sword, and I don’t think my father had sent any archers with the knights. Someone should have thought of that, but knights have such a long history of battling dragons that sometimes tradition replaces common sense. The dragon just wouldn’t land, but it couldn’t keep that up indefinitely, so it had to fly away eventually, and it never came back. My father and everyone else just presumed it found some other kingdom to terrorize,” he finished with a shrug.

“Or it came here, to the Enchanted Forest,” I replied darkly. Justin shifted uncomfortably where he sat, and glanced back up at the sky again.

“Or it could have come here,” he agreed.

We finished our meager dinners in silence, both of us watching the skies uneasily.