Once upon a time there was a Princess who wanted to fight the Dragon instead of being eaten by it, and this caused even more problems than you’d imagine.
Let’s not even begin to consider how angry this made her father, the King. He stomped around, ranted and raved and roared. He appealed to her better nature. He pointed to the high cost-of-acquisition for peasants. Nothing helped.
And don’t get me started on the reaction of her other father, the Other King. He was royally pissed; it was a bespoke level of pissed-off, the sort you could only get handmade from very snooty old businesses who put big signs in their windows saying things like “Anger Purveyors To Royalty Since 284 B.C.E.”
The knights attempted to dissuade the hell out of her. Sir Persephone, their leader, pointed out that she, herself, had begun training as a knight at the age of four, thirty years ago, and had considerable preparation for Draconic attack, whereas the Princess was only nineteen in the first place, and, as Sir Persephone pointed out, she had refused to learn to ride any way but sidesaddle, which was not practical; furthermore, while the Princess had a lovely haircut, those glorious flowing locks wouldn’t fit into any sort of helmet.
“Got to have a helmet, Princess,” said Persephone’s Sergeant-At-Arms, Daphne. “It’s hard to evade that first gout of flame, and if you don’t, you’ll want the armor. It can handle one, maybe two blasts of Dragon’s Breath, which is between one and two more than you’re going to live through, especially and particularly if it sets your hair on fire.”
The Princess replied that, as this was an enlightened kingdom, and she had studied extensively and been tutored by the very wise, she had been told that there was nothing she could not do, if she put her mind to it. The knights looked at each other uneasily, and it was Sir Guinevere who pointed out, “Really, the idea of that phrase has always been a general note on human potential, and less a specific formula for determining individual human capability for a specific instance of thing at a specific point in spacetime. It isn’t meant to cancel out out the roles of such things as practice, training, planning, and, in individual cases, inclination.”
But the Princess was, to put it simply, not going to be budged. Meeting in their private chambers, the King said to his husband, “She gets this from your side of the family, you know.”
The Other King replied, “I tried to offset that the best I could. The Royal Surrogate is notably both brilliant and practice, and has a family history of solid wisdom and practicality, whereas the both of us have a series of unfortunate congenital challenges due to severe inbreeding.”
The King looked at him sternly. “There’ll be no inbreeding here, sir.” At this rather charming reference to their first date, the Other King was disarmed. He sat heavily in his chair.
“Realistically, no-one wants to cement an alliance with us through the ancient method of matrimonial succession. The crops are only so-so, the peasantry exceptionally surly, and this castle is draftier than most. Why not let her fight the dragon? We can always adopt a successor. I mean, she’s our daughter and I love her, but she’s impetuous and brave and quirky. We thought that would serve her well, should she ever need to rescue the kingdom from some kind of enchantment, and that’s probably true; I’ve no doubt she’d make it past multiple puzzles and eventually gain the necessary magical components for fixing the situation. Those are specialized skills, which is sensible, given that we had the Knights to handle more combatative matters. In retrospect, we should have been more insistent in martial arts training anyway, but she was so very firm on learning the secret names of the trees and the song which summons the King of Eagles.”
“To be fair,” his husband replied, “that would be terribly useful against a wide variety of beasts. It’s not anyone’s fault that Dragons consider Eagles to be the perfect amuse-bouche. Realistically, you can’t know which dangers will befall a fairytale kingdom. I think we’re well set-up against Wicked Queens and Evil Fairy Godmothers, and the Seven Dwarves in the Wood have all moved to more gentrified neighborhoods here in the capital, where, indeed, their vegan smoothies are assuredly the finest in the land.”
“I prefer Snow White’s Artisanal Applesauce, myself.”
“Whatever. The point is, this is very sad, but inevitable, and so we should just continue drinking heavily.”
“Honestly, nothing in this conversation was going to stop me from doing that to begin with.”
So the Princess went out to fight the Dragon, which ate her and left, and the Kingdom mourned for a bit, and the Kings adopted several new heirs-apparent, attempting to train them in a variety of skills for a variety of different situations while developing reasonable rules of succession based on different contingencies, some of which were quite good, some of which were flawed, and they didn’t really figure those things out except through practical experience and the process of making some mistakes. Nobody automatically lived particularly happily or sadly ever after, but they tried to aim at happiness, and at least they put some thought into what they were doing, which is more than you can say for most fairytales.
All in all, you might as well consider reading this story to be time well-spent; even if you’re not satisfied now, the crucible of memory fires a fickle but inevitable spark. Given time, you’ll potentially realize that this there’s a homely little charm about this particular kingdom, and you might even want to read more in the future, and perhaps buy the author’s books. I’ll tell you right now, in the magical principality discussed above, a basilisk is on the way, and that’s going to cause no end of etiquette questions.
THE END, or, more precisely, AN ENDING.
___________
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
