Monday Morning Breakfast was the best time of the week for Queen Azalea and King Basso. Their children slept late, no guests came to bother them, and no alarming surprises awaited. Muffins and the morning mail: it made for really a peaceful meal.
So Queen Azalea was unpleasantly surprised when her husband leapt from his chair, waving a letter and shouting something she couldn’t make out, his mouth being full of muffin and marmalade.
“What is it, dear?” she inquired. “Do sit down before you choke.”
“King Rodney of Deljoley had a plague of dragons at his castle!” the king shouted, coming back to his chair.
The queen reached for another muffin. “That is bad news. Does he need your army to come and help?”
“I don’t think so, Madame. I do not think so.” He shook the letter and then brought it back to his nose, so he could study it some more. (He had mislaid his glasses again.) “Some prince or another…here it is…Prince Gloxx of Gloxinia slew all the dragons, but not before one of them trapped Princess Aster in her tower. Rodney writes, ‘Unlike any of your daughters, Aster had a very close shave.’ Bah!”
The King threw the letter down. “Well, to be sure,” the queen said, “It’s only a little joke.” She picked up the letter and touched one corner of it to a candle on the table. Then she set it on a silver tray and let it burn up.
“Little joke!” cried King Basso. “Little joke! I’d like to take the army over there and give HIM a close shave!” Jumping up again he drew his sword and waved it above his head. In doing so, he stepped on one end of the scabbard and had to put his free hand flat in the butter dish to keep from falling.
“King Rodney had never good taste in jokes,” Queen Azalea told him. “It should be fairly easy, I think, simply to ignore this letter.” She was calming him down. Sometimes she felt she had spent her whole marriage calming him down.
“I should march them over there and just cut his head and his toes right off,” grumbled King Basso, licking butter from his fingers. “Not that I’m the sort of father to be offended by foolish jokes about my daughters. Why should I be ashamed of daughters who are unique? Other kings and queens have children as alike as the faces on cards. OUR daughters are different.”
“They are ladies to be proud of,” Queen Azalea agreed. “They won that volleyball trophy against….”
“MY daughters stand out from those nobidodies,” said the King, around the buttery thub in his mouth. “Not that they’re freaks, you understand. You couldn’t tell them apart from the most beautiful princesses in the world. They look quite like any beautiful princess, at their best. Nobody could say that OUR daughters are so different that….”
“Do you want that last muffin?” asked the queen.
King Basso put a hand out for it, but stopped. “Do I have very many appointments this morning?”
Queen Azalea ran a long finger down the morning agenda the royal chamberlain had brought in. “Six men are waiting in the throneroom to be interviewed.”
“Ah!” The king rubbed his hands together. “Any royal barbers?”
She shook her head. “Only princes. Two of them are named Jack, though, so there may be hope.”
“Pooh,” said the king. “Pooh pooh pooh. You take the muffin, Madame: I’ll go and get this over with. Sox, eh? That’s Monday through Saturday then. Have the chamberlain put out that ‘No More Princes Needed This Week’ sign. Are you sure you gave him my proclamation about royal barbers?”
The queen took up the muffin and reached for the marmalade. “Yes, I did.”
The King stood up. “It isn’t the price of the razor blades I mind. It’s the unexpectedenesses of the thing. Why must they be so hairy?”
“I quite agree,” Queen Azalea told him. “It must be some kind of curse.”
“Nonsense!” he snapped, striding from the breakfast room. “They’re not THAT hairy: not MY daughters!”
Azalea and Basso had been blessed with five daughters who showed every promise of turning into exactly the princesses any well-appointed royal family ought to have. Each had eyes like twin bright stars, lips like matched rubies, and long beautiful hair so red and bright that when they stood in a row, they looked like a necklace of bonfires.
The problem was that there was so MUCH hair. Every morning, when they awoke, their eyebrows hung nearly to their cheeks. Their arms were so hairy they seemed to be wearing long red gloves. And no other woman of good family had a mustache or beard. Queen Azalea was really quite vexed by this: it had never happened in HER family. But she did not mention this to her husband, who would have roared and grumbled.
The princesses would shave every morning (and it took nearly the whole morning, too) until they looked proper. The hair would grow back, as beards and mustaches do, just a little bit by bedtime. But when the princesses rose the next morning, each had a full mustache and a beard nearly to her waist.
King Basso hired barber after barber, hoping there was some secret known to professional shavers which would help his daughters. But the hair kept growing back. Anyway, none of the barbers was quite suitable. Old barbers were too rough: they weren’t used to shaving princesses. And young barbers fell in love with the princesses, and had to be chased away. After all, when properly shaved, the princesses were quite lovely, and could do better than to marry a mere barber. (The princesses had been named by their father: Dainty, Delicate, Demure, Delightful, and Darling. Queen Azalea thought these were quite sickly names, enough to make anybody grow a beard in self-defense. But King Basso was a second cousin to Prince Charming, so terrible names were a family tradition.)
The princesses showed no sign of growing out of this as they got older. King Basso finally offered a huge reward to any prince who could watch at night and find out anything about what was happening. He offered the same amount of gold to any barber who could come up with an answer, but by this time, every barber in the country had tried and failed.
Princes flocked to King Basso’s castle, each hoping to score the gold and perhaps a chance to marry one of the princesses. King Basso arranged for one prince to do the watching each night from Monday to Saturday.
“All right, all right,” he said this Monday, as he did every Monday, to the princes who clustered around him, recounting giants slain or wolves caught in sheep’s clothing. “You’ll each get your turn.”
As there were exactly six princes this morning, the matter was not complex. “I have six marbles in this bag,” the King announced. “Each a different color. The prince who draws the blue marble watches tonight. The green marble means Tuesday night, and the other colors are for other days. You see how it works, don’t you? Step up, laddoes. “You’re Prince Jack of Lostles, aren’t you? Take a marble, Prince Jack.”
The blue marble was drawn by the other Prince Jack, Prince Jack of Solinin. “The rest of you can all go home,” he said. “I’ll break this curse, Your Majesty.”
“That’s the kind of spirit I like to see in a prince,” said the King. “Now, let’s step over to the Royal Dining Room, and the chamberlain will assign you your seats for lunch.”
King Basso had to eat with the princes because, after all, they were princes. “And they always grab for the pie first,” he grumbled to Queen Azalea that night. “And I have to let them have it because I’m such a gracious host.”
“They’re active young men,” his wife told him, “And need to keep their strength up. You’re growing a trifle pudgy anyway.”
“Pudgy? Getting pudgy? Nonsense: not on the amount of pie I get. I’m as thin as ever I was when I was a prince. In any case, who wants to be that thin? That’s why young men look so…so terribly young. I have the figure of a wise, elder statesman. I don’t look like any prince.”
“Of course, you do not,” the queen told him. “Don’t trip on the cat when you put out the candles.”
The next morning, five princes at breakfast with King Basso, Queen Azalea., and five princesses with long, swinging beards. “Well, now,” said the king, eyeing Prince Dalma, who had taken the last muffin on the plate. “Whose turn is it tonight?”
On Wednesday morning, four princes joined them for breakfast. On Thursday three. On Sunday morning, Dainty, Delicate, Demure, Delightful, and Darling had mustaches to their elbows, and the princes had all disappeared.
King Basso did not approve of princes working on Sunday night, and the princesses were allowed to sleep late Monday morning. So Azalea and Basso had their quiet Monday breakfast, and the king got his fair share of muffins.
“There are eight princes waiting for you today,” the queen said, when they finished. “You’ll need to tell two of them to wait in the village.”
“I have a good mind to send them all home,” grumbled King Basso. “They’re grabbing all the pie and doing us no good.”
The queen folded her hands. “We could invite heroes and warriors instead, of course. But I understand they eat even more than princes. Some day we’re bound to find the right prince, dear.”
The King’s lower lip stuck out. “But it’s rhubarb meringue pie this week. Anyway, what do we need them for? I was a hero once, AND a prince. I could do it. I slew that dragon for you, remember?”
“How could I forget, dear?” the queen replied. “You put that big painting of it in the throneroom. You were quite heroic. Of course, you DID have that helmet of invisibility.”
“The dragon could have killed me all the same,” King Basso declared, shaking the marmalade knife at her. “If he’d breathed fire at me, you know, or…or stepped on me. It took a real prince with brains, and courage, and strength to beat a dragon. I wonder if I still have that helmet of invisibility.”
“It’s probably at the back of the Treasury, with all that other lumber,” Azalea told him. “I don’t see how it would help. Nine of the princes who stayed here had helmets of invisibility, too, and they never came back after spending the night. Unless they were invisible.”
“They didn’t have MY helmet of invisibility,” said the king, putting the marmalade knife down with the marmalade spoon. “I need to find that: it was the best of all helmets of invisibility. Anybody could win if he was wearing that.”
“Will you lend it to just one prince, then?” the queen inquired, picking up a few large muffin crumbs. “That hardly seems fair.”
“I shall wear it,” King Basso informed her. “Why should MY daughters have to put up with all these gluttonarious princes? And I won’t have people like King Rodney saying the kinds of things he’d say about princesses who have a different man in their bedroom every night of the week.”
“What will he say if the king disappears because he was so stubborn?” his wife inquired. But Basso had gone up to the Treasury.
The princes were delighted at the King’s decision. Usually, on retiring for the evening, they had to go right to bed and stay there, lest a prince see them walking around in their nightgowns. Now they could stay up later, playing cards with their father. They let him win a few games when he got huffy.
Finally, though, they all said their prayers and climbed into their beds. “Good night, Daddy!” called Princess Delightful. “Don’t let the hair Fairies bite!”
“I won’t,” King Basso promised. He put on his helmet of invisibility, drew his royal sword, and sat down in the big armchair usually reserved for a guardian prince.
The night proved to be dark and long. King Basso had to poke himself in the foot with the sword now and again to keep from falling asleep. “Hurry up, hair Fairies, or whatever you are,” he muttered. “Heroes can’t wait forever.”
He had no sooner mentioned this than he heard a jingling sound, as of a dozen little silver bells. In the middle of the wall to the king’s left, he saw a door which had certainly never been there before.
At the same time, the sound of rustling cloth reached his ears. The draperies around each princess’s bed were drawn back. Elegant little feet slid out into elegant little slippers.
“Where are you going?” demanded King Basso, rising to his less elegant feet.
The princesses did not reply; their eyes were closed. The mysterious door swung open. Each princess walked slowly to and through it.
“What’s going on?” King Basso demanded shaking the arm of Princess Demure.
When she didn’t answer, he paused, tapping his helmet of invisibility to make sure it was still on his head. Then he hurried after the last of his daughters. The door slammed shut just as he stepped inside.
Blogsy Babbles 