“I’ve broken my soul!” wailed Egbert, looking left and right for a door in the wall. “I know it. I’ve broken my soul and I shall never be happy again!”
The egg had not, as a matter of fact, broken. On the other side of the wall was the garden of the King. And just behind the wall where Egbert had been boiling his soul sat the youngest and largest of the King’s daughters. She was not considered the most beautiful of princesses, but could be quite friendly when she wasn’t hungry. Having finished everything she had brought in her hamper for a little mid-morning picnic, she was looking around to make sure she hadn’t missed any of the food when a boiled egg plopped out of the sky onto her lap.
“How lovely!” she thought. “Daddy must have had one of the wizards put a spell on the birds here so they’d lay boiled eggs. Very useful.” She cracked the egg against the hamper handle, and peeled it. It was quite nicely cooked.
She heard someone shout “Oh!”
Looking up, she saw a shirtless man climb over the wall, carrying a salt shake. “Oh, alas!” she told him. “If I had known you were coming, I might have waited, A little salt would have been just the thing.”
“My…my soul!”
The princess raised her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
Egbert dropped into the garden, landing on his knees. “You have eaten my soul! I shall never be a whole man again!”
The princess looked him up and down. “Do you know? That’s quite the prettiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“The reverend was right.” Egbert could hardly believe his bad luck. “My soul was high, and low, and all over. And now it is in you.”
The princess clapped her hands. “And your soul is important to you? You say you won’t feel whole without it?”
“It’s priceless,” said Egbert, his mind on all his money, not to mention the rhubarb plants. “I could never buy such a soul again. Now I can never be happy.”
“I think you’d better come with me,” said the princess. Taking Egbert by one hand, she led him into the castle. Egbert paid no attention to where he was going; he hardly cared what happened to him now.
The princess walked right into the throne room where her father and mother were sitting. “This man is in love with me,” she told them. “He says I have captured his soul and he shall never be whole again without me.”
The King looked the shirtless man over. “Is this true?”
“Oh, my soul, my soul. I have no hope of ever getting it now.” Egbert noticed, all at once, that the man before him was wearing a crown, and sitting on a throne. Realizing where he must be, and remembering the respect that a good citizen needed to show the monarch, he pulled himself up straight.
“But at least, Your Majesty,” he told the King, “It is better that she should have my soul than Stanley. Or a goose.”
The princess applauded, but the King frowned. “This man talks like a fool!”
The queen reached over and patted his hand. “All men in love do, dear. I suppose we had best let them marry. Since it’s a matter of souls.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first fool I’ve added to the family through marriage,” the King muttered, quietly, so the Queen wouldn’t hear this. He looked to his youngest and largest daughter. “Are you sure this is what you want? I could find you a nice, clean Baron, or Earl.”
“Oh, they could never say such pretty things!” She turned and, taking both of Egbert’s hands, held them to her throat. “Would you like that? To stay here with me?”
Egbert brightened at once, at least facially. “That would be wonderful! I could always be near my soul, the only soul I ever had!” This was such a pretty thing to say that the Queen ordered a minstrel to write a song around it to be sung at the wedding.
Ah, wasn’t there just a wedding when Egbert and the princess were married, with even more food and drink than had been at the other! The princess and Egbert were very happy in a little castle of their own. If the princess sometimes suspected that her husband was nothing but a fool, her mother and her married sisters were always ready to assure her that all husbands were like that.
And to be sure, Egbert made the most loving husband. For, all other considerations aside, the princess had eaten his soul, for which he had paid every penny he had, plus those rhubarb plants. So he took very good care of her, all his days.
Blogsy Babbles 