“You do realize I’m the queen.”
He grinned, winking. “Oh yeah, I do. Listen, what are you doing tonight? Maybe you and I could go out. On a date.”
“Yuck.”
“Okay, some other time, then. Is this about the snake? Still haven’t found it.”
The queen shook her head and pointed to Snow White’s bedroom. “There is a wild animal in there. I need you to capture it, take it outside the village, and leave it in the meadow near the dark forest in the next kingdom. You’ll need to do it before sunset. It’s very important that you leave it in the middle of the meadow, directly in the sunlight.”
“Got it. Dark forest. Midnight. Kill it.”
“No!” The queen rubbed her forehead. The huntsman was like a headache in human form. “Meadow. Sunlight. Leave it.”
“Okay!”
“I want you to repeat it back to me.”
“Leave the sunlight in the meadow.”
“No,” the queen said, gritting her teeth. “How can you leave sunlight in a meadow? Take the creature to the meadow and leave it in the sunlight.”
The huntsman groaned. “This is getting boring. I got it.”
The queen pointed to a large bag made of thick, rough fabric. “Capture the animal and tie it up in that bag.” Then the queen held out a strip of black cloth. “And you need to do it blindfolded.”
The huntsman frowned at the blindfold, then looked warily from side to side. “Is this a trick? Am I being pranked?” He clapped his hands and bounced up and down on his massive, clunky feet. “No! It’s a surprise party! I always wanted a surprise party! Every year I tell my friends they’d better throw me a surprise party or I’ll beat them up. Then I punch them to make sure they understand.” He paused, frowning. “And then by the time my birthday comes around, I don’t have any friends. It’s weird.”
“No parties. You simply can’t look at the creature. It’s too dangerous. Can you do this or not?”
“Do you dare me to?”
The queen was beginning to seriously question her choice to use the huntsman. But she didn’t have any other options. “Yes,” she said, sighing heavily. “I dare you.”
The huntsman was a little disappointed that it wasn’t a party, but he loved a good dare. It was actually his greatest flaw: He was unable to refuse a dare. Because of this, the huntsman had only three remaining toes, no hair, and had not been able to taste anything for the last five years due to an incident with an industrial-size jar of ghost peppers. He also had an unfortunate tattoo on his arm that said LOVE MOME FORVER. When asked, he usually lied and said Mome Forver was his girlfriend. In truth, he just really loved his mom and had picked a terrible tattoo artist. (Another reason spelling matters.)
The queen tied the blindfold around his eyes as tightly as she could. Then she stuffed garlic in all his pockets. Finally, she shoved cotton into his ears so he couldn’t hear anything.
“THIS IS THE WEIRDEST JOB I’VE EVER HAD,” he shouted.
She ignored him. Taking a deep breath, she dragged aside the furniture, opened the door, and pushed him inside. Then she slammed the door shut and locked it again. There were some bumps, a few curses, and a terrible hiss and shriek.
“DONE!” the huntsman said, banging triumphantly on the door.
Relief wilted the queen like an old piece of lettuce. This was not the way she had wanted things to go. All her hard work and sacrifice! All that time spent looking in a mirror! Even sending away poor Jack.
But a stepmother had to do what a stepmother had to do. She squared her shoulders, opened the door, and let the huntsman out. The shape of poor Snow White wriggled in the bag, letting out inhuman shrieks.
The queen put one hand on the bag, a single tear in her eyes. But the queen couldn’t let Snow White be the fairest in the land. It had to be done.
She pulled the blindfold off the huntsman.
“WHAT DO I DO NOW?” HE SHOUTED, BECAUSE HE COULDN’T HEAR ANYTHING AND DIDN’T REALIZE THE QUEEN COULD HEAR PERFECTLY WELL. THIS IS WHAT YOU DO, TOO, WHEN YOU HAVE HEADPHONES ON AND FORGET NO ONE ELSE DOES. SEE HOW ANNOYING IT IS?
Sighing in exasperation, the queen grabbed a quill and ink and scribbled instructions as quickly as she could. They were running out of time.
“Do not look at the creature. Do not listen to the creature. Take the bag to the meadow. Untie it and leave it in the sun.”
The huntsman took the note and nodded, smiling big to show off several chipped and missing teeth. He really did need to learn how to say no to dares. He also really, really needed to learn how to read. But he was too embarrassed to tell that to the pretty queen. So he took the note, slung the bag over his shoulder, and set off.
The queen stood in her tower, silently crying. Her time as queen was over. She’d go to the next kingdom and resume her work there. At least there was still some good she could do for others. She watched out the window as the huntsman carried Snow White out of the village and out of her life forever.
Or so she thought.
Once upon the same time, in the other castle we saw at the beginning of the book—the one with a tower—a king and a queen had a rather musical problem.
They sat together on matching thrones. They were wrapped in silk and fur and dripping with jewels. Even though no one was there to see them, they acted very royal. Their spines were as straight as rulers because, as rulers, their spines could not possibly be any other way.
“How are we ever going to marry off our son? There aren’t any good princesses anymore,” the king said with a scowl.
“Back in my day,” the queen said, holding a perfumed handkerchief beneath her nose because even the air wasn’t fancy enough for her, “princesses were serious, proper things. Nowadays they’re all insane.”
“You can’t get through a single conversation with them before they break into song!”
The queen nodded. “Just the other day I was trying to talk to a princess and she started singing midsentence! She kept pausing, like I should join in. How would I possibly know what to sing back? How does she even know the words? I had her thrown in the dungeon.”
“As well you should have, my queen. I refuse to run a kingdom where everyone has to constantly be ready to break into a musical number. Think of the cost! All the lost hours of work. The shoes worn out by elaborate dance routines. Not to mention the voice lessons we’d have to buy. No singing princesses for us. I want a good old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill, needlework-loving princess.”
“I want her to be stuffy and uptight. No enormous, sparkling eyes and exuberance for life. She should be frequently ill, look as though she always has a bad taste in her mouth, and be extremely delicate to the point of ridiculousness.”
The king sighed, patting his large, velvet-clad belly. “Where will we find such a creature?”
“We should have a test. Perhaps some sort of obstacle course, and whichever princess throws the most proper tantrum over being asked to perform physical labor wins.” The queen sighed, rubbing the deep, dark circles beneath her eyes. “I can’t think of anything else. I’m too tired. There was a cricket outside last night, so I couldn’t sleep.”
“I didn’t hear a cricket.”
“Neither did I, but I was sure that somewhere out there a cricket was making noise, and it bothered me so much I didn’t get any rest. You know how difficult it is for me to sleep.”
It was true. She needed a mattress made from precisely 10,000 feathers of newborn geese. If the geese were teenagers, or there were 9,999 feathers, she could not sleep.
The room had to be exactly the temperature of a jellied eel dish. However, not one of the servants could decide at what temperature jellied eel could possibly taste good. So they had to constantly bring in ice and remove it, stoke the fire and smother it, and finally employ several handmaidens to sit at her bedside and gently blow on her face all night long. The handmaidens, of course, were permitted to eat nothing but honey so that their breath wasn’t offensive.
“My queen, I know what we should do! A true princess, one as royal as you, will be an equally sensitive sleeper. We shall invite them, one by one, to spend the night in our castle. And beneath their mattress we will place a single pea.”
The queen gasped in horror. “Why, I won’t be able to sleep for a week just imagining the discomfort!”
“Precisely! So if the princess comes out in the morning refreshed and alert, we’ll know she’s not a true enough princess for us.”
The queen nodded, pinched eyes shining beneath her enormous crown. “And if she’s exhausted and has not slept, we’ll immediately marry her to our son!”
The king suddenly looked nervous. He darted his eyes around the imposing throne room, with its soaring ceilings and gold-trimmed pillars. Everything in there was fancy and breakable and flammable. It felt like a museum. It had not been a very fun place for the prince to grow up. And, even worse, every time the prince tried to sing a song about it, he was sent back to his tower. He had stopped singing, but ever since the unfortunate escape, they never let him out at all.
“Where is our son?” the king asked, sweat beading on his wrinkled forehead.
The queen jingled a large ring of keys fastened to the gold belt around her waist. “Don’t worry. We’re safe. There’s no reason to consult him. We’ll surprise him when we’ve found him the perfect wife.”
(In fact, the poor prince does not appear in this story at all. Which, given that it is entirely about finding him a wife, is rather mysterious, isn’t it? Why do they keep him in that tower? Hmmm …)
The king sighed with relief, snatching the queen’s nose handkerchief to wipe his brow. She pulled another out of her dress, glaring at him. “Now that one will need to be burned.”
They both cringed at the word burned, then cleared their throats and stared royally at nothing. It was their greatest skill as rulers.
The first princess arrived on a Tuesday.
Tuesdays are the most disagreeable day of the week. Fridays are always welcome. They’re like your friend who has the best jokes and shares treats at lunch. Thursdays try to overcompensate to get you to like them more than Fridays. Their jokes are never as good as Fridays’, but at least they try. Saturdays and Sundays are like your favorite cousins who come to stay and there’s a sleepover and everything is super fun. Mondays are like your mom after your cousins leave. She’s tired and cranky because the whole house is a mess, but at least you had a good time. And Wednesdays squat in the middle, balancing everything, ready to tip from the dull beginning of the week into the inevitable slide into the weekend.
But Tuesdays! Tuesdays are the bullies of the week. Last weekend is a distant memory; next weekend is still too far away to look forward to. And if everyone is still tired from Monday? Tuesday doesn’t care! Tuesday will kick you right in the stomach and laugh all the way until next week, when it does it again.
The queen, being very disagreeable herself, felt a special kinship with Tuesdays. She thought it appropriate that the princess chose that day to arrive, and took it as a very good sign.
The princess was small, with a pointed nose and squinty eyes. She resembled a rat who had been dressed in brown silk and weighed down with gold. But at least she was like a normal rat and not an albino one, so her eyes weren’t red. This isn’t as scary as Snow White’s story. I’m glad.
While the princess was eating supper—and complaining about every course, a fact that filled the king and queen with hope—the king took their new servant boy, Jack, aside.
“You’ve prepared the room?”
“Yup.”
“And the pea? You didn’t forget the pea.”
Jack nodded with a pained look on his face. “I took care of that. But I still don’t understand why you wanted me to do it.”
The king sniffed haughtily. “Of course you wouldn’t understand. Which is why you are a servant and I am the king. Now go and make the pease porridge for the rest of the servants to eat. You can eat the scraps from the princess’s plate.”
“What kind of porridge??” Jack asked.
“Pease porridge! It’s the least we can do for our servants. No, really, it’s the very least we can do to keep them alive.”
Jack shrugged and did as he was told. This whole job thing was weird. He didn’t much like it, but it was better than being shoved in a well.
After dinner, the king and the queen sat in the library with the princess. She complained about the journey from her kingdom.
She complained about the height and width of the stairs to the castle, which she felt were several centimeters from what the ideal height and width of stairs should be. She was very passionate about stairs, as it turned out.
She complained about the color of the flames in the fireplace, which she thought should be rather more yellow than orange. She disliked the color orange in general, which she found offensive and thought should be banned.
And she complained about the prince, whom they had not invited to come down.
The king and queen were very encouraged. They complained about the prince constantly, and they had known him since he was born. So for her to complain about him before meeting him was an indication that she was very intelligent. She seemed just about perfect!
When they sent the princess off to bed, they were giddy with excitement. All she had to do was pass the pea test, and they would have a wife for their son!
The king and queen were dressed and sitting on their thrones bright and early the next morning, waiting to give the princess the good news.
“I couldn’t sleep at all last night, imagining a pea beneath my mattress!” the queen said. “I am so tired and grouchy, I will probably sentence a peasant to life in prison today for no reason at all.”
The king smiled proudly. “And soon we will have a daughter-in-law every bit as wonderful as you.”
The princess stormed into the throne room, hair askew, squinty face twisted up into a ratty expression of fury. A furious rat is something no one ever wants to behold, much less first thing in the morning. Even calm rats are preferably avoided, unless they are your pets. But you wouldn’t want one for a daughter-in-law.
However, in this case, the king and queen were delighted.
“How did you sleep?” the king asked, giggling as he had not done since he was a little boy and had his tutor whipped for telling him four times two wasn’t ten.
“Yes, how did you sleep?” the queen asked, smiling in a way she thought was benevolent, but that would have made a small child—or even a small adult—cry.
“I thought your stairs were bad, but they were nothing compared to that room! I have never been so horrendously treated in my entire life. If I never set foot in this castle again, it will be too soon!”
The king and queen turned to each other, clasping hands. “We did it!” they exclaimed. “We got a princess with high standards and no musical ability whatsoever!” They turned back to inform the princess that she had passed their test and would marry their son—
Only to find she had already left the throne room. They cringed as she slammed every single door on her way out. It was a very large castle, with forty-one doors between the princess and the outer gate.
It took a very long time.
“Well,” the king said, frowning. “Perhaps she was too sensitive.”
The queen sat on the throne with a huff. The princess was obviously more sensitive than even she was, which made the queen very angry. But the queen couldn’t very well storm out of her own castle and slam all her own doors. It was very unfair. She comforted herself with the thought that at least slamming doors was an unqueenly thing to do. She could injure one of her precious, royal hands.
She would have a servant do it for her!
She rang the bell for a servant, but it took several minutes before one finally appeared. He was out of breath, with his cap nearly falling off. It was Jack, again.
“Why d
id it take you so long? Why wasn’t someone here sooner?”
Jack shrugged. “A few servants didn’t come in today. We’re all doing double duty. The head maid is mucking the stables, the butler is weeding the garden, and the cook is cleaning toilets.”
“The cook is cleaning toilets?” the king asked, horrified. “Well, have her hands removed before she goes back to cooking for us!”
Jack scratched his head beneath his cap. “You mean have her hands washed?”
“No! I mean have her hands removed. I won’t have hands that touch the toilets touch my food.”
“But … if she doesn’t have any hands, how can she …”
“Enough!” the king roared. “Send for the next princess!”
The queen waved her perfumed handkerchief. “And as soon as you’ve done that, slam every door in the castle!”
The first princess had arrived on a Tuesday, but the second princess acted like a Tuesday. She walked in with an escorting guard on either side of her royal person and looked the king and queen up and down.
“Oh,” she said. “What an … interesting crown.” Even though she was smiling, the way she said interesting felt like being pinched.
The king’s hand darted to his crown, fondling the golden prongs. “It’s an heirloom.”
“Oh,” she said. “So it’s sentimental. That explains why you’d wear something that ugly.” She smiled again, like what she had said was nice. Her face was so blank it was like a mirror, so the king and queen smiled back to reflect her. They were pretty sure she was insulting them, but she said it so sweetly and with such a bland smile it was confusing.
They ate supper with her.
“Is that a painting of the prince?” she asked, looking at the royal portraits glowering in a long line along the wall. The most recent was, in fact, the prince. It had been painted through bars and at a distance, but the painter mostly got his face right. Though the artist had, at the queen’s request, made the prince look haughty and dour instead of clueless and pleasant. And the artist had also given him eyebrows again. Big bushy ones, like two mutant caterpillars. I prefer him without eyebrows.
Beanstalker and Other Hilarious Scarytales Page 3
