Eight Princesses and a Magic Mirror

by Natasha Farrant

  Queen Grizel was not from Rhain but from Hean, where the rules are different and royals are let loose upon the water as soon as they are strong enough to pull an oar. She had been sorry to give up sailing when she married, and it pained her that her daughters would never know the same pleasure she had. As Catriona, Ailsa, and Iseabail’s twelfth birthdays had come and gone, she had said nothing, because they had not. But, faced with Ellen’s sorrow, she knew that she could keep quiet no longer.

  “The sea has salt in it enough already, you know,” she murmured. “So no more tears, youngling. Come away with me to Bhreac’s shipyard, where only yesterday I saw a fine dory, an excellent beginner boat. We shall look at it together, and if you like it, it shall be yours.”

  Ellen caught her breath. Very, very slowly, she turned to gape at her mother. Grizel held out a hand.

  “You are a child of Hean too, you know.”

  The day was gray and overcast, but Ellen’s beam cut through the gloom like summer sun.

  The dory was perfect, trim and compact, built for steadiness rather than speed. It would be a good teacher for a student who had everything to learn. Ellen’s heart leaped with love the moment she saw it.

  “But are you sure?” she whispered.

  Her hands curled tight over the gunwale. She could not bear it if her mother changed her mind.

  “Quite sure, my love,” replied the queen. “So now there are only her colors left to choose, and her name. What will you have?”

  Ellen chose light blue for the hull, to match the clear sky breaking through the clouds, with yellow sails and oar tips to match the sun. Shyly, she gave her mother the honor of choosing the boat’s name. Grizel frowned as she thought, then smiled.

  “Princess of the High Seas,” she said. “Painted in gold, for luck.”

  Princess of the High Seas. Ellen savored the roll of the words on her tongue.

  The king was furious when he found out, and the islanders were shocked, but Grizel did not back down. She asked one thing of her daughter, that she would not go out beyond the calm waters of Taransay Bay. For a while, Ellen obeyed. But she was quick to learn, and the need to venture out of the sheltered harbor was like an itch. By midsummer, she was exploring neighboring coves. By August’s end she was rowing in and out of sea caves, pulling up to rest on hidden beaches or bobbing in pools formed by the tide, where seals and otters nosed about the hull and gulls perched on the Princess’s sides to preen. Ellen was brown as a nut, her hair bleached white from the salt and her limbs as lithe and tough as the coil of rope she kept for emergencies in the dory’s watertight locker.

  “No good will come of it,” grumbled the king, and the other princesses agreed.

  Queen Grizel did not scold Ellen for breaking her promise but waited for what she knew must happen.

  The storm came at the beginning of September.

  It was the worst Rhain had seen in years. For two days, lightning ripped through thunderclouds, driving rain like bullets into the roaring sea. Inland, roads turned to streams, streams to rivers. No craft put out in such weather. Instead, islanders pulled their boats high onto the strand, then barred their doors and shutters, praying the damage would not be too great. In the castle, Ellen sat huddled by a turf fire in the watchtower. She loved the tower because it had windows on three sides overlooking the sea, and she could pretend she was in the crow’s nest of one of the merchant schooners that sailed to Taransay on their voyages around the world.

  It was her greatest wish to sail on such a ship.

  On the third day, the storm eased. Weather vanes still spun in the unsettled wind, and the purple-blue of the waves warned of evil currents, but cottage doors opened and the islanders inspected the damage. There were roofs to mend, fences to repair, fallen trees to saw into logs. No one had an eye for the sea but Ellen, daydreaming in the watchtower, skimming the waves in her imaginary schooner, cutting through the shimmering ocean like a gull on the wing. And look! Here was another ship on the horizon, a two-master like her own!

  The fire in the grate hissed. Ellen leaped to her feet.

  The ship was going much too fast, listing to starboard and heading straight for the rocks at the end of the headland.

  All islanders, royal or not, know what to do when a ship is in peril. Ellen dashed across the room to the bell rope, seized it in both hands, and pulled.

  And pulled.

  And pulled.

  When the whole castle was ringing with the clang of the alarm bell, she gathered her skirts to her knees and raced down the stairs yelling, “Ship in peril! Ship in peril, to the east of the headland!” As she burst into the hall, the rescue crew were already running for the main gates, making for Taransay Bay where their mates were pushing the island’s three lifeboats into the water.

  The boats were built for storm and tempest, with eight strong oarsmen each, but as Ellen slipped in among the crowd, the mood was somber.

  Every island family had lost a loved one to the sea.

  Was it wrong, wondered Ellen, to feel a little bit excited?

  In, out, tumbled the tide, while a handful of men battled wind and waves. The troubled schooner surged in the swell. For a few seconds, they saw her outlined against the gray-streaked sky. Then she crashed from sight.

  The islanders bowed their heads. Only Ellen kept watching.

  What must it feel like, to conquer such waves?

  All the lifeboats had vanished too—no, she glimpsed two of them! But where was the third?

  “She’s gone!” The woman standing beside Ellen began to wail. “The Florrie’s gone, and my Duncan with her!”

  But there was the Florrie as well, pulling ahead from the Gordania and the Gavenia, and every last person on the strand cheered at the sight of her.

  There was no sight, though, of the schooner.

  “She’s run into the reef!” A runner came down from Taransay Lighthouse. “The lads are picking up the crew. Who knows how many they’ll come home with!”

  Come home they did, each and every one of the rescuers, and with them all of the schooner’s crew.

  Or so they thought.

  “Well done, lads.” Bhreac the shipbuilder was also captain of the lifeboat crew. Teeth chattering from cold, he walked among them, shaking hands, slapping shoulders. Islanders rushed forward with brandy and blankets. The king, descended from the castle with Queen Grizel and the princesses, announced that today and for the days to come the castle kitchens would be open to all, that the sailors might eat their fill.

  It was only when the final count was made that the schooner captain realized his son was missing.

  Bhreac’s heart sank. The wind was calming, the color of the waves returning to normal, but his lads were exhausted, and surely this was tempting luck too far.

  “We can’t leave the boy, Bhreac.”

  It was Duncan, master of the Florrie. And he was right, of course.

  “I need seven volunteers!” Bhreac shouted.

  But nobody was listening, because another cry had gone up.

  A pale blue-and-yellow dory was already on the waves, letters of gold glinting on its prow and a small princess at the oars. . . .

  Ellen laughed as she rowed. This was mad! It was terrifying!

  It was exciting. . . .

  The Princess of the High Seas rode the waves like a leaf on an angry wind, Ellen’s stomach flipping with every pitch and pull, but she never thought of turning back. She knew exactly where the boy would be. The schooner had foundered by Mendel Rocks. Given the incoming tide and the current, he would be washed up on the secret beach at the foot of the Black Cliffs. It was one of Ellen’s favorite places. She could row there in her sleep if she had to, but it would disappear with the high tide, and then the boy would be lost. All she had to do was keep her head and keep rowing.

  And beat the tide . . .

  And hope that he was still alive . . .

  A wave broke over the side, catching her full in the face. She dropped her oar an
d lurched to grab it before it vanished. The Princess rocked as she thumped back into her seat. Ellen’s lip was cut and her mouth full of blood—but there was the beach and there, as she had known he would be, was the boy, face down in the sand.

  A wave hurtled the Princess toward the shore. Ellen raised her oars.

  “Ahoy there!”

  The undertow swept her back out. Ellen lowered the oars, pulled around to face the beach, and raised them again as the next wave carried her in.

  “Ahoy there! Ahoy! Ahoy!”

  Still the boy did not move, and Ellen could have wept. Dead! Drowned, when she was so close!

  “AHOY THERE! GET UP, YOU IDIOT! DON’T BE DEAD! GET UP!”

  He stirred, raised himself on all fours, retched in the water. Another wave broke, and he collapsed.

  There was almost no beach left.

  “GET UP! GET UP, I CAN’T DO THIS ON MY OWN!”

  He was on his knees again . . . staggering to his feet . . . limping through the shallows. . . . Ellen threw her rope. He caught it on the next wave, pulled himself to the boat . . .

  She heaved him over the side and he tumbled to the floor.

  “Ahoy there,” he croaked, with a flicker of a smile.

  “Ahoy,” she grinned back, and her life changed forever.

  Next day, on a calm sea, the coast guards rowed out again to drag the remains of the schooner back to shore. With a huge hole in her hull, her interiors ruined, her masts broken, and her sails torn to tatters, the Gallante Héloïse was ruined but not entirely wrecked.

  “It’ll take months to make her seaworthy again,” Bhreac warned. “And when she is, she’ll be more new ship than old.”

  The Héloïse’s sailors found lodgings where they could with the villagers, but the officers, including the captain and his son, were guests at the castle. All through the autumn and the winter, Ellen and the boy—his name was Ralf—carried on the conversation that had started with those first ahoys. While the good weather lasted, she showed him the treasures of her island, the sea caves where the echoes of the waves sounded like music, the cliffs where the gulls nested, and the burrows to which the puffins returned every summer to raise their young. When winter came and the boats were put away, they sat in the watchtower and he told her what it was like to travel the oceans from east to west and back again, to see the color of the sea change from gray to clearest blue. He told her about the desert he had once visited with his father, where marble palaces glowed like fire in the setting sun, and about forests full of parrots that screeched like a person being murdered and that could be trained to mimic human speech.

  “They like the rudest words best,” he said, and Ellen snorted with laughter.

  Ralf spoke of docks where merchants came from all over the world to trade in silks and spices, of whales and dolphins and turtles and flying fish, and of days on end at sea when all that happened was the rising of the sun and its setting.

  Ellen longed for that most of all.

  “Take me with you when you leave,” she begged, and Ralf said that he would, and that together they would sail the world.

  “It will end badly,” said the king, watching them together. “I don’t like it.”

  And still the queen said nothing.

  Spring arrived, and the Gallante Héloïse was ready. With her black hull and white sails, she was the smartest ship Ellen had ever seen. The day before she was due to sail, the captain invited the royal family aboard, and she ran all over the Héloïse like a child, delighting in the smallest details—the shine of the ship’s wheel, the coop where the chickens were kept, the neat galley kitchen. She leaned over the prow to admire the restored figurehead of Héloïse herself, she slid down narrow stairs to inspect the hold, she admired the spick-and-span captain’s cabin and swung in one of the sailors’ hammocks.

  “Which is to be mine?” she asked.

  No one spoke. Ralf stared at his father. The king stared at his feet. When Grizel gently laid her hand on her daughter’s arm, Ellen knew that there was no hammock for her, and never had been.

  “Dearest, you are still so very young,” said Grizel.

  “More to the point,” grumbled the king, “you are a princess.”

  “Pa won’t take you against your parents’ wishes,” Ralf explained later, when they were sitting in the Princess for the last time, on the beach where Ellen had rescued him. “Not when he’s accepted their hospitality for so long. He says it would be a betrayal of trust.”

  “I could stow away!” said Ellen.

  “I thought of that already,” Ralf replied gloomily. “But you’d have to come out sooner or later, and then Pa would only bring you back.”

  Next day, as he boarded the Héloïse, he gave her a present, a gold mirror on a piece of scarlet ribbon.

  “I pulled it up in a fishing net,” he said. “It’s proper treasure. Keep it safe for me until I come back.”

  And with those words, he sailed away.

  Spring turned to summer, summer to autumn, and winter came again. Many ships docked on Rhain, but none were the Gallante Héloïse. At first Ellen wore the mirror on her belt, to remind herself that Ralf would be back soon, but with the passing of each season, something in her passed too, and she put the mirror away. She could not bear to look at it, just as she could not bear to watch the sea. When spring returned, she did not race to the shipyard to reclaim her overwintered boat, but sat meekly with her sisters and asked to learn to sew.

  Grizel helped her thread a needle.

  “Sailors need to sew too, you know,” she murmured. “Sailcloth does not mend itself.”

  “I shall never sail again,” said Ellen.

  Along came summer, and as Ellen sat quietly sewing, a screech fit to freeze blood ripped through the castle, followed by a stream of filthy language.

  “Goodness!” gasped Catriona.

  “Who can it be?” tutted Ailsa.

  Iseabail fanned herself with her stitching and looked as if she might faint.

  Ellen’s heart skipped a beat. Somewhere in the string of unrepeatable language, she thought she had heard her name. . . .

  There was another screech, and more swearing, and then—

  “I come for the Princess Ellen!”

  Hope smote her like a blow to the chest. Dropping her needlework, she leaped from her chair as a red-faced footman entered.

  “If you please,” he stammered. “There appears to be a parrot . . . ”

  The parrot was the first of many gifts Ralf sent Ellen over the years. It was followed by a box of spices, each carefully labeled, and then by books of maritime history, maps, more maps, and a compass. Ellen, the mirror once more hanging at her belt, read every word and memorized every chart. She brought the Princess of the High Seas out of hibernation and sailed farther, better, and faster than she had ever sailed before. And when, six years after he had left, Ralf returned at the helm of his own command, she was ready, and pressed the mirror into his hand, and took her place at his side.

  “Preposterous!” railed the king. “A princess of Rhain!”

  Still Queen Grizel said nothing, though it grieved her to lose her favorite child. She had always known that if you give a dreamer hope, her dreams will get bigger and bigger, and that if you give an adventurous child a boat, sooner or later she will sail away.

  THE

  PRINCESS

  AND THE

  CROCODILE

  The fishermen rescued the little crocodile because it was stuck alone on a log in the middle of a forest backwater and appeared to be choking. Under normal circumstances, they would have ignored him and left him to die or survive on his own. They were tough men, used to killing things. They were not sentimental about the cocodrilos, who could snatch a child from the shore and drag it under in a blossom of blood, faster than a heartbeat. But these were not normal circumstances. Today they were fishing with Old José, who was sentimental about everything.

  “Poor thing,” Old José said, before asking d
id they know that when his grandmother’s grandmother had been a girl, crocodiles had been sacred on the peninsula, and worshipped as gods?

  Pepe sighed and said that, yes, he had heard the stories many times.

  “We should take him to the chief’s daughter,” Old José decided. “She’ll know what to do with him.”

  Fernando, who was even less interested than Pepe in stories or gods or even grandmothers, asked what the chief’s daughter was going to do with a flaming great crocodile.

  “It’s not a flaming great crocodile, it’s a baby,” said Old José. “Look how dainty he is, no longer than my arm. And the princesita is good with animals. Think of the hummingbirds.”

  They smiled as they thought of seven-year-old Tica and the hummingbirds she had raised from chicks. Everywhere she went, the birds flew around her head like a multicolored crown.

  Still. “A cocodrilo isn’t a hummingbird,” pointed out Pepe. “And babies grow. I say the only good crocodile is a dead one and we kill it right now.”

  The baby crocodile hiccupped.

  “Bless him,” said Old José.

  And that was that, because, maddening though he was, nobody wanted to upset the old man. Fernando swore but picked up the startled crocodile, Pepe tied a rope around his snout to stop him snapping, and together they bundled him into their boat and carried him to the chief’s daughter.

  They found Tica sitting in her parents’ garden in the shade of a passion-fruit tree, wreathed in hummingbirds and playing with an orphaned spider monkey.

  “Brought you another rescue, princess,” said Old José.

  Fernando, with a nothing-to-do-with-me kind of grunt, deposited the crocodile in her lap.

  The birds swirled to the branches above, and the monkey swiftly followed, but Tica gave a cry of delight.