Author's Note: This story was written just for fun, for a change of pace after so much time spent on serious work. Please be kind, and don't expect too much from it. Maybe you'll laugh while reading it as much as I laughed while writing it!

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The suitors marched to the showroom. There were probably seventy-five of them. Princess Ariana sighed. Beside her, her three serving maids sighed, too, but for a different reason. Ariana could hear them whispering to each other. "Ooh, look at the one in the blue suit. Definitely a prince!" they said. Or, "Good fortune! That one looks foreign!" Or, "That one is a powerful duke, clearly."

The first suitor stepped up to Ariana's dais. "Princess Ariana," he said in a deep, booming voice that seemed odd in so feminine a showroom, "I bring you a wheel of cheese." He presented a large—it probably weighed five pounds!—cheese wheel. Ariana nodded to the nearest lady-in-waiting, who accepted the wheel even more delicately than Ariana would have.

"Come, now, daughter," Queen Ariel demanded, giggling, "a five pound wheel of cheese?"

Ariana just shrugged. "That's not funny."

If she were to be honest—and, often, she wasn't—Ariana would say that she was so tired of people trying to make her laugh that she wouldn't laugh to save her life. But, because she was of a serious sort (Princess Ariana had been recorded laughing exactly once, when she was seven months old), King Sebastian and Queen Ariel thought it a good test of character in the young man that their daughter was to marry if he could make the very beautiful, but very serious, princess laugh.

Thus far, all that the suitors had made Ariana do was sigh.

--

In the town that surrounded the castle, there lived a swordsmith. Tom the swordsmith, because of his advantageous location, worked for all sorts of high-born people like knights and dukes and warriors. He had three sons. Dick and Harry, the elder two, were smart young men of twenty-three and twenty, respectively. Then, at fifteen, there was the youngest, Isaac, so named because his mother was losing her mind just before he was born. Tom knew that his youngest son would be born stupid, and he felt it wise to warn all who would hear his son's name. And, just as Tom suspected, the first sound Isaac ever made was an infant's giggle. "He's as loony as his mother," Tom had muttered sadly, shaking his head.

Isaac grew up thinking that his name was a synonym for "simple," and he often tried to suppress his urges to laugh, knowing that laughter so often got him sad, withered looks from his family. But, try as he might to prove the contrary, Isaac was a laugher. Therefore, he was branded as stupid, dim-witted, and loony, because—as all the villagers knew—laughter is a sign of a simple mind.

One day, Tom was summoned to the castle to demonstrate his superior swordsmithing. Because Dick and Harry were otherwise occupied with the things an intelligent mind is often occupied with—numbers and foreign languages and such—and swordsmithing cannot be done by oneself, Tom had no choice but to bring Isaac with him. "Don't blow this for me, son," Tom warned on the way up.

Isaac forced away his customary smile and frowned, as dour-faced as any intelligent villager. But, because he had never been to, Isaac was pleased to be going. And when the drawbridge guard smiled—so kindly, so genially—Isaac couldn't help it; he smiled back and, to Tom's horror, even laughed a little.

"Son," Tom whispered harshly, "this is the castle, and this could be the mostimportant smithing opportunity I will ever have. Stop that infernal laughter!"

"I'm sorry, Father," Isaac apologized quietly. "But he was being so nice."

Tom sniffed. "Well, you can't help that you're simple-minded, now can you?"

Isaac shook his head.

"Just don't do it again."

Isaac nodded.

The butler at the door bowed when he answered Tom's knocking. "Lord and Lady Mason are expecting you, sir." The butler smiled at Isaac. "And who are you?"

"My son. He's extremely simple. Doesn't speak and barely understands," Tom explained, leading Isaac into the palace.

Isaac was long used to such descriptions, so it had long since ceased bothering him.

"This way," the butler instructed, jumping in front of Tom to lead them to the throne room, where the smithing demonstration would take place.

--

Princess Ariana was tired of the day's suitors, so, while the entire room was shaking with laughter, she slipped out from underneath her not-so-watchful ladies-in-waiting and began wandering down the mostly deserted halls.

--

Isaac couldn't keep his mind on the swords his father was demonstrating. What a boring job this is, he kept thinking as he watched Tom banging a hammer on one of the glowing, red-hot swords. Clank! Clank! Clank! It was giving Isaac a headache. Clankiddy, clank, clank! Boring. Boring. Boring. Clank, cla—CRASH!

Right in the middle of Tom's clank, the searing redness of the smithed sword reached Isaac's left hand, and Isaac jerked away from it. The sword clattered to the ground.

Tom turned to his son in a fury. "Isaac," he seethed through his teeth, "get outta here!"

Isaac was only too happy to obey; he hurried off into the hallway.

He could hear it before he understood: a dull roar, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but it shook the entire castle anyway. "What's that noise?" he asked of the pretty maiden he saw up ahead of him—the only other person in the hall.

Ariana paused when the boy in the hall said something to her. "Oh," she replied, cocking her head to hear the noise still floating from the showroom, "just the whole court laughing."

Isaac was sure that the maiden had misspoken. "Laughter? In the castle?" he wondered incredulously.

Ariana studied the boy she was talking to. He had freckles and a cowlick, bare feet, a simple brown shirt and pants. He was nowhere near as handsome as the dukes and princes who were in the showroom, thinking they were making the princess laugh; he was clearly a commoner. But he had a kind, friendly face and a mouth that seemed to curve upward in a perpetual smile. "Yes, indeed. Laughter in the castle," she answered.

Isaac was truly perplexed. "All the courtiers, the king and queen, the princess—are they all that simple?" The maiden didn't seem simple. She had intelligent eyes, not boastful intelligence, like Tom, Dick, and Harry had, but practical intelligence. She wasn't a fanciful baby like all the girls in Isaac's village, certainly.

Ariana shrugged. "Some of them can be, I suppose. Why?"

"You don't think laughter a sign of a simple mind?"

She just stared at him for a minute, disbelieving. Then Princess Ariana did something she had only done once in her life, back when she was seven months old. Ariana laughed. "What?" she demanded between her giggles.

At first, Isaac was shocked. He had never in his entire life heard anyone else laugh. But the pretty maiden was laughing, and she had a beautiful laugh, clear and warm, bubbly and contagious, the way water would sound if water could laugh. Isaac's heart swelled—from delight and love—and he joined her, laughing freely without worrying about the sinister glare of his father or brothers. Finally, when he and Ariana had quieted, he held out his right hand to shake. "I'm Isaac, youngest son of Tom the swordsmith," he introduced himself.

Ariana stared at his hand, her face still lit up from her laughter. "What am I to do with that?" she demanded lightly.

"You shake it, and tell me who you are as you do so." Isaac considered the girl. She was dressed formally. Perhaps she had never come into contact with the commoner's greeting. Embarrassed, he dropped his hand and sketched a quick bow. "Sorry," he apologized quickly. "Is this more to your liking?"

"Ah, sir, I have nothing against a handshake. I have just never been instructed on how to use one." Ariana curtsied deeply, straightened, and offered Isaac her right hand. "How do you do, Isaac, the swordsmith's youngest son?"

Isaac took her hand and shook it. "I'm doing fine. I'm sorry, though, I didn't catch your name."

Ariana hesitated, concerned that Isaac might turn stiff and on-edge if he knew who she was. But she didn't want to lie to this kind young man, so she replied, slowly, "I'm Ariana."

Isaac pulled away from her in surprise. "Princess Ariana?"

"Don't let that make you think of me any differently, please, just because I'm a princess—"

"Not just a princess. The princess!" And the knowledge suddenly made the laughter in the castle made sense. There was that contest, after all, the contest that all the villagers shook their heads at, claiming that it was proof that their country was moving toward disaster.

Ariana hung her head in despair. She'd done it. She'd lost him.

Isaac noticed, and he wanted her to laugh again. "You're the princess who is supposed to be the sulky and dull."

"What?" Ariana snapped, looking back up and mildly insulted.

Isaac smiled at her. "That's why the laughter in the showroom, right? There are princes and dukes in there trying to do what I've already done."

He had such a kind, wonderful smile that Ariana couldn't feel sulky and disappointed when she saw it. For a few moments, she allowed herself just to bask in that smile before she fully understood what exactly he had said. He had made her laugh! None of the princes or dukes had done what Isaac, the youngest son of Tom the swordsmith, had done! "The contest!" Ariana cried, giggling for sheer delight. "You've won the contest!"

Isaac knew what the reward for winning the contest was: the princess's hand in marriage. And there was the princess, beaming at him, and he knew he loved her…

"Isaac!" Tom had had quite enough of his stupid son, and he regretted having brought him to the castle. "You'd better come, or I'll leave without you!" Tom rounded the corner to the hallway and gasped in horror at the sight that met his eyes—Isaac, his simple, stupid youngest son, and the princess Ariana. What was Isaac doing? Smiling? Oh, good fortune, he hadn't been laughing, had he? Tom grabbed his son and bowed low to the princess. "I most humbly beg your pardon for my son, Princess Ariana," he groveled. "He is very simple, and if he has bothered you in any way, I beg of you to grant him your leave."

Ariana's laughter had died at Tom's appearance, and her smile followed soon after. "He has not been bothering me, sir. We were getting along very nicely."

Tom bowed low again. "You are too magnanimous, Your Princesship." He straightened and pushed Isaac toward the doorway in front of him.

"What did you think you were doing?" Tom hissed as he and Isaac left the castle.

"In the castle, Father, laughter is not a sign of a simple mind," Isaac hissed back.

"What do castle folk know? They spend all their time right there, not out in the world like normal people. That is the last time you ever go to the castle. I have received a grant from the king to make new swords for all the Aridonian knights; I will bring Dick or Harry with me for the next times."

No amount of pleading or begging on Isaac's part could change Tom's mind.