Once upon a time there was a king and queen who ruled their land happily, except for their lack of heir.
When the queen finally gave birth to a daughter they were most anxious about her future and so consulted the wise men.
They saw in the stars that the princess would become as one dead on her (choose an appropriate age) birthday due to a splinter.
Naturally this upset her parents, who arranged for the castle to be wood-free, to the best of their ability, but in a time when construction materials were limited, this proved difficult.
In any event it was in fact an actual tree that caused the princess's demise.
Her parents were inconsolable in their grief and left the princess's body in her room, shutting up the palace/castle and moving to another of their many homes.
Many years passed, and new kingdoms rose and fell, boundaries changing as the parents of the comatose princess left no (conscious) heir and surrounding countries fell to war with one another (royalty can become uncomfortable in times of peace).
A forest grew up around the princess's abode until people almost forgot the story of the sleeping princess, except as a children's tale.
The new king loved to hunt and it was into this forest he rode, in pursuit of his bird of prey (an eagle perhaps?)
There he found the ruined building and, inside, the sleeping princess.
He was so overcome by her beauty that he had to have her.
Consent wasn't particularly important to the king when it came to bed-partners and the fact that she wouldn't struggle was only a bonus in his eyes (I never said he was charming - he's not even a prince, remember?)
The idea of contraception never crossed his mind in this instance either, for obvious reasons, although it must be understood that normally he was slightly more fastidious, if only because bastards are expensive.
Anyway, after he's done his business he heads back to the city, eagle in tow, and promptly forgets about the girl in the tower.
Turns out the princess conceives and, nine months later, (give or take,) gives birth to twins.
They were, naturally, rather hungry and so began sucking at her fingers in search of sustenance.
One sucked so hard that the splinter came out and the princess woke up (leaving one to wonder why her parents hadn't pulled the splinter in the first place, but then, one must suppose, there would be no story).
Naturally the princess was slightly shocked at her present circumstances, and it took a while for it to register that the infants still attached to her person could not belong to anyone else, but once she got to feeding them properly she soon formed that bond needed between mother and child(ren).
Heading towards the city centre in the hopes of finding news of her family she quickly realised that it had been far longer than nine months since her collapse.
Before she had her bearings, however, the king, upon hearing of the miracle of the princess and her twins, demands her presence in his palace. (He's that sort of person.)
Assuming that the children are his, (who else would be depraved enough to sleep with a corpse?) he takes the dysfunctional group into his home (whether he marries her or not is another question altogether. One source claims that he was already married when first he "found" her, and that his Queen had subsequently died under mysterious circumstances).
The queen mother wasn't too impressed by the new woman in the king's life and was in fact slightly jealous of the attention that the king was showing his new-found family. (This probably has something to do with the former queen's demise but nothing's concrete.)
She wanted rid of these impositions and started to plot ways to be rid of the new queen. (he did marry her after all!)
The next time the king went hunting (again) the queen mother seized her chance and ordered a huge bonfire to be built in the courtyard before hunting down the queen, ordering her outside as she was going to be burnt, for witchcraft, one assumes. (One can see where the king gets his manners from and can easily sympathise over his awful childhood-no wonder he uses women.)
The new queen is not stupid and knows that she must buy herself some time until her husband returns from the hunt.
She suggests that, while she may be sentenced to death, there is no need to burn an innocent set of garments.
The queen mother (stupidly) agrees and tells her to remove her outer clothes.
This proves slow-going as the queen draws it out so that it takes a good half-hour before she is down to her underwear, and she is aided by the many, many buttons down the back of her dress.
The queen mother is just going back in to order her to hurry up when the king returns.
He enters the royal bed chambers to find his new bride in just her petticoats and promptly locks the door to the rest of the world.
He even forgets to question why there is an enormous pile of wood outside.
The former sleeping princess is on her guard for a few days but when her mother-in-law leaves her alone she assumes all is forgotten.
How wrong she is!
Only now she turns her attentions on the twins, assuming that the king would not want his new wife around without them.
Her plan is gruesome: she orders the chef to slit their throats, peel the flesh from their bones and mince it all, then serve the king his own children for dinner that night.
Fortunately for the royal prince and princess, the chef is sane, as well as having his own family whom he could never bring himself to harm.
He cooks two lambs instead, and when she queen mother wants to reveal her hideous plot, and bring guilt and self-disgust onto her son's head, the queen brings in her children to say "goodnight" to their daddy.
The queen mother is furious and now has four people on her blacklist.
This time she again waits until the king goes off hunting before ordering a pit of poisonous snakes to be dug in the courtyard.
She then has the guards round up the queen and her two children, as well as the chef, his wife and all their numerous offspring (they couldn't afford contraception, a servant's salary wasn't up to much).
The queen was fresh out of procrastination techniques and, in any case, the queen mother really wasn't in a listening mood, and so the sorry group awaited their doom...when the king rode back into the courtyard to witness this astonishing scene. (he had forgotten something rather vital, though what it was, I don't recall.)
The queen mother was driven mad by the fact that her plans had been thwarted for the third time, and threw herself into the pit, where she, inevitably, met her demise.
Everyone else lived, until they died.
The End.