The Ordinary Prince Chapter 2
Stolen, McShepped and SGAed by Fenchurch, from M M Kaye's brilliant book – The Ordinary Princess.
Beta-d by the amazing Goddess47.
Remember, this is Fairytale Land! It's sweet and innocent and distinctly British in flavour.
***
The Grand Duke Ellis of Apollo was due to arrive any minute and the Queen cleared the Prince's room of servants and courtiers. They had been working all day to make Prince Meredith look handsome… which had left Mer in a foul mood. He was so weighed down with jewels it felt as though he were dragging a horse around, and his maids had applied so much face cream that he felt he was drowning in the stuff.
"Meredith, my dear."
"Yes Mother?" Mer sighed, knowing what was coming.
"Please pay attention. This is very important. I particularly wish you to make a good impression on the Duke, for if you manage to make a favourable impression on him, he may offer to marry you and that would save your father and me a great deal of trouble… and expense." She thought of the tower, the bribe for the Wraith and the new lab they would have to set up.
"Yes Mother," Mer said dutifully as the Queen took a breath.
"So you will stand up straight with your shoulders back, instead of slouching. Speak nicely and politely when you are spoken to and… try to look as though you were enjoying yourself."
"Yes Mother."
"Also, keep your back to the light as much as possible. I have heard that Duke Ellis is a bit short-sighted and maybe if he can't see you properly, he'll just assume that you are beautiful. Always remember that you are a Prince of Canadia and even though you are not beautiful, try and look as though you were."
Mer managed not to snort with derision and instead followed his royal mother down to the banqueting hall.
Unfortunately His Royal Highness the Grand Duke Ellis of Apollo was pompous, proud and presumptuous. Within ten seconds of meeting him, Mer had realised that the man was an idiot and he delighted in telling him so, backed up with evidence of course. All the frowns and winks, kicks and whispers of 'Mer behave!' from his parents could not save the situation, while the Duke saw only Mer's excessive ORDINARINESS.
"Goodness gracious!" The Duke exclaimed loudly as they all sat down to eat. "I can't believe the man is a Prince at all! Who ever heard of a Prince with hair that colour? And that mouth!"
So, while the Duke thoroughly enjoyed the banquet (which was supposed to have been 'tea' but no one eats that much for 'tea') and Mer also enjoyed the food, there was no talk of marriage.
No one was at all surprised to hear, when the banq… tea was over, that the Grand Duke had promised to visit his cousin Baron Landry and that he would have to leave. Actually everyone was very glad to see him go, but none more so than the Ordinary Prince.
***
A week or so later, Mer was out in the forest, chipping out some quartz for an experiment, when a rather pretty girl came past collecting flowers and apples.
"Oh! I'm sorry!" The girl said, plopping down uninvited to sit next to the Prince. "I didn't think anyone else would be around here."
"No, neither did I" Mer muttered a little crossly. It didn't deter the girl, who was obviously a talker.
"It's such a shame that we won't be able to come out here and collect supplies from the forest anymore after the Wraith get here."
Mer dropped his little pick axe and said, "I beg your pardon? Did you say Wraith?"
"Yes. Haven't you heard?"
"Well obviously not! Otherwise I wouldn't have been surprised… Oh never mind! Tell me about the Wraith."
"Well, they're getting a Wraith to come here and terrorise the villages."
"What? On purpose?" Mer cried.
"Yes," the girl sighed. "You must come from a very out-of-the-way village if you haven't heard about this."
"Yes, well you can't find decent quartz anywhere nearer to the… why are they getting a Wraith?"
"Well, it's because of the Prince."
"The Prince?" exclaimed the Prince.
"Yes, you see, he's not handsome and pretty as royalty should be and no one wants to marry him."
"Hmm… now that I knew. But why ever a Wraith?"
"Well, you see…" And the girl explained about silly Princes and Princesses with huge swords and heroic ideals.
"I see," the Prince snarled.
"Well, I say that it may be alright for the Queen, but it's really not fair on the villagers. We won't be able to come here anymore and the Wraith is bound to capture some villagers and… you know… drain them."
"Yes, you're right!" The Prince announced. "And what's more, it ought to be stopped! I should be getting home."
"Yes, so should I. Well, it was nice meeting you!"
The girl hurried off, but Mer stamped his foot and threw the pick axe to the ground. "Wraith!" He stormed. "I'll give them Wraith! So they think they can push me off on to any silly Prince who kills a Wraith do they? Hah!"
On getting back to the palace, Mer gathered together the things he would need. Food and clothes, his portable science kit and all the coins he could find, and then he went down to tea.
As soon as he was alone in his room, Mer picked up his pack and wrote a short letter. He took his plainest cloak and then made his way down to the passage he always used. The night was clear and the moon shone and the Prince made his way out into the forest that he had come to know so well.
The next morning it wasn't until Carson announced that the Prince had not come to his lessons that anyone noticed Mer was missing. Then there was uproar.
There was a large letter on the chimneypiece labelled
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
And it was brought immediately to the Queen who ripped it open.
Dear everyone,
I think this Wraith idea is really stupid and only a complete moron would come up with it. I refuse to be shut up in a tower and I won't marry a Prince or Princess just because he or she can kill a Wraith. In fact I don't think I want to marry anyone at all, so I have run away. Please don't worry about me, I'll be fine.
Love and kisses,
Mer.
PS – You're all idiots!
Of course everyone went around searching for him. Rewards were offered and people were threatened (mainly by Ronon who was really enjoying himself), but the Ordinary Prince had disappeared.
***
When Mer had run away, it had been summer and there were plenty of roots and berries around as well as apples, pears and cherries. He slept in the open, or in a cave he'd become quite fond of where he had set up a temporary lab and had collected plenty of firewood for the cooler evenings.
Now, however, winter was approaching and Mer's clothes were beginning to fall apart. He was also becoming quite lonely without even Carson to talk to, so he was beginning to talk to himself, or to the trees, or even to a squirrel he hadn't yet managed to get rid of. It just kept following him around and screaming at him.
One morning, after a fine breakfast of apples and wild strawberries, Mer was startled to see a strange little gnome approaching. He had wild hair and a pair of wire-framed glasses and he was muttering to himself in some weird language, and he didn't seem at all surprised to see Mer hanging around.
"Well?"
"Well what?" asked the Prince.
"Aren't you even going to say hello?"
"Um… hello… er… do I know you?"
"Yes Rodney, I am your Godfather."
"Rodney?" Mer asked.
"You don't seriously still go by Meredith do you?" The gnome looked astonished. "You do know that this is a girl's name?"
"Of course I know! I'm the one who was saddled with it! Rodney is my second name."
"Well, you may as well use it for something."
"You're Radek Zelenka, aren't you?" Rodney asked rhetorically. "In fact, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here."
"Does that make you sorry or glad?"
"Glad!" the Prince replied promptly. "Ok, sometimes I wish I was a proper Prince so my parents would like me and not hire Wraith to trick Princes into marrying me, but not very often. I have much more fun being me!"
"Good, that gift of intelligence wasn't wasted then. So, come with me and tell me everything."
Rodney decided that he liked the name 'Rodney', that his godfather was not as much of an idiot as everyone else in the world, and that he really needed to talk to someone… even if it was just a crazy gnome with wild hair.
"So," Rodney said after he had told his Godfather everything, "what does an ordinary person do when they need to get out of the cold during the winter months?"
"That is a stupid question, Rodney," Radek told him companionably. "They work."
"Work? Where?"
"Well, I'd have thought that town over there would be a good place to start."
"Town? Where?"
Radek made a noise that may have been a sneeze, or maybe an expletive in some other language.
"Look over there!"
"You took me through a portal when I wasn't looking," Rodney told his Godfather, unimpressed.
"Oh all right! Yes, I did."
"So, where are we?"
"That is the city of Atlantis in the land of Lantea. But you must still find a job and work. Palaces are always looking for kitchen staff."
"Kitchen staff? I could do kitchen work, I suppose, after all cooking is just chemistry."
"Right, chemistry…" Radek kind of agreed. "Good luck Rodney."
"Thank you, Godfather." Rodney bowed politely. After all, he was a Prince and he had been very well brought up.
Radek conjured up a new portal and stepped through it, although not without a muttered imprecation about travel and the disorienting effect of wormholes.
"Well!" Rodney exclaimed to himself as his pet squirrel jumped up onto his shoulder.
***
It took quite a while to get to Atlantis, especially as Rodney was finding it hard to travel over the cobbled streets. He told the squirrel that he was too heavy and the cobbles that they were too knobbly. He then told himself that he should stop talking to himself.
He barely had time to open his mouth when he knocked on the kitchen door. They just whisked him inside and gave him the job of thirteenth Assistant Cook's Assistant, as the previous post-holder had just heard his mother was ill and handed in his notice.
Rodney was paid two pfennigs a week plus his keep. He woke early and went to bed late, he peeled and chopped vegetables, fetched wood and coal, filled and carried pails of water and scrubbed pots as well as a hundred other things. He had a small lumpy mattress to sleep on in a room he shared with three other lads at the top of the castle, but he was usually so tired out by the end of each day that he really didn't notice how uncomfortable or cold it really was.
The squirrel stuck by him and scampered about on the roof tops when Rodney wasn't around, but in the evenings he joined the Prince and ate the bread and milk that Rodney brought for him. Rodney was rather surprised that the squirrel hadn't run off, but at the same time it was nice to have a friend.
The best part of all was that the Ordinary Prince had every other Thursday afternoon off, and he was allowed to spend as he wished. He would go out to his cave through the portal and spend the afternoon working on his experiments, tinkering with his projects and eating his packed lunch, which he shared with the squirrel MAFS (which stood for- My Amazingly Friendly Squirrel).
Then every Saturday Mer was paid and he put two more pfennigs – money that he had earned through hard work – into a cardboard box. He had never felt so proud of anything he had done, not even when he had finally made a gun that Ronon loved.
On the whole the Ordinary Prince could only say that he was enjoying life as much as ever. Working this hard was so much more satisfying than lessons on how to sit, stand, eat, move and dance. He had always enjoyed being in the kitchen at home, but there was something special about being a true part of the bustle and workings of the staff.
Every now and again, the Ordinary Prince would write a letter to his parents to tell them that he was still alive and very happy, but he always gave it to some traveller to post so that no one would come to drag him away.
***
One of the favourite topics of conversation was the owner and ruler of the castle and the country, King Algernon. According to the kitchen maids, the King was young, handsome, gallant and wonderful, but Rodney knew better. He knew all about Kings and Princes and Dukes and they were all stiff, stodgy, boring and pointless.
Apparently the King's mother had died when he was a baby, and his father had died a few years back, since which time he had been King. This meant that King Algernon had become King at a very early age and he was not yet married.
Then, one winter's day, the castle of Atlantis was thrown into disarray with the sudden arrival of Queen Mora of Proculus, apparently here to pay a friendly visit to her favourite nephew, King Algernon of Lantea. Rodney knew better, of course.
"She wants the King to marry her daughter," he informed Harold, the twelfth Assistant Cook's Assistant.
"You mean Princess Chaya?"
"Chaya, yes," Rodney snorted. "Chaya – honestly! Why do they always give Princesses stupid names?"
"I quite like it," Harold muttered quietly, but he'd been on the other end of Rodney's scorn, so he didn't say it too loudly.
"So, how long will she stay?"
"Oh God, you know, the same as always."
"Always?"
"Look, you haven't been around royals for long. You get used to this. The number of Princes and Princesses that have dropped by for 'friendly visits' would fill the yard twice over! It's the Councillors fault, if you ask me. They're always on at the King to get married. The Prime Minister is always inviting Princes and Princesses to stay, but the King hasn't fallen in love with any of them yet."
"Well, at least he's good looking," Rodney said a little crossly. "He won't have to be locked up in a tower to make someone marry him."
Harold just blinked. "I wish I was a Prince or Princess. He's pretty damned gorgeous."
***
To celebrate the arrival of Queen Mora, there was a huge banquet and a magnificent ball, which was all very well, but it meant that the kitchen maids and cooks' assistants were kept hard at work even before the sun rose that morning.
The Queen had brought a retinue of more than a hundred courtiers and knights and ladies-in-waiting and, of course, they all had retainers and servants. It had been a rather splendid affair as they all arrived in style, even to Rodney's practiced eye, but he had not had much time to watch and had been scolded for being away from the kitchen so long when he had gone back.
The Ordinary Prince had very little time for banquets and balls, but even he was moved by the sound of the music drifting into the kitchens. There was a festival atmosphere even down there and even though they were all kept working hard, scrubbing, cleaning, peeling and preparing, people sang as they worked and laughed as they scrubbed. Some of the kitchen maids broke off to dance a little with their mops and the cooks all whistled and stirred their pots in time.
The kitchen maids and cooks' assistants were the last people to be allowed to bed and the embers were dying in the fireplaces by the time Rodney had finished scrubbing the last pot. Tomorrow morning they would start cleaning the fine platters, cups and dishes that were waiting in the pantry, waiting for daylight and nimbler fingers to clean them rather than the bone tired hands of that evening.
Rodney dragged himself to the pantry, even though he just wanted to go to bed. He wanted to pick up some nuts for MAFS and he knew that there would be some left over from the huge meal.
There weren't any in the pantry, but Rodney was pretty sure that there would be some in the Banqueting Hall. They always left that sort of thing till the next morning.
There were indeed nuts. In fact there was quite a lot of everything as the tables had not been cleared yet. Rodney sighed at the amount of work there was left to do and set about looking for some walnuts, which were MAFS' favourites.
He was rather surprised to find a young man in a creased velvet doublet, sitting on the edge of one of the tables, swinging his legs and licking a spoon.
Rodney couldn't help thinking that the young man looked rather nice, even though his hair needed a comb and his once costly doublet was obviously well-worn and pretty much ruined. Rodney decided that he was probably one of the Royal Pages.
"Hey!" said the young man, suddenly.
"Oh…er… hey!" Rodney replied. Then they looked at each other in the flickering candle light and smiled. Rodney liked the young man's smile. It made his eyes crinkle up at the corners.
"Were you looking for something?" the nice young man inquired.
"Nuts for MAFS," Rodney explained.
"MAFS?"
"Oh, he's only a squirrel, but he's a particular friend of mine and he's very fond of nuts."
"MAFS?"
"My Amazingly Friendly Squirrel," Rodney explained with a little smug grin at his own cleverness.
"Right… you know, you should probably avoid naming anything," the young man grinned and Rodney forgot to be offended.
"It's really late and I should be getting to bed, but I had to come and look. I didn't expect to find anyone here," Rodney babbled.
"Neither did I, but as you're here, why not have some chocolate cake? It's good."
"There's chocolate cake?" Rodney cried enthusiastically.
"Yeah, loads. I can't think why they always make so much. There aren't any clean plates left, but if you just grab a fork, you can scoop it up off the cake plate." The nice young man budged up a little and, once Rodney was settled, offered him a silver fork. "There's cream in that jug there too."
"Now," the nice young man said as they tucked into the cake. "Tell me about MAFS."
So Rodney told him about his cave in the forest, the cold of the winter and his finding a job in the castle, while the young man listened politely and swung his legs.
"Now," Rodney informed his new acquaintance when he had finished. "You are supposed to tell me about yourself. It's called a conversation."
"Right!" The young man drawled, clearly amused.
"So, what do you do?"
"Oh I work here."
"What kind of work?"
"Anything I'm told to do really. I'm a kind of… man-of-all-work."
"Oh! I thought you might be a page."
"God no!" the young man laughed. "They have a much better time of it than I do. Two hours off every day and an afternoon off a week."
"Don't you ever get an afternoon off?"
"Hardly ever," the man-of-all-work told him gloomily.
"Well, I really think you ought to insist on it!" the Ordinary Prince said indignantly. "Even Assistant Cook's Assistants get an afternoon off every other week."
"What do you do on your half day off?"
"MAFS and I go back to the forest. We take some left overs from the kitchen and have a picnic, then I do some more work on my experiments until it's time to come back." The Ordinary Prince yawned. "I really should go to bed."
"Oh don't go yet!" the nice young man entreated. "It's early yet! I know hardly anything about you!"
"It's not early, unless you mean early morning! I have to get up very early tomorrow morning to do more scrubbing, so I am going to bed. It was very nice talking to you." Rodney pushed off the table and bowed sleepily. "Good night."
"Good night." The young man sounded disappointed.
As Rodney reached about half way up the stairs that led up to his attic, he was stopped by a rather loud whisper.
"Hey!"
"Oh! It's you!" Rodney smiled.
"You forgot these," the nice young man held out a handful of walnuts. "For MAFS."
"Oh! I completely forgot! Thank you."
"So, when did you say your next half-day was?"
"I didn't, but it's next Thursday."
"Then may I… could I come too?" The young man's pointy ears appeared to be going as pink as the rest of his face and Rodney couldn't help grinning.
"Do you think they'd let you off?"
"Well, I'd try… if you'll let me come that is."
"We shall be delighted… only you'd better bring your own cake. We don't always get very much."
"I'll bring all the cake!"
"Oh goodness!" Rodney yawned widely. "I'd better get to bed, I've got to be up by half-past five tomorrow."
"Good night, Cook's Assistant."
"Good night Man-of-all-work."
The Ordinary Prince yawned again and then dragged himself up to bed.