Part 2
Sometimes it was difficult to tell how much time had passed. Maybe a month, maybe an hour. Prince Charming heard a sound he didn't recognize, and readied his ax in case it was a troll in disguise. A small white horse tölted into the clearing bearing a bedraggled rider, who stopped and dismounted to address him.
/
Sturmhägen was avoided by foreigners who had a choice. Though the largest of the kingdoms, most of it was dense, uncleared woodlands. The forest soil was devoid of vegetable-enabling nutrients, rich instead in trolls, rodents of unusual size, goblin colonies, giants, dragons, and fire-breathing beavers. Prince Charming was the youngest of nine children. His mother had been blessed by an all-male set of octuplets (the kingdom rejoiced!) and then by him. At just under six feet tall he was smaller than his brothers, and weaker, and slower, and uglier. Once he had tried to join them troll hunting, but eventually collapsed from exhaustion partway into the forest. They thought it was really funny. He spent a lot of time alone in his room. When Lyrical Leif started writing popular ballads about 'The Eight Princes of Sturmhägen,' Prince Charming started going out on his own into the wilderness to prove himself.
"Nine princes! There are nine of us! The nine princes of Stürmhagen, you mean," Prince Charming had roared at Leif once.
"Who are you?" Lyrical Leif had asked, bored. "There are eight princes of Stürmhagen in my ballads. Therefore, there are eight princes of Stürmhagen. You exist barely, if at all. You are nothing."
Prince Charming wore heavy, spiked armor, and carried a number of large weapons. His exploits, hunting and occasionally slaying particularly bloated and malevolent rodents, attracted little attention. He regularly passed a tall doorless tower in his expedition, home to a young woman whose mellifluous singing slowed his pace in passing, even as he pretended to pay no attention. There was an old lady who would ascend into the tower by climbing the woman's growth. One day Prince Charming decided to try and rescue the damsel, and impersonated the old lady to achieve fibrous passage. Prince Charming took in the philocomal damsel he had yet seen only from a distance as she urged him to depart before her captor returned. She was stocky and ample, and had a plainer face than he had hoped.
"What, that old lady?"
"She's a powerful witch."
"No biggie." A damsel in distress and a witch to boot! This kept getting better. They waited for her return, passing the time talking. It started out awkward, but they grew easy in each other's presence quickly. She was eager to talk to anyone, and he found her easy to talk to. Prince Charming couldn't remember the last time he talked for so long.
Soon, the witch returned. Prince Charming waited with his ax at the ready to decapitate her as soon as her head popped within range. He felt good, confident. As he wound up to deliver the blow, roaring 'STUUURRRRMMHHAAAAAAAAGEEENN' to impress Rapunzel, the witch seized him in her little claws and hurled him out the window over her shoulder. It was a long way down. He smashed through tree limbs breaking his fall enough for him to survive; a protruding branch popped one of his eyeballs as he fell, and the other was too swollen from gore to see more than vague shadows. He lay in place for a long time, in varying agony and feverish consciousness, his blood and heat held in by his armor. A rodent chewed off one of his feet. It grew infected, but so was his face. Hot dark-colored growths and a strange sweet smell. After a few days he was found by Rapunzel—the witch had gotten bored with her and released her. Rapunzel's tears, possessed of magical properties, healed him and restored his sight.
He left. He returned to the castle, resuming his old lifestyle except he no longer left his room to venture into the forest. Defeated by an old lady and saved by a tiny woman. His brothers would never let him forget it. Lyrical Leif wrote a popular ballad about his adventure: Rapunzel saves Prince Charming. It didn't even mention his name. It aknowledged him as the ninth prince of Stürmhagen: now he existed and this was what he was, all he was. He suffered bouts of confusion and lapses of memory, and his thinking grew feverish. His brothers found his new personality hilarious. He spent most of the day sleeping.
"Are you going to come down from that tree?" Rapunzel asked.
"You ruined everything, Mega-Braid," he told her. "If you had left me alone in the forest, I would have healed on my own and killed the witch. Everybody thinks I'm weak." And eventually she left him in the tree.
One day he found himself back in the woods, with no memory of how he had gotten there, screaming his stomach abundantly into the undergrowth before passing out again.
/
Sometimes it was difficult to tell how much time had passed. Maybe a month, maybe an hour. Prince Charming heard a sound he didn't recognize, and readied his ax in case it was a troll in disguise. A small white horse tölted into the clearing bearing a bedraggled rider, who stopped and dismounted to address him. He was of average height for a foreigner and exceptionally skinny. He wore poofy pants and a no-longer-white shirt with tassels on its shoulders.
"Excuse me, but it would be very helpful if you could give me some directions please. Do you happen to know where I can find Rapunzel?" asked the rider, looking up at him from chest level. Prince Charming looked back down. "You know, the one from the ballad? 'Hearts, hear of Sturmhägen, land of bad food / 'Tis a tale of this lass of pluck and pulchritude...'"
"I know the song. Why're you looking for Mega-Braid?"
"Oh, do you know where she is? Perfect!" At last, he was close to finding his fiancée and ending his journey! Prince Charming had discovered something he didn't like nearly as much as some other things. Though he didn't like to complain, Lyrical Leif was right-the food was terrible! Some of the inns he had stayed at didn't have a single vegetarian option. He was encountering every Enemy of Gentlemen his father had spent his life warning him of; dirt, body odors, bad posture. There was no point fighting it, he had decided after the first week, in a moment of reflection. This was a corporeality he had never experienced. He existed solely for himself here, evaluating each moment of reality for its instantaneous merit. Most of it was dominated by how very, very unpleasant it was to be riding a horse. He ached in ways he had never imagined, pain being the default state in every fiber of his body. He would be happy when he found Ella and could finally rest, for a day.
"Nope."
"I would very much appreciate if if you could please–"
"I'm not on speaking terms with her."
"Well, I would very much appreciate it if you just gave me directions, please. Then, you wouldn't have to speak to her."
"Tassels, do you even have an axe?"
"I didn't have time to pack. Also I do not have any axes. In harmonia we have servants to chop the wood. They are very nice and I like them very much." That was actually pretty impressive. Prince Charming wouldn't dare to go into the forest without a good weapon. A heavy pole was the bare minimum, just to whack aside the rodents that regularly came flying at you. But nothing!
"You came into Sturmhägen without so much as a butter knife?" Prince Charming rested a paw on his enormous ax, and adjusted a plate of his heavy, spiked armor.
Tassels reached into his pocket and produced something Prince Charming didn't recognize.
"What's that?"
"It's a butter knife," Tassels grinned.
Prince Charming grinned back down in spite of himself. "There's no butter in Sturmhägen, and if there was, we wouldn't cut it with that. That looks like a toothpick." So did he, Prince Charming added mentally. Or an emaciated scarecrow. "You should go home if you don't want to die," he added genuinely.
"I'm not turning back. I can't go back until I find my fiancée," Tassels explained. He searched briefly in himself for a burning desire to see her face or hear her voice or something, but was surprised to discover that what he yearned for most deeply was a comfortable bed, right this instant. A bath, filled with scented oils. Hot running water to wash his face and hands.
"You're marrying Mega-Braid?" Tassels really did look like a scarecrow, Prince Charming decided, down to the way his well tailored shirt hung a little from the frame of his shoulders. His arms were like toothpicks! A miracle he hadn't been eaten by an enterprising porcupine. They occasionally went after babies in Sturmhägen.
"Nej, Ella! I'm Prince Charming of Harmonia." Prince Charming's thoughts wandered from the conversation at hand. Why was he doing this? Why hadn't he given up, or just ordered a servant to do this in the first place? It didn't make sense, especially not for him.
"Prince Charming of Sturmhägen at your service," Prince Charming announced grandly. Tassels' thoughts stopped wandering.
"This is perfect!" he exclaimed. "You two live together, right? So you can take me right to her!"
"Nope. Don't care about her at all, except that she's running around saying she saved my life and ruining my reputation."
"But did her tears really heal you and restore your sight?"
"Who knows?" said Prince Charming. "She thinks they did."
"But the bard—oh, the bard…"
"Alright, Tassels, my turn. Why do you have a butter knife?"
"I was studying for a summative in cutlery usage when I decided to leave. It was a major focus of my studies, and I had fallen behind because of Ella. Ballroom dancing, posture, penmanship, pronunciation, addressing, noble history, dinner conversation, dragon whispering–"
"Dragon whispering?"
"When I was very young I had trouble concentrating on learning Sentarin, which is odd because it's really very interesting to learn old languages, so the servant taught me dragon whispering instead, because one whispers to dragons only in Sentarin. I think it worked very well, and my Sentarin is very excellent, but my dad was very angry when he found out. He was very concerned about dangerous activities like dragon-whispering, although I secretly thought it was in my opinion maybe a little bit of an overreaction, because anyway it isn't like I ever actually saw a dragon."
"Alright. So why are you looking for Mega-Braid?"
"Ella said something about meeting up with Rapunzel to find the bards, I think," Tassels responded. Hah! He came all the way into Sturmhägen for this, and he wasn't even sure! Prince Charming was having a bit of fun It would be a shame to let Tassels die.
"My name is Gustav. You are Tassels, just in case we run into another Prince Charming. Maybe the one from The Ballad of How Prince Charming is a Terrible Person... Otherwise, we'd just be 'The Prince Charmings,' and we couldn't tell each other apart!" He roared with laughter at his own joke.
"The Princes Charming," Tassels corrected." Gustav stared at him. "Charming is an adjective, not a name. Grammar was a major focus of my Princely Studies."
"We'll have to share a tent, if you want to keep all of your fingers till the morning," Prince Charming announced, surprising himself as much as Tassels. "And if you ever want a vegetable, you can make it yourself. Where we're going, there are no more inns."