The king took the lion’s advice and commanded that the spinning wheels be brought in. However, the servant who was fond of the huntsmen once again overheard the plan and went to tell them ofit.
“Oh, no!” cried one of them when she heard what was in store. “How can we possibly resist the powerful allure of treadle-operated textile-production devices?”
“We must once again be brave,” their leader exhorted them. “Treat them as you would a less beguiling apparatus. Behave as if they were not designed to seductively twist plant fibers into thread.”
The following morning, the king once again called the huntsmen to court. But the twelve disguised women walked past the spinning wheels without paying them any mind.
“What do you wish of us, my king?” the lady entreated.
“Uh, I wished for something, yes,” the king extemporized, realizing that calling them in for no apparent reason was beginning to look rather odd. “I wished…to organize a hunt today!”
The lady bowed to him. “Then it shall be done.”
Once they had left, the king frowned at the lion. “They are clearly men. They didn’t even glance at the spinning wheels once. Admit to your lies, you lying liar.”
“I am no liar!” the lion roared. “Someone must have warned them! They knew you were testing them, so—”
“Silence!” bellowed the king. “I will hear no more of this nonsense!” And he strode off to join his huntsmen on their hunt, leaving the lion behind to grumble under its breath about ungrateful kings who don’t know how lucky they are to have a magical talking lion hanging around all day questioning people’s gender.
“Ah, what a lovely day for a hunt!” the king opined as he rode with his hunters through the vast forest. “Just me and my twelve manly companions. Manly men doing manly things in a manful way. Let us idly scratch at our testicles whilst we pee standing upright together.”
“Um, sure,” asseverated the lady—and I am very sorry she asseverated it, but I am rapidly running out of synonyms.
As she was wondering how she could best excuse herself from these activities, a messenger greeted them, which to her immense relief distracted the king from his itchy balls.
Her relief was short-lived, however, for what the messenger had to report was this: “My king! Your bride, the princess of the mountain kingdom, has at last arrived! She has reached the border of the kingdom and will be here shortly.”
Upon overhearing this, the lady fainted dead away, falling off her horse.
Distraught by the notion that his cherished huntsman had been injured, the king ran over to help. As he removed the huntsman’s gloves—for as everyone knows, when someone has fallen unconscious, you must take off their gloves immediately—he noticed she was wearing the ring that he had given to his true love. Peering at her face, he recognized her at long last.
His heart was touched, and he kissed her. As she opened her eyes, he said, “I am yours, and you are mine, and nothing shall ever part us again.” And yes, he simply said it, much to the amazement of everyone present.
Turning to the messenger, he added, “Go and tell the princess of the mountain kingdom to return to her own land. I cannot marry her, for I have a bride already.”
Smiling at him through tears, still dizzy from her fall, the lady murmured, “I win.”
After the wedding celebration, the king grudgingly admitted that the lion had told the truth and made sure that the lion’s book was widely disseminated.A Natural History of Humansproved to be a great delight for the minority of scholars who agreed humans are a kind of enormous spider. And they all lived happily ever after.
That is the story as it is currently told. But savvy readers may perhaps have noticed it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
What, exactly, was the endgame of the lady’s plan? Why did it require finding eleven identical duplicates? What was up with the gender-essentialist lion? Did the king really not recognize his one true love until he noticed the ring? And what on earth did the princess from the mountain kingdom think of all this?
That last one, at least, is a question I can address.
Because I am the princess from the mountain kingdom.
Part I
My Evil Stepmother
Chapter One
The Irritating Riddle of the Sphinxes
I was going to get myself eaten. I could tell. It was just one of those days.
The field beyond the low rise was guarded by three stone sphinxes. A sphinx, as you might be aware, is a terrifying creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and a mouth full of sharp fangs it uses to rip off the limbs of slow-witted travelers. When found in nature, sphinxes are about as large as a cow. Whoever had sculpted their likenesses here hadn’t been concerned with realism, and all three were roughly the size of a barn.
