Strange Princess Lea
Wednesday 22 nd February 2012I entered this story into a competition. Let's see if I win!
Once upon a time, there lived a King and Queen in a beautiful kingdom, and they had a lovely daughter, who they named Lea.
It is pronounced Lee-a.
Oh, I do beg your pardon. They had a lovely daughter called Lea.
Lee-a!
Low-a?
No, Lee-a!
Loo-a!
Oh, move over and let me tell the story.
Right. We’re not having any of that ‘once upon a time’ lark. That’s how normal sappy fairytales start, see. And this is no sappy fairytale. Anything but, my friends, anything but…
I guess it started when I was born.
Everybody in the palace turned up to see me pop into the world. Unfortunately, they all thought I was coming at exactly 3. They had planned around that. At 3, royal birth. At 3:30, group portrait. At 4, first baby stroll in the palace grounds. And at five, a celebratory dinner!
I came at 3:20. That’s not too bad, you say.
I came at 3:20…the next morning.
Yes, I was a bit slow. But that wasn’t as bad as the next surprise… I was a girl.
See, the royal doctor, Professor M. Ad, thought I was a boy.
“You are slightly more round than a woman pregnant with a girl.” He said. I haven’t the faintest idea why that classed my mother as a woman pregnant with a boy, but that’s men for you.
Anyway, after I finally came into the world, my mother was fast asleep, and as for my father, he had abandoned it hours before and gone to bed. So my first hours or so in the world was parentless.
Still, the nurses wrapped me up warm and took me to see the royal doctor. He unwrapped me from my blankets and…
“A girl!” He proclaimed.
“A girl?” The nurses gasped.
“A-ga!” I probably said.
My parents were devastated. They wanted a boy to take over their kingdom when they were old and weary. A Queen… that was bad news. I mean, look at Cleopatra. And Anne Boleyn. And Marie Antoinette…
The point is, I wasn’t wanted. I was a mistake. So my parents hurriedly named me and locked me away in a tower the day I turned 13.
The castle was all right. Sometimes, during the cold winter nights, the dragon that guarded me would blow wisps of fire to keep me warm. We were a happy pair.
Until the prince came.
As I said before, this isn’t a sappy fairytale story. So the prince didn’t defeat the dragon. He tricked it.
He dressed up as a woman and said he was my mother, come to visit me. The dragon let him climb up its scaly back and into my room. When safely inside, he swept off his disguise.
“Hello, Princess Lea!” He proclaimed.
He even got my name right. This was my kind of person.
So we were married, and lived in the tower together, had numerous, lovely children, and lived… oh, all right. We lived happily ever after.
THE END
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