3 Dead Princes Read online

  Table of Contents

  An E.A.P. Fairy Tale for Adults of All Ages

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - BALD MOUNTAIN CASTLE

  Chapter 2 - THE WONDERLOOK

  Chapter 3 - DOES GOD GO TO THE TOILET?

  Chapter 4 - THE WILSONS AND THE GODLOVES

  Chapter 5 - GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

  Chapter 6 - BIG HAIR, BIG TROUBLE

  Chapter 7 - ONE DEAD PRINCE

  Chapter 8 - YOGA BREATH

  Chapter 9 - A GIG AT THE GRACKLE TAVERN

  Chapter 10 - DREAM DREAM DREAM

  Chapter 11 - THE WITCH IN THE DITCH

  Chapter 12 - GIRLTALK

  Chapter 13 - SORTOFINGTON

  Chapter 14 - THE BLACK BIRD

  Chapter 15 - THE DEVANIMALS’ WORK

  Chapter 16 - THE BELLS OF WAR

  Chapter 17 - TRANSKINKERY AND THE CHICKEN MAGICIAN

  Chapter 18 - TWO DEAD PRINCES

  Chapter 19 - THE BATTLE OF BALD RIVER FALLS

  Chapter 20 - THREE DEAD PRINCES

  Chapter 21 - THE RIDDLE OF THE EGG

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Copyright Page

  An E.A.P. Fairy Tale for Adults of All Ages

  At EXTERMINATING ANGEL PRESS, we’re taking a new approach to our world. A new way of looking at things. New stories, new ways to live our lives. We’re dreaming how we want our lives and our world to be…

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  Prologue

  Once upon a hiccup in time, there was a sort-of-fairy tale world. That is, it was as we might imagine a fairy tale world to be, with sort-of-castles and sort-of-knights riding around on sort-of-horses, occasionally stumbling upon sort-of-monsters, and people generally being in the thrall of strange magickery going on, but there was something else about it too. Something we cannot quite put our finger on.

  Or as The Fool would have said:

  The bird laid an egg. But I’m ahead of myself now

  And in truth the black bird was a boy

  Not a boy, but a boy-bird, you begin to see how

  This whole world was off-kilter some …

  Chapter 1

  BALD MOUNTAIN CASTLE

  “How? How can you? It’s summer. School’s out! You can’t leave me with ... with,” she spat it out, “... Lady Muck Batbreath.”

  “Now, Alex,” the King began. He always said “Now, Alex ...” when he was trying to calm the tempests that whipped up inside his daughter, even though he knew that, as she got older, it was more and more like pissing in the wind.

  The King was discovering, for the zillionth time, that his daughter, Princess Alexandra Stormybald Wilson, could be very Stormy indeed. Perhaps it was her age, yes, he thought, that was it. Probably the snowstorm that raged during the first moon of deep winter on the night she was born, over thirteen winters before, had little or no actual bearing on her character.

  “No,” Alexandra Stormy continued, “Bats are too good for her. She is bat vomit, after the bat has eaten rotting mosquitoes, and it’s not just puke; it’s coming out both ends.”

  King Walterbald Wilson the Second of Morainia couldn’t help repressing a smile. “This is the Queen you’re talking about. Such respect for your elders. Tsk, tsk.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” snarled Princess Stormy.

  “Oh my. When did my daughter learn to use such big words?”

  Now, the King did sound patronizing to his only child. But his words had come out wrong, as they sometimes did when he tried to make a joke that, in his own boyish imagination, might make light of his daughter’s woes. What he was really thinking to himself was: what a clever girl, such a fertile imagination. And then, with a tinge of sadness, so like her mother.

  But his daughter didn’t get it.

  “Dad, you just don’t get it.”

  “Now Alex … You’re right. I probably don’t get it, but that doesn’t alter the fact …”

  “The fact that you are going off gallivanting around, exploring, adventuring, and having a right royal ball, and leaving me here for two whole moons with Snot-for-Brains.” And with that, she threw herself on the bed to hide the tears of rage welling up in her brown eyes.

  King Walterbald sighed. “I’ll be back in a few weeks. In plenty of time for Archmother Night.”

  “But Daaad!!”

  “Alex. I … ’er, well …” Relenting perhaps inevitably, he gave way. “Well, I never said … Well, all I actually said was that you can’t come with me. Not this time. It’s too dangerous. And, well, it was going to be a surprise, but I never said that you had to stay here, ’er, period.”

  Now Stormy, unusually for her, was the one struggling for words.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I’m not giving away any details. Suffice to say I have arranged for you to go on a trip of your own, and for some weeks, I believe. You could even call it an adventure.”

  “A mystery adventure? I love it. When do I go? Who’s taking me, Geraldo?”

  “Erm, no. Geraldo will have to stay here to keep an eye on things. ’Er … not to … well, after all … The Fool … yes, definitely The Fool … he’ll …”

  “The Fool! You’re leaving me, and you’re counting on The Fool to take me Zuss-knows-where? Dad, I don’t believe this! The Fool couldn’t organize a piss up in a potstillery!”

  “Well, prepare to be surprised then,” snapped the King. But seeing his daughter’s face, he went and sat on the edge of her bed.

  “Alex. Darling. It may come as another, not unrelated, surprise. But we adults do have an inkling of how this might be a challenging and exciting time for someone of your age. We were all young once you know, and you might want to have a little trust in our wisdom and experience, once in a while.”

  “But, you’re a boy. I mean you were a boy.”

  And I still feel like one much of the time, Walterbald thought to himself, hoping that he could trust his own judgment in sending his daughter out into a world where a certain amount of danger was guaranteed.

  The King exhaled a deep breath. With a heavy heart, he bent to kiss his daughter on the cheek. “Good night, darling. And I know you will not have it all your own way, but I wish you a great summer. I’ll be gone before breakfast. Sweet dreams. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Dad,” and she hugged him a hug that lasted eons. Or so it felt. Those hugs do, sometimes.

  Afterwards, when her head sank deep into the pillow, Stormy’s thoughts raced ahead like clouds in a stormy sky. Beyond the town and lake and into the forest they flew, towards the snow-capped mountains and the ocean she could barely remember seeing. Her thoughts raced toward everything that lay beyond her. Feeling half scared and half excited, she imagined looking out on a vast new world of possibility blooming like a whole mountainside of balsam root greeting the Spring.

  Chapter 2

  THE WONDERLOOK

  On his way downstairs, Walterbald looked in on Gwynmerelda in the royal bedroom. The Queen sat up in bed reading.

  “How did she take it?” she asked without looking up.

  “Oh you know. It could have been worse.”

  “How?�
� snorted Gwynmerelda. This time she did look up.

  “Well …” And then the King faltered, finishing the thought in his head: I could have told her the truth.

  “You’re leaving us at a time like this? Why not the day after tomorrow?”

  “We’ve been through this, love … no time to lose, ’er … and,” (this said more sheepishly) “I, ’er, I’d only be in the way … And you know how I hate all that pompiffery …”

  “Just like a man! Pleading business to get out of …”

  “It’s something I have to do,” implored the King. “That’s right enough.”

  “I know,” the Queen sighed. Strangely enough, she really DID know, and she understood too. But this was something she would never admit unless cornered, and so she went back to scolding. “But you’ve known about the Oosarians coming for weeks. Your daughter’s whole future hangs in the balance. And not only that, but …”

  “Well, I doubt that,” said Walterbald. In spite of himself, he grinned.

  In spite of herself, and in spite of the very real worry on her mind, the Queen grinned back. And then caught herself, and frowned.

  “Well, I wouldn’t be too sure,” she scolded. “Playing for time is all very well, but things have ways of escalating out of control, where young people are involved …”

  “It won’t come to that,” he argued. “And besides, you know better than anyone that binding Morainia to Oosaria will solve nothing in the long term.”

  “Let alone making your daughter never want to speak to you again.”

  “Stop,” said the King. “No one will force Stormy to marry where she doesn’t love. You know that.”

  “I know,” said the Queen. “It’s just that playing with people’s emotions let alone emotions as stormy as Stormy’s just... might … make … things … worse.”

  “You and Geraldo can handle anything the Oosarians can throw at us.”

  “Yes,” said the Queen. “But can we handle Stormy?”

  The King threw up his arms.

  “AND,” she went on in her grumbling voice, “it seems to me you’re leaving me to do the hard stuff.”

  At this the King smiled again and took her hand. The Queen forced her face into a frown, but there were signs that she wasn’t fooling anyone.

  When he spoke next, his voice was gentle, but very, very firm. “You know me, always more a left field player than leader. I am going to the mountains because there might be something in that cave that will help Morainia resist them once and for all … for all our sakes.”

  He did not need to convince her. Gwynmerelda simply did not want to him to be away so long. She looked at him in silence, and then abruptly held open her arms. Walterbald went to her, and they held each other.

  “I’ll come and kiss you goodnight.”

  “You’d better. Even if I’m asleep,” said the Queen, letting her face relax into a smile at last. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

  “Later,” said the King, winking as he slid out of the room.

  Walterbald went down the stairwell into the basement of the castle, where he had his skolarshop. In solitude there, he packed his specially fashioned iron digging tools, his brushes, his notebooks. Then he smiled at a hamper of provisions left there by the Queen.

  Walterbald loved the mountains. It had been nine whole moons since he had last been there. There was something about their calming majesty that enabled him to think clearly. He knew that the sort-of-cave held strange wonders, AND that the meditative work of excavation enabled him to dig deep within himself. He sensed there were vital clues, waiting to be found. Clues that would guide him in addressing the threat facing Morainia, a threat which would rear its ugly head sooner or later.

  Turning his attention to the table in front of him, he opened an ornately carved wooden box. From the cushioning inside it, he took out an object that was largely responsible for his burning desire to return to the sort-of-cave.

  He replayed the memory in his brain. What an expedition it had been! First he had found the mysterious egg, which being too big for him to carry back to Morainia, he had left for safekeeping with Emmeur in the mountains. Only then, at the start of the journey home, had he stumbled on the wonderlook.

  It had been late fall and a new snow could come at any time, though the weather that day was bright blue and yellow. Walterbald had ridden over a mountain pass on a narrow, rocky, and in parts still ice-bound trail, before the descent to safer ground began. And then a glinting thing, which caught and reflected the sunlight, grabbed his eye. Probably just ice, but some inexplicable urge made him stop and take a look.

  Tying his donkey to a tree, he made the awkward descent into a small valley on foot. The remaining snow was old, and where the ground peeped through it was frozen hard. The climb up the opposite south-facing slope into the sun was arduous, but not treacherous.

  That was how he saw the sort-of-cave. And it was by the sort-of-cave that he found the wonderlook.

  It was like nothing he had ever seen: an unknown shiny metal tube with a cap inset into each end. Made of a clear hard substance not ice, not rock, not ceramic. The end pieces were, we would say, polished, and unique in the Oosarian world unlike the opaque quality of river ice, they were completely translucent. You could see through them.

  The tube was circular and almost two hands around. It was narrower at one end than the other, and extended to a little over half an arm’s length. And, the most amazing thing of all, it let Walterbald see things never before seen. Looking through the end piece, he could see the craters of the moon, or the hairs on a deer’s nostrils at a hundred paces. What we would know as a small, but powerful, telescope, Walterbald saw as a scientic marvel.

  The King’s mind had burned with questions, and when he brought the wonderlook back to Bald Mountain Castle, he was, with his expertise in metal-making after a long winter of experimentation able to master the technology of fine glassmaking. First he made the spectacles that enabled Jakerbald, his father, to read the smallest words in books, which had been lost to him for many summers. Second, Walterbald made a whole array of magnifying devices which revealed the eyes of a spider, the hairs on the back of a yellow jacket, and the ability to see the world in a new and wholly amazing light.

  Though he barely dared think it, for it was a blasfamy of staggering dimensions, Walterbald sensed that the sort-of-cave, and the people, or creatures, who had made the wonderlook, were older than any of the western peoples, perhaps even dating back to the cataclysm. Could they even have existed at the beginning time itself? He had to find out. It was as simple as that. If there were such great secrets in the past … there might be an answer to …

  A knock at the door shook him from his train of thought. Geraldo entered the skolarshop, trepidation on his face. His expression changed, though, at the sight of the metal tube.

  “Ah, the wonderlook,” said Geraldo in awe.

  “Yes. It never ceases to amaze me … Has something happened, Geraldo?”

  “Aye, Walt. I’ve just taken a message bird.” He passed the King a tightly rolled wad of paper. “It’s from King Jude.”

  King Jude was Gwynmerelda’s older brother. He had ruled Rockport, the neighboring kingdom to the south, for the past twelve summers, since their father had died.

  Walterbald opened the message:

  My spies in Oosaria reveal their ships bring strange looking men from some newly discovered island south … the strangers are somehow beholden to Oosaria, for they allow themselves to be trained, by Prince Braggardio and Prince Toromos, as soldiers in the Oosarian guard. It smells like big trouble for us … will keep you birded … J.

  Walterbald let out an audible sigh and rested his head in his hands on the table. “It is nothing less than I have been dreading,” he said, and passed the note to Geraldo.

  “But strange looking men from the south? What could that mean?”

  “There is so much unexplored in our world, Geraldo, and it seems that the Oosarians are pu
shing back the frontiers of discovery in the south with their boats, as we have done a little up north. It does not really surprise me that there are other peoples. But why on earth would they want to help the Oosarians?”

  “Does this affect your immediate plans any?”

  The King shook his head: “I will go, but keep me informed. In an emergency, Emmeur can bring me back in a single night. You reply to Jude. Any sign that Oosaria’s army is on the move and I’ll be back. I just need a little time. And, I know that Morainia is as safe in your hands as it would be in mine, Geraldo.”

  The Vice-King smiled. “Your trust is not misplaced, Walt. Juggling the peculiarities of administration is what I love to do.”