They Lived

Sarah did not remember the route from the guest suite to Queen Anna's chambers. However, it seemed to her sleep-fogged mind that Christine was leading her to a completely different wing of the castle.

The door at which they stopped looked nothing like the one before; it was considerably plainer. Christine's fingers went into her apron to remove a heavy set of keys. It took her nearly a minute to find the one that would open the tarnished lock. Sarah did not understand why she was being moved. She almost asked Christine, but she did not wish to seem ungrateful. After all, Sarah did not mind where she slept as long as she could sleep somewhere.

The door opened, protested with a creak that traveled along the floorboards and up Sarah's spine. She shuddered. "After you, my lady," murmured Christine.

Sarah took a few steps forward. Her eyes adjusted to the muffled gloom. Once they registered what Sarah was seeing, they nearly escaped back into the recesses of her head before Sarah managed to gain conscious control of them by breathing deeply.

"Christine," Sarah ventured, "is that to be my bed?" Christine did not reply.

The furniture in question, if one was generous in considering the sole object in the room as such, rose like an obelisk from an ancient Puzhan rug on the floor. It proclaimed its magnificence by height alone. The most arresting feature, though, was that the bed seemed to be composed entirely of wide mattresses of varying thickness. Eleven...no twelve!...mattresses towered in the dark. Sarah hoped for clean sheets and a few soft pillows atop the thing, but since she was unable to see that far up, she could not be sure of their existence.

"How am I to get up there?" Will this night never end? Sarah moped.

Christine finally regathered enough of her scattered wits to construct a sentence. "There should be a ladder somewhere..." she flicked her gaze about the room, "my lady," she appended belatedly.

Sarah spotted a rickety ladder precariously perched against the foot of the bed. Constructed more of air than wooden beam, Sarah thought of what a pity it would be if the ladder succumbed beneath her weight. Now that Sarah realized she only had to climb one more mountain to reach the finish, the bed did not appear an insurmountable obstacle.

First, she needed out of this dress. It would weigh her down.

"Christine," she said sharply, reaching down to remove her slippers. "Help me out of this gown." Christine's fingers, needing none of her mind's few wits to work their magic, undid the laces readily.

"Right," Sarah said mostly to herself. Now clad only in a snowy white shift, freed hair flowing down past her shoulders, she, somewhat incongruently, looked like a virgin sacrifice prepared for battle.

Sarah grasped the third rung of the ladder with her right hand. "Hold the base of the ladder steady please, Christine. Once I reach the top, I will call out to you."

Sarah climbed the ladder with more determination than she thought she had. When her head cleared the top of the very last mattress, which she happily noticed was layered in blankets, quilts, coverlets, and comforters, unadulterated triumph burst within her breast. Sarah took a deep breath...the air seemed sweeter at the summit...and dismissed Christine. She clamored up and into the delicious warmth, tucked herself between clean cotton sheets, and buried her head into the pillows at the other end of the bed. This wasn't a bed fit for a princess or a queen. This was a bed fit for an empress.

And it was all hers.

The fuzzy thought crossed Sarah's mind that she might fall off the bed in her sleep; there were no sharp edges in her exhausted head, though, so Sarah was not as alarmed as she should have been.

Her eyes shuttered of their own accord, and the light in Sarah's brain winked out. Sarah's victory was hard-won, but it was a victory all the same.

She surrendered enthusiastically to slumber.

---

A few hours later, Sarah was roused from a deep, dreamless sleep, by a shaking of her mattresses.

An earthquake? No! Someone was trying to scale her bed. Who dared disturb her? This was her bed, and she was sleeping in it.

Bernard? Sarah briefly entertained visions of being set upon by men garbed in Queen Anna's livery. She screwed her eyes shut and mentally scrubbed the image from the backs of her eyelids.

A hand clutched at the corner of one comforter. Sarah gasped a somewhat frightened and affronted gasp and brought her knees up to her chest. She could not escape except off the sides of the bed, and she did not think it prudent to plunge valiantly to her death just yet.

Sarah waited.

Another hand joined the first and a black-haired head soon followed.

Peregrine, Crown Prince of Shea, levered himself onto Sarah's bed. His jacket was rumbled and unbuttoned. Sarah noticed he appeared slightly winded. She watched his chest rise and fall beneath the loose drape of his shirt.

"Through the woods and to grandmother's house is it?" a snide voice asked. Sarah registered it as belonging to Prince Peregrine. "Wolves?" His tone teetered dangerously close to screeching.

"What? What are you doing in my bed!?" No need to stand on proper forms of address. There was a man. In her bed.

"Wolves?" The prince repeated.

"What are you on about?" Sarah yanked her bed linens up to her neck. Prince Peregrine took no notice.

"You asked my mother whether or not we have wolves in the northern woods! Wolves! And now you are going to tell me that your traveling cloak is red, right?"

"No." Sarah did not think an hours-old conversation merited so much ire. "Actually, it is brown. Who would wear a red cloak?"

"El Puti Shapuron Ru, that's who," Prince Peregrine nearly shouted the title in Farbudi.

"Oh." Sarah's brain caught up with her. "I must have been channeling the wrong folktale, then. Did you get through any of Von Gierke's Modern Physik this evening?" Sarah asked, referring to the prince's neglected book. Without waiting for an answer, she burrowed into her pillows as if to return to sleep.

The prince shook her; Sarah's eyes snapped open. Her blankets fell to her waist.

"What do you think you are doing? Unhand me." Sarah further upset her bedding with her struggles.

"Not until you listen."

"I doubt you have anything to say that would interest me."

The bedroom was dark, so Sarah would not have been able to see this clearly, but Prince Peregrine's face was flushed a most unnatural shade of pink. "Listen you..."

Sarah cut him off. "No you listen to me, Your Highness. I refuse to hear out the nocturnal ramblings of a strange man who has accosted me in my sleep! Are you mad? Does it run in the family? Madness can be inherited, you know. And with your family's history of inbreeding...mmpf!"

Prince Peregrine placed a warm hand over Sarah's mouth just as she was about to launch into a history of mental disease amongst royalty. "Shut up. Look, I don't care what you think of me at this moment. I came to speak with you about my mother's plans. I thought you deserved to know."

"Wha?" came from beneath the prince's palm. The prince's skin tasted like salt and parchment.

"My mother has decided to take it upon herself to play fairy godmother to both me and an unsuspecting victim...that would be you, by the way. The reason you are currently sleeping atop a dozen mattresses is testament to her grand idea. She has placed a pea underneath this pile of a bed."

"A pea?" The prince removed his hand from Sarah's lips. "That's the big surprise? That's it? To what end?"

"My mother is suffering from the delusion that a princess, a true princess, would be unable to sleep soundly due to the lump caused by a single pea beneath a tower of mattresses."

"Seriously? Perry, that's ridiculous!"

The prince doggedly continued. "In the morning my mother will ask you if you slept well. To prove that you are a princess, you must tell her that you did not."

"I am supposed to tell Queen Anna that I slept terribly because of a pea?" The disbelief in Sarah's voice was evident.

"No, not 'because of a pea.' You're not supposed to know about the pea. Bloody hell, woman! Are you being this obtuse on purpose?"

Sarah sat up and laughed; she could do nothing else. Prince Peregrine scowled at her.

"So I will be exhausted because my delicate royal body could not get comfortable during the night, leaving my delicate royal self unable to sleep?"

The prince scoffed. His eyes locked on Sarah's. "You are not delicate. But you are a royal..." Prince Peregrine trailed off.

Sarah prompted him. "Royal pain in your...?"

"Forget it. Do you understand the plan?"

"Yes, sir. Your Royal Arse, sir."

Prince Peregrine, who was readying himself to make the perilous climb back down to ground level, started. "I have never heard you speak like that before," he whispered.

"This is what happens when I am assaulted by princes in the middle of the night. I am unable to check my tongue. Besides, I am no princess."

The bedroom was awash in quiet except for the synchronized breathing of its two occupants. The prince and Sarah were lost to internal self-debating. One of them was about to instigate something rash.

"You know. It might be better...for the plan...if you actually are tired in the morning." The prince addressed this statement to the level of Sarah's chest.

Sarah, now wide awake, said: "I won't be able to fall asleep anytime soon thanks to you."

The prince of Shea reached out to take Sarah's hand in his own. He missed, though, and caught her thigh instead.

She froze. Moments passed silently. They spoke volumes.

"I think I understand you now, Prince Peregrine." Sarah's words were oddly formal.

"Do you?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"Will you really go through with it – all of it?"

"Yes."

"You realize there will be lasting consequences?"

Sarah's voice came out a little lower than usual.

"You know, I think I am counting on them."

Prince Peregrine then sought to prove to Sarah that being attacked by strange princes in foreign castles on stormy nights is not necessarily bad.

For her part, Sarah was trying her hardest to embrace this new development. Nearly an hour later, once her eyes had adjusted quite well to the shadowed room...and her hands and mouth had adjusted just as easily to other places...Sarah experienced two bright epiphanies in quick succession.

At least that is what she had decided to call them.

She had been wrong before.

The way Peregrine was looking at her, searching her face as his body hovered over hers, he embodied his namesake completely. Sarah looked at his eyes in turn: truly looked. And she found, with no begrudging reluctance, that maybe the Farbudi poet had the gist of it after all.

And then she had no room for thoughts, revelatory or otherwise.