The Princess Rules 2-Book Collection

But next morning, before anyone was up, there was a great Tooroo! Tooroo! at the palace gates, and in galloped Prince Bennett with half a dozen of his courtiers, a dozen soldiers and a couple of trumpeters. Just a small informal visit.

He had come to see the king, for someone had told him that Princess Florizella was locked in her room and that the king would not let her out until she promised to marry the prince.

Prince Bennett popped up to the king’s bedroom and argued with him while the king sat up in bed and longed for his morning tea. He had never liked Bennett less than he did at that moment.

Just think of him married to Florizella and living in the palace! the king warned himself. I’d never have a peaceful morning.

But, out loud, all he said was that Prince Bennett should go home and wait for a message, and that he was certain Florizella would agree to a wedding soon. And then the footmen finally poured the morning cup of tea, and the king looked so hard at the door and at Prince Bennett and back again, that even the prince could see he was very much in the way. So he made a bow and got himself out of the room as quickly as he could go backwards. (You’re not supposed to turn your back on the royals. It’s a nuisance when you’re in a hurry.)

Prince Bennett didn’t go home, of course. He at least knew how a prince should behave in a crisis. He popped round to the back of the castle and hooted like an owl until Princess Florizella put her head out of the window and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Bennett. Everyone knows owls come out at night. Besides, that wasn’t anything like an owl.’

Then they argued about whether or not owls made calls like too-wit-too-whoo, or whether it was more like hoo-hee, hoo-hoo, and whether they came out at dawn or dusk. They made owl calls at each other until all the windows of the castle opened and lots of people put their heads out to see what was going on.

‘What on earth is that racket?’ the queen asked her maid, pausing in the middle of trying on one of her twenty crowns.

‘Princess Florizella’s young prince, Your Majesty, making secret signals to her,’ said the maid, leaning out of the window to have a good look.

‘He’s come to rescue her, then,’ said the queen, extremely pleased. ‘That’s very prompt. I like a young man who gets on with a rescue. When I was a princess, my future husband, the dear king, was very late. I was tied to a rock for three days, and if the sea monster had not had an upset stomach, my dear husband might have been too late altogether. It’s not all fun being a princess, you know.’

The maid nodded and looked out of the window again.

‘He’s climbing up to her bedroom, ma’am,’ she said.

‘That’s unusual,’ said the queen, with interest. ‘I’d have thought Florizella would have had the sheets knotted together by now. How is he climbing? Not by her hair – it’s not nearly long enough. She will keep having it cut. I told her she’d need it one of these days.’

‘Up the ivy, ma’am,’ said the maid. ‘Looks a bit unsteady to me.’

The queen smiled because it had been her idea to plant the ivy outside Princess Florizella’s bedroom on the very morning that she was born, to be ready for just such an occasion. And now here was Prince Bennett climbing up it to free Florizella! It was very gratifying. Next, Bennett would rescue Florizella and ride away with her. Then the queen and the king could forgive them and they could all have a wonderful party and live happily ever after.

But she should have remembered that Florizella was not like other princesses.

Prince Bennett should have remembered that Florizella was not like other princesses.

She was not a bit grateful to him for climbing up the ivy.

‘But I’ve come to rescue you!’ Bennett protested, scrambling through the window and diving head-first on to the floor.

‘How did you get to my bedroom window?’ she demanded as if she had not seen him scrambling, and grabbing for the drainpipe when a branch broke.

‘The ivy,’ Bennett said, surprised at the question.

‘And don’t you think,’ said Florizella sarcastically, ‘that if you can climb up, then I can perfectly well climb down?’

Bennett said nothing. He hadn’t thought of that. He was so used to the old idea of princesses sitting still and waiting to be rescued that he had forgotten Florizella did not follow the Princess Rules.

‘Just go,’ said Florizella, giving him a little push towards the window. ‘It’s bad enough with everyone nagging me to marry you, without you carrying on like a prince in an old fairy story as well.’

‘But what about you?’ Bennett asked, rather worried.

Florizella laughed. ‘My father will let me out soon enough,’ she said. ‘And, if I get too bored, I can always climb down the drainpipe and go for a ride. When I’m out, I’ll come over and see you. But I’ll stay here for now. My father shouldn’t have locked me in, and I want to talk to him about it. He’ll never learn to treat girls properly unless I tell him.’

Bennett thought that perhaps Florizella was not a very comfortable daughter for anyone to have. And he thought that perhaps she would not be a very obedient wife. But she was a great friend. So he shook hands with her and climbed out of the window.

‘Gracious me, ma’am!’ squawked the queen’s maid. ‘It’s Prince Bennett coming back down the ivy. On his own! He’s left the princess behind!’

The queen dashed to the window and watched Prince Bennett scramble down, whistle for his horse, mount up, signal to his trumpeters to go Tooroo! Tooroo! and gallop off without a care in the world and – more importantly – without a rescued princess across his saddlebow.

‘Oh no!’ she said. She had no doubt who was to blame. ‘Oh no! Oh, Florizella!’

When the king heard what had happened, he went bananas.

There was no chance that he was going to let Florizella out now. He had been so sure that Bennett was going to rescue her, he was even prepared to overlook the way the prince had bothered him so early in the morning. But for the prince to leave without taking Princess Florizella with him, breaking all the traditions of fairy stories and happy endings!

‘Amateur!’ he snapped and stumped off to the garden to prune the roses. ‘Half-hearted,’ he said with a snip. ‘Half-witted, more like,’ he said, taking off another flower.

There wasn’t a single rose blooming by lunchtime, but the king was feeling a lot better.

Until the messenger came, that is.

It was one of Prince Bennett’s trumpeters. She came Tooroo, Toorooing into the courtyard in a terrible hurry, scaring the hens half to death and setting the guard dogs barking.

‘Prince Bennett has been captured!’ she shouted. ‘He was on his way home when he was captured by a dragon in the Purple Forest!’

Everyone came running at once. Florizella opened her window to listen. The messenger told them that the great two-headed dragon of the Purple Forest had jumped out at the prince and his courtiers, and everyone had ridden away as fast as they could except for Prince Bennett, whose horse reared and dropped him right at the dragon’s feet. Bennett had bent his sword in the fall and couldn’t draw it from the scabbard! As he lay there, stunned and helpless (‘Amateur!’ the king exclaimed. ‘As I said. Nincompoop!’), the dragon had picked him up and tied him to a tree, using all sorts of particularly difficult knots, and was sitting beside him, waiting for forty-eight hours (according to Dragon Association Rules) for the rescue party to arrive, before eating the prince up – every little bit of him except, possibly, the bent sword.

‘Ooo!’ said Florizella, privately rather pleased at hearing this, and she leaned out of the window and whistled a loud, clear whistle that Jellybean could hear wherever he happened to be. He was in his stable and had to back up against the far wall and take a little run at the door and rear up to jump over it, and then he came galloping round and crashed to a stop under Florizella’s window. Florizella grabbed her sword and her dagger, and a spare sword for Prince Bennett (which she kept in the wardrobe in the space for the long dresses) and shinned down the drainpipe as quickly as she could.

She dropped on to Jellybean’s back and galloped as fast as she could to the Purple Forest, steering Jellybean with the halter rope and clinging on tightly to the two swords.

She saw the dragon before he saw her.

He had dozed off while he was waiting, with an alarm clock in one of his great green ears to wake him when the forty-eight hours were up. His snores bent the tallest trees of the Purple Forest and made a noise like a thousand thunderstorms. His reeking, smoky breath scorched all the grass and flowers and bushes for three miles around, so that Jellybean snorted and shivered at the dreadful smell of burning.

Bennett was tied to a tree with fiendishly complicated dragon knots, looking rather white and scared. But as soon as he saw Florizella, he whispered as softly as he could, ‘Florizella! Untie me, quick!’

Florizella had a look at the knots as she jumped out of the saddle and thought it would take her all of the forty-eight hours to get even one of them undone and, drawing her sharp sword, she cut through the rope. She and Bennett were just about to get up on Jellybean and gallop away, when …

… the dragon woke up!

As soon as the dragon saw Florizella and Bennett, he let out a dreadful great roar. His yellow eyes flashed and smoke spouted from all his nostrils in both his noses.

Florizella and Bennett stood back to back without saying a word, and both drew their swords. The dragon lurched towards them, his two great scaly heads getting closer and closer. Florizella’s sword went up, and Bennett’s too, and before the dragon had a chance to blow flaming breath all over them, the two heroes brought their swords down with a mighty swoosh and a horrid thwack that resounded through the forest.

The dragon lay dead at their feet, disappearing from its toes up, as dragons do when their heads are cut off, and That was the End of Him.

‘Wow!’ said Bennett. They both leaned down and wiped the blades of their weapons on the grass and the ferns of the forest. Their swords were smeared with the dragon’s bright-green blood. It made them both feel a bit sick just to see it. When their swords were clean, they gave each other a hug and slumped down together on the ground and waited to get their breath back.

‘You know, you shouldn’t have risked your life to save me, Florizella,’ said Bennett as they sat under the pine trees.

Florizella thought he was being polite.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’d do the same for me.’

But Bennett wasn’t being polite at all.

He was being horrid, though he didn’t mean to be, and though he didn’t know it yet.

‘I’d risk my life to save you,’ he said carefully, ‘but you shouldn’t have done the same for me, because I am a brave prince and you are a princess, and it’s not how a princess should behave. It’s right against the Princess Rules.’

Florizella stopped staring at the sky and listening to her heart, which was beating too fast because she had been so scared by the dragon. She took the stem of grass she was chewing out of her mouth and she looked at Bennett. She did not look at him affectionately. She did not have a pretty-pleasing expression. She squinted at Bennett as if she thought he was about to say something stupid.

She was dead right.

‘It’s the prince’s job to do the rescuing,’ Bennett prince-splained. ‘Everybody knows that the princess has to be caught by the dragon so the prince can come along and rescue her. Then he asks her to marry him and they get married to universal rejoicing. Everyone knows that. That’s how we should have done it.’

‘There wouldn’t be universal rejoicing if we got married,’ Florizella said sharply. ‘Because one person, at least, wouldn’t be rejoicing, and that would be me. You know very well that I don’t want to get married yet. You know very well that we agreed to be friends. And if you want to be friends with me then you have to see that I am not the sort of princess who is going to get caught by a dragon and wait to be rescued!’

She jumped up and whistled for Jellybean, collecting the cut ropes and gathering the swords in a very busy, cross way.

‘But that’s how princes and princesses are supposed to be!’ said Prince Bennett, a bit cross himself. ‘We’re supposed to warn you, you’re supposed to wander into obvious danger, then I am supposed to rescue you.’

Florizella put a hand on Jellybean’s halter and looked at the prince with blazing eyes.

‘Suit yourself!’ she said crossly. ‘If you want to be best friends, then you come to me when I need you and I’ll come to you when you need me. But if you want to be like other princes and princesses and get married as soon as something interesting happens, so that nothing interesting ever happens again, that’s up to you! But I told you once and I’ll tell you again – I won’t get married for a good long while. And I won’t marry you just because we fought a dragon together. You said we were best friends, and that’s what I want. But if you want me to be a regular princess – and worse than that – a princess who has to be rescued, then you can fight your own dragons … and I hope they eat you!’

‘But a proper princess—’ Bennett started.

‘This is a proper princess,’ Florizella yelled, waving her sword above her head in her agitation. ‘I am a proper princess! Like a prince only with more s’s!’

‘Why, what do the s’s stand for?’

‘Swordsmanship,’ said Florizella crushingly, and she jumped on Jellybean, dug her heels in and scorched off at a gallop. She did not even look back at poor Prince Bennett, standing all alone in the Purple Forest with his broken sword and the trees quietly smouldering all around him.

She went home, put Jellybean back in his stall and gave him a rub-down and a feed. Then she climbed up the drainpipe (for her bedroom door was still locked) and pulled back the covers on her bed, tumbled in and fell fast asleep. She was very tired.

So she did not know until the next morning that she and Bennett were the best of friends after all. For when the rescue party finally arrived in the Purple Forest, he did not go straight home, where his parents were anxiously waiting. He rode all the way back to Florizella’s kingdom and, for the second time that day, he sought and found the king, Florizella’s father, and addressed him as ‘Sire’ just like a proper fairy tale.

Bennett told the king straight that he would never marry Florizella, unless one day she really wanted to marry him.

‘And I think, Sire,’ he said, ‘that a girl who is big enough to kill her own dragon is big enough to make up her own mind.’

The king could not help but agree and give Prince Bennett a hug.

‘Undoubtedly! Undootedly!’ he said.

And the queen, who had taught Florizella sword-fighting in the first place, nodded rather proudly and said, ‘Well, Florizella was never just an ordinary princess.’

She hugged Prince Bennett too, and they sent him home in the second-best royal carriage, the silver one with the blue cushions. And from that day onwards no one ever suggested that Princess Florizella should obey the Princess Rules.

Least of all Prince Bennett.

It was a bright, sunny morning as Princess Florizella threw back her bedroom curtains and saw, to her relief, that no overnight spell had turned her kingdom into a watery waste, or the people into butterflies, or any of the other tedious and unpredictable things that can happen to a fairytale princess.

Since everything seemed normal, she leaned out of the window to see her horse, Jellybean, grazing in the field beyond the palace gardens. She put two fingers in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle. Jellybean’s head went up and his ears went forward and he thundered down the paddock towards the gate and cleared it with a metre to spare, narrowly missing the king, who was gardening on the other side.

‘I do wish she wouldn’t do that,’ said the king as he pulled himself out of the rose bush.

The queen gave him a helpful tug, and watched Florizella slide down the drainpipe and jump from the windowsill on to Jellybean’s warm back, and trot round to the stables.

‘I wish she’d use the doors,’ she agreed. ‘But she’s always been a princess in her own way.’

‘Undoubtedly!’ said the king, with much feeling. ‘Undootedly!’

Florizella had Jellybean tacked up in a few minutes. She put on her hard hat with its smart princess cover, and trotted out of the stableyard, over the castle drawbridge and down the lane towards the Purple Forest.

It was a wonderful day in early summer; the scarlet swallows and the golden swifts were swooping low over the river, and in the central square, the fairies were holding a farmers’ market, buying and selling farmers. Florizella was singing to herself, and Jellybean put his ears forward and went into an easy canter down the track that runs through the Purple Forest and up to the high moorland.

But somehow they took a wrong turn.

Florizella rode for a little while, then she pulled Jellybean to a standstill and looked around. She had never been this deep into the Purple Forest before and she was surprised at how dark it was. She knew there were wolves and lions in the forest, as well as witches and enchanters. Florizella felt rather uncomfortable – as if there were cold fingers walking up and down her spine.

It grew darker, and Florizella started to wish she was at home. The black bushes and shadowy trees seemed to whisper in the wind, and the little rustlings sounded like someone coming closer.

Jellybean put back his ears, a sure sign that he was unhappy, and moved restlessly. Florizella patted his neck and said, ‘Silly Jellybean! Fancy being frightened!’ as if she were not nervous herself, and she turned him round to ride back the way she had come.

Then suddenly the rain started – great thick drops of rain that cascaded through the leaves of the trees and soaked Florizella and Jellybean in seconds so they both stopped being scared and became cold and miserable. Jellybean’s head drooped and his lovely bright chestnut coat went all streaky and dark with the wet. Florizella was wet through, rain dripping off her hat and down her neck.