Appease - Princess and the Pea Retold

Part 2

TWO

His mother was wrong, Reidar decided as he followed the little princess. Sativa would make quite a queen one day, if her six-year-old self was any indication. As long as no one did anything to dampen her fire between now and their wedding, which would be at least a decade away. She had her mother's fair colouring, so she'd probably grow up to look like her. Regal and feminine and fiery – everything his kingdom needed in a queen, for if the border wars continued, she would need to rule while he kept the neighbouring armies at bay like his father was doing right now.

She might not hunt yet, but she at least rode. That was good, and she knew her way to the stables well enough. His sisters would not be so sure, leading the way around his father's castle, but the princess of a bigger, more prosperous kingdom like this one, living in a castle surrounded by such a huge town, would need to be more assured than the girls at his father's seaside castle back home.

"This is Philip," Sativa announced, waving at a fat pony that looked very much like a hairy barrel with legs. A hairy barrel that snorted, blowing his mane up off one baleful eye that stared disdainfully at Reidar for a moment before it disappeared beneath the descending mane. "He likes apples." She fetched an armload of fruit from the apple barrel, her shoes scuffing through the straw.

Then her face screwed up, and she sneezed. And sneezed again. Reidar counted seven in all before he began to grow concerned for her health.

By the time the sneezing fit had subsided, her eyes and nose were running and Sativa needed to hold onto a post to stay on her feet.

Reidar's heart sank. Perhaps his mother was right, after all. He'd need a strong queen, not a weak one, and Sativa's health mattered. She wouldn't just have to rule the kingdom in his absence – she'd have to give him an heir or two to ensure the succession, too.

"Are you well?" he asked.

She sniffled loudly and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Then she seemed to remember herself, and she pulled out a handkerchief to clean herself up in a more ladylike fashion.

"It's the straw," she said thickly. "It makes me sneeze something awful. My father found a physician who had seen something like this before, in a son of some sultan of a desert land far to the south. He called it rose fever, because the prince sneezes at flowers. Me, I sneeze at straw. Not all straw. Just the stuff we have here, which the farmers insist on growing as pasture because it makes our fields the most fertile in the region. Pea straw, they call it. He said I should go to the desert, where it is dry, or by the sea, where it is too salty for such straw to grow."

Reidar couldn't help it. He laughed. "No wonder your parents wanted us to be betrothed. My father's castle is on a cliff overlooking the sea. The salt breeze blows day and night, so that all you can smell is the sea. When you are my queen, I shall build you a tower, and the topmost room shall be your bower, so that you will never need to sneeze at straw again."

"It sounds like heaven," Sativa admitted. "A place with no straw, where I can breathe. Do you truly mean it?"

Reidar pulled a ring off his smallest finger and held it out to Sativa. "Take this as a symbol of my unbreakable promise. I swear that one day, when I am old enough, I will return to save you from this place, and carry you off to my castle to be my queen."

Sativa smiled. "Just like a hero in one of my nurse's fairytales." She slipped the ring onto her finger, and for a moment, the amber caught the sunset light, glinting gold as the silver setting glowed around it. "I will wait for you, my prince," she promised.