Copyright

The Princess Rules and It’s a Prince Thing first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019 and 2020

Published in this ebook pack edition in 2020

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

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Text copyright © Philippa Gregory 1988, 1991, 1992, 2019 and 2020

Illustrations copyright © Chris Chatterton 2020

Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Philippa Gregory and Chris Chatterton assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work respectively.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBNs: 9780008375485 (The Princess Rules) and 9780008403256 (It’s a Prince Thing)

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008405632

Version: 2020-09-24

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Princess Rules

It's A Prince Thing

About the Author

About the Publisher

For Freddie and Sebastian

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Princess Florizella

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Florizella and the Wolves

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Florizella and the Giant

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Once upon a time (that means I don’t exactly know when, but it wasn’t that long ago), in the land called the Seven Kingdoms, the king and queen very much wanted a son. They waited and waited until one day the queen told her husband, ‘I have news for you. We are going to have a beautiful baby boy!’

‘And when he grows up he will be king,’ said the king, very pleased. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

But when the baby came, it was not a boy. It was a girl.

This was a big shock for the king and queen, but since they were royal they put on a smile and took the baby through the tall windows to the balcony of the palace and waved at everyone. They pretended that they did not mind that she was a girl when they had been counting on a boy, and after a little while they loved her anyway. ‘Besides,’ the king said, ‘undoubtedly she will marry a handsome rich prince, and they can be king and queen over his kingdom and ours. Undootedly!’

‘We’ll call her Florizella,’ said the queen. ‘Princess Florizella.’

Though they started with good intentions, the king and queen were dreadfully careless parents. They messed up the christening by inviting everyone, so that nobody was furiously offended. No angry witches blew in and put a fatal spell on the baby, nobody turned her into a mouse. The king and queen forgot all about locking her in a high tower so that a prince could climb up her hair to rescue her, they did not forbid her from spinning, or ban her from sharp needles. They did remind her not to run with scissors in her hands, but this is of no use to a fairytale princess – it’s just normal. They did not strap her into tight gowns so she had a tiny, tiny waist that a prince could span with one hand. They did not feed her poisoned apples and bury her in a glass coffin. The queen was particularly neglectful – she completely failed to die and leave her daughter to a cruel stepmother to make her herd geese or sit in the cinders.

They let Florizella do as she liked, and so it was partly their fault that she did not learn the Princess Rules, but grew up into a cheerful, noisy, bossy, happy girl who spent her mornings on her horse called Jellybean, and her afternoons working with them in the royal office. She particularly liked answering letters of complaint about the expense and the unimportance of a royal family. Mostly, she agreed with them. ‘We are dretfully ex-pence-sieve’ she wrote when she was six years old.

‘You’re never going to post it like that!’ said the king.

‘So sweet,’ said the queen, putting it in the bin.

Florizella was friends with some princesses who had studied the Princess Rules, and behaved just as the Rules said they should. Florizella thought their hair was lovely: so golden and so very long! And their clothes were nice: so richly embroidered by devoted peasants. And their shoes were delightful: so tiny and handmade in silk! But their days bored her to death!

In the morning, they got up, washed their faces and put cream on their cheeks and on their hands and on their noses. Then it was time for breakfast. They drank hot water and sometimes green tea. The Princess Rules were clear about breakfast: ‘Princesses live off air,’ the Rules said. They got dressed, and that took them hours because they wore petticoats and underclothes and beautiful gowns and overgowns and even those tall pointy hats called henins. By the time they got all that on, and did their hair, it was lunchtime.

In the afternoon, they were too tired to do anything but pluck their eyebrows.

In the evening, they said they were bored.

‘What do you do all day?’ they asked Florizella, looking in bewilderment at her. She wore trousers and a shirt for riding, and a skirt or a dress for best.

‘I’m learning how to run the Seven Kingdoms when I’m grown up,’ she told them. ‘I’ve got a lot of ideas.’

‘Ideas!’ They were all quite horrified. ‘We don’t have ideas! We have the Rules.’

But Florizella thought that everyone should live in the size of house that they needed. So families with lots of children, or who had friends living with them, should have the biggest houses, and small families should have the smaller houses.

‘Actually, that sounds rather sensible,’ said the queen, who was sick of dusting the 134 royal rooms of the palace.

Florizella thought that everyone should be paid whether they had a job or not. They should be paid to garden or think, to paint or run. Fathers could stay at home and look after the children, and when mothers went out to interesting jobs they could come home to a clean, tidy house.

‘That would never work,’ said the king, who had no intention of dusting 134 rooms, not even one or two.

Florizella laughed and went out to canoe in the moat. ‘You know, she’s not like a regular princess at all,’ the king complained to the queen. ‘I think you must have gone very badly wrong somewhere.’

‘She’ll find her own way, in her own time,’ the queen said comfortably. ‘And surely, since she’s a princess born and bred, she’ll just naturally come to the Princess Rules in time? Won’t she?’

One day an invitation came to the palace. It said ‘Princess Florizella’ on the front in wonderful curly writing. It was an invitation for a ball, to be given by Prince Bennett in the next-door kingdom – the Land of Deep Lakes. He wanted to meet all the princesses in the neighbouring realms so that he could choose one to marry.

‘I’d like to go,’ said Princess Florizella at breakfast when the invitation arrived.

The king gave the queen a look, which meant that she must start the job of telling Florizella ‘no’.

‘I don’t think you’d enjoy it,’ the queen said nicely.

Florizella said she thought she would.

The queen gave the king That Look, and he said, rather impatiently, for he was uncomfortable when he thought he might hurt Florizella’s feelings:

‘Thing is, Florizella, Prince Bennett will never choose you to be his bride because there will be very, very pretty princesses there, trained in the Princess Rules. And you have never been like that. Not at all.’

‘I know that,’ said Florizella. ‘But I’m not going there to get married to Prince Bennett. I’m going to see my friends and enjoy the party.’

‘Ah,’ the king said. ‘Then you may go. Undoubtedly. Undootedly!’

So she threw a clean pair of jeans in a bag, and after lunch she hopped into the glass coach – for they had no cars and trains or buses in the Seven Kingdoms – and drove off with her horse, Jellybean, trotting behind.

Prince Bennett’s kingdom wasn’t far from Florizella’s home, and Florizella was the first to arrive. The prince had invited one hundred and twenty-one princesses, and Florizella waited at the gate to watch them all drive past. One hundred and twenty princesses went by, some in fine carriages, some in smaller ones, and one or two in carts. One very poor princess came in a wheelbarrow. Some of them were very beautiful and some were less so, but they all desperately wanted to marry Prince Bennett. They didn’t have anything else to do in those days, and the Princess Rule no. 500 (the last) said: Marry a handsome prince.

The one hundred and twenty-first princess, Florizella, was the only one not planning marriage. She was just there for the party.

‘And to eat the food!’ said Princess Florizella longingly when she saw the banquet.

She had a wonderful time. There were tons of cakes, and three hundred different sorts of ice cream and forty different coloured jellies. There were meringues, pizzas and hot dogs. There were sticks of rock and candyfloss. There were toffee apples, and strawberries still growing in the strawberry beds that you could pick yourself and eat – as many as you wanted. Florizella ate a very good dinner indeed.

But the one hundred and twenty princesses ate a little bread and butter and nothing more. They were worried about spilling on their best ballgowns. They were worried about whether they would be able to dance lightly on their toes. They were worried that someone might think they were greedy. (Princess Rule no. 42: Princesses Live Off Air.) Florizella worried about nothing. She had seconds and thirds of nearly everything.

She had a much better dinner than Prince Bennett, who had to dance with every single one of the hundred and twenty-one princesses. He thought he had better make an early start. He danced with each princess, one after another, and they all smiled and agreed with whatever he said.

They were lovely. They were the nicest girls he had ever met. They were so pleasant that he could not tell them apart. They were so charming that he had the horrid feeling that nobody could be that nice all the time. So how could he possibly know which were nice for most of the time? One or two might not be nice at all, but might just be putting it on for the party. And very sorry he would be if he married one of them! Prince Bennett’s head was spinning by the time he came and sat down beside Florizella, who was just finishing a bowl of raspberries.

‘Would you like a dance?’ he asked politely.

‘Not especially,’ said Florizella. ‘And I would have thought you might have had enough.’

‘Yes, I have,’ Prince Bennett said honestly. ‘I think it’s the worst party I’ve ever been to.’

‘Have a choc-ice,’ said Florizella to cheer him up, and Prince Bennett started to feel better.

‘You’re a girl,’ he said trustingly. ‘You advise me. How can you tell which princesses are really nice and which are just pretending?’

Florizella looked around. ‘I only know a few of them. Most of them I don’t know any better than you do,’ she said. ‘The thing you have to remember is that they all have to be nice to you because it’s in the Rules. You’re the handsome prince.’

‘That’s just it!’ Bennett groaned. ‘How do I choose which one to marry?’

‘You could disguise yourself as a woodcutter,’ Florizella said helpfully, ‘and go away for seven years, walk all round other kingdoms and see if you meet your True Love.’

‘That’s a really rubbish idea,’ Prince Bennett said. ‘I’m not cutting wood for seven years.’

‘Or you could go and work as a swineherd in a royal palace and see if the princess chooses you?’

‘I’m not being a swineherd!’ Bennett exclaimed. ‘Do you have any idea what swine are?’

‘Then don’t marry anyone,’ Florizella said helpfully. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘But I have to! All princes have to give balls and choose their princess and get married. Then they have to live happily ever after.’

Florizella frowned. ‘I know people say that’s a happy ending, but they never say exactly how to do it.’

Prince Bennett nodded. ‘Or how to do it forever after,’ he said dolefully. ‘That’s the whole problem with being a fairytale prince.’

Then the band played and poor Prince Bennett had to go and dance with another princess, and then another and another, until the clock struck midnight and all the princesses got up at once, rushed up the stairs and limped to their beds. There were one hundred and twenty glass slippers dumped on the stairs like a jumble sale. Bennett picked up sixty of them, and then gave up.

‘This is getting completely ridiculous,’ said Florizella.

That night all the beautiful princesses set their alarm clocks for six in the morning to give themselves time to get up early and find their shoes, have their baths, wash their hair and put on new dresses for breakfast.

The next day, Prince Bennett was in the parlour waiting for them, and as each princess came in, he bowed very low and said, ‘Good morning!’

Each princess curtsied and smiled, and said, ‘Good morning, Prince Bennett!’

Then the tired prince said, ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

And each princess said, ‘I don’t know. What are you having?’

When Prince Bennett said he was having porridge, every one of the one hundred and twenty princesses gasped as if he had said something dreadful, and said, ‘Oh, no! Not for me! Just a glass of herbal tea, please! Nothing else!’

One or two of them even said, ‘Just a glass of hot water!’ and all the other princesses looked envious that they had not thought of that, and gazed at Prince Bennett to see if he was impressed.

So he was very glad to see Princess Florizella, who came in late because she had been out to the stables to see her horse. And he was very glad when she said at once that she would like bacon and eggs, and tomatoes and sausages too, if they had any. They had a most peaceful, hearty breakfast while, all around, the one hundred and twenty princesses sipped tea and looked beautiful but hungry.

After breakfast, Prince Bennett asked the princess on his right what she would like to do that day. And the princess on his right said, ‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’

Then Prince Bennett asked the princess on his left what she would like to do that day. And she said, ‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’

Then Princess Florizella suggested very helpfully, ‘Why don’t we all ride down to the Deep Lakes and go swimming? We could take a picnic with us.’

Well – some of the princesses couldn’t ride, and some of them couldn’t swim. Some of them hadn’t got trousers for riding, and some of them hadn’t got swimming costumes. Some of them were frightened of cold water, and some of them were frightened of horses, and none of them would dream of eating a picnic sitting on the ground where there might be ants or wasps.

‘Or grass!’ one of them exclaimed.

And they all said, ‘Grass stains! Oh no!’

So in the end, no one went … except Princess Florizella and Prince Bennett.

They had a lovely day.

When they were trotting back to the prince’s palace in the evening, just as the stars were starting to come out and the sky was getting grey, Prince Bennett said happily, ‘Florizella, I’ve had the most brilliant idea. I won’t marry any of the one hundred and twenty beautiful princesses. I’ll marry you!’

And then Florizella said something that surprised him so much that he nearly fell off his horse.

‘No, thank you,’ she said politely.

Prince Bennett gawped at her. ‘Why ever not?’ he asked. ‘I am a fairytale prince, remember. And you would be my queen.’

‘Look here,’ said Florizella reasonably, ‘I told you I wasn’t going to marry, and I meant it. One day I shall inherit the Seven Kingdoms, and there are a lot of things I want to do there. I don’t want to come and be your queen. I’m not even sure that I think kings and queens are a good idea. It might be a lot better for everyone if people made up their own laws and didn’t have one person ruling everything.

‘Why should I come and live in your palace when I’ve got a perfectly good palace of my own? I’m not even planning to keep that one all to myself – I’m going to share it. Another home would just be greedy.

‘And I don’t want to live in your country. I’ve got one of my own. I don’t need your fortune. I can earn my own money. I’d very much like it if you were my friend, though – my best friend, if you like. But I don’t want to marry you. I’m not actually intending to marry anyone.’

Prince Bennett rode along saying nothing for a little while. He was wondering if he really liked this new sort of princess. Certainly, she wasn’t like the normal ones in fairy tales. This was not how the Rules said it should be. Perhaps it was better for him to have a princess at his side who agreed with every single thing he said, however stupid? But then he smiled.

‘Florizella,’ he said, ‘I think I agree with you. I won’t choose a princess to marry, either. I shall tell my mother and father. And I should like to be best friends with you.’

So Princess Florizella and Prince Bennett shook hands and rode back side by side in the starlight.

When Florizella got home, the king and queen were waiting for her at the door of the palace.

‘How did you get on?’ asked the queen.

‘Who did he choose for his bride?’ asked the king.

‘How many princesses were there at the ball?’ asked the queen.

‘Did he choose the princess of Three Rivers?’ the king asked.

Florizella laughed and jumped out of the carriage.

‘I had a lovely time,’ she said. ‘And he decided not to marry anybody just yet. There were one hundred and twenty princesses there as well as me, and I didn’t spot the princess of the Three Rivers, but the place was so awash with princesses that I didn’t even see the princess of the Two Mountains, who promised to meet me there.’

‘Not choosing a bride!’ said the king.

‘Not choosing a bride!’ said the queen.

Then they both fell on Florizella at once, demanding to know what on earth could have made him decide not to choose a princess at a princess-choosing ball. They were secretly afraid that Florizella had somehow put him off marriage.

So Florizella explained that Prince Bennett thought the nice princesses might have been just pretending to be nice and might be secretly rather awful to live with, and he hadn’t wanted to take the chance.

‘Did he ask no one at all, then?’ demanded the king. ‘Not one of them?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Florizella. ‘He asked me. But I told him I didn’t want to marry yet.’

The king and queen stared at each other for a stunned moment, then they both rushed at Florizella again and made her sit down and tell them all about the ball and the breakfast and the horseride and the picnic for two and Prince Bennett asking her to marry him under the stars. They took a lot of interest in the stars. And if there was a nightingale singing. Then the king jumped to his feet and went to the window and said, ‘Undoubtedly! Undootedly!’ a great many times, very softly.

And the queen had a little smile on her face as she looked at Florizella.

‘What a match!’ said the king. ‘Prince Bennett’s kingdom! The Land of Deep Lakes! It’s beyond my wildest dreams!’

‘What a triumph!’ said the queen. ‘And everyone always said she was such an odd sort of princess!’

Florizella looked from one to the other.

‘I said I didn’t want to marry him, and we agreed to be just friends,’ she said. But she could tell they weren’t listening.

The next day, her father the king laughed and teased her all day, calling her the Queen of the Land of Deep Lakes, which was rather irritating.

The second day, the queen spoke of inviting Prince Bennett over to stay.

The next couple of days there were lots of letters between Prince Bennett’s parents and Florizella’s mother and father. Then on the fifth day the king told Florizella that she was going to marry Bennett whether she wanted to or not.

Florizella looked at him as if he were crazy. ‘You can’t make me marry someone if I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘It’s just wrong.’

‘Oh, can’t I?’ said the king.

He snatched Florizella up and bundled her upstairs, and locked her in her bedroom.

‘You’ll stay there until you agree to marry Prince Bennett!’ he bawled through the keyhole.

‘Nonsense,’ said Florizella. She knew perfectly well that her father had no right to lock her up, or to order her to marry anyone. No one can tell a girl who she has to marry. She also knew that if she wanted to leave, nothing was easier than to open her bedroom window and climb down the drainpipe. After all, she went out like that most mornings to go horseriding. It was so much easier than opening the great double doors, raising the portcullis and lowering the drawbridge on her own. But, instead of running off, she thought she would wait until her father came to let her out and talk the whole thing over with him. So she got one of her favourite storybooks and settled down for a quiet morning’s reading.

Florizella’s lunch was served on a tray in her room by ten footmen.

At teatime they arrived again with a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

By dinnertime Florizella had finished her book and was pretty bored.

At bedtime her father came to the door and said in his most kingly voice, ‘My daughter, Princess Florizella, this is your father.’

‘I did know that already,’ she said.

‘Do you agree to marry Prince Bennett?’

Florizella, who was rather sulky, for she had wasted a whole day indoors while the sun was shining outside, said, ‘Certainly not! And you know you shouldn’t treat a daughter like this. Not even in a fairy story.’

At that, the king stamped off to bed in a terrible temper. He was cross because Florizella would not do as he wanted, and he was cross because he knew perfectly well he was in the wrong.

‘She’s acting like she thinks she’s a prince!’ he complained to the queen as they went to bed that night.

‘A princess is just a prince with more s’s,’ she replied.

The king thought for a moment. ‘What do the s’s stand for?’

‘Sass,’ she said. ‘Sass and science, sensibility and scepticism. Sincerity, spirit and certainty.’

‘That’s a c,’ said the king. ‘Undoubtedly.’

‘And tomorrow,’ the queen continued, ‘Florizella is to be let out, whatever she says about Prince Bennett.’

The king said, ‘Humph,’ as if he meant No. But he really meant Yes. There is nothing more boring than being a tyrant.

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.

Then there was a great Crash! of thunder and a great Crack-crack! of lightning. Jellybean flung up his head and reared in fright and Florizella tumbled off his back and down into the mud. Before she could catch the reins, Jellybean was gone! Back to his warm stable – because he had known the way home all along, but hadn’t been able to explain it.

That was bad. But there was worse to come!

The lightning had struck a great tree nearby – it was groaning and creaking and swaying. Florizella could see it looming over her, but she was so stunned by her fall that she couldn’t move. She could only lie there in the mud while the great tree leaned and cracked and finally came down with a great roar and a crackle of breaking branches.

She was always the luckiest of princesses! The two main branches of the tree fell either side of her. The tree trunk, which could have crushed her, fell short; the boughs that could have broken her bones were spread out all around her.

‘Crikey!’ said Florizella when she dared to open her eyes.

The storm was still raging, and as she struggled to sit up and look through the great bushy branches of leaves, she heard the thunder roll again, and the lightning was as bright as fireworks. Florizella heard another tree crashing down, and she knew that she had to find shelter. She scrambled over the branches and looked around in the stormy darkness.

There was a little hill to her left, away from the path, and some solid-looking boulders. Florizella thought that if she could creep under one of the rocks she would be out of the rain and safe from any more falling trees. She scrambled up the hill, her path sometimes very bright from lightning and sometimes very black from the storm; her eyes sometimes able to see everything as clear as day for the few seconds of light, and then quite blind afterwards. The rain poured down on her, and she was wet through and gasping – it was like being under a super-strong power shower turned to COLD – but eventually she scrambled up the slope and reached the top of the hill and found, to her relief, a proper cave.

The entrance to the cave was a little patch of grass and one rock leaning against another to make a doorway. Florizella dropped to her hands and knees and squeezed through. The roof of the cave was higher inside and Florizella was able to stand up and feel her way along the wall towards the back. She sat down in the darkness and thought that she was lucky to be safe and out of the rain.

Then she stopped feeling lucky, and felt instead … a Horrid Feeling.

It is the feeling you get when you think you are in a room on your own, and you suddenly know that someone else is there.

That sort of Horrid Feeling.

It is the feeling you get when you play games like What’s the Time, Mister Wolf? or Cat and Mouse, or Grandmother’s Footsteps, when you turn your back, and the other people creep quietly, quietly up on you.

You don’t need to turn round to see your friends coming closer and closer in those games. You can feel them sneaking up.

It was that kind of feeling for Florizella.

She knew that she was not alone in the cave.

She knew that there was something else in the cave too. She knew it was sneaking up on her.

As she stayed very still and listened, she could hear it breathing.

She was scared then, all right.

Prince with two s’s or not, brave or not, Florizella was very scared then. She could clearly hear soft little breaths. And, what was worse, they were coming from between her and the entrance. Whatever was sharing the cave with her and gently panting, had her trapped. And she did not have a clue what it might be.

Florizella froze as still as a statue and listened as hard as she could. Nothing happened for long, scary moments. The princess put her back to the cave wall and looked around in the darkness, straining her eyes to see.

Then she felt something extremely soft touch her foot.

She very nearly screamed and jumped, but she did not. You might hope this was because she was a brave princess who feared nothing! You might hope that she remembered the Princess Rule, which says that a princess never raises her voice except in the case of fire. But that is not true either. She did not scream and jump, she did not run away, because she was frightened rigid. She let out a tiny little mouse-squeak and stayed as still as a stone princess.

Then she heard a funny little growl and ascuffle, and something warm and heavy tumbled over her other foot.

So there were two of IT.

And they were small.

And they were light, Florizella thought, as light as … puppies. They were puppy-shaped, they made little puppyish noises, they smelled that delicious smell of warm, dry fur and clean paws, and they were playing in the dark with each other.

Florizella laughed out loud and put her hand down to her feet to feel for them. As her eyes got used to the darkness she could just see them. One, two, three, four darling little puppies with smooth grey coats and fat little bellies and big black eyes, tumbling over each other and biting each other’s tails and paws. Florizella sat down among them and picked them up and put them on her lap.

They were adorable. They tumbled on to the floor and they bit the belt on her trousers. They gnawed at the heels of her riding boots, made fierce little attacks on her twiddling fingers, and climbed all over her.

Florizella thought that they must belong to a couple of dogs lost by their owners in the forest, or perhaps a dog that had run away from home to have puppies on her own. But she didn’t think much about the mother dog at all.

And that was a mistake. A very big mistake.

Florizella sat on the floor of the cave and played with the puppies as if she were a young silly puppy herself. She didn’t think about the mother dog or the father dog once.

Until …

The entrance to the cave suddenly grew dark as the light was blocked by a great animal coming in. A great animal coming back into its own cave, to feed its young. A huge animal, so big that it had to squeeze in through the cave mouth. It smelled Florizella the moment it was inside, and it looked for her with its fierce orange eyes, and then it growled.

And Florizella, silly Florizella, looked up from playing with the puppies and saw the light blocked by the great animal and saw … not a lost pet dog … but a wolf.

Worse than that (twice as bad, to be very precise) she saw two wolves. The mother and the father wolf came into the cave and glared at Florizella sitting on the floor of their cave with their puppies on her knees.

Florizella stayed very still. She had no weapon and, anyway, she couldn’t fight two wolves at once. No one was going to rescue her as no one knew where she was. If she were going to get out of this adventure alive, she would have to do it all on her own, with skill, and a lot of luck.

‘Nice wolves,’ said Florizella nervously into the darkness. ‘Here are your puppies. See? I was just petting them.’ Carefully she put them on the floor and they stumbled on their fat feet over to their parents. The mother wolf dropped to the ground with a dead rabbit in her mouth and tore off little bits of meat and skin for the puppies. The father wolf sat on his haunches to guard them and looked at Florizella with his marmalade-coloured eyes. He didn’t take his gaze off her once. He didn’t even blink.

Florizella sat very still and waited for them to finish their meal. Overall, she thought it was better if they were not hungry. Being stuck in a cave with six wolves is dangerous – six hungry wolves is worse. She didn’t say a word, but she couldn’t help shivering. She shivered so hard that her teeth chattered like clattering castanets. The mother wolf glanced up at the noise. Florizella gritted her teeth and tried to shiver in silence.

When the puppies had played and pulled at the meat, and eaten a little, the mother wolf sprawled out and they swarmed up to her belly and sucked milk from her. The smell of wet wolf filled the cave, and the noise was rather soothing. The cave was small and, when the mother wolf stretched out, her head rested on Florizella’s foot. Florizella froze, not daring to move, but the mother wolf took no notice of anything but her four wolf cubs sucking like little pumps and wagging their tails. The father wolf picked his way over them and sat down opposite Florizella, watching her with his unwinking amber eyes.

Florizella stayed as still as she could, waiting for him to pounce.

But he did not pounce. Instead, he turned round and round two or three times like the palace pet dog in his basket, and then he lay down beside her. Soon he was breathing steadily and Florizella could tell he was asleep.

Now the cave was very quiet. The father wolf, stretched out to his full length alongside Florizella’s leg, made her feel warmer. All four cubs were well fed and dreaming – Florizella could hear them snoring softly through milky whiskers. The mother wolf’s head rested, warm and heavy, on Florizella’s foot.

With one warm, heavy wolf on one foot, and another warm wolf stretched along her leg, Florizella wasn’t cold any more. She felt quite cosy – a bit nervous maybe – but no longer chilled. She thought she would wait a moment till they were deeply asleep and then creep out of the cave. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes for a few moments.

And then it was Florizella who fell deeply asleep.

The four wolf cubs, the mother and father wolf and Princess Florizella slept sweetly until morning.

There was uproar in the palace when Jellybean galloped in with his reinsloose, and the stirrups flapping, and no Florizella. There were search parties in all directions and diviners with wands. They were all very relieved when Florizella walked in the next morning, damp and rather smelly, and told them all about her night in the wolves’ cave. Then she begged the king and queen to outlaw wolf-hunting for the season, so that the four little wolf cubs could grow up safely in the Purple Forest. And Florizella’s mother and father – who believed in magic and in paying debts – agreed that their daughter had been spared by the wolves, so the least they could do was to make sure that all wolves were safe for a season.

Throughout the land of the Seven Kingdoms everyone was warned that wolf-hunting was illegal for the rest of the year. All the wolves – including the quite beastly ones – enjoyed a pleasant holiday eating other people’s goats, popping into hen houses and howling at the full moon.

One day Princess Florizella was in the courtyard feeding the golden carp inthe fountain pond when a trader rode into the castle yard. He was very red-faced and hot because he wore or carried all his stock. He was wearing three shirts, two jackets and four capes. His poor horse was quite bow-legged under the weight of the saddle packs. He had toys in the right-side pack, and books in the left. He had bolts of cloth strapped on the back of the saddle, a carpet rolled up in front – and spread out over the horse’s hindquarters … he had a pair of beautiful fresh wolfskins.

As soon as Florizella saw them, she let out a shriek and raced up to him and grabbed his stirrup leather.

‘Where did you hunt those wolves?’ she demanded, so fiercely that the man was quite afraid.

‘In the Purple Forest,’ he said, looking over her head to the grooms. One of them made a warning face at him, but he had travelled so far, and for so long, that he did not know this girl was Princess Florizella, and he did not know about the ban on wolf-hunting.

‘How could you!’ said Florizella, nearly crying. ‘Was it a male and a female?’

‘Yes, a pair,’ he said. ‘I trapped them by a tree that had been struck by lightning, just beside the track.’

Florizella looked at him as if he were worse than a slug.

‘That’s forbidden!’ she said furiously. ‘There was to be no hunting of wolves this season to protect a special family of wolves. They lived in a cave near that tree. I think you’ve killed them!’

The trader stammered that he had not known about the ban on wolf-hunting, but Florizella looked at him as if he were worse than a slug: a squashed slug, an old, dried-out squashed slug, until he stopped and shrugged his shoulders, and said there was nothing he could do about it. For the wolves were dead and that was the end of it.

It wasn’t the end as far as Florizella was concerned.

She felt that she owed the wolves a debt of gratitude. They could have attacked her, but instead they had shared their cave with her. They could have eaten her up, but instead they had kept her warm.

So, while the trader was in the castle apologising to the king and queen, Florizella went to the kitchen and fetched a strong basket, lined it with a soft tea towel (which she took without asking!), whistled for Jellybean and set off for the Purple Forest.

Why did she need the strong basket and the soft tea towel?

Wait and see.

Florizella had no difficulty in finding the track, and as soon as she came to the tree that had been struck by lightning she tied Jellybean to one of the fallen branches and set off up the little hill.

Outside the wolves’ cave she stopped and called softly. If they were still alive she didn’t really want to meet them again. She wasn’t altogether sure that they would be so hospitable on a second visit.

But there was no noise from the cave except a very soft whimpering, which sounded like cubs.

It sounded like four very hungry cubs.

Florizella forgot all about being careful and plunged into the narrow entrance of the cave, blinking so that she could see in the gloom.

Four little wolf cubs came squirming up and climbed all over her riding boots. Florizella bent down and stroked them. To her horror they were not fat little creatures any more. They were thin, so thin that she could feel their sharp little ribs and the bony knobbly bits on their spines. They had not been fed for several days.

Florizella put down the basket and, one by one, lifted the skinny, squirming cubs into it. (That was what the basket was for!) When she picked it up, it was surprisingly heavy. She carried it carefully down the hill to where Jellybean was waiting.

Jellybean didn’t really like carrying a basket of wolves, but he went as steady as a rock all the way back to the castle, because he knew that Florizella had only one hand on the reins. And Florizella was lucky when she got home for there was no one in the courtyard, and no one on the stairs. She got the basket with the cubs in it all the way up to her room, and no one spotted her.

Then she went straight downstairs to the kitchen and told the cook that she was starving hungry.

‘You can have a slice of pie,’ he said, pointing to the larder. ‘There’s a nice steak-and-mushroom pie left over from lunch. Or I’m just about to take a chocolate cake out of the oven.’

‘I’ll have some pie, please,’ said Florizella, and the cook was surprised because Florizella adored chocolate cake, but was usually a bit so-so about steak and mushroom.

Florizella slipped into the larder and took the whole pie – a massive great round one. She carried it carefully up to her room and cut it into four portions and put each slice on the floor. The little wolf cubs fell on it like mad things, and in an amazingly short time the pie had gone and there were four little cubs, with bellies as tight as drums, snoozing on the carpet.

Florizella fetched a shawl from a drawer and tucked them up under her bed where they would not be noticed, and went down to her supper.

When Florizella came back from supper, she discovered that keeping wolf cubs is no easy job.

Keeping wolf cubs in secret is impossible.

They had made horrid smelly poos all over the floor, which she had to clean up with paper and a bowl of water. They had hunted her bedcover and pulled it to the floor and killed it. One of them had bitten and swung on the curtains, dragging them right off the pole. And worse than all of that … they were hungry again!

As soon as they saw Florizella, they scrambledall over her, making pitiful whines, begging for more food. Florizella looked down at them like a distracted mother and said, ‘But you’ve only just been fed!’

The cubs didn’t care. There is a reason why people say, ‘I am as hungry as a wolf,’ and Florizella understood it now. These cubs were wolves and they specialised in being hungry.

All the time.

Florizella scowled at them. She knew she would have to go back down to the kitchen. And she was wondering if the cook might not find it a bit odd.

He did.

He found it very odd indeed that Princess Florizella should have taken a massive steak-and-mushroom pie up to her room before her supper. He found it very odd that she should have brought the pie dish back quite empty. Then she had eaten a good supper – and one of the footmen had seen her sneak the chop bones off her plate into her pocket.

Now, less than an hour later, Florizella was in the kitchen again, asking for something to eat.

The cook looked at her suspiciously.

‘I have chocolate ice cream,’ he said. ‘Or cheesecake.’

Florizella adored cheesecake. She didn’t mind chocolate ice cream, either.

‘Do you have any meat?’ she asked. ‘Any of those chops left over from supper?’

‘I have twelve chops,’ he said, ‘but they’re not cooked.’

‘Oh, that’s all right!’ said Florizella hastily, thinking of the hungry little wolf cubs upstairs who would love raw lamb chops. ‘Even better!’

And to the cook’s utter amazement, Florizella went to the larder and came out with a bowl of uncooked lamb chops, and took them to her room as if she had been having midnight feasts of raw meat all her life.

The cook had an idea.

But he didn’t say anything yet.

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