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Once there were 12 dancing princesses who tried to rescue 12 cursed princes. Each night they would dance with the 12 princes, a special dance to disenchant them. Each night brought the princes closer to freedom. But the father of the princesses put a bounty on discovering their nightly outings and an old soldier caught them out.
When the princesses did not come, the princes' attempts to escape were discovered, and all the nights of their magical dance were added to their sentence.
In this way, the 12 princesses entered and left the story of the 12 princes.
This was not the end of the princes' story, and it wasn't the beginning either. But before we tell you how the curse was lifted and the youngest prince found love, we must explain how all this came to be.
The 12 princes, from young to old, were the sons of a powerful queen. She ruled a vast kingdom and she bowed to no one. They said she was unconquerable and none had proven this untrue.
In other words, she had made many enemies.
One of these enemies was her only true rival. This rival was called a warlord but was, in truth, a witch - she had won her battles by magical treachery. This warlord witch was known for her cruelty and lust for combat. She never spared when she could kill, she never played fair when she could cheat.
The queen had repelled all advances from the warlord witch, thus far. But she was content to stay in her own kingdom and go no further.
The warlord witch boasted and bragged that soon all the kingdoms would be hers. But she also knew that if the queen mustered her own forces against the warlord witch, not even her magics could protect her.
And so, the warlord witch had to be clever.
This witch sought out the queen and proposed that in lieu of a final battle, one destined between them as the warlord witch schemed, the queen give the witch one of her sons for a husband and thus unite their kingdoms.
The queen immediately refused. She loved her sons dearly and knew within only days of such a marriage, this warlord (and, still unbeknownst to her, a witch) did something terrible.
The warlord witch was furious, but the queen would not relent.
"Then," said the witch, "since you would not give me one of your sons, you will have none! Let the earth swallow them!"
The queen, not knowing the witch's true nature, took her leave. She thought this had been a threat to assassinate her sons and rode fast to the castle to assure their safety.
But when she got there, they were already gone. Their room was empty, the servants bewildered. It was as if they had simply disappeared.
And much like the father of the 12 dancing princesses, she placed a bounty on the rescue of her sons. But while many men died in the quest for the princesses, no man or woman was clever enough to figure out what had happened to the princes. At least, that was how it was for many years.
The witch waited. She knew it would strike into the queen's heart like a blade if the warlord witch were the one to bring back the 12 princes. Furthermore, the queen had no inkling that the curse was made to last 12 long years before the princes were delivered back into the hands of the warlord witch. A year for each prince. And in those years, she would watch the queen suffer. The warlord witch's safety was assured, for she was the only one who might know where the 12 princes had vanished.
At first the princes suffered and lamented, for they did not care to be imprisoned. Even though the strange underground world they found themselves in was full of magical wonders - invisible servants, plants of rare metals with leaves and flowers of cut gems, and seemingly never-empty stores of food - it gave them no comfort. They wanted their beds and home. They wanted their mother, the queen.
Their new home was a large pavilion with tables of magic food and soft round beds in the middle of a vast underground lake, a man-made magic island. Enchanted boats would take them to and fro to the 'shores' of the underground cavern, but there was no way to simply walk out.
Soon, though, they realized that their only escape would be through their own skills. They stopped simply looking at the magic around them as an impossible enemy, and began to unlock its secrets.
Now, as the 12 princesses had been resourceful and clever, so were these princes. The queen had educated them well and they put their minds to work. The eldest prince used his knowledge of the earth to try and find a way to freedom past the gold and silver trees that made up a strange forest in the north of the cavern. After weeks of exploring, he found a secret path that had to be followed exactly to keep it in sight. And at the end of this path was a discovery he hadn't imagined!
He succeeded in finding the stairwell that led to their first failed attempt to escape: the room of the 12 princesses. The 12 princesses lived in a far away kingdom and had never heard of the princes! It took great cleverness, but the brothers managed to send a message to the princesses through the magic doorway.
In this way, they contacted the 12 princesses. The brothers could not exit the strange doorway, but the sisters could enter in. The eldest brother spoke to the eldest sister and she vowed to aid them.
The eldest prince knew the ways of magic and discovered that they could dance to weaken their curse, a power that doubled as the princesses danced with them.
In this way they tried to dance off their curse, each dance taking layers of power away from the warlord witch's spell.
But they were found out, the curse renewed, and the sentence increased. Their great discovery had come to naught. But the princes persisted. The cavern was filled with many secrets, being older than the warlord witch itself. But she was no fool and the princes just boys.
A second attempt failed just as surely as the first, then the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Finally the first eleven princes had all found a possible exit from the strange underground world, but all of them had found failure.
The princes all fell into despair, except for the youngest.
He had been quite small when the curse was laid on them, and knew very little of the outside world. He would explore their jeweled prison, every nook and cranny. He was a shy boy and regretted now that he was too reticent to speak to the twelve princesses when they visited each night. For no company had passed into their realm in the other ten attempts.
He was too shy, even, to speak much to his eleven brothers, and so he would speak to the metal trees in the underground prison. He did not realize that he had found yet another hole in the prison, his voice carrying into another far off kingdom through the trunk of the gold tree that rose up into the roof of the cavern.
In this way, he discovered their salvation.
He had not known this would happen. But while his brothers moaned and planned, he had been too shy to speak up with his own ideas. So he whispered them into a golden tree, wishing he had the courage to say these words to his brothers. His plans to flee and see the outside world were spoken in confidence. He pretended the tree was a sympathetic princess, who would understand that the youngest prince was trying his best.
One day, the tree spoke back.
"What a strange tree you are," it said. "I always hear you talking about escaping and climbing, but you're simply a tree. Your roots will never let you out and if I tried to move you, you would die."
It was a girl's voice. She sounded no older than the youngest prince.
The prince's shyness could have been his ruin then, keeping him silent, but he was so startled he yelped loudly, which echoed up through the trunk to the surface world.
"Oh, I'm sorry for scaring you, dear tree!" said the girl's voice. "I shouldn't talk of death so easily."
The prince realized then that this might be their last chance. "I'm not a tree!" he said, his voice small and meek. "I'm a prince! I'm trapped!"
It was a moment before the girl answered back.
"This tree is too small to hold an entire human boy," she said.
"It's a magical realm we're trapped in! This tree must lead to the outside! Are you a princess? My name is Gael."
"And mine is Lindy," said the girl. "I'm no princess. If I dug down, would I find you?"
The prince liked her, even if she were not a princess, because that was a sensible enough question.
"I don't think so," he said, voice still shy. "I don't think we're really anywhere."
He sighed.
"I'm sorry," he said, "I've wasted your time. We're going to be down here forever and ever and there's nothing that can be done."
"Don't give up so quickly," said Lindy. "I know just who to ask. Will you stay and wait for me? I will return, I promise. Is there any proof you can give me?"
The prince looked around, then plucked a small golden twig off the tree and pushed it into the hollow. It disappeared from his sight like it had never been.
But it had not disappeared from this world at all!
"Oh!" said Lindy from her side of the tree, "you've sent me gold! Consider my help bought and paid for! Wait here!"
And so Prince Gael waited.
And now our tale will tell how the princes were finally freed. Not by a soldier who tricked his way into the half-kingdom, but by a young girl both sensible and kind.
Lindy was the only daughter of a weaver-woman, whose husband died at the hands of the warlord witch's army. They'd fled to another country, a land with deep forests, eking out a very modest living. Lindy did what she could for her mother, and one of her chores was collecting mushrooms and wild vegetables from the forest.
For the longest time, she had noticed one of the spindly trees would talk. Little whispers she'd sit and listen to, wondering why a tree had such wanderlust.
She did not expect, when she spoke to it, for it to turn out to be a prince!
Now, she did not know that the warlord who had killed her father was a witch. If she had, she might not have been so inclined to trust the old woman who lived deeper in the forest, who everyone said was a witch herself.
But this other witch had broken bread with her and her mother many times and was, to Lindy's eyes, a nice old sort who knew a fair bit about everything. And if you needed magic advice, you asked someone who did magic. That was just sensible.
And so the old witch entered - briefly - the story of the 12 princes.
The old witch was sweeping the doorstep of her flower-covered cottage when Lindy came up the path. The forest didn't seem to loom so closely around the old witch's cottage.
"Hullo, Lindy," said the old witch. "Spare a mushroom for my soup?"
"Yes, but I need something from you in return," said Lindy cannily. The old witch looked curious and stepped aside to let Lindy into the cottage.
As soon as Lindy sat at the old witch's table, the old witch's raggedy calico cat leapt into Lindy's lap and settled down to purr.
"And what do you need from me that's worth one mushroom?" asked the old witch. She examined Lindy's basket of them.
"I need to know how to get to a place that doesn't exist, ma'am," said Lindy.
"Ah, then I'll be wanting this big mushroom in payment," said the old witch. She took it and placed it aside. She sat and rubbed her whiskery chin and looked thoughtful.
Lindy stroked the cat, taking care to scratch between the ears.
"Well, the way to places that aren't there are doors that don't exist," said the old witch. "I've got some chalk you can use. I warn you, once you go into one of those places you might not come out."
"May I have more than chalk if I also give you these wild onions?" asked Lindy.
"Hm, yes, I think that's a fair deal," said the old witch. She bustled around her kitchen, drying herbs and other sundries brushing the top of her head as she walked. The hearth, which glowed with red heat but burned no wood or coal, filled the cottage with a lovely warm feeling.
Lindy kept petting the cat, and waited.
"Ah!" said the old witch, and pulled out a long black raven feather. "I won this in a game of cards and it's worth some onions."
She placed it on the table and looked at Lindy.
"When you wave this feather, it will take you and whoever's with you back to your home. I never found much use for it, because I have my own ways back and makes such a mess of things. But if things get dangerous, wave this and you'll find yourself safe and sound." The witch placed the chalk on the table beside the feather.
Lindy smiled and handed over the wild onions, with another mushroom as a special thanks. She got up, collecting her basket, the chalk, and the feather. She put the chalk in her basket and the feather in her pocket for safekeeping.
"Going already?" said the old witch.
"Yes," said Lindy, "I gave my word. I'll be back soon, I hope."
In this way, the old witch left the story of the 12 princes.
And so Lindy went to the tree to tell the prince about her plan.
"A feather and chalk?" he said.
"It's more than I started with," said Lindy. "Now wait for me to draw this door, please."
It wasn't easy and in fact it looked quite awful when she was done, but Lindy used the chalk to draw a doorway in the dirt in front of the Gael's tree. It was a miracle the chalk didn't break as she worked.
Then she hopped into it.
The next moment, she was falling into the deep water of the underground lake that surrounded the 12 princes' pavilion. There was a great deal of shouting and two strong arms. One of Gael's older brothers was pulling her from the water and clapping her on the back until she coughed mouthfuls of it up.
"H-hello," said Lindy, gasping for air. She barely had time to take in the strange beauty of the cavern before focusing on the princes.
She looked up at the princes, each more handsome than the last, and then saw one who looked to be her age, with shy eyes and a small smile. He, she thought, was the handsomest of all.
"Are you Lindy?" he asked.
She nodded.
"It's me, Gael!" he said. They shared a smile.
But before she could respond, a wicked wind blew through the underground prison. The harsh wind bent the metal trees sideways and hit all their skins like a whip.
"You are very ill-behaved guests," bellowed the witch, her voice shaking the walls of the cavern. "I keep you fed, I keep you in luxury, and you bring girl after girl home to cause me strife! You'll be here a hundred years!"
"You need to run," the oldest brother whispered to Lindy. He pointed her to the enchanted boats she could use to get to the nearest exit, the stairwell of the 12 princesses, if those would still let anyone exit.
A chunk of rock ceiling fell onto the nearest boat, snapping it in half and sinking it into the bottomless underground lake.
Lindy bit back a scream and shoved her hand into her pocket, seizing the feather. "Grab each other's hands!" she yelled, grabbing Gael's. With her free hand, she waved the feather.
Lindy's mother was quite surprised when her daughter dropped onto her doorstep with 12 royally dressed young men in tow!
The ground rumbled and hissed for days, but the warlord witch could not discover where the 12 princes had fled.
And when they were recovered enough (and had learned enough about gathering mushrooms and vegetables to feed themselves at Lindy's home), Gael waved the feather and brought them all in a tumble to the queen's castle.
The queen rejoiced to have her sons returned to her, and vowed that the warlord witch would pay for what she had done. And as the warlord witch feared, even her power could not stand up to the queen's battle prowess.
And so it came to pass that the Queen crushed the warlord witch and her army for their crimes and gave half her kingdom away to Gael and his new bride, Lindy. And that golden twig became Lindy's wedding ring.