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Once upon a time, in a kingdom renowned through all the lands for the green of its hills and the blue of its sky, there was a young prince. He was handsome, with hair as black as coal and eyes as blue as deep water. He was clever, although his cleverness was more the cleverness of careful thought and kindness than of blazing intellect and study. He was in all ways and all things as a prince is meant to be, and his parents were glad of him, because they knew that when their story ended, he would be ready to take up where they left off. The kingdom would be cared for. Do not think for a moment that his parents did not love him, for they loved him very much, but the concerns of kings and queens must be forever different than the concerns of people like us, and they worried for their land as much as for their son. The prince knew well what was expected of him, and he bore his destiny without complaint. Indeed, it seemed that never had any prince been more prepared to live up to expectations, and if he was other than expected in one small way, well. No one questioned it.
For the prince, you see, loved roses. Now, it may seem seem natural that a prince of a farming kingdom would love his garden, and indeed, that much is true, but he did not love carrots or potatoes or the things he could grow for his own table, which would have been understandable, and would have caused no whispers among the court. The prince loved roses, impractical roses, thorn-stemmed roses with their soft-petaled flowers and their peerless perfume. They had no purpose but to be beautiful, and the prince swore, to anyone who asked, that beauty was its own reward.
Because the king loved his son, he sent messengers to all the surrounding kingdoms, asking whether they might have roses that did not grow outside their borders. So it was that by the eve of his seventeenth birthday the prince had a garden unmatched in all the world, where roses of living ice grew beneath the sheltering leaves of roses that had been bred to twist and twine their way up the trunks of the world’s tallest trees, where roses that could not bear the touch of darkness blazed like the very sun itself, daring the night to fall, separated by a screen of silver from roses that glittered like stars and could not bear any light brighter than their own. He had roses of fire and roses whose roots gripped water like it was soil, roses so transluscent that they seemed carved from wind and roses that could be seen only in the moonlight, when they would reveal themselves as dark holes cut from the world. People traveled from all over the world to walk in the prince’s rose garden, and it became a popular place for lovers to walk as they had certain conversations, and made each other certain promises, for nothing, you see, inspires a lover’s heart like a rose.
When the sun rose on the prince’s seventeenth birthday his mother, the queen, called for her handmaids and bid them dress her in her finest gown. They brushed her hair and pinned it up with emeralds and sapphire, for those stones were common in their country; they scented her wrists and throat with rosewater. Thus prepared, she walked the long length of the palace from the room she shared with the king her husband until she reached the tower of the prince, her son, who she loved more than she would once have believed she could love anything. As she walked, she smiled, for the prince was near to becoming a man now, and would need to begin preparing for the pleasures and pains of manhood.
“Good morning, my son,” she said, opening the door to his quarters. “Good morning, and happy birthday; I have come to discuss the matter of your marriage.” Then the queen spoke no further, for she saw that her son was already gone from his bed. The windows stood open, and through them she could see him in the garden below, silver shears in his hand, walking among the roses.
The queen sighed, for she was a good mother, and she knew her son well, but still, she had hoped that this was going to be easier than it seemed determined to be.
When the queen reached the garden, she found her son kneeling beside one of his more common plants, a sweet kitchen rose whose perfume was strong, not subtle. “My son,” she began. “Good morning, and happy birthday—”
“Look, mother,” he said. “There has been a rabbit at the roots of this rose; you see here, and here, where the creature has gnawed the stems? It must have been a very hungry rabbit, to come here and dare the thorns when there are so many more tender plants to feast upon.”
“Rabbits are strange creatures, and not to be trusted,” said the queen. “It is your birthday. Or have you forgotten, in your concern over rabbits and roses and other things not befitting a prince’s attention?”
The prince, as I have said, was clever, and knew when he had roused his mother’s ire, although he was not entirely sure what he had done, for he began every day with his roses, and he considered a rabbit in the garden to be well worth worrying about. “Mother?” he asked, straightening. “Is something wrong? I have not forgotten my birthday, nor could I have, since the entire palace has spoken of nothing but for the past week.”
“Did it occur to you to wonder why this birthday, of all birthdays, was of such great concern to your people?” asked his mother, measuring her words carefully, for fear that she might lose her temper.
The prince shook his head. “I have been tending my garden. The roses from the ice are blooming well this year, and I thought I might be able to send a bouquet to the princess of that kingdom, to thank her for the gift.”
Relief washed over the queen. “A bouquet is an excellent beginning,” she said.
The prince frowned. “It is also an excellent finish, mother. I have no other roses that would bloom so well in frozen soil.”
There was a long silence between them then, as the queen searched for the words that would make him understand why she had put on such a lovely gown to wake him, and why she had come down to the gardens without changing her clothes. But ah, subtlety is an art for subtle times, and with a prince who, upon the morning of his seventeenth birthday, cared more for rabbits than for princesses, she felt that subtlety was perhaps an art best left abandoned.
“It is time for you to marry,” she said. “You are a prince, and one day will be a king, and kings do not grow roses. They have gardeners, and they smile to know that the work has been properly divided between noble and common hands.”
The prince felt his mouth go dry, and the perfume of the roses all around them seemed suddenly too strong to be borne, like it might overwhelm him. “M-marry?” he said. “But mother. I am not in love.”
“Love is not as important as lineage,” she said. “This weekend, there will be a ball. All the princesses in all the lands we know will be there, and one of them will be your bride. Take heart, my son, for you have met them all already, through their roses. Perhaps there will be one you find to be even fairer than her flower.” She leaned forward and kissed his forehead. “Happy birthday.”
Then she turned, the queen who had forgotten what it was to be a princess, and what it was to love something you were told belonged to other hands than yours, and she walked out of the garden, leaving her son, the prince, alone.
The prince watched after his mother for a time, unsure of what to say, before finally, he turned back to the bush he had been tending when she arrived. For roses do not know of birthdays, and they do not care whether the hands that tend them belong to prince or pauper. All they care is that they are tended, and that their needs are answered. The prince moved through his garden like a man asleep, and from every bush he took a single flower, until he held a bouquet as bright as day, as black as night, as cold as ice, as hot as fire, as solid as a forest, as thin as a wind, and as liquid and inconstant as the sea. He carried the flowers back to his room, where he set them in a vase beside his bed and went about the business of being a prince who was having a birthday.
We could follow him through his lunch, through the celebratory dinner, and through his parents speaking, ever speaking of the grand ball that was to come, but you do not want that, do you? Those are dull, uninteresting things, and there are better secrets in this story, if you will simply let yourself pursue them. So instead, we will move forward through the tale to see the sun set and the night fallen, and the moon riding white and distant in the deep black of the sky.
The prince had always been fond of the moon, for it bloomed like a rose in the heavens, dwindling to a bud and then bursting into full flower over the course of the month. He dreamed of someday coaxing his various roses together to produce a single rose as bright as the sun but with the pale light of the stars, as cold as ice but burning always with an inner light. He dreamed, in short, of making himself a moon, planted and perfect and living in his land.
That night, after his duties were done and his parents had left him, the prince went to his window and looked out on that ever-changing, ever-constant moon. His room smelled of roses, all the perfumes mingling together until he thought he could almost smell the promise of that one perfect rose, his moon-rose, which existed only in his dearest dreams.
“I am very lonely, and I do not know what to do,” he said. “I do not long for the company of princesses, for they are very nice, but I have met so many of them, and none of them have touched my heart as you have, or held my eye as my roses have. I cannot marry my roses, and as I cannot marry you, I do not know what will happen next. I could choose a princess, wed her, make her my queen…but I fear I could never love her, and I fear also that she could never love me, for there is no princess in the world who would not see that my heart was not hers. I am tired of disappointing my parents, but I cannot marry without love. I am tired of expectations. I am tired of everything, and I do not know what to do.”
That night, he slept in his room that smelled of a dozen different roses, and he dreamt that the moon was a girl in a gold and silver dress, with silver roses in her hair. When he woke, he was at peace, and he felt that everything would somehow be as it was meant to be. What’s more, and to the great surprise of his parents, he had found in himself a great enthusiasm for the ball that was to come, and he threw himself into the preparations with a furor that no one quite believed. He cut roses by the hundreds for the garlands and the maidens’ poseys, and when the day arrived, it found him dressed in his finest clothes before the clock could even strike noon.
At last, his parents shooed him from the palace, ordering him to take a walk in the garden while they finished the preparations, for the prince was very much underfoot, and was not actually much use when it came to tasks such as the folding of linen and the polishing of flatware. So into the garden he went, into the smell of roses…and the sound of small, sharp teeth gnawing through a woody stem. Cautiously, the prince crept toward the sound, and knelt to see a white rabbit in the process of devouring a kitchen rose.
The prince cleared his throat. The rabbit froze.
“There are other things that you could eat, besides my roses,” he said. “I would appreciate it if you would go and eat them, and let my garden be.”
The rabbit hopped cautiously out into the open, studying him, until finally it said, “You sound like the prince, but you do not look like him, and the roses tell me that the prince has not been here in several days. I do not believe this is your garden. You cannot forbid me to eat it.”
The prince was not accustomed to being argued with by rabbits, and frowned. “I assure you, I am the prince,” he said. “There is a ball tonight. I have been preparing.”
“Ah,” said the rabbit. “Well, if you will feed me, I will tell you a secret.”
“Why do I need a secret?” asked the prince. “I have a ball. Do you have a ball?”
“No,” said the rabbit. “But I have a secret, and you do not. If you feed me, you could have a ball and a secret, which any sensible man would agree is better than a ball on its own.”
The prince laughed. “What a strange and stubborn creature you are! If I feed you, will you stop eating my garden?”
“If you feed me, and invite me to your ball,” said the rabbit.
“Ah, but you can only come to my ball if you wear a fine gown and finer shoes, and if you do not chew on any of the table arrangements.”
“That is fair,” said the rabbit. “Now feed me.”
The prince, who was humoring the rabbit more than anything, took his silver shears and moved among the roses, clipping the largest flowers from each bush, until he laid a great armful in front of the rabbit. As for the rabbit, it fell upon this offering and one, two, three, every leaf and petal was gone.
“Here is your secret,” said the rabbit. “You must ask no questions, you must push no suits. But she loves you, and she will come.” Then it ran into the bushes and disappeared, and although he searched until his men came looking for him, the rabbit was nowhere to be found.
But oh, there was no more time to think of rabbits, or their secrets, because it was time for the ball to begin—and what a splendid ball it was! Every table groaned with food, every surface was polished to a mirror-sheen and decked with roses, and as the prince stood beside her parents on their thrones, the princesses began to arrive. They were beautiful and strange and wondrous fair, and none could be called the fairest of them all, for they were so different, and so miraculous. The princess of the daylight kingdom gleamed like her roses, and lit up the room with her laughter. The princess of the ice was pale and lithe and left frost behind in her footprints, and when she spoke, her wit cooled tempers and soothed sore egos.
Any one of them would have made a glorious queen, and the prince knew that as he danced with each of them in their turn. They were beautiful and wise and strong, and he could not marry them, because he could not love them, and they deserved better.
The last to arrive was a princess with hair the color of moonlight. She wore a gold and silver gown, and all the other princesses frowned when they saw her, not in the way a person frowns at something they do not approve of, but in the way a person frowns at something that they do not quite remember, that they might have seen once in a dream and then forgotten, for there are things we cannot truly know in waking.
The prince went to her, for it was his duty to go to all the princesses at his ball, and she smiled at him, and everywhere there was the smell of roses. And they danced, oh, how they danced, the prince and that princess of an unknown land, who claimed no kingdom, who brought no heralds to announce her name. And if she was not so brilliant as the princess of the daylight or so clever as the princess of the ice, not so determined as fire nor so strong as wood, there was still something in the silent slide of her steps that called him.
In time, he forgot what the rabbit had said, for she was so beautiful, and she was so perfect in his arms. “What is your name?” he asked.
Eyes cast low, the princess shook her head. “Do not ask,” she said.
And the prince was ashamed, for he had done what he had been bid not to do. They danced another time around the room, and the smell of roses was stronger still, all the roses mixing, until he smelled his impossible rose, the one he had never been able to grow. The urge seized him again, and before he could stop himself, the question was in the air between them: “What is your name?”
“Please, do not ask,” she said.
They danced a third time around the room, and the moonlight through the window was the color of her hair, and everything was silvered and still.
“What is your name?”
“Three times asked and three times refused,” she said, and pulled her hands away. Then she kissed him, fleeting as the moon on water, and she turned, and she ran out of the room.
The prince ran after, but she was already gone, and he found himself in the middle of his garden, alone, still in his finery, with princesses and parents left behind him. He heard a footfall and whirled, heart leaping…but it was only the princess of the kingdom of fire, standing in the dust, looking at him gravely.
“What did you say to the moon to make her run?” she asked. “Did you insult her honor? Did you break her heart? The moon is my friend, and you are a handsome prince, but handsome princes are more common than friends.”
“What?”
“The moon. You danced with her for so long, and you held her so closely…did you not know?” The princess stared at him. “You did not know. You fool. You held the moon in your arms, and you let her slip away.”
And the prince knew what had happened, and what he had done, for everyone knows that you should not ask a lady a question she has already refused to answer. He looked down into the dirt at his feet and saw the footprints, delicate as any lady of the court’s. He saw the point where they dwindled into the marks of a rabbit’s paws, and were gone.
“I am in love with the moon,” he said.
The princess of fire, who knew well how much havoc the moon could cause without meaning to, said nothing.
“How can I be in love with the moon?” He looked up at the sky and found it empty, no white moon hanging there like a promise; but there was a new perfume in his garden. He followed the rabbit-tracks, and the princess of fire followed him, until they came to a rosebush he had never seen before, one whose flowers glowed softly silver, whose perfume smelled like the perfume worn by the strange girl who had claimed no kingdom, who had run when he asked her name.
“Ah,” said the prince, and so great was his grief that the princess left him then, for there is nothing to be said to a man who has broken the rules not once, not twice, but three times, and who has let his true love slip from out his hands.
The prince did not return to the ball, or to his bed, or to his palace; he has not returned to this day, and those who know the story say he left that very night with a bundle of moon-roses on his back and with hope hiding, burrowed deep, inside his heart. They say he is still roving, looking for a white rabbit that will ask for food in exchange for a secret. He hopes it will tell him the secret of finding the moon, of holding her hand and asking her to dance. He will not ask her name.
There are those who say that one day, he found her, and that his love was enough to change the heavens. But that is another tale to tell.
Now rest, my dear, and be at ease; there’s a fire in the hearth and a wind in the eaves, and the night is so dark, and the dark is so deep, and it’s time that all good little stars go to sleep.