1 Chapter 1: Prologue

The christening party was a disaster. Her parents had done everything right, and yet...

The Princess was delightful; she smiled and burbled at all the visitors. Everybody who was anybody crowded into the ballroom. The Amfibs of Poond were there, as was the Princess Sopo. Even Charmant and his Queen were dancing a glittering path through the guests.

A tiny fountain flowed with wine, and tables groaned under the weight of the food. The gifts were many and diverse, quite suitable for the honor of a first-born princess. There were the usual gems and gold, as well as some more unusual gifts. A ring that was clearly magical, though, no one knew quite what it did, and a pouch which could hold all the new princess's needs and yet only need one nurse to carry it.

The problem was in the small stack of pleasantly worded cards from the fairy community. They all extended best wishes etc. and some even granted gifts like grace and beauty, but none of the fairies came. Not even the one the proud parents had carefully not invited. Her parents looked at each other with dismay. The poor princess! She was not going to be enchanted. How could they possibly make a proper match for her if she had no enchantment to be broken by prospective suitors?

The King put his arm around the Queen, and tried to comfort her.

"We will think of something. After all, she is only a baby," the King said, but the Queen was inconsolable.

"My poor baby, what's going to happen to her? She is a princess without an enchantment. We will be the laughing stock of the kingdoms." The Queen peeked out over her King's shoulder. "Look at that Princess Sopo, she looks so smug. I'll never be able to go out in public again." Yet, she was a Queen, so she pulled herself together and was gracious and confident as she said her farewells, even to the Princess Sopo.

When the castle was empty again, the princess was taken up to her nursery, where her nurses had their own little celebration, and made a huge fuss over the bright little girl. They didn't care about enchantments or spells; all they knew was that the Princess Alexandra was a beautiful baby. She smiled and laughed at them, then went quietly to sleep. The King and Queen called an emergency meeting of their Council. They dis-cussed options until the early hours of the morning, yet in the end they could only wait and see what developed.

As the weeks passed everybody could see that the princess was a perfectly normal baby; which of course was the whole problem. Finally, the royal couple decreed that nobody was to raise the princess's lack with the little girl herself on pain of exile, then set themselves to come up with some way of solving the dilemma. After all, they had sixteen years.

Alexandra learned to crawl and then to walk, she got into mischief, and had all her nurses wrapped around her tiny finger. She began talking and never stopped. She asked questions which had the royal scholars scurrying for answers, and by the time they had their answer she had moved on to new questions. As she grew no one even hinted that there was something as terribly wrong with her as lacking an enchantment.