Medieval Thing

Prologue

Young Princess Anette, who was newly twelve years old, 2 weeks before, was going for a quiet walk through her father's forest of pine trees that he'd had grown to celebrate her birth because she was the first born.

Anette liked to walk through the forest. She liked to listen to the birds, and she liked the smell of pine. She liked how her heels only rustled the pine needles that coated the forest floor, instead of clacking loudly, as they would on the castle's stone floor.

Walking through the forest, especially on mornings when the air was crisp but not cold, was Anette's favourite pastime.

The princess reached out and brushed the rough bark with her fingertips as she passed.

The air was crisp this morning, and the spiders' webs sparkled with dew, as did the occasional tuft of grass.

Anette looked around carefully, just to make sure that nobody was watching, then climbed partway up a tree to a comfortable, chair like nest between three branches. From there she pulled a small stick with a tuft of brown pine needles on the end out of a hollow branch.

"Oh, darn it," she said to herself, as she often did when she was alone, and looked down at the stick in disappointment,"I shall have to replace that."

Before she did, however, she put her arm as far down the hollow branch as she could. She felt around in the old pine needles on the bottom of the branch. She had spent a very long time putting all those pine needles in until the branch was full enough that she could reach the 'bottom'.

"Oh, darn it," Anette said again, "I don't think there's a single apple left!"

She was about to pull her hand back out when she thought she felt something. The top of the branch started to crumble as she stretches her hand further digging deeper into the pine needles.

Just a little-bit-further! Annette's fingers dug even deeper still, but unfortunately, it was a little bit too far, and the dead branch snapped.

Annette fell to the ground, winded, but not hurt except where she had landed on her arm.

A spray of pine needles fluttered to the ground as Princess Anette raised herself to her feet. She looked sadly at the broken stump of a branch that would hardly've been able to conceal one apple, and said,"Oh, dear. That was the perfect branch for hiding apples in. Now I'm afraid I shall have to find another."

She looked around quickly, once again making sure nobody was watching, then said quietly to herself, "Well,at least I still have apples."

If you're wondering how the young Princess still had apples, you might like to be informed that on the other side of the pine forest was an orchard.

Seeing as the branch had just collapsed, that was where Anette set off to go. She often went to the orchard, because she always ate two or three apples, instead of one.

Anette picked a large, rosy apple, then sat down on the ground with her back against the tree trunk and took a bite.

There had been a lot of pine needles inside the branch, and a large number of them had landed on Anette. She set her apple on the ground, then took off her small tiara and began pulling the long, sharp, brown things out of her hair. Each one that she pulled out went to a small pile on the fresh grass that still glistened with dew beside her until most of the pine needles were gone, leaving her hair in an awful mess.

"Oh, darn it," the princess cried as her hair caught in the branches when she stood up to straighten it, "I'm afraid I shall have to get out from under the tree if I'm to fix it."

Then, she took another bite of her apple and was about to go when she remembered her tiara.

She picked it up and looked at it. It was shaped like a ring of golden hills, and embedded in the largest and frontmost hill was a small red star–her kingdom's emblem. Actually, the emblem was a large red star with four smaller red stars around it on a yellow background.