When he drew near to it, he saw a most beautiful maiden looking out from one of the windows, and at sight of her the lad’s heart melted within him for love of her, she was so beautiful.
“It is lucky for you that you had your lions with you just now,” said the maiden.
“Why is that?” asked the lad.
Then the maiden told him how the Trolls had gone out into the orchard a bit ago, when he was asleep under the apple tree, and how they had changed themselves into man-eating steeds and come at him to destroy him, and how the lions had then risen up and torn the Trolls to pieces.
The lad listened to her until she had made an end of the story, and then he said, “That is as it should be, and it was to guard me that I brought them hither.” Then he asked the maiden whether he might come in, and at first she would not let him, because she was afraid of the lions, but when he promised they should not harm her, but would lie down at the threshold as quiet as house cats, she opened the door to him.
The lad looked about him, and it seemed to him the castle was but a rough place for such a beauty to live in.
“I wonder,” said he, “that such a one as you should be living here with no better company than those two Trolls were.”
“It is not of my own will I am living here,” replied the maiden. Then she told him she was the daughter of the King of Arabia, and that she had been walking in her father’s garden one day, and the Trolls had appeared out of a forest near by, and carried her away with them, and she had been well-nigh scared out of her wits by it. But they had done her no harm, though they had kept her a prisoner here, and they intended that after a while one or other of them should take her as a wife. Then she asked the lad who he was, and where he had come from, and he told her all about it.
“You may be the son of a beggar, but all the same it seems to me you are something of a hero,” said the Princess, “and now we will see whether I am right about it.”
Then she led him into another room and showed him where two great swords were hanging on the wall.