“No! A prince: a real live prince.”
“A swineherd disguised as—as—a soldier, turned up in proper ragged clothes, and argued with the dragons, and that was the end of them. Then he took the princess back to her father’s castle, and there was no end of rejoicing. When the swineherd and his friends got to Aryenis’s castle they found that her father had a war on with the dragons, and so they joined in with him, and he lent them clothes to make them look like princes.”
“Not true. A fairy godfather gave the prince some clothes such as he ought always to have been wearing instead of ragged disguises.”
“So, being rigged out as a prince, the swineherd began to think about the princess. Only she had carefully changed her clothes and done her hair differently, so that she was very hard to recognize, so hard that when the swineherd went off to fight the dragons again he really couldn’t find her at all.”
“That was because he was a fool and didn’t look properly. I said all fairy princes were fools.”
But she didn’t say it quite so incisively this time.
“Then, when he met the dragons, one of them bit him, and he came home on the flat of his back with lots of time to think. While he was lying in the fairy godfather’s house, he thought out a plan for finding out where and who the princess really was. You see the dragon’s bite had quickened up his brain. It’s a way dragon’s teeth have. And that’s the end of part one.”
“Go on, Harilek, quickly! Don’t stop at all the best parts.”
“That is the real story-teller’s trick to make people pay up. I can’t go on unless I’m paid.”
“What is the price, trickster?”