The Midnight Archive has returned to making fairytales... and now they did an hour-length Frog Prince. I was pleased that the titular love interest was "clever" (even though he out-Joffreys Joffrey at first, I knew the enchantment would teach him a lesson)...
He was a young man who had been handsome and clever and loved from the day he was
born and who had come to believe without ever thinking it through that the world was arranged that way on purpose. He was
kind to his dogs, and to his horse. He was generous with his friends. He tipped well and he had never once looked at a person who
could do nothing for him and seen a person. He had come to hunt.
Heinrich was 2 years older. He had been given to the prince as a companion when the prince was six, the son of a steward, chosen because he was steady, and he had been steady ever since. When the prince fell from his first pony, it was Hinrich who set his arm. When the prince got drunk at 17 and said things to his father that could not be unsaid. It was Heinrich who carried him to bed and sat with him until morning and never mentioned it again. He was not the prince's friend. The prince did not have any true friends. He was the prince's servant, and he loved him. And he knew exactly what the prince was, and loved him anyway, which is the hardest kind of love there is.
He denies a crone (fairy? goddess?) a drink of water to quench her thirst (apparently his kindness somehow excludes old crones!), and the crone turns him into an amphibian (though keeping his human mind and power of speech) until he finds true love.
He was thirsty and through the trees ahead of him in a hollow he saw the pale trunk of a great linden tree and
under it the gray stones of a well, or more of an artificial pond. He rode down to it. There was a woman sitting on the rim. She was old. That
5:105 minutos y 10 segundoswas the first thing he saw. And for a long moment, the only thing old in the way that people in stories are old, past
5:counting, her face folded down into itself, her hands like roots. She was dressed in nothing he could name, gray
son gray, and she had a wooden cup in her lap, and she was looking at the water.
And she did not look up when the horse came down the slope, though she must have heard it. He did what he always did. He spoke first and he spoke down.
"Old Grandmother", he said, "is this water good?"
"It is the best water in the woods", she said without turning. "It is the best water in either kingdom. Kings and queens have
drunk from it".
"Then draw me a cup". She turned then [music] and looked at him, and he saw her eyes, and something in
him that had never been afraid of anything went cold, and did not know why. I will draw you a cup, she said. if
you will give me something for it. He laughed. [music] It was a good laugh.
People had told him so.
"Name it," he said.
"Give me your word," she said. "Not gold, not the ring on your hand. Your
word. Promise me one thing, and you may drink".
"What thing?" She held out the cup, and it was full, though he had not seen
her draw it, and the water in it was so clear that he could see the grain of the wood through it. Promise me, she said
that when someone who can do nothing for you asks you for kindness, you will give it. That is all. One promise. Then
drink. And here is the moment. Here is the whole of Prince Anselm's life in a single breath. He could have said yes. It would
have cost him nothing.
She was
holding the cup out to him and he was thirsty and the water was the clearest thing he had ever seen. But she was old and she was hideous
and she was nobody and she had told him what to do. He reached down from the saddle and took the cup out of her hands
and drank it dry and dropped it on the stones at her feet and said,
"I do not make promises to beggars. Tell me the
way to the eastern road and I will see you paid." She looked at the cup on the ground. She did not pick it up.
"You have
drunk," she said. "And you have not promised. I told you I do not promise beggars. Then you will learn what it is to need one," she said. And she stood up.
He would say afterwards when there was anyone to say it to that he did not remember getting down from the horse and
did not remember the horse going and did not remember the words she used only that she used a great many and that they
came out of her in a voice that was not old at all. He remembered the tree going up and up above him like a green
wall. He remembered his own hands [music] and that there was something wrong with them
Then we move into a nearby kingdom with a widowed king and his three daughters. The eldest, the crown princess Edda, is already married to a northern duke and has a daughter of her own (I headcanon her as being in her thirties like me). The youngest, Adela, is OBVIOUSLY our heroine / protagonist, a bratty but physically adorable teenager.
But my absolute FAVOURITE is Irmgard, the second / middle sister, in her twenties, described as "kind and plain and clever," you can see why I identify with her! Why can't Irmgard be the protagonist? Why can't we have plain and clever heroines? Why is the heroine often the cute but ditzy youngest child? Doesn't a clever prince need an equally clever heroine (as in the Fourth Story of the Snow Queen) here as well?
Here I add how TMA characterises Irmgard:
The second was Irmgard, who was kind and clever and
plain and knew that she was plain and had made her peace with it in the way that clever people do by becoming the
one everybody relied on.
Irmgard had asked her (Adela) at breakfast. The envoys from the north were coming in 2 days and there were 40 beds to make ready.
And Irmgard, who did everything in that castle that nobody else remembered to do, had looked across the table at her younger sister and said, "Will you help me this morning?"
And Adela had then got up from the table and picked up her golden ball and walked out through the little gate on the woods side without a backward glance. And Irmgard had watched her go and had not said anything because there was no point.
