PRINCESS HATTIE

Once upon a time, there was a kingdom much like many kingdoms you have heard of before. There was a King and a Queen and three princesses, each with auburn hair like their mother and hazel eyes like their father, and everyone who saw them said they looked just alike.

Then something changed.

All three were tall, but while Maddie and Lillie had dainty little feet, little hands and little waists, Hattie, the middle sister, had enormous feet, thick hands, and a very round waist.

One day when she was ten, she sat down after correctly conjugating all the French irregular verbs. There was a loud crunch, and her chair splintered into pieces. Both of her sisters laughed. Hattie left the schoolroom in tears.

That was when her French tutor went to her parents. “The child is clearly overeating!” the woman said. “She’s stuffing her face, the little piggie!”

The next day, Hattie was put on a strict diet. No more cake, no more cookies, no more bacon. Hattie looked on in dismay as her sisters gobbled up mountains of buttery potatoes and she had to eat raw lettuce instead.

“Don’t think about it,” the Queen told Hattie. “It’s baby fat. You’ll grow out of it, and then you can eat all the potatoes you want. Someday you’ll be just as beautiful as your sisters”

When she was thirteen, her dance instructor made her dance so long and so hard that Hattie’s ankles swelled up and pain started shooting into her legs. She begged to stop.

“It’s because she’s so lazy,” her dance instructor told her parents. “Her sisters never need to stop.”

Hattie tried to point out that this was because her sisters didn’t have as much weight to carry and her shoes that didn’t support her ankles properly, but her parents took the dance instructor’s advice and ordered Hattie to run three miles every morning.

But she didn’t get any thinner. If anything, her legs got thicker.

“You just have to be patient.,” said her father. “Just a few months, and you’ll be as pretty as anything.” No one ever told her she was all right as she was: they only told her that someday she’d be different.

Meanwhile, her parents couldn’t find her a husband. Maddie was engaged to Prince Laurent of Frontdeguerre, and Lillie was engaged to Archduke Horace of Otatopia, but every prince or duke or earl who sought Hattie’s hand would lose interest. They even tried getting the enchanted frog in the pond to kiss her, but the frog said he’d rather continue being a frog than marry a hippo. Hattie told him she’d rather be a hippo than marry an ass.

“It’s very upsetting,” said Hattie’s father, one day when Hattie was sixteen. “We’ve already tripled your dowry.”

“What are you doing?” Hattie asked. “Paying someone to take me off your hands?”

“You know what your problem is,” Maddie said, as she gazed at her portrait of Prince Laurent. “You just need to lower your expectations.”

“Lower them to what?” demanded Hattie. “Mother and Daddy tried to get me to marry a frog.”

“Well...” said Maddie, very gently. “You’re not the sort of girl who can expect perfection. You’re going to have to compromise a little.”

“You’re saying that I’m going to have to marry someone awful because I’m fat,” said Hattie. “I didn’t even mind the frog part until he turned out to be horrid! Would you marry Laurent if he were fat?”

“Well, of course not!” answered Maddie.

“He could be awful,” said Hattie. “And you don’t care, because he’s handsome.”

“He can’t be awful,” said Maddie, showing off the portrait of the svelte prince. “Look at him.”

Three days later, Prince Laurent’s army attacked the capital.

“But he seemed like such a nice prince!” lamented everyone but Hattie.

Prince Laurent stormed the throne room with a dozen men. He pointed the King, Queen, Maddie and Lillie to one side of the room. He sent Hattie and the servants to the other side.

“There are three princesses!” he shouted at his soldiers. “Find the third one! Take this lot out to the wagons!” He gestured at Hattie and all the servants. “And take these to the dungeons!” He pointed at her parents and sisters.

Hattie almost spoke up, but then she realized that Laurent hadn’t expected a fat princess. She’d been mistaken for a servant.

The soldiers took them to be loaded onto a prison cart that looked like a cage on wheels. There were a lot of prisoners and just a few soldiers. Hattie decided to take her chances and make a run for it.

The soldiers ran after her.

Hattie was slow, and the soldiers were fast, but what she lacked in speed she made up for in endurance. The soldiers, exhausted from sprinting, stopped running. “Never mind her,” they said. “She’s just some fat cook’s maid or something. Probably steals from the kitchens.”

Hattie just kept running, all day and all night. She was tired, and hungry, and sweaty, and her ankles were very swollen. She collapsed in a pile in the middle of the woods, panting.

Her stomach was grumbling and she was hallucinating from sheer hunger. She thought she smelled frying potatoes.

No, she did smell potatoes. And smoke.

Two young, raggedy-looking men crunched through the trees. “It’s a girl!” one of them called. “She’s unarmed!”

They took her back to their camp, where they were met by an equally-raggedy, but very handsome young man. His eyes widened. “You’re one of the princesses!” he exclaimed. “But not Lillie. Maddie? Hattie?”

Hattie hesitated. “Hattie,” she answered.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “I’m Archduke Horace of Otatopia, Lillie’s betrothed. We came as soon as we heard you’d been attacked, but as you can see, we don’t really have much of an army, so we’re waiting for reinforcements from the North.” He smiled at her again. “I knew I recognized you. You’re just as beautiful as your sister. Would you like some potatoes?”

Hattie’s head swam at the fact that Horace had just uttered two sentences she had never expected to hear anyone say to her...in sequence.

“I’m not beautiful,” she blurted. “I mean, no, thank you. I mean, I’m not allowed.”

Horace’s eyes bugged out. “You’re not allowed to eat?” he asked.

Hattie’s stomach rumbled. “Not potatoes,” she answered. “I’m too fat. Do you have any lettuce?”

Horace gave her a very sad look. “In Otatopia,” he said, “all we have to eat are potatoes. We have a lot of droughts, and potatoes are the only crop that grows.”

“I’m sorry,” Hattie said, and she was. Even if she had secretly dreamed of whole rooms full of potatoes, she felt very badly for anyone who could only eat one thing. “Thank you. I’ll have some potatoes.”

The potatoes were cooked in butter. Hattie closed her eyes and savored them slowly. She hadn’t had a potato in six years.

Horace sat down beside her, and put his own cloak over her shoulders. She told him about the situation at the palace, where her parents and sisters were in the dungeon, and he told her about Otatopia, where people were building their houses out of potato-bricks because the straw they usually used hadn’t grown.

On the second night in the forest, she told him about how the royal seamstress tut-tutted at her when her dresses required twice as much fabric as her sisters’. He told her about Otatopia, where seamstresses were trying to figure out how to make clothes out of potatoes, because there wasn’t enough money to trade for new cloth.

On the third night in the forest, she told him about how her parents made her run every morning, and that was how she had escaped the soldiers.

“I’m glad you escaped,” said Horace. “But your parents should be happy they have a beautiful, healthy daughter and not make her feel badly because she doesn’t look like her sisters.”

“I’m not beautiful,” Hattie reminded him, as if he could have forgotten, when she was sitting right there.

“Yes, you are,” said Horace. He looked sad again. And then he kissed her.

Hattie kissed him back, liking it very much although their teeth kept banging together. And then she came to her senses, and pushed him away. “You’re supposed to marry my sister!” she pointed out, mortified.

“But I don’t want to marry your sister,” Horace said. “I want to marry you. You said you weren’t engaged to anyone. Surely your parents won’t mind if I just...switch sisters, will they?”

Hattie didn’t know what to say. She just sat there with her mouth wide open.

He looked away from her, suddenly shy. “I mean, if you’ll have me.”

She kept sitting there. She wanted to say something, but nothing would come out.

He bit his lip. “I know I don’t have much to offer you. But we were...we were depending on your sister’s dowry to dig better irrigation ditches, and--”

Hattie burst out laughing. Loudly. “My dowry is much bigger than hers!”

When the reinforcements arrived, Hattie and Horace outlined their plan to rescue the royal family. And though some lives were lost, everything went according to plan.

After a while, things settled back down and Hattie’s sisters adjusted to the fact that now she was the only sister engaged to be married. Hattie expedited the wedding so that Horace could get the money to irrigate Otatopia, and Horace discovered several beneficial uses for potato starch that made potatoes a more desirable commodity on the global market.

And when Hattie got married, she ate all the potatoes she wanted. She still ran every morning, but she only ran a mile and a half instead of three, and she stopped wearing shoes that hurt her ankles, even when she and Horace had to dress up for state business. And when she and Horace had children, they fed them potatoes at every meal and told them all that they were beautiful every day.