#based on the idea of what if a jafar-type character tries to sabotage the suitors to protect the princess

[radioactivepeasant]

Fic Prompts: Folklore Friday

(This wasn't on the schedule, but the idea just hit me)

She is two years old when he rises to the position of royal advisor. Everyone is busy fussing over the newborn prince, and nobody notices the princess wandering where she shouldn't. Nobody but Lord Ulfric. He finds her trying to pull one of his secret books off the shelf -- the ones inherited from his mother, hidden from the rest of the court -- with little success.

"Pretty!" The princess beams and points to the grinning, golden skull on the spine. "S'as a happy book?"

"Er...for some, I suppose, your highness." Ulfric awkwardly lifts the girl off the floor. "Best get you back to your nursery, eh?"

She is five when Ulfric begins to feel that the king is ignoring his advice. Matters of economy, justice, education, all given a perfunctory "yes yes, I'll see to it, of course."

Even Princess Aria's own education seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of increased military activity near the borders of their kingdom. Ulfric had advised caution there, as their neighbors were known to have a penchant for snatching territory that was already inhabited, and so he wasn't complaining there. But as he watches Aria pelting down the halls with a frog in one hand and a cookie in the other, chased by her weary nursemaid, Ulfric begins to think the royal children's time could be used more constructively.

Aria is six when Lord Ulfric catches her in his private laboratory once again and offers to teach her to read. She points to the book with the golden skull and says, "Read me that one!"

"When you are older," Ulfric says firmly.

When Aria is ten, she realizes that there is something strange about Lord Ulfric. She's not sure most royal advisors have secret laboratories where they experiment with potions. She doesn't think most royal advisors have books wrapped in chains and strange artifacts hidden away. And she knows there is a prejudice against magic among the nobles.

"You're a wizard, aren't you?" she asks boldly, sitting on his workbench in her tattered play clothes.

Ulfric looks up from where he is crushing several small crystals to go into a chemical solution. "Now whatever gave you that idea?" he asks dryly.

"Father wouldn't like it if he found out his advisor was a wizard," Aria says thoughtfully.

"I imagine he wouldn't."

Neither one brings it up again.

Aria is twelve when she discovers that, despite being the firstborn, she won't inherit her father's throne. She's angry, and hurt, and betrayed. She begins to spend more time in Ulfric's lab, even when he's not there.

"It's a foolish tradition," she snaps one day. "Theodore is only ten! If something happens to Mother and Father, they'd have to wait even longer for him to be old enough to rule than they would if it were me!"

"The ruler of the kingdom can easily change that law," Ulfric says patiently for the hundredth time, "For now, you must focus your energy on planting the idea in the king's mind. And remember, if you make him think it was his own idea, he's less likely to question it."

"Is that how you get your work done, Uncle Ulfric?" Aria asks shrewdly.

"Yes," Ulfric answers. "Being an advisor is difficult when the person you must advise has a history of ignoring advice. You have to get creative sometimes. Now aren't you supposed to be reading a treatise on judicial reform?"

By the time Princess Aria is fifteen, Lord Ulfric is more her advisor than her father's. Thanks to him, she knows how to read people, when to conform to expectations and when to defy them. How to balance the budget of a kingdom. Where to place watchtowers to protect the vulnerable places of the land. And she knows other things.

Ointments to make her invisible so that she can slip out of the castle and interact with the real world. Rings that let the wearer understand the speech of birds or fish -- Theodore had been delighted when she gave him one for his twelfth birthday -- and flowers that can be made into deadly poisons. She knows ways to protect herself from the more common curses that fall on princesses. She can counteract most enchanted sleep spells without help.

And she knows that the king is steadily driving their kingdom to ruin.

She is sixteen when the suitors begin to arrive, and seventeen when her parents realize that she will never choose any of them. When the king sets up a grand tournament and declares that the prize is Aria's hand in marriage, most of the kingdom is appalled. What if the winner should be from an enemy kingdom? What if the winner is a cruel brute? Has the king even considered that? No, no he has not.

Princess Aria goes to her teacher and confidante the moment the news reaches her.

"Uncle Ulfric, something has to be done about Father," she says reluctantly.

Ulfric is already preparing several fearsome tasks to weed out the suitors, which did involve calling in a few favors owed to his late mother by the witch-in-the-well.

"Even without the issue of your future and wellbeing at stake," he agrees, "The kingdom does not have the money to waste on an extravaganza of this sort."

With the kingdom of Spindle making ominous advances on the edge of the Bespelled Woods, and the dread Captain Cinder making her annual attack on their sole port, the kingdom of Tangle was in a bit of a pinch. The king's idea of a solution is to marry Aria off as quickly as possible to gain access to other kingdoms' arms and resources to bolster Tangle's own depleted stores.

If he'd just compromised on the trade agreement with the territory of Neverspring, they might not have been in such a pickle. But it's too late to cry over spilled milk now.

"Uncle Ulfric," Aria says as she bursts into his study one night, "I need you to get rid of my brother."

"I beg your pardon?" Ulfric sputters.

Aria waves a hand impatiently. "He's old enough for a Quest, right? Find one that won't get him killed. We need him out of Tangle for the rest of the summer."

Ulfric sets down his scroll and runs his wrinkled hands over his face. There is more grey in his beard now and he likes to remind Aria that she's half the cause. He suspects there will be more grey there soon.

"Dare I ask why?" he asks.

And Aria holds up the book. The golden skull seems to wink at Ulfric from the spine.

"We need to overthrow the king while there's still a kingdom to save," she says bluntly. "I know you've been considering it for a long time. I just want Theodore out of harm's way when it happens."