The Halcyon Fairy Book

began a great dispute between Patypata, Grabugeon, and Tintin, and they came to high words, until at last Grabugeon, who was quicker than the others, ran up to the very top of the nearest tree, and let herself fall, head first, to the ground, and there she lay — quite dead!
It is a bad day when your followers begin committing suicide to spite each other.
The Princess was very sorry, but as Grabugeon was really dead, she allowed the Captain of the Guard to take her tongue; but, alas! it was such a little one — not bigger than the Princess’s thumb — that they decided sorrowfully that it was of no use at all: the King would not have been taken in by it for a moment!
“Alas! my little monkey,” cried the Princess, “I have lost you, and yet I am no better off than I was before.”
“The honor of saving your life is to be mine,” interrupted Patypata, and, before they could prevent her, she had picked up a knife and cut her head off in an instant.
Right, I’m off to get some gin.
And hey, even leaving aside all the unpleasant overtones to this and going straight for the practical, how the hell do you cut your own head off with a knife?
But when the Captain of the Guard would have taken her tongue it turned out to be quite black, so that would not have deceived the King either.
WHAT. THE. HELL.
“Am I not unlucky?” cried the poor Princess; “I lose everything I love, and am none the better for it.”
… more gin. This requires more gin.
Okay. I’m going to leave the black tongue thing because I cannot even figure out how to deal with it — I mean, where do you even GO from there?! — but on a purely psychological note, the princess is really … off … here.
For my money, there are a lot of perfectly appropriate responses to having two friends commit messy suicide in front of you. I would have accepted screaming, wailing, sobbing, curling in fetal position and rocking, swearing, cursing god, and deciding to go back to bed for a month. Any of those would have been fine. This is not fine. Maybe the King was on to something.
“If you had accepted my offer,” said Tintin, “you would only have had me to regret, and I should have had all your gratitude.”
Tintin’s being a bit of a dick about this whole thing.
Miranda kissed her little dog, crying so bitterly, that at last she could bear it no longer, and turned away into the forest. When she looked back the Captain of the Guard was gone, and she was alone, except for Patypata, Grabugeon, and Tintin, who lay upon the ground.
Wait — hang on — how did the dog die? What? Did the Captain of the Guard kill him and take the dog’s heart and tongue? This can’t be a small dog, if it’s got a human-sized heart, and the King will have to be pretty dense not to recognize a dog’s tongue from a human one and dude, this whole sequence is just majorly messed-up.
She could not leave the place until she had buried them in a pretty little mossy grave at the foot of a tree, and she wrote their names upon the bark of the tree, and how they had all died to save her life.
Have you ever tried to dig a grave for a human and a human-sized dog, with your bare hands, in tree-root filled soil? Not gonna happen. (We’ll assume the monkey was negligibly sized.)
That’s a very large piece of bark, or she is writing very, very small.
If the king is trying to kill you, do you maybe think that right outside the palace is perhaps not the best place to write the full accounting of how you’re deceiving him? This is like the huntsman in Snow White getting his stag taxidermied, wall-mounted, and then hanging a little sign around its neck saying “Used Its Heart To Fool The Queen.”
And then she began to think where she could go for safety — for this forest was so close to her father’s castle that she might be seen and recognized by the first passerby, and, besides that, it was full of lions and wolves, who would have snapped up a princess just as soon as a stray chicken.
See above on the inadvisability of sticking around writing bark eulogies.
So she began to walk as fast as she could, but the forest was so large and the sun was so hot that she nearly died of heat and terror and fatigue; look which way she would there seemed to be no end to the forest, and she was so frightened that she fancied every minute that she heard the King running after her to kill her. You may imagine how miserable she was, and how she cried as she went on, not knowing which path to follow, and with the thorny bushes scratching her dreadfully and tearing her pretty frock to pieces.
You’ll forgive me if I’m still hung up on the freaky competitive suicide pact and not all that worried about her frock.
At last she heard the bleating of a sheep, and said to herself: “No doubt there are shepherds here with their flocks; they will show me the way to some village where I can live disguised as a peasant girl. Alas! it is not always kings and princes who are the happiest people in the world. Who could have believed that I should ever be obliged to run away and hide because the King, for no reason at all, wishes to kill me?”
When he’s that kind of king, he’s just that kind of king, honey.
So saying she advanced toward the place where she heard the bleating, but what was her surprise when, in a lovely little glade quite surrounded by trees, she saw a large sheep; its wool was as white as