Christopher Healy - The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom

For most of his early years, Frederic was perfectly happy to skip out on pastimes like tree climbing (twisted ankles!), hiking (poison ivy!), or embroidery (pointy needles!). King Wilberforce’s warnings about the hazards of such endeavors sank in good and deep.

But at the tender age of seven, Frederic was inspired to try something daring. He was in his private classroom, being taught to write his name with fancy curlicue letters, when a commotion down the hall caused his tutor to cut the lesson short. Frederic followed his tutor down to the palace gates, where many of the servants had gathered to gawk at a visiting knight.

The old warrior, who was battered and exhausted from a recent bout with a dragon, had staggered up to the palace seeking food and shelter. The king invited the weary visitor inside. This was the first knight Frederic had ever seen in real life (and frankly, even the ones he’d read about in books weren’t very exciting—his favorite bedtime story was Sir Bertram the Dainty and the Quest for the Enchanted Salad Fork). During the knight’s short stay, a fascinated Frederic followed him everywhere, listening to his tales of ogre battles, goblin wars, and bandit chases. There was a look in the man’s eyes that Frederic had never seen before. Frederic could sense the knight’s thirst for thrills, his yearning for action. The knight was a man who thrived on adventure the way Frederic thrived on tea cakes.

That evening, after the knight departed, Frederic asked his father if he could take sword-fighting lessons. The king dismissed his request with a smile: “Swords are sharp, my boy. And I need a son with both ears attached.”

Young Frederic was undaunted. The next day, he asked his father if he could take a shot at wrestling instead. King Wilberforce shook his head. “You’re what they call petite, Frederic. You’d have your spine snapped in an instant.”

The day after that, Frederic requested a spot on the jousting team. “That’s more dangerous than the other two combined,” the king moaned disapprovingly. “You’ll be skewered like a cocktail weenie.”

“Archery?” Frederic asked.

“Eyes: poked out,” the king insisted.

“Martial arts?”

“Bones: broken.”

“Mountaineering?”

“Eyes broken. Bones poked out.”

By the end of the week, King Wilberforce couldn’t take it anymore. He needed to put a stop to Frederic’s thrill-seeking dreams. He decided to set his son up for a fall.

“Father, can I try spelunking?” Frederic asked eagerly.

“Cave exploration? You’ll fall into a bottomless pit,” the king chided. Then he changed his tone. “But you can try animal training if you’d like.”

“Really?” Frederic was stunned and thrilled. “You mean with wild animals? Not hamsters or goldfish?”

The king nodded.

“You don’t think I’ll be eaten alive?” Frederic asked.

“Oh, I fear that you will, but if you’re so determined to put your life at risk, perhaps I shouldn’t stand in your way,” his father said, weaving his deception.

The next day, with his heart racing, Frederic was led down a winding basement corridor to a storeroom in which all the old coats of arms, spare scepters, and crates of outgrown baby clothes had been shoved up against the walls to make room for an enormous cage. Inside that cage: a pacing, panting tiger. The animal let out a low growl as soon as it saw the young prince.

“Wow, I didn’t know we’d start with something so big,” Frederic said, considerably less eager than he had been a minute earlier.

“Are you ready for this, Your Highness?” the animal’s trainer asked. Frederic barely had time to nod before the trainer slid back the bolt and let the cage door fall open. The trainer uttered a quick word to the tiger, and the big cat burst out into the room, rushing straight at Frederic.

Frederic screamed and ran. The giant tiger, easily three times his size, dashed after the boy. Frederic darted among the crates of tarnished goblets and out-of-tune lutes, looking for someplace to hide. “Why aren’t you stopping it?” he shouted at the trainer.

“I can’t stop it,” the trainer replied. “It’s a wild animal. Your father told you this would be dangerous.”

Frederic ducked under a heavy wooden table, but the tiger swatted it away as if it were nothing more than a piece of dandelion fluff. Frederic scrambled across the floor in an attempt to get away from the beast, but was soon backed up against a stack of rolled tapestries. There was nowhere left for him to go. With tears running down his face, Frederic shrieked as he saw the tiger’s open mouth coming at him.

When the tiger snatched him up into its maw, Frederic was too terrified to realize that the animal had no teeth. The big cat calmly carried the limp, weeping boy back to its cage and set him down gently on the floor—which is what it had been carefully trained to do. For this was no ordinary tiger: This was El Stripo, the talented and cooperative star of the Flimsham Brothers Circus. The Flimshams were famous for their visually horrifying—but impressively safe—act in which El Stripo’s trainer would stuff the tiger’s mouth with up to five infants from the audience and then instruct the animal to spit them back to their mothers. The babies almost always landed in the correct laps.

It took Frederic a few seconds to realize he hadn’t been eaten. At which point his father appeared. Frederic ran into the king’s arms, burying his wet face in his father’s royal robes.

“Do you see now?” the king asked. “Do you see why I say you can’t do these things?” Behind Frederic’s back, he flashed El Stripo’s trainer a thumbs-up.

King Wilberforce’s plan had worked. The prince was so deeply frightened by his experience with the tiger, so chilled to the core, that he never asked to try anything daring again. Father was right, he thought; I am not cut out for such bold escapades.

Fear ruled Frederic from that moment on. He even found a few Sir Bertram the Dainty stories to be a little too scary.

Instead Frederic focused his energies on taking etiquette lessons, putting together stylish outfits, and becoming exactly the kind of prince his father wanted him to be. And he became pretty darn good at it. In fact, he began to love it. He was proud of his excellent posture, his artful flower arranging, and his flawless foxtrot.

More than a decade passed before the thought of adventure found its way back into Frederic’s mind. It happened on the night of the big palace ball, at which it was hoped that Frederic would find a bride (he never left the palace, so this type of event was the only way for him to meet girls). Among the dozens of elegant women at the ball that night, there was one girl who caught Frederic’s attention immediately—and it wasn’t just because she was beautiful and elegantly dressed. No, she had something else: a daredevil gleam in her eyes. He’d seen that look only once before—in that old knight all those years ago.

Frederic and the mystery girl had the time of their lives dancing together. But at midnight she ran off without a word.

“Father, I have to find that girl,” insisted Frederic, newly inspired and feeling a bit more like his seven-year-old self again.

“Son, you’ve never been outside the palace gates,” the king replied in a foreboding tone. “What if there are tigers out there?”

Frederic shrank away. That tiger episode had really done a number on him.

But Frederic didn’t give up entirely.

He instructed his trusted valet, Reginald, to find the mystery woman for him. It turned out that Ella (that was her name) wasn’t a noblewoman at all; just a sooty cleaning girl. But her story—the way she mixed it up with a fairy and used magical means to escape her wicked stepfamily—intrigued Frederic (even if he hoped he’d never have to meet any of her relatives).