The Princess Rules. Philippa Gregory

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      When the king heard what had happened, he went bananas.

      There was no chance that he was going to let Florizella out now. He had been so sure that Bennett was going to rescue her, he was even prepared to overlook the way the prince had bothered him so early in the morning. But for the prince to leave without taking Princess Florizella with him, breaking all the traditions of fairy stories and happy endings!

      ‘Amateur!’ he snapped and stumped off to the garden to prune the roses. ‘Half-hearted,’ he said with a snip. ‘Half-witted, more like,’ he said, taking off another flower.

      There wasn’t a single rose blooming by lunchtime, but the king was feeling a lot better.

      Until the messenger came, that is.

      It was one of Prince Bennett’s trumpeters. She came Tooroo, Toorooing into the courtyard in a terrible hurry, scaring the hens half to death and setting the guard dogs barking.

      ‘Prince Bennett has been captured!’ she shouted. ‘He was on his way home when he was captured by a dragon in the Purple Forest!’

      Everyone came running at once. Florizella opened her window to listen. The messenger told them that the great two-headed dragon of the Purple Forest had jumped out at the prince and his courtiers, and everyone had ridden away as fast as they could except for Prince Bennett, whose horse reared and dropped him right at the dragon’s feet. Bennett had bent his sword in the fall and couldn’t draw it from the scabbard! As he lay there, stunned and helpless (‘Amateur!’ the king exclaimed. ‘As I said. Nincompoop!’), the dragon had picked him up and tied him to a tree, using all sorts of particularly difficult knots, and was sitting beside him, waiting for forty-eight hours (according to Dragon Association Rules) for the rescue party to arrive, before eating the prince up – every little bit of him except, possibly, the bent sword.

      ‘Ooo!’ said Florizella, privately rather pleased at hearing this, and she leaned out of the window and whistled a loud, clear whistle that Jellybean could hear wherever he happened to be. He was in his stable and had to back up against the far wall and take a little run at the door and rear up to jump over it, and then he came galloping round and crashed to a stop under Florizella’s window. Florizella grabbed her sword and her dagger, and a spare sword for Prince Bennett (which she kept in the wardrobe in the space for the long dresses) and shinned down the drainpipe as quickly as she could.

      She dropped on to Jellybean’s back and galloped as fast as she could to the Purple Forest, steering Jellybean with the halter rope and clinging on tightly to the two swords.

      She saw the dragon before he saw her.

      He had dozed off while he was waiting, with an alarm clock in one of his great green ears to wake him when the forty-eight hours were up. His snores bent the tallest trees of the Purple Forest and made a noise like a thousand thunderstorms. His reeking, smoky breath scorched all the grass and flowers and bushes for three miles around, so that Jellybean snorted and shivered at the dreadful smell of burning.

      Bennett was tied to a tree with fiendishly complicated dragon knots, looking rather white and scared. But as soon as he saw Florizella, he whispered as softly as he could, ‘Florizella! Untie me, quick!’

      Florizella had a look at the knots as she jumped out of the saddle and thought it would take her all of the forty-eight hours to get even one of them undone and, drawing her sharp sword, she cut through the rope. She and Bennett were just about to get up on Jellybean and gallop away, when …