• Alice
    By: Hether McCuistion
    Once upon a time there was a girl that was not very appealing to the eye. Her name was Alice, she was born a beautiful princess but in the night an evil witch cast a spell on her that made her very ugly and of course there can’t be an ugly princess. So the king and queen gave her away to a poor widow that was so old she couldn’t have any children. She was very grateful for the gift. Soon the widow died and Alice was taken in by a husband and wife that knew nothing of her past. Life went well for Alice until her second stepmother died. Now all she had was a widowed man that was reluctant to have her in the first place but he loved his wife so much he didn’t complain to her when she was alive.
    But he soon fell into despair about his wife’s death and turned to drinking and the only reason he kept Alice is because he hoped she would make an ok wife to a very unlucky and ugly man. But when she came to the age of marriage she refused to marry anyone because she didn’t want to marry a man like her stepfather. This made him very upset and he threw her out with nothing but the clothes on her back and a loaf of bread that she had taken from the kitchen earlier that day. She planned to sleep in the woods at night and in the day she would sneak into her stepfather’s house and take his food and sell his belongings while he was at the tavern getting drunk. This worked for about a week and because he was constantly drunk he didn’t notice the things that went missing around the house. So while Alice was living a life better than when she was living with her stepfather; he was getting poorer and poorer even when he didn’t spend any money on liquor because he was too drunk to walk a quarter mile to the tavern. And it was one of those fateful days when he couldn’t get to the tavern that she was raiding the kitchen when he stumbled in and caught a glimpse of her and this made him mad. Lucky for her he couldn’t catch her because he was so disoriented from his hangover he kept tripping over things. She quickly jumped out of a window and ran into the forest and since he scared her so much she couldn’t stop running for fear of being followed. She ran at least five miles until she was so tired that she couldn’t run anymore and collapsed on the forest floor from exhaustion.
    When she woke up in the afternoon of the next day she was stricken with fear of never getting out of the forest and wandering for a way out until she collapsed and died. This of course made things worse because she wouldn’t be able to think straight and make a plan to get out. She started to run in random directions screaming and crying for someone to help her then she heard a voice and quickly tried to stop crying so she could trace the noise. She listened and was entranced by the beauty of the voice and quickly found her way to it. When she found the source she was on top of a small hill with a broken down cottage and without even thinking about it, she went inside. She then went up the creaking stairs and into a nearby room and in this room there was a bed in which a little girl that looked a lot like herself was lying; but she wasn’t the source of the singing the source was a middle aged woman dressed in clothes of royalty crying and singing a sad song of losing her little girl .But when she looked at the girl she didn’t seem sick or injured in any way the only problem was her ugliness and then the scene she was just in disappeared and an old woman took its place. It was silent for a couple of minutes as they were looking each other over then Alice asked the old woman who she was. The old woman said ‘ I am an evil force that has taken the form of an old hag that is thousands of years old and the most powerful force in the world’. Then Alice asked who the girl was and why the woman was crying. The old woman then told her that the girl was Alice and the woman was her mother the queen and she was crying because it was wrong to have an ugly princess. So the king her father had ordered Alice away to live with the old widow and to be forgotten by the kingdom that she was ever born and they had spread the rumor that the little princess had gotten sick and died at the young age of 8 months. At first she didn’t believe she but then it started to piece everything together and it all made since of how an old woman too old to have children had raised her from infancy. She looked at the old hag and asked why she had told her this. Then the hag replied “when I do an evil deed to someone I want to make the person I hurt know it was me or the evil wouldn’t benefit me at all and it would be useless and every one that knew of your royal heritage would think that you were just born an ugly child, and now I have to go tell your birth parents the sad story of my despicable evil” and then she disappeared.
    Alice just stood there and cried but not for herself but for the pain her mother and father must have felt losing her little girl to physical appearance. And this was probably the nicest thing she could at this point so the evil of the spell wore off and she was beautiful once again. But at the very moment as she was shouting thankfulness to the world for her returned beauty her stepfather that had been looking for her in the woods to make her repay for her stealing and overheard her loud shouting he automatically turned and ran in that direction. When he found the cottage he climbed the stairs and when he busted into the room he saw the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life. He automatically thought it was a gift to him to replace his dead wife and this made him happy to marry a beautiful girl once again and this was even more gorgeous than his first and he planned to marry her at once.
    Alice was shocked when her stepfather came into the room but she felt no need to resist him so she followed him home but once she was out of the woods the urge to obey him was gone and then she sprinted towards the center of town. But this day turned out to be the day that the royal family was passing though the town on their way to their summer castle. She ran right though the procession and almost got trampled by a horse which stopped the procession and one of the guards grabbed her to show to the king and queen as the root of the problem. When the queen looked out the window and caught a glimpse of a pretty girl in rags she automatically thought of her daughter before the dreadful night when the witch came to curse her. The queen then recognized her own daughter fifteen years after she was forced to leave the kingdom. As the queen was getting out of her carriage to go to her daughter, Alice’s stepfather pushed his way thought the crowd and grabbed her and threw her on the ground and slapped her for running away. The queen was so frightened by this outburst that she fainted and the guards overwhelmed her and Alice and her stepfather were pushed away by the crowd. Then Alice was put in her stepfather’s home and locked in her old room so she couldn’t escape again. And when the queen woke up she remembered her daughter in the small town but she was ten hours away from there and no one believed her for they thought she dreamed her “dead” daughter was still alive and believed her dream was real.
    So as Alice was being prepared to get married to her abusive stepfather, her real mother was being called insane and desperate for her long lost daughter and only the king knew she was not insane and understood her pain. And to help he was secretly arranging for someone to go get his lost daughter but he had to find her before that was possible. Plus he had to find a way to bring her to the kingdom and introduce her as there so called dead daughter without explaining her past “appearance” problems.
    Alice was very scared of the upcoming marriage because when her stepmother was alive and well she often heard her crying and she also had many different scars and bruises all over her and wasn’t allowed to have people over or leave the house to see people or even to go to church. Even before she was married to him she wasn’t allowed to leave her room and the only time she saw people is when they came to feed her and to get her ready and her wedding dress ready.
    The king started to have people searching every house, inn, and farm in this small town but when they came to Alice’s house one of the maids answered the door and when they asked to search the house for the girl the maid refused and said they had no time to delay because the owner of the house was getting married and they started to fight because the orders were to search every house and farm even if they resist. So the guards pushed the maid away and stormed into the house, they went through every room and the entire time the maids and the stepfather were behind them yelling at them to get out and when they came to the locked room they said if they didn’t unlock the room they would bust it down. Meanwhile inside the room Alice hears them coming and starts yelling and screaming that she has been kidnapped and held against her will. The stepfather resisted unlocking the door and the guards pushed it over and almost crushed her. When the guards saw her they knew it was the lost girl that the queen was so desperate to have with her.
    The guards quickly escorted Alice from the house and the stepfather who they were arresting on the charges of kidnapping and resisting orders. Alice thought her life was finally getting better and would finally have a more normal life than what she had started with but of course she was wrong.
    When the carriage arrived and Alice was sent on her way to her real mother and father and on the way the witch appeared in the carriage and when she tried to scream for help she couldn’t. Then the witch said the she couldn’t have one of her spells to hurt people make someone’s life better and since Alice had destroyed her last spell with her innocence she couldn’t do the anymore spells on her again so she had to find a way to use her parents to make her sad. Then the witch discovered the perfect idea and disappeared, releasing Alice at the same time.
    The king and queen had gotten word that their daughter was on her way and were starting to plan a huge ball to celebrate her return to her rightful home when the witch appeared in front of them and all of the guards and workers froze in their places. The witch then explained her dilemma and told them her plan on how to fix it and then it was over the queen and king plus all of the people that knew of Alice’s true identity had forgotten everything that had happened in the last couple of days everyone, except Alice.
    To Alice she didn’t even notice the happening of the spell except that the carriage stopped and when the guards looked inside the carriage they threw her out and told her to get lost. At this Alice was very confused until she thought about the witch and she drew conclusions and figured the witch had taken everyone’s memories about her relation to her true parents. At that point she just couldn’t take it and sat down to think about her life and what she could possibly do.
    While she was thinking an old man passed by on his cart and when he saw this beautiful girl sitting by the road looking like she was homeless but was dressed as royalty he had to investigate what was going on. When he walked over to this beautiful girl and asked her who she was she told him she was the king and queens daughter. When he didn’t believe her she told her the story of the witch’s first spell and how she had fixed it and of how the witch had cheated and cast another spell to destroy her. At first he didn’t believe her but the story did explain her clothes and while she was on the side of the road so he decided to put his trust in her and took her to his house to fix her up with commoner’s clothes. Then on his way home he was trying to find a way for her to prove it to him then he remembered that all royalty are supposed to have a birthmark and sure enough when he asked her she search and found it on the lower part of her back.
    They spent many nights trying to find a way for Alice to regain her royal name and family and after searching in books for weeks they found the answer. They found that if you conjure a witch she has to come to you and since she revealed her name to Alice they could conjure her to them. On the night of the full moon they set to work and at midnight they called her to them.
    When she appeared she was very mad and decided at that moment to kill them both on the spot. She turned herself into a snake and quickly bit the old man and luckily they called the witch in the kitchen because Alice reacted very quickly grabbed a knife and cut the witch in half. Instantly the spell of forgetfulness was lifted but Alice didn’t care and she ran to the old man’s side. She started to cry and he began to heal. This was because she killed a witch she got the powers from her because the power had to go somewhere. When she finished healing the man she set out in the early morning hours to the castle and when she got there she was greeted warmly by the same guards that had thrown her out of the carriage and onto the road.
    When she saw her parents they ran to each other and cried in each other’s arms from overwhelming happiness. When they calmed down she told them the story of her life that they had missed out on. They were very proud of their daughter’s strong courage and cleverness and when they heard of the man they sent him enough gold that he and his descendants would never have to work again. And to cover up their original mistake they said that they had felt they should test their daughter to see if she was brave enough to be a first born royalty and hadn’t told the people because they didn’t want people to help her cheat. The commoners and people of the court took this explanation and believed it and were very gracious to be rid of the old witch that had tormented them for years.
    Many years later when Alice was queen and her husband was king she put her own daughter through the same test but always kept a diary just in case a witch made her forget her daughter. It took her daughter till age thirteen to pass the test and come home but it was all worth it because those test made her an amazing queen...