"Bless you, Bruce, but I'm afraid I had a few dozen suitors who felt very differently about freckles and mouse-colored hair and turned-up noses on Princesses.

"So when my parents and the Council decided that no one was ever going to offer to marry me, they decided to hire a dragon. It's not unheard of, as a plan to find a husband for a less-than-beautiful girl. You hire a dragon to lay waste to the countryside -- in a controlled fashion, of course -- lock the girl in question in a tower, and then proclaim that whomsoever slayeth the dragon gets her hand in marriage. And, well, once he's a slain a dragon for you, no prince can refuse to marry you. It simply isn't done.

"Only I found out about it. And I didn't care for the plan at all. So I ran away from home. And I stayed in the Forest for a while, but then my dress got quite ragged, and I needed to get a job to buy a new one. By then I'd wandered clear across the Forest of Faraway to the Ambergeldar side. So I took a job as the fourteenth assistant kitchen maid in the palace here. I thought it would be interesting to work in a castle instead of living in one."