I remember my first love exquisitely.

He had been a labourer, a woodcutter, and aside from my brothers and my father, he was the first man I had known.

He had hair that seemed to be made of spun gold and sapphires for eyes, just like the mother I never knew. His skin was a rich tan colour, from being so often exposed to the sun. Across his cheeks and his nose, and the breadth of his back were freckles, small dark-brown patches. He looked very much like the cinnamon whirls the cook would make me before I fell out of favour, and I often wondered if he would taste like they did, too.

His family lived on the edge of the Great Forest, at one of the furthest reaches of my father’s kingdom.

My favourite book had always been the book of fairytales my father bought me. In monetary terms, well it could easily have bought half a kingdom. That’s what my nurse always told me. When I asked how big the kingdom was, however, she had no answer.

But that never truly mattered to me, because that book was one of my most treasured possessions: it was richly and intricately illustrated, and I would sit, lost in the stories for hours.

Each story held a simple veracity at its core, and thus it became the guide by which I lived my life. Up until that year, it had not failed me.

And so I believed with all my heart that woodcutters were humble, caring people. I believed with all my heart that the working boy would fall for the princess, that we would marry, ascend to the throne and live happily ever after.

I think that’s what broke my heart more then anything else: the fact that my beloved book of tales was wrong. And that is why I’m writing this.

To make it right.

The woodcutter thing did not work out. The family kept me with them for two weeks, during which time they put me to all sorts of work. I proved useless at everything, of course.

The last night of my stay there, we had gone for a midnight walk through the forest, my first love and I. We had talked about everything under the stars, and we danced to no music in a glade.

He wove me a ring of grass, and asked me to marry him. He said that if I gave him the bag of gold I’d been sent with, he would arrange a ceremony fit for me, fit for a princess.

I gladly agreed, and so we floated back home. I led him up to the wood loft, where I had tried and failed to sleep, and showed him where the money was hidden.

He asked me that night if I would not rather share the comfort of his bed, but I declined.

The next day I was given a pocketknife and a stale loaf, led to a part of the forest I have never seen before, and left there.