Author's Note: This is based off of the original Giambattista Basile version of Sun, Moon, and Talia (Sleeping Beauty) which has always, always irritated me for several reasons:

First we have a rape upon an unconscious (dead) woman, who is later taken to wife by her rapist. Second, when he comes back, he has presumably come back to rape her again, working out his lust on an unconscious woman who cannot defend herself or say no. Third, the King's first wife, who is angry at the woman that her husband has been having an affair with, is portrayed as evil and vengeful. The rightfully angry Queen is shown to be in her anger jealous, spiteful, and greedy, and the fact that her husband is a philanderer gets completely lost in the fact that she's "jealous". And then she gets put to death because she tries to kill her husband's mistress. Why is the rapist rewarded with a beautiful wife, the (original) wronged wife killed, and Talia married to her rapist for life?

This is going to explore what goes on when that doesn't happen, and when certain punishments are reversed.

Once upon a time there was a great Queen, and though her arm was strong and her mind quick, she had a bit of a flighty imagination when it came to odd imagery. So, when one day a candle tipped over on her desk and lit aflame a bundle of pale pink roses in a bleached beachwood vase, the wish she made must have sounded a little peculiar. "I wish I had a child as orange as flame, pink as the roses before me, and as dark as the wood of the flower-vase."

Still, whatever fairy had been listening granted her wish, and within three months her belly swelled with child, and six months after that the Queen delivered a female baby with hair as orange as candle-flame, lips as pink as the roses in the vase, and eyes as brown as the bleached wood that vase had been carved of, which is to say, not very dark at all.

Upon her birth her father the King sent for as many star-gazers and oracles as the wide, wide Kingdom had to offer, and for a wide Kingdom it had a lot.

Astrologers came from the north, fire-seers came from the south, and from the east and west came fortune tellers of nomad tribes that wandered the wide world and saw all that was to see there.

Amongst them was much bickering, for the methods of their seeing were varied and different, but after much debating and looking down alternate paths, all the astrologers and fortune-tellers had but one thing to tell the King and Queen: Upon her eighteenth birthday the young Princess would break the end of her ring finger in a horseback riding accident and fall down dead.

The King and Queen were sorrowful at first, but then realized that they had recourse. And so they banned all horses from the Kingdom and were, for the next eighteen years, quite often seen to ride oxen and elk. They were often the laughingstock of all the nearby Kingdoms, but the King and Queen bore it gladly and well. They even named their daughter Talia, after the name of the trader who had sold them her entire breeding-stock of elk for a handsome, retireable price. The oxen were strong and fast, and the elk were tall and handsome, and the King and Queen were proud of their mounts, and of the mounts of the rest of the Kingdom, who often made do with what they could get, which often amounted to large dogs for children just learning to ride, and llamas, camels, and the increasingly rare giant mountain goat.

The Princess, however, did not. She was often seen to offer any newcomer into the Kingdom as much gold as they wanted if they would only bring her a horse in disguise. She had only seen horses in picture-books, and was therefore very curious about them. Alas, since everyone in the Kingdom had been warned not to bring in any kind, color, or breed of horse on pain of death or banishment, whichever was better, her requests were often met with a mumbled "I'm sorry Princess."

For the first seventeen years of her life, she never saw a horse that was not a drawing in a book. Though she grew up to be strong, beautiful, wise, and noble just like her mother, she was simply desperate to see a horse. No one had ever told her that it had been foretold that one day she would meet her death on the back of one.

And then one day, coincidentally on her eighteenth birthday, when Talia was passing the King's stable, an animal that did not look at all like a horse leaned out of its stall and spoke to her. It was such an odd animal, Talia thought she had never seen its like before. Long, spindly legs, a little nub of one horn next to one ear, a fat body, and a neck that was entirely too long to ever belong to an ox or elk. "I hear you have been seeking a horse," it whispered confidentially.

"Says who?" asked Talia.

"Says everyone," replied the animal.

"What's it to you?" the Princess countered.

"I happen to be one-sixteenth horse," it proclaimed. "On my mother's side."

Talia raised an eyebrow. "Oh, really," she drawled in a good imitation of a northern goat-trader.

"Really," said the one-sixteenth horse.

"What is the rest of you?" asked Talia.

"Mostly alpaca," said the horse. "And a little moose."

"Oh," said Talia.

"So," said the alpaca-moose-horse. "Would you like to ride me?" It looked out the open door of the stable wistfully. "No one else will. They say I'm too odd."

Talia looked the not-quite-horse over carefully. It was true; the animal had too-long legs that ended in splayed hooves, that fat body with a spine that stuck out like a mountain range, and a head that looked as though it had been a child's crude construction with clay.

"Okay," she said.

So it was that Princess Talia came to ride, and so it was that in a not-so distant corner of the riding-field, in full view of her parents, the alpaca-moose horse reared at a snake in the grass, and Talia fell off and broke the very end of the ring-finger on her right hand. Of course she fell right down, dead in the long grass of the field. At the terrible sight, and at the terrible knowledge that he himself had been the one to cause Talia's death and was therefore destined for death himself, the poor horse fled the field, jumping this way and that over hedges and fences, not stopping until he was three Kingdoms over.

Talia's grief-stricken parents, after much grieving and consulting with various seers, left their dear dead daughter in sitting repose upon a throne that had been hewn half out of the Queen's throne and half out of the King's throne, under a beautifully decorated canopy that the King himself had embroidered and the Queen had dyed with her tears. The Palace itself was in the middle of a dense wood, and very hard to get to if one did not know the way, so they only bricked up the doors of the lowest level and left forever the home which had brought them such pain and suffering, so that they might have other children in places far from the ill-fated one, and that those children might live without the shadow of their dear dead older sister hanging over them. They left forever, and for some time the Palace-mausoleum sat empty and abandoned, save for its one dead occupant whose body steadfastly refused to decay. Bougainvillea grew over the walls, along with the wild briar rose, and ivy grew on the more shadowed walls. The trees slowly crept closer, and everyone who had ever been to that place died.

Mice made their homes in various corners of the Palace, and sometimes a fox entered and wrought havoc upon the mice, but aside from them, but they were not human, and no one ever carried tales of the abandoned palace in the woods.

The next time someone entered the great hall on their own two feet was long after the original King and Queen had died long ago, as had their children, and the Kingdom had been left to their youngest child, another daughter who was soon fated to embark on an epic quest to rescue her six older brothers from an evil ogre. But that was another story, far away and a little later, and their older sister remained in her grand mausoleum. So it came to pass that the falcon of a local King who was out hunting in those parts--which had recently been annexed by his Kingdom--flew into a window of the Palace. When the bird didn't return when called back, the King sent one of his lower servants to knock at the house, thinking that such a grand house could not simply have been abandoned. Of course no one answered, so in good time the King sent that same servant to search for a fruit-picker's ladder, so that he might climb in and search the house for any abandoned treasure, and possibly get his bird while he was at it.

He climbed the distance up and went in, and searched for a long while, stopping every so often to exclaim at the beauty of the young woman who appeared in so many portraits. Finally he came to the room in which Talia sat, eyes closed as if asleep.

The King called to Talia, thinking her a strange fairy asleep, but since nothing he did could wake her, and since he thought her so beautiful, and since he was a King, he dragged her over to a nearby couch and had his way with her. The details shall be spared here, but suffice it to say that he was not careful with his seed, and since Talia unknowingly had a set of seven nieces and nephews and seven younger sisters and brothers, it only took the third time of his taking her to impregnate poor Talia.

Having sated his lust in the comatose girl, the King left her lying there in the dust and stale mouse-droppings, and returned to his own Kingdom. For a long, long time he entirely forgot the affair. Nine months later, Talia gave birth to twins, both of whom were pretty as pearls. One, in its search for a nipple to suck for food, nosed its way up Talia's side, and it at once mistook the very finger that had been broken for a nipple and began sucking. In its hunger it sucked so hard that the broken bone straightened itself, and Talia was roused as though she had only been sleeping.

When she saw the babes at her side she was rightfully astonished at its presence, for she did not feel the pain of her nine months agone encounter with the King, and somehow she also did not feel the aftereffects of childbirth. She could not understand what had happened, such as the whereabouts of her parents and why the palace was abandoned and how she was suddenly inside, but since she found food aplenty in the overgrown gardens outside and plenty of dried foodstuffs in the cellars below the palace, she was content to live there and try to raise her child, and perhaps when the children ere grown a little she would send for help. But for now she was filled with a sleepy contentment, and as far as the babes were concerned that was all that mattered. She named the babes Star and Tide, and hoped that one day both boys would each grow enough to make his own way in the wide world outside.

But soon a hard winter's frost wiped out most of the wild gardens outside her door, and Talia was forced to abandon her home and bring her children in search of shelter. It wasn't long before they came to the winter home of the King and Queen of the land, and it also wasn't long before the King realized who Talia was. The Queen was out hunting, and he immediately realized what he needed to do.

Adultery was punishable by death in that kingdom, so immediately the King ordered the "crazy beggar woman" and her childred put to death by flame. First Talia was made to strip for the King, who howled in lust at every piece of clothing that Talia pulled off at crossbow-point. But it was her complaining and beratings of the King that saved her life, for as slowly as she pulled off each item of clothing, the Queen had time to return from her hunt, see the commotion, and ask the cause.

Now, before I go any further I should probably explain the situation in the King's own home. The King, and his Queen who was more of a King than she was a Queen, had an understanding that they were joint rulers, and that she was in no way subservient to him nor would she do "womanly" things like embroidery, cleaning, and cooking, of even lie with him. He was free to have his run with any woman that would have him, but she would not and never would be one of them. They did not even sleep in the same bed nor share the same rooms. He had grudgingly agreed to these standards put forth by a woman who was more like a man than she was a woman, and they had ruled in semi-peace for several years.

When she first saw the woman, the Queen--whose name was Lynn--knew instinctively what had happened. She had always known that her co-ruler had itchy fingers, and when he explained how he had originally found Talia, the Queen's blood boiled as she figured out what had happened. He said that the childred must have wandered in from he knew not where, but one look at the similarities between the younglings' features and the King's left no doubt in Queen Lynn's mind.

She tapped the King on the shoulder, and when he turned she smashed him in the face with the pommel of her sword. When he staggered back, holding his smashed cheek, she yelled for the guards holding the woman and children to stop.

They stepped back and released the flame-haired woman and watched as the Queen hamstrung the King with one swift stroke of her sword, and kicked him onto the edges of the fire. When she turned to Talia, the Princess was clutching her children to her chest and weeping, imagining sure death for "seducing" the King.

The Queen, intending nothing of the sort, ran her hand through her short brown hair and surveyed the girl in front of her. What was she to do with her? She cleaned her sword on the still-twitching leg of the King--the only part of him not aflame--and sheathed it.

Talia didn't flinch when Lynn approached her with her hands open and down at her sides, but then again the King had probably approached her the same way. She held Star and Tide closer, and braced herself for the gripping hands that would surely pitch her onto the bonfire.

Instead, gentle, calloused hands rested themselves on Talia's shoulders.

Talia looked up into the green eyes of the Queen, who smiled very gently, and said in a husky voice, "Don't worry. I know what he has done, and I do not condone it." Her eyes hardened into green steel, then softened. "You are safe here."