The princess was acting weird. Ever since their odd encounter in the garden, she had been avoiding eye contact. It was strange – before the incident, the princess had occasionally descended into a strange sort of quiet brooding, but she had been lively in between these episodes. Alice had just attributed it to her worrying about the itch chasing her and mourning her lost family. But now she seemed to be despondent all the time, and awkward whenever she was forced to talk to Alice. It was concerning.

Alice tried to help, at first by leaving her in relative peace, letting her take less than her share of chores. But this didn’t help, if anything, the princess acted even more deflated, watching Alice when she thought she wasn’t paying attention and sighing. So Alice returned to her original strategy: try and make things as similar to the story as possible by forcing the princess to act as a co-owner of the cottage. When she comes to the cottage in the novel, the princess is stuck alone and scared with only the house to guide her, and in the process, she learns how to care for herself and gains important confidence and self-assuredness in the process. Of course, as a royal and an inherently strong-willed person, the main character had been deeply confident before, but the damage the witch did to that confidence by casting her out of her family was severe. Her learning how to exist alone and be self-sufficient was key to the plot, and to the fate of the kingdom.

So, seeing that coddling her was doing nothing to shake the princess out of her funk, Alice decided to double down. She had told the princess that this was her home, and she would prove it to her by training her to care for the home as though it truly was hers. That was how Alice sought to make amends for arriving first, and for choosing to stay, a choice that she still felt guilty about.

Princess Aurum was a fast learner, and soon the standard household tasks and even gardening took less than a full day. As Alice was struggling to think of a useful task to add to their daily schedule, the cottage saved her once again. Looking for the rags she stored for cleaning, she found a basket of yarn and crocheting supplies in the closet that she had never seen before. She also found an axe outside by the shed, and a place for chopping wood. They did need more firewood for cooking, and though it was a long time until winter, it might be useful to make some additional blankets and clothes. If they were good enough at it, they might even be able to use it to trade in the village for supplies.

Gathering the crocheting basket, Alice marched into the common space, finding the princess sitting dejectedly at the table with a mug of tea she must have made herself. Alice felt a flash of pride at the realization – it was one thing for the princess to do the tasks Alice had assigned her, and quite another for her to prepare her own fire for hot water just to have a cup of tea. Pushing the feeling aside, she plopped the yarn on the table, startling the royal from her reverie.

“We need to learn how to do this,” Alice announced. “Let’s start with blankets.”

The princess looked at her without comprehension.

“It’s time we started making progress crocheting. We can sell the blankets in town.”

Leaving the still-stunned princess with the yarn, Alice practically ran to the bookshelf and gathered up a few books on crochet stitches.

“Wait. I don’t know how –” the princess was cut off by one of the books dropping on the table in front of her.

“Let’s get started. Then we need to gather and chop more wood. We don’t have a lot of time to get everything done today.”

This earned her a bemused look and a sigh of resignation.

Alice sat down determinedly next to the princess, trying to ignore how their proximity to one another made her stomach swoop slightly at the memory of the mud-on-the-nose incident. Shaking off the feeling, she flipped open the booklet on basic stitches and how to start a new project. As she started to follow the instructions, picking out a pale yellow yarn whose color she found somehow soothing, she gave the project all of her focus.

After a half hour or so, it became clear that Alice was not talented at crocheting. Every time she tried to gather the yarn for a new loop, she wound up tangling the yarn, and her stitches were uneven in size. As she got tenser and tenser, she started getting a hand cramp, pain shooting up through her wrist. She remembered her burgeoning carpal tunnel syndrome from her past life of office work at a computer screen and realized she had made a serious mistake.

For her part, the princess was making steady progress on her maroon blanket and was barely containing her amusement at Alice’s struggles. Every time Alice mumbled a quiet curse to herself, she heard an odd sort of huff from next to her which she realized after a while was the royal pain-in-the-butt’s muffled laughter.

“What even are you saying?” the princess finally asked after another curse from Alice. Alice looked at her in confusion – why was she asking about her mumbled swearing? But then she realized, with a sense of panic, that her curse words were likely not the same as those in this kingdom. Crap, shoot, darn, jeez, m-----f----- – none of these would make sense as exclamations of frustration to the princess. Rubbing her wrist absently, Alice struggled to think of an explanation, but came up only with “Ummm.”

The princess laughed outright. Alice glared, annoyed by the mocking and by the perfectly sized stitching on the princess’s project, still holding her wrist.

“You really are so bad at this. I never thought I’d beat you at something.” The princess kept laughing, far more than the situation warranted, in Alice’s opinion at least. Alice huffed and went back to struggling, deciding that pleading the fifth was the best way out of this situation.

“Are you alright?”

Alice finally snapped. “Yes, I’m fine, just awful at this clearly!”

“No, I mean, is your hand okay?”

Alice looked up to see the princess watching her in concern.

“You keep wincing. Does this hurt? Why does it hurt you?”

“Carpal tunnel,” Alice answered finally, a bit dejected. “It’s a kind of injury from using your hands in ways like this too much.”

“What did you use to do? Obviously not crocheting.” The princess seemed torn between worry and lingering amusement.

“I worked on a – I wrote a lot. For a long time.” Alice tried to make it clear by her tone that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but the princess seemed to have no intention of letting it go.

“Why? What did you write? Is it a book here?”

“I was a… a scribe. It was a job.”

This earned her a look of well-earned disbelief. Alice knew she seemed like a completely isolated person; who could imagine her out in society with her strange clothes and manners and ignorance?

“I worked from home?” she almost asked. “A long time ago. I would work remotely – I would write things, and then send them to my clients. Letters and… manuals and book transcriptions.”

The princess was still confused. “I’ve never heard of a job like that. Who would want handwritten copies when there are the new printing presses?”

Fair question. “Uhhh. It was a long time ago.” In a different world, actually…

“Huh. Well, you shouldn’t do this anymore, then, if you are injured. Let me do this.”

Alice was honestly thrilled, suddenly remembering her original goal had been to distract and cheer up the princess. She looked much more lively now, and she had actually volunteered to do a task. They still needed some firewood, but Alice could try and do that herself now that the princess was excited about a new project and feeling a bit better.

“Thank you! I will get some wood so we can start on dinner.  Just make sure to pick a proper pattern for the blanket from the booklets. We want it to look pretty!”

The princess chuckled, still in a good mood. “Yes, Your Majesty.” Alice choked on air, muttered something unintelligible, and ran out.

It turned out, though, that chopping wood was not any easier for Alice than crocheting had been. She managed to avoid chopping off a hand or hacking into her foot or leg, but only barely. The split logs took forever to accumulate. Partway through the pile she had set as a goal, sweating profusely, Alice took a bad swing and felt a sudden horrible pain in her back.

“M-----f-----” she got out, crumpling to the ground. Of course, of course she would throw out her back trying to do a simple task like this. Now she wouldn’t be able to do her part around the cottage anymore. Her back was painful, but mostly the whole thing was humiliating, and she sat there for a long time, unwilling to go back inside and face more mocking from the princess. She must have taken too long because eventually, the princess came out looking for her.

“Ah. Looks like this went well.” The royal’s voice was as dry as autumn leaves.

Alice simply groaned from the ground, glaring at nothing in particular. It looked like she wouldn’t need to invent new chores for the princess anymore.