THE WITCH'S APPRENTICE AND THE BAKER'S SON- a
fairy tale
Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there was a King
whose only son was a young Prince.
Because the Prince was his only son and heir, the King loved him dearly
and doted on him constantly. But the as Prince got older, he grew tired of
being pampered by his father, so he ran away from the palace to explore the
world for himself and live like a normal person. He found a bakery, and
convinced the Baker (who was himself childless) to allow him to work there and
pretend to be the baker's son. Thus the Prince learned how to bake bread.
Unfortunately for him, he was a dreadful baker and often inattentive to his
tasks. This is the story of how his inattentiveness affected the lives of
others, and his own.
In the same kingdom there were two children, a girl Amy
and her younger brother Matt, who were everything in the world to each other.
But Matt was a naughty boy and always getting into trouble, and their parents
told Amy that she had to watch over him constantly, and she often had to scold him
for disobeying her. One day the two children came to the bakery to shop for
bread. Amy told Matt to behave himself, but he smelled something sweet and
wandered off. He found some dough for raisin bread in a large mixing bowl, and
he climbed in to have a good lick; but the dough was so sticky, that he got
stuck in the bowl! Just then the Baker's Son (who was the Prince in disguise)
took the mixing bowl and emptied the dough into the bread-making machine. And
because he was so inattentive to what he was doing, he didn't notice that he
had dumped Matt into the machine as well. When the machine went on, poor Matt
was mixed up with the dough! Battered and bruised and banged about, shaped into
a loaf and then baked in an oven, poor Matt barely made it out alive. When the
Baker's Son took the bread out of the oven, he noticed that one particular loaf
was wiggling. When he opened it up, he found a creature of indescribable appearance.
It was Matt, but he had lost all his teeth, and all his hair, and his skin was
scorched from the oven, and he lost his power of speech, and he couldn't stand
up and had to walk on all fours. The Baker's Son didn't know what Matt was.
Then Matt lay on his back in exhaustion, and curled up his hands and legs like
paws, and had such a pitiful look in his eye that the Baker's Son was convinced
he must be an animal, so he adopted him as a pet and named him "Dog."
Meanwhile poor Amy didn't know what had happened to her
brother Matt, and asked the Baker about it, who knew nothing. So Amy went home,
assuming that her brother had died or run away. She blamed herself for her own
negligence, for not watching Matt carefully enough. And she blamed herself for
a long time. Her parents were so sad that Matt had disappeared and grieved for
him so much that they both died, leaving Amy alone in the world for the first
time. Amy knew she would have to find work for herself, so she decided to go to
the local witch and offer to become her apprentice. The Witch had a shop in the
centre of town, and she was always helping people read their fortunes, cast
spells, mix potions, find lost treasures, and other important jobs. The Witch was
very happy to have Amy as her apprentice, so she taught her how to gaze into a
crystal ball, and how to write incantations, and how to pick herbs by
moonlight, and how to make magic wands, and other important things.
The years went by, Amy remained the Witch's Apprentice,
and Matt lived as the Baker's Son's pet Dog. No one at the bakery liked the look
of Dog, and Dog didn't like any of them; his one and only friend was his master
the Baker's Son. And, truth be told, the Baker's Son remained a dreadful baker.
And it was Dog who secretly kept his master out of trouble. During the day, the
Baker's Son would make batter and dough all wrong--he would add talcum powder
instead of baking powder, or quinine instead of quince--and in the evening,
when everyone was asleep, Dog would stand on his hind legs and become Matt
again and mix everything again correctly so that the Baker's Son never got into
trouble. And Matt's baking was so good that the bakery became popular and
famous. So Matt was Dog by day, boy by night, but never spoke a word to his
beloved master. And his beloved master adored Dog, and confided everything to
him. So Dog knew from the very beginning that the Baker's Son was really the
Prince; but he never told anybody.
All this time, the King had been searching the entire
kingdom for his son, the Prince, who had run away all those years ago. Finally,
one day, he went to the Witch and asked her to use her magic to find the
Prince. The Witch and her apprentice, Amy, looked into their crystal ball and saw
that the Prince was hiding in disguise as the Baker's Son, at the very bakery
where Amy's brother had disappeared. But they didn't tell the King that. They
needed to find a way for the Prince to reveal himself. So Amy had a brilliant
idea. She would mix a love potion to give to the Baker's Son; he would fall in
love with Amy, and beg her to marry him; and she would refuse to marry him
until she revealed his true identity to his father, the King.
But this otherwise brilliant plan went wrong. Amy came to
the bakery, introduced herself to the Baker's Son, and shared a drink with him.
She slipped the love potion into his drink; but the Baker's Son's faithful Dog
saw what was going on and switched the drinks, so that Amy drank the potion
herself. She fell madly in love with the Baker's Son; and the Baker's Son, who
had not drunk any of the potion, also found himself falling in love with Amy. And
what was more, his faithful Dog began to fawn on Amy and sit by her side. This
astounded everyone, since she was the only person besides the Baker's Son that
Dog had ever shown any affection for. Dog, of course, was Amy's brother Matt;
but he did not reveal his identity to her, because he blamed himself for his
own predicament, because he disobeyed her all those years ago when he wandered
off from her when he should have known better,
In due course, the Baker's Son asked Amy to marry him.
And she said yes. But on the wedding day, he still had not revealed his true
identity, nor had Amy asked him to do so. The Witch appeared at the wedding and
reminded Amy that her job had not been to marry the Baker's Son, but to make
their client happy by restoring the Prince to his father the King. But Amy
protested that she was in love with the Baker's Son now, and had no interest in
revealing the truth about him. Ah, said the Witch, did Amy know the whole
truth? Then the Witch cast a magic vision into the past, and Amy witnessed how
it was none other than the Baker's Son who dumped poor Matt into the bread
machine all those years ago! But in her vision, Amy did not see what had
happened next, so she believed that Matt had been killed.
Now at last Amy thought she knew what happened to her
little brother. For years she had blamed herself for her brother's
disappearance, because she was negligent. Now she learned that another person
had been at fault, another person had been negligent too—and it was the man she
loved! She was torn between two loves: her love for the Baker's Son, whom she
wanted to marry, and her love for her cruelly slain brother, whom she wanted to
avenge. In the choice between brother and fiancé, she chose her brother. Her
love for her fiancé was only the result of a love potion, she thought to
herself; but her brother had been everything in the world to her. So Amy mixed
together a deadly poison and planned to kill the Baker's Son.
Just before the wedding, she asked the Baker's Son to
share a drink with her to toast their future together. She placed the poison in
his goblet, and he raised it to his mouth. But just as he was about to drink,
faithful Dog leapt into the air and dashed the goblet from his hands, landed on
his two feet, and spoke his first words in many years. He tearfully addressed
his sister, and revealed himself as her long lost brother. Stunned and
confused, Amy was reunited with Matt, and through tears they forgave themselves
at long last for the accident that happened years ago.
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