A Fairy Tale Of Sorts

The prince had travelled for a very long time. He was tired from walking for over a year without company. His horse had been stolen many months ago while he was asleep in a forest, and with the horse he had also lost his change of clothing, most of his food and money, and the greater part of his cheerful disposition. To be quite honest, the prince was now, so near to his goal, more a grumpy, dirty and unshaven man than the handsome, cheerful and clean prince he used to be. He had endured many hardships on his journey and every single wrong turn and night's sleep on the bare soil without dinner had taken something out of him.
His tired eyes looked up at the turret of the castle which he could just about make out through the vast rose bushes covering the palace. He sighed a big sigh, pulled up his trousers (he had long ago sold his belt for food and with all the weight he'd lost the trousers barely fit) and took his dagger out of his right boot. Realising he couldn't hold up his trousers and cut at the rose bushes at the same time, he knotted his trousers as tightly around his waist as he could and walked around the rose bushes, trying to find the part of the wall of roses that was closest to where he guessed the gates of the palace were.
As he started cutting the rose bushes, an old woman walked up, sat down on the ground and started humming. After a few minutes, in which the prince had cut halfway through a branch and had managed to get his arms covered in cuts and blood, the old woman spoke to him. 'Young man,' she said, 'what do you think you are doing?'
The prince, glad to have an excuse to stop torturing himself for the sake of a woman he had never seen, sat down next to the old lady and told her all about the prophecy at his birth and how he had set out on his twenty-first birthday to find the woman he was destined to marry. He told her about the way the rosebushes were supposed to magically open for him to form a path to his beloved, how the castle's inhabitants would be frozen into whatever they were doing when time froze, and how his beloved, having been asleep for a hundred years, would be awakened by the kiss of her true love. He also told her about his journey, and as he had had no one to talk to for a long time and was feeling quite sorry for himself, when he was done talking, he burst out crying.
The old woman said nothing, but embraced the young prince and let him cry until he felt a bit more like himself again. He apologised to the lady and was about to start cutting again, when the old lady stopped him and asked: 'Why don't you come to my house and have a bath and some food before you wake up the princess?' The prince, who was really very tired and hungry, didn't need much convincing and he went with the old lady to her house, which was on the other side of the castle, just outside the rose wall.
The old lady drew the prince a bath and gave him some new, clean clothes. As he was bathing she prepared him a nice dinner, and the prince accidentally cut himself shaving when he smelled the exquisite aromas. When the prince came into the kitchen after his bath and shave, he was almost unrecognisable. After he had his dinner and had sat by the fire for a little while, the prince started to feel like he was his old self again. With his clean clothes, full stomach and content smile he looked and felt much more like a prince than he had when he had first gotten to the palace.
After he'd had a short nap in the easy chair in front of the fire, he told the old woman he was going back to the rose bush. The old woman wished him good luck, but asked; 'could you please do me one favour before you go? I need some more fire wood, but I am too weak to lift the axe.' The prince, who was raised to be kind to older people and pay back kindness, but was also just a nice guy, had no problems doing this for the old woman and he went into her back garden.
As he was chopping the wood for the old woman, he looked up mid-chop and saw the most beautiful woman walking towards him. She came from the forest behind the castle and was carrying a basket filled with food. The woman smiled at the prince and as she came closer, he saw she was the same age as he was, and also that she was obviously related to the old lady. When she was right in front of him she greeted him and asked: ' Where is my great-grandmother?' The prince, almost unable to talk, forgot all about his destiny and the princess sleeping in the turret, and walked into the house with her. All evening the old woman watched the young woman and the prince talking and falling more in love with each word they spoke and each look they exchanged.

On their wedding day, the old lady thought back to the day, long ago, when she had fled her father's palace to be with the man she loved. She smiled as she realised that the prince's destiny had finally been fulfilled.