The Very Little Princess: Zoey's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

place. She knew she did. There had never been a more perfect throne room!
    “Finally,” the little doll said, as though Zoey had been extremely slow getting there, instead of walking right to it the way she had. “Now … you can put me on my throne.”

    It didn’t take Zoey long to pick out the throne, either. At the base of the trunk was a large mossy rock. The top of the rock was indented, forming a velvety seat. At least it formed a seat for a very small doll.
    Zoey set Princess Regina down carefully on the rock. Clearly she had guessed right, because the doll settled right in and pointed a royal finger. “Flowers,” she commanded. “Go gather flowers.”
    Relieved to have gotten the first part right, Zoey curtsied obediently.
    “Yes, Your Majesty,” she said, and she went off in search of flowers.

Chapter 6
Princess and Servant
    You may be wondering right about now why Zoey is so willing to obey a doll, especially one who stands only three and one-quarter inches tall. Surely not because she is afraid of such a tiny thing. Not because she has no mind of her own, either.
    There is a reason, to be sure, and it comes out of something I haven’t yet told you about Zoey.
    Actually, there are many things I haven’t told you about Zoey, about her mother … abouteverybody in this story. Lives are complicated things, you see, and the storyteller’s task, as much as any other, is to make them appear simple and easy to understand. In order to do that, I choose. I choose what to tell you, when to tell it, and what to leave out. It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.
    For instance, I could have told you that Zoey’s favorite color isn’t really pink, it’s purple. She used to like pink when she was a little girl, but now she prefers purple. And her mother has never noticed that she has grown beyond pink to purple. That’s just the way her mother is. She loves every inch of Zoey, but her mind is very … well, perhaps the best word is
full
. Her mind is so full, in fact, that she often doesn’t notice things like Zoey’s growing from pink to purple.
    But Zoey’s favorite color isn’t part of thisstory. Not really. So let’s talk about something that is.
    For as long as Zoey can remember, she and her mother have had a favorite game. They call it Princess and Servant. One pretends to be a princess and orders the other about. For instance, the princess says, “Go find me a sip of nectar so sweet it will curl my toes.” And the servant comes back with a thimble full of the brine from the jar of sweet pickles in the refrigerator. Then they turn the game around, and the other one is the princess for a time, asking, perhaps, for a puff of wind.
    As you can guess, Zoey’s mother learned the game from Princess Regina. What she didn’t learn from Regina, though, was changing the roles about. The doll, as I’ll bet you can also guess,
never
in her long existence has played the servant.
    Anyway, Zoey has always loved playing Princess and Servant with her mother. So when Regina announced that she was a princess and that Zoey was her servant, Zoey fell in with the idea happily. Perhaps the time will come when Zoey will decide that she has plans for her life beyond being a servant to a tiny doll. But that isn’t going to happen just yet.
    So let’s look at what
is
going to happen.
    The last time we saw Princess Regina, she was sitting high on her mossy throne. And that’s where we’ll find her still, on her throne, gazing about.
    Ah
, she is thinking,
how fine it is to be awake and a princess!
    How fine it was, also, to have her servant off gathering flowers for her. She
loved
flowers! They grew, she was certain, especially for her.
    She also loved sitting on her throne,watching the sunbeams play hide-and-seek among the dancing leaves.
    But best of all, she loved being in charge once more. Nothing could be better than being a princess and awake and in charge!
    Regina smoothed her gauzy