The great castle where dwelled the Royal Family of the Land of Fritillary was the finest castle around. Top notch. Grade A. It was by far the largest known, and the most aesthetically pleasing. It was situated on a lush hilltop near the coast of the ocean with nearby a preponderance of waterfalls and many a cave, inlet, and hollow that nature photographers would have salivated over if cameras had been invented at this point in Fritillary’s history. The castle itself was beautiful beyond description, but I’ll give it a try anyway! Wherever there was a place that would benefit from a nice pillar or a bit of carving, there was a nice pillar or a bit of carving. Wherever there was fabric (curtains, banners, upholstery, etc.) it was of the finest possible quality. Wherever there were doors, they were made of the best wood available, and their hinges never squeaked. The furniture was the grandest, the floors and ceilings tiled the most intricately, the ironwork the most curved and twisted, the nooks and crannies the most cozy, the gargoyles the most fierce, and the cherubs the most sweetly angelic.

But--

Come with me now, dear reader, down a dark, hidden hallway, through a dark hidden doorway, to a dark hidden staircase. Let us pause, summon our courage you and I, and walk down, down, down.

To the dungeon!

Let us walk down into its depths, where many a poor soul has disappeared, never to reappear again. The stone steps extend for an eternity and the torches are few, far between, and rarely lit. Once we have stumbled down the dark and uneven steps and our feet have found level ground again we find ourselves in a high-ceilinged main chamber festooned with all manner of unpleasant-looking gizmos and machines whose purpose is plainly to inflict pain on the unhappy lodgers of the dungeon. Only two of the ten visible devices are in use at the time our story reaches this dreadful chamber, which says something for the head jailer and his boss the King, I suppose. Not much, but something.

Four dark passages led off the main chamber, one north, one south, one west, and one (you guessed it!) east. Between the passages the main chamber was lined with barred cells.

The head jailer, Jim, was shuffling through some papers at his desk by the stairs, mumbling irately about the bother of paperwork and opining that they should get some dame down here to do the filing, thus freeing him up for some Man Work. But no, he’d put in a request to his boss for a secretary and he’d turned Jim down flat, saying the dungeon was no place for a woman, they being so delicate and prone to fits and things of that nature. Plus they just get married and pregnant and quit and you have to hire another one and start the whole darn process all over again. Women! Bah! Yes, Jim supposed it really was best if they stayed home and cooked and had babies and didn't get uppity ideas about employment and financial independence. So, when his boss had refused his request for a secretary, he had been annoyed but unsurprised.

Glancing up from some new admittance forms at the scene of blood and groaning before him he had to concede that there might be some logic to their refusal. Chicks didn’t study the Secretarial Arts with this sort of workplace in mind. He allowed himself a moment of fun and spun around a few times in his swivel chair, then looked back down at his work, but the final sheet on the stack of long-postponed drudgery would have to wait, because just then something odd happened.

He cocked his head to one side, for he had heard something strange. Footsteps coming down the stairs. Of course, footsteps are not, in general, strange; but these ones were. They sounded... female. Those feet were wearing not boots but some shoes that sounded as though they didn’t even have hard soles. Slippers? And was that the swish of fabric against the wall? A gown?

Closer and closer the newcomer came, and, after a few moments, voices could be heard. Two women? The visitors rounded the bend, and Jim found himself staring straight at the Queen! Queen Lillian (since last we saw Lillian, she has gotten married to Conroy and experienced the death of her father- and mother-in-law, thus becoming the Queen). Despite the general spirit of shock that swept around the room like a cyclone, Jim and everyone else had the presence of mind to fall into the customary groveling bow. That is, everyone who wasn’t affixed to a device that prevented it.

Oblivious of her prostrate subjects below, she was talking energetically to her maid, Eugenia, who was as always trailing a few steps behind the Queen. Jim heard the last bit of what she was saying: “--never even knew there was a dungeon in the palace! Imagine my surprise! But I simply had to come down here and see it for myself, because I think it would be just the perfect place!” Here she took another step and continued as her eyes scanned the room, seeing but not seeing. “Deep underground, no windows, quite sizeable. All we’d need is a good interior decorator --”

And there her voice trailed off. Her gaze had, in the process of scanning the room, fallen on a prisoner chained to the wall. A full minute of incoherent stuttering and stammering ensured, then she gasped, “Who is in charge here?”

“Your majesty, I am,” Jim said, still bowing.

She glanced at him and said distractedly, “Oh, do stand up.” Then her eyes drifted back to the room and she stared, waking from a lovely dream of a charmed life married to her handsome king to the nightmare of what went on behind the scenes of her fairytale castle she called home. “Does the King know about this place?” she whispered. It was a silly question, but she was pretty shocked and still inclined to believe the very best of her husband.

Before Jim could answer in the affirmative, Lillian continued, “No, he couldn’t possibly,” and of course Jim wasn’t about to contradict the Queen.

But the truth was that Conroy knew very well about the dungeon; as his father and his advisors had taught him, the dungeon was a key component in their formula for running a manageable kingdom. Scoop up just enough citizens for committing petty crimes or speaking ill of the King and imprison them for unreasonable amounts of time (or never release them at all) and you can bet your bottom dollar that gossip will spread like wildfire that you are not a ruler to cross. Conroy’s kingly ancestors had worked the process out to a science after centuries of trial and error. Take too many commoners at a time and you run the risk of the populace banding together and having riots, and take too few and no one really notices, but take just the right amount and the dungeon becomes a mysterious, fearful place whispered about before the fireplace on cold nights -- a place that is possibly a rumor, maybe true, but certainly terrifying. A ghost story, a tale told to children to keep them from grabbing fruit and turkey jerky off the stands at the market. Yes, the key to keeping a populace under control was just the right amount of fear that they might be carted off for some minor offence and locked away forever. Once every few years, when his spies said that talk of the dungeon was dying down, the King would have a prisoner released, one who’d been driven crazy and thus couldn’t give too many specifics, and rumors would begin to fly anew.

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When Lillian herself had been a lowly peasant on the asparagus farm, she had never heard the gossip since she tended to block out all things unpleasant in her need to construct a happy fiction around herself. But, her parents had talked fairly often about a cousin’s friend’s uncle who had disappeared shortly after refusing to pay his taxes.

However, now that Lillian was standing in the very dungeon itself not even she could any longer pretend it didn’t exist.

Shakily, she descended the rest of the stairs. Shakily, she took one deep breath. Two deep breaths. Three. She was, as you’ll have noticed, not that bright, but she was remarkably kind and good, and could be quite brave when confronted with something that went against her sense of what was right. “What is all this?” she squeaked.

“This is the dungeon, Your Majesty,” Jim waved his arm about vaguely, confusedly, since to him it seemed that the answer was so obvious that the question was utterly unnecessary. What had she expected when she’d come down here? Dames, who could figure them out? “These are the prisoners,” he added helpfully, pointing around to a few men, most of them looking just as confused as he was by their fancy visitor, but nodding or waving a hand as Jim pointed them out.

“What are their crimes?” she asked. “Surely they must be murderers, or...” her sheltered existence failed her here and she could think of no other really horrible crimes, the kinds that might come close to justifying the dungeon. Again she asked, “What are their crimes?”

“Oh, this and that...” Jim responded with a shrug, while at the same time feeling he should have a better answer available for the boss’s wife. Yet another reason he should be more up on the paperwork.

She looked at him, appalled, then transferred her gaze to the scrawny fellow hanging by his wrists from the wall. “Why are you here?” she asked him.

He looked downright scared to be addressed personally by the Queen, but after a glance at Jim (who nodded that he should respond) he said, “I stole a loaf of bread.”

She gasped.

“For my children.” Really he had no children, but he did have the good sense to milk this situation for all it was worth.

Her hand flew to her mouth and she staggered back a step.

“Who have no mother.” Of course they had no mother. They didn’t exist.

A cry of horror from the Queen. “The poor darlings! And their father imprisoned for trying to feed them! How long have they been alone? How long have you been down here?”

“Six months. Little Gretel’s birthday was two weeks ago,” he added piteously.

Lillian sobbed a bit, and looked around the chamber again through tear-filled eyes. She almost asked the prisoner on the rack what his crime had been, but bit her question back before it left her mouth, sure she couldn’t bear another story as painful as the last. But FYI, the prisoner on the rack actually was a murderer. If she’d known that she might not have done what she did next, but who knows?

“This is ghastly. Ghastly!” She paused, and rifled through her brain for some stuff she’d learned from her Royalty tutor during her betrothal period. She’d only been married three months, so the info was all still fresh enough in her head for her to say with some authority, “By my authority as the Queen of the Land of Fritillary, I pronounce all these men free! To be released this very day!”

You could have heard a pin drop.

Especially one of the big creepy pins they used down there in the dungeon.

“Can she do that?” asked the murderer on the rack, whose thoughts flew to the man who’d turned him in, and the revenge he might at last be able to dole out. Sweet, sweet ice cold revenge. Like strawberry sorbet.

“Yeah, can she?” asked the guy chained to the wall, whose thoughts flew to his kids, who were, as previously discussed, not real. But gosh darn it, they could be some day if he was released! If he could just get out of there he’d make some real changes in his life! Renounce his lazy ways, find himself a nice girl (one who’d make his mama proud for a change!)! He’d marry that nice girl and they’d have some nice babies who he’d provide with the best of everything! Little Gretel’s lavish dowry would land her a nice young man and then he (the prisoner) would have a brood of nice grandkids who he’d bounce on his knee on summer afternoons, and regale them with endearingly exaggerated tales of his ruffian past and subsequent reformation due to the kindness of the Queen herself! His dear wife would stand arm in arm with Gretel and they’d gaze with fond smiles at him as, in the background, his son-in-law would chop wood for the fire that would cook their nutritious and substantial dinner that he had provided them all. Ah, bliss.

“Yeah, can she do that?” asked a guard, whose thoughts flew to his job security.

All eyes were on Jim, whose own eyes darted around nervously. What the heck was going on here? Release all the prisoners? Was this some sort of sick stealth on-the-job training thing to test his handling of the situation? Covertly, he glanced up the stairs to see whether there as someone in the shadows holding a scroll, checking boxes and marking down his every word.

But before he could speak, Lillian said imperiously, “Why are you asking him? I am the Queen. Does his word carry more weight in this land, or does mine?”

All present had the sense to recognize this question as rhetorical.

“But – but --” Jim said into the silence, quaking in his blood-stained boots. If there was a way to smoothly navigate this rocky workplace situation then he did not have the appropriate skillset. “But if we could perhaps, just-- ask your husband?”

The Women’s Rights movement had not taken a firm hold in the Land of Fritillary at this point in its history, since anyone who tried to start up such unnatural nonsense was promptly burned as a witch; but with the jailer’s last sentence the cause of feminism finally gained a recruit too powerful to be silenced in such a manner.