Once upon a time, in a world a mirror’s thick­ness away, there lived a lit­tle girl by the name of Abi­gail Hydrangea. She was tall and pretty and wore flow­ers in her pure white hair; so pretty was she that all the boys and girls in the land spoke of her beauty. How­ever, inside her heart, she was trou­bled. It was not long after her twelfth birth­day that her father, Duke Hydrangea, suc­cumbed to an unknown dis­ease. Abi­gail was very, very sad for many days, and she hid away so well that it took a week before any­body found her.

Her courtiers found her even­tu­ally, how­ever, and made clear to her what must be done. For Abi­gail, whose mother had died in child­birth and her father recently hav­ing passed away, was now a Duchess and ruler of her lands.

Though her father was a kind and just man, he had not ruled well. The Hydrangea lands stretched far and wide, but the East and the West of those lands were as dif­fer­ent as coun­tries could be. The East, where pink Hydrangeas bloomed, was pros­per­ous farm­land in which crops grew well and com­mu­ni­ties blos­somed under suc­cess­ful trade. The West on the other hand was a wild, dark, moun­tain­ous place where the Hydrangea flow­ers grew blue and pur­ple. The peo­ple there envied the bounty of the east­ern lands, and civil war loomed.

One of Abigail’s first duties as the new Duchess was to travel the length and breadth of the duchy, meet­ing each and every noble and gain­ing their sup­port. She and her ret­inue began first in the pros­per­ous East, where her cas­tle lay. Day after day, she trav­elled from one cas­tle to the next. At each she was given fine food served on sil­ver plates, and fine wines in golden gob­lets. She was con­soled on the pass­ing of her father, con­grat­u­lated on her coro­na­tion, and given the lords’ and ladies’ best wishes for her rule, and Abi­gail in turn con­grat­u­lated the lords and ladies on the suc­cess of them and their land. At the end of each evening she slept on a soft bed with goose-feather blankets.

So con­tin­ued each day in the sunny and suc­cess­ful part of her realm. But, pro­to­col dic­tated that the young Duchess must visit each and every cas­tle in the land, and so as the weeks passed she found her­self fur­ther and fur­ther toward the west. The cas­tles of her noble sub­ject became harder and harder to reach, and they hitched an extra four horses to her car­riage to carry her up the steep slopes of hills and mountains.

Though Duchess Abi­gail was still given the best that her hosts had to offer, the food and wine were no longer as splen­did. Gold and sil­ver plates and gob­lets became china and mar­ble, and her blan­kets were stuffed with chicken feath­ers and saw­dust. The lords’ and ladies’ con­grat­u­la­tions became strained and forced, and Abi­gail her­self found less suc­cess to con­grat­u­late them on.

Her evenings became steadily less and less pleas­ant, until one day she came to a cas­tle whose gates were barred to her. Arrayed atop the bat­tle­ments were a hun­dred men in armour, who refused to answer her calls as the rain sluiced down around her. She knocked and knocked on the door for ten min­utes or more, before the shut­ter opened and a bearded face looked down at her.

“Abi­gail,” he boomed, “know ye that my name is Thur­gar, and that all the lords of the West bow to me as their Duke! We refuse to recog­nise you as the Duchess of the Land of Hydrangea!”

Duchess Abi­gail was quite taken aback, though she refused to let her­self be offended by the man’s words. This was a les­son her father had taught her, the way in which the nobil­ity ele­vate them­selves over those who think rashly like peasants.

“Why so?” asked the lit­tle Duchess. “What is it about my family’s rule that you dis­like so fiercely that you resort to treason?”

“You and your father, and your father’s father, you have cared only for the East of this land. While you have con­tented your­self with riches there, you have not spared even a thought for the peo­ple of the West, who are poor and strug­gling to survive.”

“I speak not for my father or my grand­fa­ther, but know ye now that I care for all of my realm, East or West. Oth­er­wise, why would I be here?”

“The lords of the West demand more than words, girl who would be a Duchess!” said Thur­gar. “We demand action! The peo­ple of the West live in the moun­tains, and can scarcely feed our­selves, whilst the East has food aplenty! Arrange for each farm in the East to send but a quar­ter of their har­vest to the West, and we will sub­mit to your rule.”

Thur­gar closed the heavy shut­ter with a thump, and bel­lowed laugh­ter. “They will not even con­sider giv­ing up a frac­tion of their profit!” he thought to himself.

Duchess Abi­gail turned away from the great wooden doors of the cas­tle with a stern look on her face, and she and her ret­inue rode back to her cas­tle in the East.

There she sum­moned all the land-owners and the mer­chant Princes, and told them plainly. “The men and women of the West are starv­ing, and I can­not abide it! Hence­forth you must give a quar­ter of your har­vest to the West.”

The land-owners and mer­chants talked amongst each other, and did sums in their heads. Even though they would still have plenty to feed the East, they would not tol­er­ate their prof­its being reduced. A mer­chant Prince named Assam spoke up.

“Methinks the Duchess favours too much the West of her realm! I fear that if she does not allow the East to pros­per freely, she may find an upris­ing on her hands!” There was a cho­rus of ner­vous assent. “We will not give goods,” said Assam, “we deal in trade, and only in trade!”

Abi­gail did not rise to Assam’s trea­so­nous claim, just as she had remained calm in the face of Thurgar’s threats. Instead, she returned to her cas­tle to think. Many days and nights she pon­dered this prob­lem, whilst the West­ern­ers armed their troops and the traders of the East plot­ted amongst themselves.

One day, a man came down from the moun­tains with a hand­ful of coal, which he pre­sented with haste to the Duchess.

“Your father sent me into the West many years ago,” he said, “to spy on move­ments in the mountains.”

Abi­gail was shocked — to spy on one’s own cit­i­zens! But the man continued.

“But as I went about my duty, I noticed that West­ern fires never wanted for fuel, even though they have pre­cious few forests and no char­coal is ever shipped there. This, your Grace, is the fuel — coal! Beneath the moun­tains lie tons of the sub­stance, quan­tity beyond measure!”

And with that, Abi­gail hit upon her idea. No mat­ter how divided a realm, no mat­ter how insu­lar a peo­ple — every man wants some­thing that some­one else has. But that prob­lem can be turned into an advan­tage for everyone.

Abi­gail rode as fast as she could to the camps of the mer­chants, pre­sent­ing each with a frag­ment of the coal as a token of their bar­gain. They each would offer a ton of food for each ton of coal brought down from the moun­tains. Next, Duchess Abi­gail took all the jew­els and coins from her trea­sury, along with carts of bread from the mer­chants as a token of their side of the bargain.

She rode up to the gates of Thurgar’s cas­tle, and Thur­gar was so aston­ished to see a wagon train loaded with food that he swung the cas­tle gates wide open. He was even more excited to see the cart of jew­els and coins, and to hear the promise that they would be used to build mines all over the mountains!

Within but a few months, wagon trains reg­u­larly brought coal from the moun­tains to the rivers of the East to be sold, and carts of food from the pros­per­ous East wound their way back West to pro­vide the peo­ple their with food.

Under the guid­ance of Duchess Abi­gail, along with Thur­gar and Assam as her advis­ers, the land of Hydrangea blos­somed from a divided and squab­bling nation into a beau­ti­ful land in which each and every one of Abigail’s sub­jects worked hard, ate well, and lived hap­pily ever after.