The Boy with the Moon on His Forehead

A poor gardener’s daughter once said, half dreaming, to the girls she worked beside, “When I am married, I shall have a son with a moon shining on his forehead and a star upon his chin.” The other girls laughed at her. But it happened that the king was passing by, and he heard her say it, and he was so charmed that he made her his wife and brought her to live in the palace.

Now the king already had four older queens, and they did not like this gentle new wife one bit. So when at last her baby was born, a beautiful boy with a soft glow of a moon on his forehead and a little star on his chin, exactly as she had said, the four jealous queens were furious. While the poor mother slept, worn out, they stole the newborn away, left a smooth stone in his place, and told the king his new wife had given birth to nothing but a stone.

The king was confused and hurt, and the four queens whispered against the gardener’s daughter until she was sent away from the palace in disgrace, to live poor and alone once more.

But the baby had not been lost. The queens had ordered him left out in the forest, and there the king’s own faithful old dog had found him, and guarded him, and carried him gently to safety. The little prince with the moon on his forehead grew up far from the palace, not knowing who he truly was, but kind and bright, and with a strange soft light about his face that he kept hidden under a cloth, for it made people stare.

The years passed, and the boy grew tall, and one day his travels brought him back at last to his father’s city. And though no one knew him, there was something about him that drew every eye. When at last, by chance, the cloth slipped from his brow, the whole court fell silent. For there, plain as morning, shone a moon upon his forehead and a star upon his chin.

The old king stared, and remembered, and understood everything. The four jealous queens could hide the truth no longer. The boy’s mother, the gardener’s daughter, was found and brought home in honour, and she wept to hold the son she had been told was only a stone. And the king set his small, glowing, long-lost prince upon his knee, and never let the truth out of his sight again.