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When the jewels are delivered, the clocks chime.

Saralinda warms the clocks, and they begin to tick once more. They go from frozen clock to frozen clock. While Zorn distracts the duke’s guards so they’ll leave their posts beside the stopped clocks, Golux engages Saralinda’s assistance. The two men, satisfied with temporary jewels, make the woman laugh until they have 1,000 jewels. The catch is that these jewels only last a fortnight before becoming tears once more. They discover, though, that the woman also cries jewels when she weeps tears of laughter. They tell her all sorts of sad stories to make her cry, but to no avail. What he doesn’t know is that there is a woman blessed with the gift of crying jewels. The nearest jewels are 99 days’ journey from the castle, so the duke believes that this task is impossible. The trick works, and the duke sets him the task of acquiring 1,000 jewels in 99 hours, with the twist that the 13 stopped clocks in the castle must strike upon his return. An odd man named Golux meets the disguised prince and advises him to tell the duke that he will perform any task set for him, so long as the duke doesn’t ask him to retrieve 1,000 jewels. The nursemaid witch had prophesied that the one to save Saralinda from the duke would have a name that starts with X, and yet doesn’t.Ī new suitor, Prince Zorn, disguised as a minstrel called Xingu, wants to win the princess’s hand.

Some were fed to the geese because they used names that started with an X. When her suitors inevitably fail, he slices them from “zatch to guggle” and feeds them to his geese. For years he’s thought up impossible tasks for the suitors of Saralinda to perform - cutting a slice of the moon, making the ocean into wine or finding objects that do not exist. The duke enjoys the last part of the curse. She cast a spell on the duke so he can’t wed the princess until her 21st birthday, he must keep her in a chamber safely away from himself, and he must give any prince the chance to seek her hand in marriage.

In reality, the duke stole Saralinda as a young child from her kingly father and brought her to his castle, where he intends to eventually marry her. In a cold castle where the hands on 13 clocks have stopped moving, an evil duke pretends to be the uncle of Princess Saralinda.