There had never been so many guests in the palace, so the queen had made a great many rules about them. Every guest would sleep on a mattress. Under every mattress would go another mattress. Under that one, a third. Nobody who ever came to this palace would be able to say that a bed here was hard.

Twenty mattresses went down in the blue room. The eldest princess, Karen, pressed the top one with her hand and pronounced it soft. The second, Else, sent for a second pillow, and a third pillow, and a bolster behind the third pillow. The queen's own bed, which nobody was permitted to test, held nine. The mattresses came from a warehouse in the town. They went out that morning and came back that evening and were let again to a house on the fish quay, where a family of six slept soundly and said nothing about it.

Ottoline came to the palace in a cart with one bad wheel and a leather pouch on her back. She was a seed collector. She had spent eleven years walking in fields that nobody had planted, picking up the seeds that had got by on their own, and she had come to ask the queen for a bed.

The queen gave her the bed in the blue room, which was the bed with the fewest mattresses in it, because the blue room was where the seed collector slept and nobody thought about her. Ottoline set her pouch down on the table. A hole was worn through the bottom of it. One pea fell out, rolled along the boards, and went under the bed.

That night the youngest princess, Mette, was sent into the room with a hand mirror. Looking under beds for lost pins was her job. Nobody had given it to her, because it was hers already. She knelt on the cold boards and slid the glass under the third mattress from the bottom. There was one pea.

It was round and green and the size of a small marble. Mette closed the mirror, put the pea in her pocket, and went down to supper. She told nobody, because there was nothing to tell yet. A pea in a pocket is not a pea in the ground. The fuss began the next morning, and it was a very good fuss. The court was certain that somebody had put a pea under the mattresses on purpose, as an insult. "Who dislikes us well enough to leave a pea?" asked the steward. "Somebody with a pea," said Karen.

The sisters were searched. Their rooms, their shoes, their hems, their soup. Else had to lift the lid of a chamber pot, which was not a thing a princess should ever have to do, and which made everybody laugh except the steward, who wrote it down. "Search the guests," said Karen. "You may not search a guest," said the queen.

So the palace added a fourth mattress under the third, and a fifth under the fourth, and posted two guards at the door, and the pea was lifted out of the middle mattress by the chamberlain and set in a small china bowl on the sewing room windowsill, where it was considered settled. It sat there all winter. The sisters went on testing mattresses. The blue room was now nine deep, and nobody could account for the extra four, and the palace had begun to be described, in town, as a warehouse with a queen in it.

Ottoline came back in March. She had heard there was a bed in the palace, and beds should be found before the men go looking for them. "Is my pea there?" she said. Mette fetched the bowl from the sewing room. The pea was grey now, and small, and it had a crack along one side. "Oh," said Ottoline. "Oh, you poor thing. Nine months in a dry room in a china bowl." She turned it over in her palm. "This is not a pea any more. This is a pea that wants to be a plant and cannot find the ground."

Rask was the palace gardener. He had been in a hurry for forty years and had a name for it. He came out to look at the bed with his hands behind his back, which was how he looked at everything that was not yet a plant. "A pea wants a bed," he said. "Not a bowl. A bed with the ground forked over twice and the stones picked out, because a stone in a pea row is a stone the pea has to go around." "Which bed?" said Mette.

Rask pointed at the middle of the east wall, where a bed of roses had grown for thirty years and had never once flowered, because nothing that came up there was ever given anything to do. "Everything in the ground is called whatever you put there," he said.

Mette dug the bed. She dug it badly, and then she dug it again with Rask's spade, and then Rask showed her how deep the seed should go, which is as deep as your thumbnail and not one inch further. She pushed the cracked pea into the loose ground and pushed the earth back over it and pressed it down with the heel of her hand, the way you press a letter into a pile of sand. The sisters came to the window in the afternoon to see what she was doing. "You have ruined the roses," said Else. "The roses were not doing anything," said Mette.

"You have a whole wall," said Karen. "Why do you want that one?" Because Rask chose it, Mette thought, and did not say so, because the answer would not have sounded like a reason to anybody over twelve.

Nothing happened for a month. Mette watered it anyway. She weeded it although there was nothing in it to weed. When the rain came she did not need to water, and she watered anyway, and Rask watched her do that and said, "She is all right. She is the slowest of them and she is all right." Then there were two leaves, and then a stem, and then a green thing that had to lean, because it was looking for the light.

By June the pea was taller than Mette's waist and leaning hard on a stick, because peas climb or they do not. The sisters' beds were still empty. Rask had turned the whole east wall over to peas, and Mette had done the second and third rows herself, with the seed Ottoline had left behind, and the seed from the bowl, and eight pods she had bought in the market with her own pocket money, to be sure there would be more. The queen came to look at it in July. "Whose bed is this?" she said. "Mine," said Mette. Karen laughed. "Mette has a bed of peas."

"Mette has a bed," said the queen, "and the peas have a bed, and I have heard about that one all spring." She looked at the ground for a while. "Keep the wall. Do it the same way next year."

Ottoline came in August with her empty pouch and a paper packet. "Eleven pods," Mette said. "I counted them twice. I counted them wrong the first time." "Count them a third time at supper," said Ottoline, "and hand me eleven." The sisters ate peas out of the pods in the garden, sitting on the grass, which the steward wrote down and then erased, because it seemed an unnecessary thing to keep.

Mette tied the top of the last vine to its stick. Then she watered the row, the way you water anything that is growing, and went in to supper. The sisters were still arguing about mattresses, and they had used every mattress in the castle.