` Where are you driving to ? ' asked the lindorm with a hideous voice . ` That does not concern you , ' said the prince . ' I am the prince , and can drive where I please . ' ` Turn back , ' said the lindorm . ' I know your errand , but you shall get no bride until I have got a mate and slept by her side . ' The prince turned home again , and told the king and the queen what he had met at the cross-roads ; but they thought that he should try again on the following day , and see whether he could not get past it , so that he might seek a bride in another kingdom . The prince did so , but got no further than the first cross-roads ; there lay the lindorm again , who stopped him in the same way as before . The same thing happened on the third day when the prince tried to get past : the lindorm said , with a threatening voice , that before the prince could get a bride he himself must find a mate . When the king and queen heard this for the third time they could think of no better plan than to invite the lindorm to the palace , and they should find him a mate . They thought that a lindorm would be quite well satisfied with anyone that they might give him , and so they would get some slave-woman to marry the monster . The lindorm came to the palace and received a bride of this kind , but in the morning she lay torn in pieces . So it happened every time that the king and queen compelled any woman to be his bride . The report of this soon spread over all the country . Now it happened that there was a man who had married a second time , and his wife heard of the lindorm with great delight . Her husband had a daughter by his first wife who was more beautiful than all other maidens , and so gentle and good that she won the heart of all who knew her . His second wife , however , had also a grown-up daughter , who by herself would have been ugly and disagreeable enough , but beside her good and beautiful stepsister seemed still more ugly and wicked , so that all turned from her with loathing . The stepmother had long been annoyed that her husband 's daughter was so much more beautiful than her own , and in her heart she conceived a bitter hatred for her stepdaughter . When she now heard that there was in the king 's palace a lindorm which tore in pieces all the women that were married to him , and demanded a beautiful maiden for his bride , she went to the king , and said that her stepdaughter wished to wed the lindorm , so that the country 's only prince might travel and seek a bride . At this the king was greatly delighted , and gave orders that the young girl should be brought to the palace .
When the messengers came to fetch her she was terribly frightened , for she knew XXXXX it was her wicked stepmother who in this way was aiming at her life .
At beside by in over past than that to until