The Wild Swans

Wikipedia:

"The Wild Swans" is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a princess who rescues her eleven brothers from a spell cast by an evil queen.

The tale was first published on 2 October 1838 as the first installment in Andersen's Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen, Denmark. It has been adapted to various media including ballet, television, and animated film.

Plot

In a faraway kingdom, there lives a widowed King with his twelve children: eleven princes and one princess. One day, he decides to remarry. He marries a wicked queen who was a witch. Out of spite, the queen turns her eleven stepsons into swans (they are allowed to become human by night) and forces them to fly away. The queen then tries to bewitch their 15-year old sister Elise, but Elise's goodness is too strong for this, so she has Elise banished. The brothers carry Elise to safety in a foreign land where she is out of harm's way of her stepmother.

There, Elise is guided by the queen of the fairies to gather nettles in graveyards; she knits these into shirts that will eventually help her brothers regain their human shapes. Elise endures painfully blistered hands from nettle stings, and she must also take a vow of silence for the duration of her task, for speaking one word will kill her brothers. The king of another faraway land happens to come across the mute Elise and falls in love with her. He grants her a room in the castle where she continues her knitting. Eventually he proposes to crown her as his queen and wife, and she accepts.

However, the Archbishop is chagrined because he thinks Elise is herself a witch, but the king will not believe him. One night Elise runs out of nettles and is forced to collect more in a nearby church graveyard where the Archbishop is watching. He reports the incident to the king as proof of witchcraft. The statues of the saints shake their heads in protest, but the Archbishop misinterprets this sign as confirmation of Elise's guilt. The Archbishop orders to put Elise on trial for witchcraft. She can speak no word in her defence and is sentenced to death by burning at the stake.

The brothers discover Elise's plight and try to speak to the king, but fail. Even as the tumbril bears Elise away to execution, she continues knitting, determined to keep it up to the last moment of her life. This enrages the people, who are on the brink of snatching and destroying the shirts when the swans descend and rescue Elise. The people (correctly) interpret this as a sign from Heaven that Elise is innocent, but the executioner still makes ready for the burning. Then Elise throws the shirts over the swans, and the brothers return to their human forms. The youngest brother retains one swan's wing because Elise did not have time to finish the last sleeve. Elise is now free to speak and tell the truth, but she faints from exhaustion, so her brothers explain. As they do so, the firewood around Elise's stake miraculously take root and burst into flowers. Because of the miracle that happened, the youngest brother's wing turns back to a normal arm; the king plucks the topmost flower and presents it to Elise.

Elise's courage prevails, and she is forever reunited with her brothers and her father, the king.