The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic

by Jennifer Trafton

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - IN WHICH A FLYING HAT HAS DIRE CONSEQUENCES

  Chapter 2 - IN WHICH TRAGEDY BESETS THE ROYAL HOUSE

  Chapter 3 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY HEARS SOMETHING SHE SHOULDN’T

  Chapter 4 - IN WHICH HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTACHE IS

  Chapter 5 - IN WHICH GEOGRAPHY TAKES A TURN FOR THE WORSE

  Chapter 6 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY BUILDS CASTLES AND THE POTTER MAKES PLANS

  Chapter 7 - IN WHICH A SMUDGE GETS A GOOD WASHING

  Chapter 8 - IN WHICH PHILOSOPHY LEADS TO A TICKLISH CONCLUSION

  Chapter 9 - IN WHICH A LYRE TELLS THE TRUTH (PERHAPS)

  Chapter 10 - IN WHICH THE KING’S EMPTY PEPPER SHAKER RESULTS IN TYRANNY, ...

  Chapter 11 - IN WHICH OUR HEROES ARE ARMED WITH MIGHTY WEAPONS AND MANY ...

  Chapter 12 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY MEETS A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON

  Chapter 13 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY DRIVES A HARD BARGAIN AND WORVIL CATCHES A ...

  Chapter 14 - IN WHICH IT PAYS TO BE POLITE, BUT GRAMMAR CAN GET STICKY

  Chapter 15 - IN WHICH IT IS BETTER TO BE A NOBLE WORM THAN A DEAD FROG (OR SOME ...

  Chapter 16 - IN WHICH CAPTAIN GIDDING SHOWS HIS VALOR WITH COCONUTS

  Chapter 17 - IN WHICH INJUSTICE IS OVERTHROWN AND A PERFECTLY GOOD BUBBLE BATH ...

  Chapter 18 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY REMEMBERS HER MANNERS

  Chapter 19 - IN WHICH THE RUMBLEBUMPS INVENT A NEW GAME AND WORVIL GAINS PERSPECTIVE

  Chapter 20 - IN WHICH CAPTAIN GIDDING SHOWS HIS VALOR WITH POETRY

  Chapter 21 - IN WHICH KING LUCAS AND WORVIL HAVE TOO LITTLE LUNCH, AND ...

  Chapter 22 - IN WHICH THE KING IS LEFT ALONE, AND EVERYTHING IS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

  Chapter 23 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY’S TALENTS ARE APPRECIATED, THOUGH NOT THE ...

  Chapter 24 - IN WHICH THE AIR IS FULL OF FEAR, SUSPICION, BLAME, AND VEGETABLES

  Chapter 25 - IN WHICH A FEATHER AND A FLUTE PROVE THEIR WORTH

  Chapter 26 - IN WHICH MOURNING COMES IN THE MORNING

  Chapter 27 - IN WHICH PERSIMMONY SMUDGE SWEEPS A FLOOR

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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  Text copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Trafton Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Brett Helquist

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

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  S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Trafton, Jennifer

  The rise and fall of Mount Majestic / by Jennifer Trafton;

  illustrated by Brett Helquist. p. cm.

  Summary: Ten-year-old Persimmony Smudge, who longs for heroic

  adventures, overhears a secret that thrusts her into the middle of a

  dangerous mission that could destroy the island on which she lives.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44551-8

  [1. Fairy tales. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.

  3. Giants—Fiction.] I. Helquist, Brett, ill. II. Title.

  PZ8.T71 Ri 2010

  [Fic]—dc22 2009051659

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my parents

  PROLOGUE

  There is a very good possibility that you will not believe a word I say. Alas, it is the risk all historians take. The truest things are often the most unbelievable.

  There is an island in the world, a small but lovely piece of earth, which its inhabitants call (rightly or wrongly) the Island at the Center of Everything. On the day before my story begins, it was as nearly perfect a place as an island in the world could reasonably expect to be.

  The farmers whistled as they labored in their fields. The fishermen pulled in nets overflowing with fish. The Rumblebumps leaped from rock to rock along the Western Shore, splashing through tide pools and laughing at the wind. All over the island, people breathed the fresh, crisp breeze wafting in from the sea and let out long, lazy sighs of contentment.

  And towering above them all was Mount Majestic, that beloved mound of grass and earth and stone. At the very top of the mountain stood the castle, and in a room somewhere the king sat cheerfully eating something.

  Naturally there were troubles. Every so often some unfortunate soul wandered too far into the Willow Woods and was eaten by a tortoise. The people grumbled about the king; the king grumbled about the people; the Rumblebumps grumbled about no one and were ignored by everyone. The tired workers in the pepper mill trudged their weary circle. The Leafeaters collected their tears and waited anxiously for justice. The restless mangroves paced the forest floor searching for a spot to plant their roots and be content. And a young girl with mouse-colored hair and dirty feet hid under a threadbare quilt and dreamed of glory.

  But despite some rumblings under the surface, the island drifted on the sea as peaceful and complacent as a cloud in a blue sky—until certain events changed it forever.

  This is the story of those events.

  I have thoroughly interviewed every eyewitness and triple-checked every detail. If the pages that follow are inspiring, enlightening, or life changing, I take full responsibility, but if there are any errors it is not my fault.

  And so I invite you to take off your cloak of doubt, empty your pockets of all suspicions and jests, sit down before the roaring fire of my tale, and believe.

  Chapter 1

  IN WHICH A FLYING HAT HAS DIRE CONSEQUENCES

  On a dark night in a dense forest while the great wide wonder of the stormy sky threatened to burst through the trees and swallow her up, a girl lost her hat.

  This would not be an event worth recording in the annals of history, except that the girl not only lost her hat, she lost her head. Which is to say, she panicked. When a gust of wind swept off her hat and sent it flying above the trees, she left the path she had been so carefully following to run after the vanishing blue speck. It is not surprising that when she finally recovered her head and sat down to think, she realized that she had now lost both her hat and her way home.

  Out of the clumsiest moments of our lives, time can weave the most extraordinary tapestry of events. Who would have guessed that the fate of an entire kingdom depended upon a gust of wind, a flying hat, and a girl losing her way in a forest? Certainly she did not know what was to come, and on that night she imagined herself to be the most miserable person in the world.

  The girl’s name
was Persimmony Smudge, which only added to her misery. She was ten years old, and ten whole years of living with that name was already too much. As far as she knew, only one person named Smudge had ever managed to be heroic, and he had disappeared.

  Persimmony angrily kicked a stone (which, unfortunately for her toe, remained in place). “It’s all Prunella’s fault!” she cried. “If she hadn’t pestered me about sweeping the floor right in the middle of my glorious dream about rescuing a baby from the teeth of a murderous alligator, I would never have thrown the broom across the room. Then the broom would never have hit the Giving Pot, and I wouldn’t be here trudging through the Willow Woods in the middle of the night to fetch a new pot from Theodore. And with a storm coming too!”

  She shivered, not so much from the cold as from the thought of her mother returning home in the morning to find the Giving Pot and the new hat gone (not to mention her daughter). She could just imagine her punishments. No more trips into town. No more afternoons sneaking out to the seashore. Nothing but chores. She would end her life as a shriveled old woman surrounded by brooms and darning needles and mixing spoons and rags. Doomed—all because of her sister—to an everlasting existence of sweeping and dusting and stirring and mending. She could hardly bear the thought.

  That’s why she had run straight for the path to Theodore’s cottage in the first place. If it was a choice between braving the woods at night or braving her mother’s anger, well, she would take her chances with the woods. Braving the woods at night to save the family from a slow, agonizing death by starvation did have such a heroic sound to it. Well, maybe they wouldn’t exactly die of starvation without the Giving Pot, but they would certainly be very hungry.

  But then her hat had blown away, and with it all of her heroism. It was a large-brimmed blue hat with embroidered fruit all over it. It looked more like a drowning apple tree than a hat, but she loved it. Usually she felt invisible—a poor girl with worn-out clothes, a forgettable face, and hair that was neither golden yellow nor chocolate brown nor fiery red, but rather like dirty dishwater. People didn’t notice her, but they noticed her hat. It made her feel less Smudge-like.

  All at once, the sky burst through. White streaks of lightning lit up the blackness that had gathered over the trees. Thunder made the ground tremble. A sudden downpour drenched the Willow Woods.

  Persimmony jumped to her feet, holding her arms helplessly over her head. She was angry, and afraid, and hungry, and wet. So she did the only thing she could do: She started to dance. She leaped and spun and flung out her arms. Her bare feet skipped and slid and squished in the mud. Take that, you thunder! She kicked her heels high. Take that, you storm! She twirled in circles until she was dizzy and out of breath and her fear had turned into laughing.

  Then she took one last leap into the wet branches of the nearest willow. She clasped her arms around them and swung upward into the night sky. When she swung back, she bumped into the tree trunk, slid down into the dark, dry space around it, and lay there on the ground, panting.

  As Persimmony would have remembered if she had been thinking clearly, disturbing a willow tree at night is even more foolish than leaving a path to run after a flying hat. High above in the willow’s canopy of leaves, two round, yellow eyes slowly appeared. A black shape began to creep noiselessly down the trunk. There was a flash of lightning that made the woods suddenly as bright as day, and in that moment Persimmony saw the tortoise.

  There had been a time, when she was very, very young and only acquainted with the lumbering, clumsy sea turtles that played with her by the shore, when Persimmony had laughed at the idea of being frightened by a tortoise. A poison-tongued jumping tortoise? Faster than a human? Living in a willow tree? She had thought it was another of her mother’s tricks to keep her out of the woods and at home. Then she had learned better.

  There is absolutely nothing laughable about a poison-tongued jumping tortoise when you are standing two feet away from it.

  Crouched at the base of the trunk, it was nearly as tall as she was. Its domed shell of black, bony plates was rimmed with sharp spikes, and its legs were several times the size of its head. The tortoise’s eyes were fixed steadily on her, and from underneath its pointed snout slid a long, snakelike tongue—a tongue so poisonous that a single lick would put a swift end to her. Persimmony saw all of this in a few seconds, and then the night was black again.

  This was not how it was supposed to happen. She had told the story to herself hundreds of times, lying in her bed with the quilt pulled over her head and imagining that she was the last remaining defender of the town of Candlenut as it was being ravaged by a pack of poison-tongued tortoises. The townspeople—and her mother and sister—and in some versions the king and his entire court—cowered in the background weeping and crying out, “Persimmony, you are our only hope! Forgive us for thinking you were nothing but a basket maker’s daughter, a nobody, a Smudge! Forgive us for ignoring you! Save us, Persimmony, save us!” And then she would smile sweetly and walk up to the leader of the tortoises and plunge a knife into—

  But now she was alone, without an admiring audience or victims to be rescued, without a knife or a slingshot or anything at all to defend herself. Now the woods were dark and the rain was pelting the ground like hail and she was hopelessly lost, and even if she was to put up a valiant fight before she died, no one would ever know and she would never get a new pot from Theodore or make it home to tell her mother that it was all Prunella’s fault.

  “DON’T YOU DARE EAT ME AFTER ALL I’VE BEEN THROUGH TODAY!” she yelled.

  The tortoise responded with a hiss as piercing as a scream.

  Persimmony decided that it was safer to run than to scream back, so she ran through the freezing rain and the darkness, over and under and around what she could not see—except in moments, when the lightning lit up the world like a huge candle only to be blown out again by the wind.

  The ground trembled under the weight of the tortoise as it jumped after her, plowing through the trees in its way. BUMP! THUD! CRASH!

  At last Persimmony spied a large fallen tree trunk, and she sprinted over it and ducked in its shadow, pressing against the soft layer of moss that covered it. To her surprise, the moss gave way behind her. She tumbled backward and suddenly found herself inside the tree. The trunk was hollow, like a tunnel, and the moss had been covering a small hole in the side. What a perfect hiding place! If only the tortoise had not seen her! But it had. Its shell scraped against the bark as it scrambled over the tree trunk. Persimmony squeezed farther back into the dark tunnel—just as the tortoise thrust its head straight into the hole and began to come in after her.

  It was lucky for Persimmony that the shell of the poison-tongued jumping tortoise was so much larger than its brain, and also larger than the hole in the tree trunk. Just as the snapping jaws and outstretched tongue had almost reached her face, the tortoise’s shell got stuck and wouldn’t move forward another inch. Hissing in fury, the tortoise kicked and rolled and stretched its neck as far as it could, but Persimmony was beyond its reach. It finally withdrew in disappointment.

  But it did not leave. Instead, it sat down right outside the hole, blocking Persimmony’s exit.

  “Oh, I should never have gotten out of bed this morning!” said Persimmony, forgetting that to be alive and uneaten was a miracle worthy of notice. She waited and waited in the pitch-black tunnel, until the sound of the pouring rain was drowned out by the harsh rattle of the tortoise’s snoring. At last, she lay down inside the cramped space and fell asleep, too tired even to pout over her misfortune. Too tired, in fact, to hear the faint shudder of a sigh behind her in the dark recesses of the tree trunk.

  A broom. A hat. A girl. A hole.

  Such small things in a big world. But without the small things, there would be no story to tell, and—most importantly—I would not still be alive to tell it.

  Chapter 2

  IN WHICH TRAGEDY BESETS THE ROYAL HOUSE

  On the very evenin
g that Persimmony Smudge lost her hat in the middle of the Willow Woods, young King Lucas the Loftier ran out of pepper in the middle of his supper.

  He had already eaten three lobsters, four bowls of shrimp, eleven crab cakes, two pumpkin pies, and a platter full of pineapple chunks swimming in coconut sauce. He was just about to start on his favorite dish, the crowning glory of his evening meal: sweet potato soup.

  The king’s life had many delights—wealth, power, comfortable mattresses, subjects bowing at his feet and wishing he would live forever, servants scratching that part of his back that he could never quite reach—but what delighted King Lucas above all things (except one) was sweet potato soup. That one thing he loved most, the highest delight of his life, was pepper. So when the large, steaming hot bowl of soup appeared on the table, he immediately reached for the pepper shaker and turned it upside down.

  Nothing happened.

  He shook it. He smacked it. He sat on it. He stood on the table and jumped up and down with the pepper shaker until his face had turned as red as the lobsters and his soup had splashed all over the floor. But still nothing came out.

  “Nubbins! Nubbins! You stupid oaf, get in here!”

  A terrified steward peeked through the doorway. Though he was five times the age of the king and twice his height, the aging servant bowed with the nervousness of a child about to be punished. “Yes?” he squeaked. “Is there something wrong with Your Highness’s dinner?”

  “This pepper shaker is broken!” yelled Lucas, thrusting it into the steward’s trembling hands. “Nothing comes out! FIX IT!” His crown slid down on his forehead and he shoved it back furiously.

  The poor steward answered, “Right. Of course. Pepper shakers can be tricky little things. They have minds of their own, you know. Have you tried salt, Your Highness? Salt can be much more cooperative. Or ginger, perhaps?”