Of Mice and Magic

by Ursula Vernon

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  An imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Ursula Vernon

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-40793-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vernon, Ursula.

  Hamster Princess 2 : of mice and magic / by Ursula Vernon. pages cm.

  Sequel to: Harriet the invincible.

  Summary: “Harriet Hamsterbone sets out to reverse the curse on twelve mice princesses who are forced to dance all night, every night”— Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-8037-3984-0 (hardcover)

  [1. Princesses—Fiction. 2. Blessing and cursing—Fiction. 3. Hamsters—Fiction. 4. Humorous stories.] I. Title. II. Title: Of mice and magic.

  PZ7.V5985Han 2016 [Fic]—dc23 2015006966

  Version_1

  To the many friends of Rooster the Paladin.

  Weasel Invicti!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Once upon a time, in a kingdom just over the next hill, there lived a fierce warrior hamster named Harriet Hamsterbone.

  Harriet’s parents were a king and queen, which meant that she was a princess by definition, but Harriet herself was more interested in slaying monsters than in most of the traditional occupations of princesses.

  Up until a few months ago, she had been invincible, owing to a fairy curse gone awry, but now she was merely very, very stubborn.

  She was also a bit cross because she had to give up cliff-diving. Cliff-diving is a marvelous sport if you are invincible, but not so marvelous if you can actually break every bone in your body doing it.

  “I don’t know, Mumfrey,” she said. “If I go back home, Mom is going to try to get me to take deportment lessons. I don’t think I can stand to balance a book on my head again.”

  “Qwerk . . . ?” said Mumfrey, which is Quail for “Yeah, but what are you gonna do?”

  “I need an adventure,” said Harriet. “I need to do something! I’m nearly twelve and a half! Do you know how long it’s been since I fought an ogre?”

  “Qwerk,” said Mumfrey, which is Quail for “Seven and a half weeks.”

  The problem, Harriet decided, was that she was bored. The monsters had all heard about her. Many of the ogres had given up eating people and taken to vegetarianism in a big way so that she wouldn’t show up and start whacking them with her sword. Jousting contests now had rules stating that if you’d won in the last three years and you were a hamster whose name started with H, you had to sit out and let somebody else try. She’d been away from home for three weeks, just trying to find something to do, and there was nothing.

  “Qwerrk,” said Mumfrey, but he said it under his breath. Mumfrey knew that in a land containing dragons, ogres, dark knights, and fearsome curses, there was nothing half as dangerous as Harriet when she was bored.

  Harriet was trotting along on Mumfrey’s back when she heard a voice from the side of the road.

  “Good warrior, will you not stop and help a wretched old soul?”

  The hamster reined in her quail and eyed the speaker suspiciously.

  There was a little old lady sitting on a rock by the side of the road. She was a shrew, but the smallest, oldest, most bent-over shrew that Harriet had ever seen.

  “Please, mighty warrior, won’t you spare a crust of bread for a starving old woman?” asked the shrew. Her voice was weak and creaky and sounded like an old door hinge in the rain.

  Now, Harriet had had more than her fair share of experience with fairy god-mice and wicked rat-fairies and witches and curses.

  She was also nobody’s fool.

  Nobody talks like that in real life, she thought to herself. And I’m about a six-hour ride from the next village, which means that this old woman has been doing some hiking to get here.

  You should be polite to people on general principle, of course. But if you happen to be wandering through a magical land, and a little old lady asks you for help, you should be extremely polite to her, just in case. Otherwise you may well wake up with earthworms falling out of your mouth whenever you talk, or various other suitably awful fairy punishments.

  “Sure,” said Harriet, sliding off Mumfrey and rummaging in her saddlebags. “I’d be happy to.

  “Let’s eat our lunch together.”

  She had two cheese sandwiches and some carrot sticks set aside for lunch. Just to be on the safe side, she gave the old shrew the lion’s share of the carrot sticks, along with a sandwich.

  She also made sure that her sword was within easy reach. You never could tell with fairies.

  The shrew ate her sandwich and most of the carrot sticks and also the cupcake that Harriet had been planning on eating for dessert. Then she belched. Loudly.

  “Thank you, dearie,” she said, patting Harriet on the knee. “That was very gracious of you.”

  “I’m glad that I could help,” said Harriet.

  The shrew tapped her nose with a long claw.

  There was a brief, awkward pause.

  “I see,” said the shrew, in a much less feeble voice. “Figured that out, did you?”

  “Sorry,” said Harriet. “You’re a bit far out of town for a real little old lady. And you rather overdid the helpless-old-lady thing. Plus . . .” She cleared her throat. “It’s your shadow. You haven’t got one.”

  “Bless it!” growled the old woman, and whistled sharply.

  Her shadow, which had been cavorting with the flickering shadows of some willow leaves, jumped up and came sliding hurriedly across the grass. It fastened itself to her heels and hunched down, looking sheepish.

  “Silly old thing! You cut it loose once, and it gets in the habit of wandering off.” The shrew scowled.

  “You keep being so sharp, you’re liable to cut yourself,” said the shrew, looking cross. “Fine. Off with you, then. I’ll wait for the next hero.”

  Harriet sighed. That was the problem with fairies. Some of them were extremely touchy.

  “Well . . .”

  “It’s possible that I might have another cupcake in here somewhere,” said Harriet. “I was going to save it for Mumfrey, but if you’re going to send us both on the quest . . .”

  “Qwerk!” said Mumfrey, annoyed. That was his cupcake!

  “It’s a good quest,” said the shrew. “I wouldn’t want to waste it on just anybody.”

  “Fine!” said the shrew fairy, snatching the cupcake and devouring it in three bites. (Shrews are almost always hungry.)


  She licked frosting off her whiskers and patted the rock beside her.

  “Now, sit down, dearie, and I’ll tell you the story of the Twelve Dancing Mouse Princesses . . .”

  CHAPTER 2

  Far away from here (said the shrew fairy), in a great kingdom to the west, lived a royal family of mice. The mouse king had twelve daughters.

  Their names were January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December, because the king had that sort of relentlessly logical mind. (He also had two sons named Solstice and Equinox, but they’d fled the kingdom as soon as they were old enough. People like the mouse king are difficult to live with.)

  More than anything in the world, it was said, the princesses loved to dance.

  They danced fox-trots and tangos and square dances and reels. They danced waltzes and quadrilles and jigs and cotillions. They could dance any dance ever invented. A constant stream of dancing instructors went up to the palace and taught the twelve mouse princesses everything they knew, and then went home again, exhausted.

  What the dancing instructors had noticed was the state of the shoes worn by the twelve mouse princesses.

  The shoes were made of silk, of course, in pink and ice white and sky blue, and they were carefully fitted to the feet of every princess like a glove is fitted to a hand.

  (“Yuck,” said Harriet, who thought silk shoes were ridiculously impractical.)

  And every morning, the silk shoes were worn completely through. There were holes in the heel and holes in the toe, as if the princesses had been dancing all night.

  Eventually the king noticed as well. First he was very confused, and then he started to get angry. The oldest princess was thirteen years old and the youngest was eight, and they were going through an immense amount of shoes.

  The royal shoemakers were summoned and threatened with terrible punishments for making substandard footwear, but the shoemakers had sterling reputations and produced several dozen professional ballerinas who testified at their trial that these were very fine shoes indeed. The fault did not lie in the shoes.

  And if the shoes were not at fault, that meant the princesses were dancing their shoes off every night.

  This is considered very strange behavior for princesses, and the mouse king did not approve of strange behavior.

  The mouse king threatened his daughters with terrible punishments. He had them all grounded and doubled their homework and sent them to bed without supper and took away all their toys.

  . . . but still none of them said a word.

  The mouse king raged and yelled and stomped about the castle, and would have come up with even worse punishments, but the court wizard stopped him. He had been conducting his own experiments and had a few suspicions.

  The mouse king sent for other wizards, for knights and heroes and princes, for anyone who could find out where the princesses went at night and how they danced through their slippers.

  He offered half the kingdom and the hand of his oldest daughter in marriage if anyone succeeded, so there were quite a number of people eager to try. Stable boys and dishwashers turned up at the palace, hoping to be princes.

  But none of them ever succeeded. Most went away embarrassed. One slept so late that he had to be dumped into the moat to wake him up, and he fell asleep again while talking to the king. He was escorted to the edge of the kingdom and dropped there. On his head.

  One or two of the people who tried were never seen again.

  The mouse king became extremely grumpy.

  As for what the twelve mouse princesses thought of the matter, nobody was sure. Every night, all twelve were locked into a room of the palace, and none of them would ever say where they went, or how.

  And every morning, their shoes were worn away to nothing.

  In this very unsatisfactory state of affairs, six and a half years passed.

  CHAPTER 3

  Harriet listened to the whole story from first to last. Her big pink ears stayed trained on the old shrew, not flicking from side to side to catch the sounds of the forest.

  When the fairy was finished talking, Harriet sat in silence.

  “Oh, very well,” said the shrew. She watched Harriet with bright black eyes.

  What Harriet was thinking was, There’s more going on here than she’s saying.

  After a few minutes, the hamster princess said, “Did they ever try tying the princesses up?”

  “What kind of question is that?” asked the shrew, a bit shocked.

  “A logical one?” said Harriet. “I mean, if they’ve tied the princesses up and they got loose anyway, then there has to be someone helping them, right? Why not send them to another castle while they’re at it? And they should have tried taking away the shoes and giving them very big stompy boots to see what happened.”

  (Harriet herself did not usually wear shoes—hamsters don’t, unless they’re planning on walking through something disgusting—but when she did wear shoes, she preferred very large boots with steel toes and, if possible, spikes.)

  “I was expecting you to be a bit more concerned for the plight of the princesses,” said the shrew sourly. “As a fellow princess and all. I don’t mind telling you that I’m having second thoughts here.”

  Harriet shrugged. She had not met very many princesses, and the ones she had met were all rather useless and tended to spend a lot of time brushing their hair and singing duets with little forest animals. It was all very soppy.

  “As a fellow girl, then,” said the shrew. “Since they’re under a curse. I’d think you’d remember what that’s like.”

  “Look,” said Harriet, “if they’re unhappy, they have all my sympathy, okay? But the mouse king doesn’t sound like a very nice man. Maybe the princesses like dancing. Maybe it’s nobody’s business where they go.”

  “I’ve got my own kingdom in a few years,” said Harriet. “And I’m already a hero. Ask any of the ogres. If you can find one.”

  “Fine,” said the shrew, sighing. “If you’re going to be like that, I suppose I’ll have to tell you the rest of it.”

  Harriet examined her fingernails and tried not to look smug.

  “It is a curse,” said the shrew. “All the fairies know about it. There was a write-up in Fairy Godmouse Today, but of course no one will tell the mouse king the details.”

  “Whether they want to or not,” the shrew said, “the mice must climb down, down, into the underworld beneath the castle.”

  “And if you tie them up?” asked Harriet again.

  “Fine!” said the shrew. “The ropes come untied, if you must know!”

  “And if you move them to another castle—”

  “Earthquakes. They can’t go beyond the wall around the castle grounds, or the whole thing starts shaking and the turrets start falling into the moat. The king keeps guards to make sure they stay on the property, for fear that the castle will fall down.”

  “Hmmm,” said Harriet. She had to admit, that did sound like a pretty powerful curse. “If somebody sleeps in their room—”

  “Aha!” said the shrew. She tapped Harriet’s knee with one long claw. “Now you’ve got it. All those knights and heroes and princes and stable boys hoping to be princes—they get three nights. Most of them fall asleep and don’t remember what happened, and a few of them have disappeared completely.”

  Harriet rubbed the back of her neck. It did sound interesting, and she was awfully bored . . .

  Still, you didn’t just go breaking other people’s curses because you were bored. The princesses might love to dance, and they might not thank her for getting involved.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  The shrew scowled.

  “I didn’t want to say this,” she said. “But if you do not help the princesses, Harriet Hamsterbone, then your own kingdom will be in peril. I have se
en the future, and if the princesses are not freed, then the name of Harriet Hamsterbone shall be written in dust and in a handful of generations, the line of hamster kings shall end!”

  She sat down with a thump.

  “Written in dust?” said Harriet. “Like . . . somebody swept up some dust and wrote my name in it? That’s just weird. Why would I be scared of that?”

  The shrew groaned. “It’s a metaphor. Like your name won’t matter, because people won’t remember it.”

  Harriet looked unconvinced.

  “Maybe you should focus on the bit with the hamster kings coming to an end,” said the shrew.

  “Right . . .” said Harriet. “How many generations are in a handful, exactly?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not a very scientific measurement, is it?”

  The shrew put her long snout in her hands.

  “Like, my parents are one generation, right? And I’m two, and if I have kids—which I suppose could happen, in theory, someday—that’s three. If a handful is three generations, then we’re already there and that’s bad! But if a handful is like forty-five generations, then we’re only a fifteenth of the generations involved, and I sort of feel like the other fourteen-fifteenths need to take care of themselves. I can’t be responsible for everybody.”

  “I’m just saying,” said Harriet. “So how many generations are we talking about?”

  “Not that many,” said the shrew.

  “And how does this work exactly?”

  The shrew rubbed her forehead. “Look, the future isn’t a straight line or anything. Probably one of the princesses will marry somebody who was planning on invading the hamster kingdom and she’ll talk him out of it. Or maybe she’ll invent a better quail saddle and one of your descendants who was going to fall off his quail and break his neck won’t. Futures are squishy. All I know is that if you don’t do this, your kingdom will suffer.