“I don’t need anything dug,” said Harriet. “Well, not personally—I have a friend with a flooded basement. I may get you to fix that, assuming we all get through this without getting married or turned into frogs or something.”
She tapped a nail against her teeth and thought for a minute. “Is your mother watching us? Is she going to poof in here or something?”
“She doesn’t really poof,” said Gemini. “She’s more of a tunnel-up-through-the-floor type. And no, at this time of night she’s in a bubble bath with a copy of Witchcraft Today.”
“Okay.” Harriet nodded. “I have an idea.”
“Unfortunately, you’re going to have to go in and dance for part of the evening, because otherwise it’ll look suspicious. And don’t tell anyone else I’m here. The more people know a secret, the less of a secret it is.”
August looked at Gemini. Gemini looked at August.
Hand in reluctant claw, they went through the doorway and into the pavilion.
CHAPTER 10
Harriet woke up in the morning because a guard was poking her in the ribs.
He was using his finger and not a sword, so Harriet did not feel the need to shake him until his teeth rattled, but it was a near thing.
“What time is it?” she growled. “Is it even six o’clock? Why are you waking me up?”
“It is half past seven,” said the guard. “His Majesty wants to see you. Immediately.”
The mouse king sat on the throne, looking altogether too awake for this hour of the day. (Harriet’s father, the king, slept until nearly noon most days, and stayed awake for half the night.)
“Yeah,” said Harriet. “Remind me how long they’ve been doing this, again? Seven years, was it?”
The mouse king scowled. “Return here in the evening,” he said. “You will have your three days. But then I want results, or you will be banished forever from the kingdom.”
“How awful for me,” muttered Harriet.
She actually would have liked very much to get on Mumfrey and leave the kingdom as fast as the battle quail could carry her.
But no. There was the royal hamster family’s future to consider.
Harriet gritted her teeth. Even if the future hadn’t been at stake, she really didn’t want to leave the princesses in the lurch. Being trapped in a palace with the mouse king had to be pretty awful, even if he was their father.
She left the Throne Room and went through the Orange Hallway and a Blue Room, then fumbled her way through the Magenta Room with her eyes closed. Eventually she made it to the stables.
“Wilbur!” she called. “Wilbur!”
Wilbur came around the side of a stall, wiping his hands on a cloth.
She produced a list. “I need you to go to the hardware store and get me everything on this list.”
Wilbur took the list and read it over. “Hmm. Okay, I think I can do that after I’m off work . . . ”
“Great. Bring it all to the Throne Room the day after tomorrow, early in the morning.” She poured gold coins into his palm. “Thanks, Wilbur. You’re the best friend a princess could have.”
“Qwerk!” said Mumfrey from his stall. He was getting annoyed that Harriet was off having an adventure without him, and this was the last straw.
“Except for a battle quail, of course,” Harriet added hurriedly.
“Qwerk.”
“So you think you can save the princesses?” asked Wilbur.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure. Piece of cake. It’s the waiting,” said Harriet. “I’ve got two more days of this. And I’m not sure it’s going to go right. There’s a whole bunch of ways it can go wrong.”
Harriet was not good at waiting. Most of her adventures involved whacking things. She was very good at whacking things. (Also smiting, thumping, and general mayhem.)
But waiting . . . all she could think about was how easily things could go wrong.
If something went wrong when you were fighting dragons, you got set on fire, and that was very unpleasant, but at least you (and perhaps your faithful battle quail) were the only ones in trouble.
If something went wrong here, there were a whole bunch of people in trouble.
“Twenty-four of them,” she told Wilbur. “Plus Mumfrey and me. Twenty-six total. We’re only a thirteenth of the number of people in trouble . . . ”
“I still think you have an unnatural love of fractions,” muttered Wilbur.
“Yeah, yeah. But—c’mon, come outside the stable . . .” Harriet glanced around, wanting to make sure that no one was listening. “Look, it’s not just us! It’s the future of the hamster kingdom!”
She explained what the fairy shrew had said. Wilbur was fascinated.
“I dunno,” said Harriet. “Maybe there’s a horrible monster that shows up to eat the kingdom, and one of the mouse princesses’ great-grandsons slays it.”
“It’s always slaying with you,” said Wilbur. “What if your great-grandson is all sickly—”
“My great-grandson will have a superb constitution,” said Harriet, miffed.
“—and one of the mice invents a cure?”
“It could be anything,” said Harriet, who was secretly hoping for a monster. (Presumably she would be long dead, because otherwise she’d slay the monster herself. Harriet planned to be beating up ogres when she was ninety.) “Right, Mumfrey?”
Mumfrey wasn’t listening. He was looking across the lawn, very distracted by a new arrival.
“Hi,” said August.
“Oh, good!” said Harriet. “I was hoping I’d get a chance to talk to you.”
August’s riding quail, Hyacinth, was plump with very long eyelashes. Mumfrey pranced and tried to look taller.
Harriet and August exchanged knowing looks. Wilbur rolled his eyes and went off to shovel things.
“Right,” said Harriet. “Walk with me.”
“I can’t go very far,” said August. “The guards will stop me if I get too close to the edge of the lawn. It causes earthquakes.”
Harriet paused.
They made their way along the back of the stables. Mumfrey and Hyacinth continued to make eyes at each other.
“Can you talk to me about the spell now?” asked Harriet.
“I think so,” said August. “It’s different now that you know.”
“So what have you done to try and break the spell?” asked Harriet.
“Everything,” said August, groaning. “It all started when we were really young and Dad made all the girls in the kingdom take dancing lessons.”
“Anyway,” said August, “dancing was okay, but then at night we couldn’t stop. We can’t not dance. I mean, we can sort of stop for a few minutes, to get a drink or go to the bathroom, but it’s like an itch, and you have to scratch eventually. And then the door started opening and we had to go underground . . .” She shrugged.
“What happens if you don’t go?” asked Harriet.
“Can’t,” said August simply. “I’ve tried. I tied myself to the bed with a belt once. Lasted five minutes. The belt came untied and I danced a quadrille down the stairs. And a quadrille requires four people, so that was not easy!”
“Mmm. And if January doesn’t drug whoever is trying to save you . . . ?”
August sighed. “Poor January. It’s hard on her. I replaced the sleeping potion with water once. The prince woke up and came charging down the stairs and fell in the river. And it ate him.”
“I knew that river was up to no good,” muttered Harriet.
Harriet was of the opinion that quail-kickers deserved whatever happened to them, but it didn’t seem polite to mention it.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got . . . about half a plan. Definitely more of a plan than I had last night.” She rubbed her hands together. “How do you feel about climbing down very long ropes . . . ?”
CHAPTER 11
That night, the guards locked Harriet into the room with the princesses, and all thirteen of them listened as the big iron bar went CLUNK in the sockets.
There was a sad little sound in the room, the sound of a dozen mouse princesses sighing at once. Harriet scowled at the barred door and almost felt like sighing herself.
She walked to the little screened-off bed. Just like the night before, January brought her a mug of hot chocolate, and just like the night before, Harriet kept it in her cheek pouch and spit it all into the chamber pot.
Then she lay down in the bed with the Poncho of Invisibility wrapped around her shoulders and waited.
There was scuffling and a scurrying and the sound of a stone door opening. Harriet slipped out of the bed and snuck after the princesses.
Down the stairs they went again.
They crossed through the forests of metallic trees and this time, Harriet didn’t break off any samples. When the boats pulled away from the dock, Gemini was the last one to leave.
“Got your lead underwear on tonight?” he asked cheerfully.
Harriet hurriedly climbed aboard. The mole grinned. “There it is . . .”
He poled the boat across the dark water. Harriet squeezed August’s hand again.
She had almost two-thirds of a plan.
Well . . . three-fifths.
Definitely more than half, anyway.
When they reached the dock, Harriet slipped out of the boat. She was on her guard, in case Gemini was planning to double-cross her, but the mole pulled off his cloak, adjusted his tuxedo, and said, “Well?”
August looked around for Harriet, which would have worked better if Harriet wasn’t invisible.
“I’m over here,” said Harriet. “Okay. Gemini, day after tomorrow, I may need you and your brothers to do some digging.”
“Uh,” said Harriet, who had underestimated how strongly moles felt about digging. “Yes?”
Gemini grabbed her by the arm, put his shoulder against her waist, and pulled. Harriet nearly decked him before she realized that the mole was trying to dance with her.
“You look like a mole dancing with a disembodied hamster head,” said August. “It’s very weird.”
“Dancing is weird, if you ask me.” Harriet disentangled herself from the waltzing mole. “Can you dig up into the castle?”
“Sure,” said Gemini. “No problem. How fast do you want it done?”
“I can give you five minutes,” said Harriet. “Will that be enough?”
Gemini drew himself up to his full height, which barely came up to Harriet’s collarbone. “We’re descended from a long line of mole witches and mole engineers,” he said proudly. “We can do it in three.”
The next morning, Harriet woke up at half past seven, although the guard had the good sense not to jab her with anything.
“I’m coming,” she said grumpily. “I don’t know why. I get until tomorrow.”
“We are growing impatient,” said the mouse king when she arrived, rather frazzled, in the Throne Room.
“We who?” asked Harriet.
“It is the Royal We,” said the rat advisor hurriedly. (The Royal We is what it’s called when kings and queens refer to just themselves as “we” instead of “I.” Harriet’s parents had never done anything like that, and Harriet thought it was all rather silly.)
“Oh. Good for royal them,” said Harriet. “Look, tomorrow morning, all right? I’m on the cusp of a major breakthrough here.”
“I am forming some ideas,” said Harriet, backing toward the door. “Investigating leads. Gathering clues. I’ll see you tomorrow, Your Royal We-ness.”
She ducked out of the room and went down to the stables. Mumfrey poked his beak over the stall door.
“We’ll be done soon, buddy,” she told him. “Then we can get back on the road.” She considered. “Well, or I’ll have doomed my kingdom to some kind of horrible squishy future.”
Mumfrey glanced over at the stall where Hyacinth was standing and said, “Qwerk,” which is Quail for “No rush.”
“Tomorrow morning, I need you and Wilbur to be under the tower with the princesses’ bedroom,” said Harriet. “It’s the one with the bars on all the windows.”
“Qwerk . . .” said Mumfrey, which is Quail for “That seems weird.”
“Bring Hyacinth along with you,” said Harriet. “It’ll be easier.” She stood on tiptoes and hugged him fiercely.
She spent the rest of the morning composing a letter home to her parents. It was a postcard of the mouse kingdom, so she had to write small and couldn’t explain things very well.
Dear Mom & Dad,
I am in the mouse kingdom trying to break a curse. The mouse king is kind of a jerk and I don’t trust him. If I wind up dead or cursed again, please make sure Mumfrey is well fed and look after Wilbur because it will be my fault he lost his job in the stables here.
Also, if I fail, the kingdom will be doomed in a couple of generations, so you should probably talk to somebody about that.
Love,
Harriet
She stared at the letter for a while and then added:
P.S. Do not worry.
She suspected that Wilbur would tell her that writing Do Not Worry on a letter about how she might wind up dead was not going to stop her mother from worrying, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“Life was easier when I was invincible,” she muttered, and went into town to mail her postcard.
That night, when January brought her the hot chocolate, Harriet drank down every drop and went to sleep. She had a feeling that tomorrow was going to land like a ton of bricks and she wanted to be well-rested when it crashed down on her head.
CHAPTER 12
In the morning, Harriet was summoned before the mouse king at the unholy hour of five o’clock in the morning.
“This is ridiculous,” said Harriet. “Doesn’t the king sleep?”
“Four hours a night,” said the guard. “He spends the rest of the time sorting the Royal Library by color.”
“By color?” said Harriet, scandalized. “How do you find a book in it, if you don’t know what color it is?”
“We’ve all stopped trying,” said the guard, and opened the door to the Throne Room.
The mouse king and his rat advisor waited for her at the end of the hall.
“Yep,” said Harriet.
There was a brief, awkward silence.
“Look,” said Harriet, “I’d rather only tell this story once, and it’s all tied up with the curse and whatnot. Can you bring everybody in?”
The mouse king inhaled sharply, but waved for the guards to bring the princesses. Harriet kept an eye on the door. It was very early in the morning . . . would Wilbur make it in time?
It is very awkward making small talk with a king while you wait for a curse to be broken. Harriet tried: “So, how about this weather we’re having?” This earned her a deathly glare.
She looked at the door again. Still no sign of Wilbur.
“Err . . . color-code any good books lately?”
“Yes,” said the mouse king. “Three green ones. They were lovely.”
“What were they about?”
“They were green,” said the mouse king, as if it were obvious.
The princesses shuffled in, yawning. September leaned on May and snored.
“Now that we are all assembled,” said the mouse king, “tell us what you have learned!”
“Right,” said Harriet. “It’s all very simple. At night, a magic staircase opens in their room and they go down it into an underground cavern full of magic metal trees, across a black river that’s not quite made of water, and dance all night with the twelve sons of a mole witch. They’re dancing on a symbol that I’m pretty sure is powering the mo
le witch’s spells. Then they come back upstairs.”
The mouse king stared at her.
“Do you have any proof?” asked the rat advisor.
Harriet reached into her pack. “Right here,” she said, and pulled out the branch from the silver tree.
As Harriet had half suspected it would, when the king touched something from the kingdom underground, it had alerted the mole witch. The flagstones crackled and split. Up into the Throne Room emerged the head and shoulders of a gray mole with wild hair and a large pointed black hat.
“Who dares to challenge my spells?!” screeched the mole witch.
The mouse king drew himself up. “Who are you, madam?” he said. “And why have you cursed my daughters?”
“I’m sure you’ll get along great . . .” Harriet said to herself.
The Witch Molezelda folded her claws together and glared at the king. “It’s not a curse,” she said. “It’s a spell. I have twelve sons and I required twelve brides for them.”
“And why,” said the mouse king acidly, “did you choose our daughters for this?”
“Here it comes,” said Harriet, to no one in particular.
“I could have picked anyone,” said Molezelda. “I just needed twelve dancing brides to power my magic.”
(“Thought so . . .” muttered Harriet.)
“But my sons are all named after signs of the zodiac,” said Molezelda. “Your daughters are all named after months of the year. When I heard of them, it was obvious that they belonged together.”
“Signs of the zodiac, you say?” said the mouse king.
“Sure,” said Molezelda. “Aries, Gemini, Sagittarius, Virgo, Libra, and all the rest. A good, proper naming scheme.” She nodded to the king.
Of Mice and Magic Page 4