“I got bored with deportment lessons,” said Harriet, annoyed. “Is that all this is? Because I’m a princess, and if I’m beating monsters senseless, it is something that princesses do, okay? And anyway, you eat people, so I don’t think you get to tell me how to live.”
“I don’t eat people,” said the Ogrecat. “Not anymore. Haven’t for months now.”
“If you heard that a crazy hamster princess with a sword was attacking ogres who ate people, wouldn’t you consider a change of diet?”
Harriet thought about this. It did seem logical, and it was cool that her reputation had spread so far, but it was a bit disappointing to come all this way and discover that the monster had already gone on a diet. “So what do you eat?”
“Soy, mostly,” said the Ogrecat. “They do a pretty good person-flavored tofu. Of course, the texture’s not quite right, but everybody heard what you did to my great-aunt, so I can live with the texture.” He rooted around until he found the book he had dropped, which was titled To Serve Man-Flavored Substitute, and waved it at her. Apparently it was a cookbook.
“Which one was your great-aunt?” asked Harriet, who had not previously considered that the various ogres might be related.
Princess Harriet wandered around the Ogrecat’s front yard. Unlike the front yards of some previous ogres, there were not piles of bones lying around. There was a skull hanging over the front door, but it looked old, and it was wearing a jaunty hat.
“About that skull—” she began.
“Traveling salesman,” said the ogre. “He tried to sell me non-stick cookware. And that was twenty-six years ago, so give me a break.”
Princess Harriet had to admit that the statute of limitations on eating traveling non-stick cookware salesmen had probably elapsed after twenty-six years. She wandered around the yard some more.
“Soy, huh?”
“Mostly. Some chickpeas. I could make hummus, if you’re hungry.” The ogre waved his claws. “I have kale chips?”
Harriet shuddered. Kale chips were a foe beyond any hero’s strength.
“So I guess I don’t need to beat you up, then,” she said.
“I’d really prefer you didn’t.”
“Qwerk!”
The ogre made very good hot tea and even had a saucer for Mumfrey. It was all very cozy. Since the last time Harriet had spent any time with an ogre, it was trying to eat her, it felt a little weird.
“Qwerk,” said Mumfrey, which was Quail for “Yeah, but what’re you gonna do?”
“I guess that’s all the ogres, though,” said Harriet.
“Qwerk,” agreed Mumfrey.
The hamster princess sighed. “So that’s it, then. Time to go home . . .”
CHAPTER 7
The day that Princess Harriet was to return home, the entire court assembled in the great hall. Everyone came out, including the dukes, the earls, the viscounts, and the regular count (the marquess was home with measles), as well as various servants and staff and hangers-on and a special guest.
They waited in the great hall for three hours, until everyone was thoroughly bored and had to go to the bathroom, and then a servant rushed in and whispered something in the hamster queen’s ear.
“What?” said the queen. “In her room?”
Apparently Princess Harriet had arrived very early, gone directly to the stables to make sure that Mumfrey had all the birdseed he could eat, and then went to her bedroom and went to bed.
“Go wake her up!” yelled the queen.
The queen went up the ninety-six stairs to Harriet’s tower. It was a lot of stairs to climb, so the princess had marked every stair with a fraction to let you know how far up the stairs you were.
The hamster queen was panting by the time she reached the top, and reconsidering the wisdom of putting Harriet’s bedroom at the top of a high tower, but princesses lived in towers. It was traditional.
“Harriet?” she said, pushing the door open. “Honey, are you home?”
Princess Harriet was indeed home. She was also snoring loudly enough to rattle the windowpanes, and clutching her sword in her sleep.
The queen sighed and shook Harriet’s shoulder. “Honey, it’s time to get up.”
“Hrrggggkkkk . . .” said Harriet.
The queen tried again. “Honey . . .”
“Znnggghk!”
There is a power that all mothers possess, although some of them rarely use it, to wake their children from a profound sleep. Queen Hamsterbone gritted her teeth, took a deep breath, and yelled:
Harriet shot out of bed with her sword, swung it wildly over her head, realized that it was her mother, and dropped the sword on her own foot.
“Yerowrch!”
“Oh good,” said the hamster queen, adjusting her skirts. “You’re awake.”
Harriet picked up her sword and rubbed her smarting toes. She felt a sudden sympathy for the Ogrecat of Olingsturm.
“You need to get dressed,” said the queen. “The court is waiting for you!”
“Court?” asked Harriet blearily. “What court? I haven’t been arrested. I don’t need to go to court. They can’t prove anything. I was nowhere near that chicken. I demand a lawyer!”
“The royal court,” said her mother patiently. “The dukes and the earls and the viscounts and—”
“I don’t know what you were thinking, traveling at such a beastly hour,” said the queen, while Harriet tried to make her clothes look as if she hadn’t slept in them.
“Mumfrey was homesick,” said the princess. “It took longer to get home than I thought it would.”
“I should say so!” The queen folded her arms. “Do you know that it’s only a week until your birthday? It’s hardly enough time to get your dress sewn and the cake baked and the musicians brought in and—”
“The army of gardeners with pruning shears,” muttered Harriet, who remembered the part of the curse about the brambles.
The queen frowned.
“Mom,” said Harriet, “there’s no point in pretending that this is a normal birthday. You’d be better off skipping the musicians and hiring every fairy in the land to try and fend off Ratshade.”
“We will discuss this later,” said the queen, in a tone that indicated that later meant sometime in the next century. “For now, you must go and greet the court. And the prince.”
Harriet froze.
“The what?”
“The prince,” said the queen. “You didn’t think we’d just wait for any old prince to come along, did you?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” said Harriet. “Um.”
“Well, we did think about it. So while you were out gallivanting around, saving children from witches living in candy houses—”
“I saved the witch, actually. Children kept chewing her rain gutters off, the poor thing.”
“—we were finding an appropriate prince. And it wasn’t easy!”
Harriet stared at her feet.
“For one thing,” said her mother, “you’ve made quite a name for yourself. It wasn’t easy to find a prince willing to come and kiss you. Now come meet him.”
“But—”
“And leave that sword here!”
“Now I remember why I liked fighting monsters,” muttered Princess Harriet, and followed her mother down the tower stairs.
CHAPTER 8
The week before Harriet’s birthday passed very quickly for everyone except Harriet.
The dukes, the earls, the viscounts, and the regular count wished her a happy upcoming birthday at least five times a day. This got old quickly.
The queen refused to talk about Ratshade or hamster wheels, and would turn the conversation immediately to whether the cake should be chocolate or carrot.
The king, meanwhile . . .
“He means well,�
�� Harriet told Mumfrey one evening. “It’s just that he does it five or six times a day. And I keep running into him because he’s pacing around my bedroom tower muttering about brambles and the foundations. He even ordered two hundred gallons of weed-killer, but Mom made him get rid of it because it wasn’t organic.”
“Qwerk,” said Mumfrey.
“But at least he’s thinking about it! Mom keeps changing the subject. If I have to hear about fabric swatches and puffed sleeves one more time, I’m going to go find Ratshade and throw myself on the stupid hamster wheel, just to make it stop!”
“Qwerk,” agreed Mumfrey, pecking birdseed out of her hand.
“And as for Prince Cecil . . .” She shuddered.
It is not entirely fair to say that Harriet disliked Prince Cecil on sight, because she actually disliked him before they ever met, thanks to her mother.
But it’s fair to say that meeting Prince Cecil did not make her any happier.
He did not like riding quail or fighting monsters. He kept trying to explain things to her—things she already knew perfectly well, like how to play checkers and how to reduce a fraction to the lowest common denominator.
And he seemed to think that she ought to be grateful he was willing to kiss her.
“I’m not going to marry him,” said Harriet. “I beat him three times at checkers and he had the gall to tell me I was getting better at the game, like I haven’t been playing since I was a little kid! Can you imagine being married to that?”
Mumfrey shrugged.
“I’ll run away and become a traveling monster-slayer first. I’ll paint my shield black and wear black armor and call myself the Black Knight and people will go ‘Ooooh, she’s so mysterious . . .’”
“Qwerk!” said Mumfrey, which meant “Uh-huh.”
“We’ll dye your feathers black too.”
“QWERK!”
“Oh, well,” said Harriet, sighing. “My birthday’s tomorrow, anyway. At least it’ll finally be over. I’m almost looking forward to the deathly sleep, just so I get a rest.”
She wasn’t that worried about the curse. At least stupid Prince Cecil ought to be good for that. She was mostly worried about Mumfrey, who would pine away if she spent more than a few days asleep. She’d already made the stablemaster promise to come and read him bedtime stories, and to make sure he got extra grain in the evenings.
Besides, there was a whole squadron of armed guards waiting for her up in the tower. Once she was done saying good-bye to Mumfrey in the stable, she was going to be under guard from dawn until dusk.
Harriet sighed, petted Mumfrey’s beak, and turned away, whereupon she ran into a tall, bony white rat with angry red eyes.
“Sorry,” said Harriet automatically, “I . . . didn’t . . . see you . . .”
“Qweeeerrk,” said Mumfrey, and kicked the door of his stall nervously.
Her gaze went slowly over the rat, from the bone-white fur to the stump of a tail.
CHAPTER 9
Indeed I am,” said Ratshade. “Indeed, in-very-deed.” She glared down at Harriet.
Twelve years had not changed Ratshade. She looked as pale and hungry and evil as ever, although her claws were much shorter.
“But it’s not my birthday yet,” said Harriet. She wasn’t as frightened as she should have been. She’d spent years fighting ogres ten times the size of Ratshade. She did wish that she had her sword, but her mother had confiscated it after the deportment teacher had shown up with another book to balance on her head and Harriet had chopped the book into pieces.
“Yes, it is,” said Ratshade. “Your birthday is on the seventeenth of August.”
“No, the eighteenth,” said Harriet.
Harriet was forced to admit that this was entirely possible. Her father was one of those people who was always wandering into a room and asking “What day is it? Is it Tuesday?” when it was actually Saturday, and had once famously misplaced the entire month of November.
“Huh,” said Harriet. “So it’s my birthday today. And here you are.”
“And here I am,” agreed Ratshade.
There was an awkward silence. Harriet stuffed her hands in her pockets.
“I can’t help but notice you aren’t begging for mercy,” said Ratshade.
“Not really my style,” said Harriet apologetically. “Sorry.”
“Not a lot of weeping either.”
“I don’t weep,” said Harriet. “Every now and then I have a good cry, but weeping isn’t my thing. And I’m not going to swoon either, so don’t bother.”
“Hmph!” Ratshade folded her arms. “Not very princessly, are you?”
“Fine,” grumbled Ratshade. “It’s just not very satisfactory, cursing a princess and then when you show up, the princess is in the stable—”
“Qwerk!” snapped Mumfrey, and kicked his stall door again.
“—and she’s not begging for mercy or anything. Do you know how hard that curse was? And then I had to go into hiding for years so that nobody could find me and force me to break it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Harriet, who was already getting tired of talking to Ratshade. “I’m sure it’s been awful. Now where’s the hamster wheel?”
“In the stableyard,” said Ratshade sulkily.
Harriet followed the wicked fairy out of the stable and into the broad open yard where the quail exercised during the day. Mumfrey, who was quite intelligent for a quail (which admittedly is sort of like being intelligent for a grapefruit), gathered himself up and jumped over the stall door so that he could accompany his rider to her fate.
“Aww,” said Harriet, patting the quail’s neck. “You’re a good boy, Mumfrey.”
“Qwerk,” grumbled Mumfrey, which was Quail for “I want to kick that rat in the face.”
Princess Harriet stepped into the stableyard, and beheld her doom.
CHAPTER 10
In her travels across the land, jousting and jumping off high objects, Princess Harriet had encountered any number of wheels. Hamster wheels were very popular across the kingdom. Hamsters ran on them for exercise, for fun, and more importantly, to power things like flour mills and forges and cooking spits and anything else where you needed a lot of rotary motion and didn’t have a windmill or a watermill available.
She had never actually used one, however, because while she wasn’t afraid of the curse, she also wasn’t stupid.
Even if she had been fond of hamster wheels, she probably wouldn’t have used this one. It was old and rusted and had sharp pointy bits of metal sticking off it and enormous jagged splinters and little tiny hard-to-see splinters, the sort that get into your foot and require someone with tweezers and a needle to get it back out again.
“Yeesh,” said Harriet.
“Qwerrrrrk . . .” said Mumfrey.
“Well, there it is,” said Ratshade grumpily. “One hamster wheel. Go jab yourself on it, and we’ll get this over with. If I start work now, I might be able to make Fairy God-Mouse Today’s Most Wicked List this year.”
Harriet stared at the wheel, her mind working furiously, and then turned back to Ratshade.
“Before I do—”
“No, no,” said Harriet. “Actually, I wanted to thank you.”
Ratshade immediately looked deeply suspicious. People did not usually thank wicked fairies. The mouse who delivered her groceries often said, “Here you go, ma’am, thank you for not killing me,” but you couldn’t really count that.
Ratshade did not have eyebrows, but she had big pokey whiskers that went up in surprise. “Really?”
“Yeah,” said Harriet. “I’ve had a really good life, because of your curse. I got to do all kinds of stuff.” She took a step toward Ratshade. “So—well, I couldn’t shake your hand before, probably, but since you’ve trimmed your claws . . .”
She stuck out her hand
.
“Oh . . . well . . .” Ratshade felt completely out of her depth now. She was a wicked fairy. She knew how this was supposed to go. A normal princess would be weeping and swooning and falling down, and then Ratshade would press her hand against the wheel—or if the princess was a real numbskull, she’d go “Oh! A hamster wheel!” and run up to it herself, which was practically shooting fish in a barrel—and then the curse would take and everybody could get on with their lives.
This was not a normal princess.
Ratshade felt vaguely embarrassed and determined to get this over with as quickly as possible. “Right. Um. You’re welcome, I guess.” She reached out to shake Harriet’s hand.
Harriet grinned.
Just being invincible doesn’t make you good with a sword. Swinging swords is an art form. Harriet didn’t have a sword with her, but she still had the muscles she’d earned from two years of riding around and swinging swords at people, and now she had Ratshade’s hand.
“Whaaaat?!” yelled the wicked fairy as Harriet whipped her around and charged toward the hamster wheel.
Now, there are any number of things that a wicked fairy can do to stop someone who is attacking her. Ratshade could have put Harriet to sleep or set her on fire or turned her into a sack of turnips, all without breaking a sweat.
All of those things, however, require at least a second or two and a couple of magic words to pull off.
She didn’t get a second or two.
Harriet slammed her into the hamster wheel, hard enough to give the wicked fairy a shoulder full of splinters.
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