Harriet the Invincible

by Ursula Vernon

  “Wait here,” said the butler, and slammed the door again.

  Another few moments slid by, and the butler came back. “Harriet, you say? Harriet Hamsterbone, by chance?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Harriet. “And you don’t have to slam the door. You can just shut it. It’s cool.”

  The butler did not scowl—she suspected that his face could not move that much—but the air around him gave the impression of scowling anyway. When he shut the door this time, without slamming it, Harriet heard a whisper of conversation from behind the door.

  The door opened again. The butler started to say something, and somebody behind him whispered, “That’s Crazy Princess Hamsterbone? Really?”

  “Really,” said Harriet grimly. “And I need a prince. My family’s under a spell, and I need a prince to break it.”

  “His Grace is not at home,” said the butler.

  “What about the other prince?”

  “His other Grace is also not at home.”

  “I thought she’d have, like, fangs!” said one of the princes.

  The other prince giggled.

  “No one is at home,” said the butler, very forcefully, and slammed the door.

  Harriet turned around, walked back down the road—Mumfrey followed, qwerking nervously—and she proceeded to decapitate every single topiary rabbit she saw, as well as a topiary lungfish and a pair of topiary parakeets.

  “Qwerk-qwerk?” asked Mumfrey, which is Quail for “Do you feel better now?”

  Harriet put her arms around Mumfrey’s neck and pressed her face into his feathers. This alarmed Mumfrey a great deal, because Harriet generally required comforting about as much as a steel bear trap does, which is to say, not very often.

  Harriet felt awful. She couldn’t help but think that if she were a more princessly princess—the sort who was pale and melancholy and didn’t stomp—the princes would have helped her instead of leaving her on the doorstep, and her family might even now be waking up.

  She had spent all this time thinking that Prince Cecil was awful. Now it was starting to look like he was the best prince that her parents had been able to get.

  She took a deep breath. She wasn’t crying, exactly. She was just . . . breathing hard. With a little bit of a catch in it. Yeah. She’d fought ogres. No stupid princes who hid behind their butlers were going to make her cry.

  Fangs. Hmmph. Harriet wished she did have fangs. She’d bite that prince’s stupid ears off, and make him eat them. Without salt.

  “All right,” she said to Mumfrey, cleaning sap and bits of bark off her sword. “This isn’t going well. We’ll try one more, and if their prince isn’t at home, invincible or not, I’m storming the castle.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The third castle did not look nearly as perfect as the other two. It was large and ramshackle and the moat had green gunk in it and a sign that said “No Fishing.” The drawbridge did not seem to work anymore, and had broken down about six inches off the ground, so Mumfrey had to hop up onto it to get to the castle door. There were no flying banners, and a bird had nested on one of the roofs.

  Harriet had spent most of the ride over wondering gloomily if she should pretend to be a more princessly princess, and had finally decided that it was probably a bad idea. She’d need better clothes. And anyway, a really princessly princess would never have thrown Ratshade into the enchanted wheel in the first place, so the act would have been over once she started explaining why she needed a prince’s help.

  She got down from Mumfrey’s back and knocked on the door. Her stomach felt all woogly, like when she had to go to the dentist.

  Harriet was relieved that the woman who answered the door wasn’t a butler who looked like a coatrack. “I’m looking for a prince!” she blurted out.

  The woman sighed. “Aren’t we all, honey, aren’t we all . . . ?” She dried her hands on her apron.

  “It’s not for me,” said Harriet. “My parents are under a curse. Only a prince can break it.”

  “Oh, honey,” said the matronly hamster kindly, “I’m afraid you’re too late. The prince—well, he’s under a curse too.”

  “Really?” said Harriet, surprised. She’d thought that curses were rarer than that.

  “He’s at the top of a glass mountain,” said the other hamster. “Guarded by a fearsome hydra with five heads. I thought the hydra was a bit excessive, because no one’s ever even made it up the glass mountain, but there you are.”

  “Really?” asked Harriet as the matronly hamster pulled her inside the castle and beckoned to Mumfrey to follow. The quail stepped daintily into the foyer and tried not to knock anything over.

  “Absolutely!” said her hostess. “When I heard about you, I thought—now there’s a princess who might be able to help my son!”

  “Your son?” asked Harriet, trying to keep up with the conversation.

  “Well, yes,” said the other hamster. “I’m the queen.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Harriet was not used to a queen that roamed around the castle in an apron, looking like a housekeeper, but it soon became obvious that this was not the sort of castle she was used to.

  It was . . . well . . . shabby. The furniture was old and worn and had been gnawed on by countless generations of hamster toddlers (and a hamster just getting in his adult chisel teeth can really gnaw. Some of the legs had been reinforced with sheet metal). The tapestries were pretty but threadbare, and there weren’t servants and guards every few feet.

  “Not too many of us here,” said the queen over her shoulder. “Just me and the gardeners and two maids and Cook. And we’ve got a master-at-arms somewhere, but I don’t like to bother him when he’s napping.”

  Harriet didn’t mind at all. It was refreshing to go somewhere where you weren’t constantly being dusted around and swept around and curtseyed at. Her mother would have been horrified.

  “So, Your Majesty, about this curse . . .” she said as they walked through the great hall, and Mumfrey padded along behind them.

  “You see,” said Queen Hazel, taking Mumfrey and Harriet past the hall and into a small drawing room off to one side, “we’ve never been a very wealthy kingdom. And so poor Prince Wilbur was wearing a hand-me-down christening gown from his cousin Matilda, and I’m afraid it was rather pink. So when the wicked fairy showed up, she thought he was a princess, and . . . well . . .”

  “At any rate,” said Queen Hazel, “we’ve heard all the stories about how wonderfully you handled those ogres! You’re just the sort of princess we need! Someone who can give that hydra a proper whomping! And—err—well, whatever you do to teach a glass mountain who’s boss . . .” She waved a hand, presumably in the direction of the glass mountain. “I’ve got a map—it’s only a day or two away, you can’t miss it. And we’ll pack a lunch for you and your quail.”

  And so, before she even had time to think, Princess Harriet was back on the road, in pursuit of a prince at the top of a fabulous glass mountain.

  CHAPTER 18

  The glass mountain was easy to find. In the daylight, it glittered like diamonds.

  Princess Harriet had never actually climbed a glass mountain before, but she had an idea. It was extremely obvious, but presumably the previous people who had tried to climb the glass mountain hadn’t been trying very hard.

  As for the hydra, she was a little more worried. She’d fought a hydra once, and it wasn’t easy. When you chop off one of a hydra’s heads, it immediately grows two more heads. A little indiscriminate chopping, and suddenly your five-headed hydra has eighty-nine heads and a real attitude problem. You can theoretically stop this by burning each stump with a torch, but it’s very messy, to say nothing of the difficulty of carrying a torch in one hand and a sword in the other and trying to use both on a giant dragony thing that’s trying to bite you.

  Harriet had come out of the las
t fight covered in bald patches where she’d burned her own fur off by accident, and Mumfrey hadn’t stopped snickering for a month.

  They reached the glass mountain a little after dawn.

  “Hmm,” said Harriet.

  She climbed down from Mumfrey’s back and went up to the mountain. She poked it a few times.

  Definitely glass. The surface of the mountain was as smooth as a punchbowl. There was no question of climbing it. Anything but a fly would slide right off. She rapped her knuckles on it, and it went “tink.”

  “Right!” Harriet dusted her hands together and got back on Mumfrey. “I have a plan.”

  “Qwerk.”

  “It may even be a brilliant plan.”

  “Qwerk?”

  “You’re going to hate it.”

  They backtracked to the nearest village. The village was called Brickingham and it held an annual cabbage festival. The only other significant thing about Brickingham, so far as Princess Harriet was concerned, was that it had a hardware store.

  At the hardware store, she bought two toilet plungers, eight bungee cords, and a hacksaw.

  They rode back to the glass mountain. Harriet set to work.

  First she used the hacksaw to cut off the wooden handles of the plungers, because it is very hard to chop through wood with a sword, and the sword tends to be useless for brandishing at monsters afterward. When she was left with four large rubber plunger heads, she picked up a handful of bungee cords and turned to Mumfrey.

  “I told you that you were going to hate it,” said Harriet.

  Mumfrey hid his head under his wing, and refused to come out while Harriet strapped the plunger heads to his feet and tied them in place with the bungee cords.

  “There!” said Harriet, sitting back in satisfaction. “Now we can get up that stupid mountain!”

  It took some coaxing, but Mumfrey was eventually persuaded to come out from under his wing and test his new shoes.

  He took a wobbly step along the ground, then another one. Then he reached the base of the mountain, and put a foot up on it.

  The plunger heads—which were really giant suction cups, when you got right down to it—stuck firmly to the glass.

  Mumfrey stared at his foot in astonishment. He put his other foot on the glass, and it stuck. He lifted the first foot—it took a bit of effort and made a loud SKWTHUP! sound—and put it down farther up the glass.

  “Yeeeehaaa!” cried Harriet, and vaulted onto the quail’s back. “Let’s go!”

  CHAPTER 19

  It took about half an hour to reach the top of the glass mountain. Mumfrey had to spread his wings occasionally and flap for balance—he was too big to fly, but he could still flap—but the suction cups worked wonderfully. All Harriet had to do was hold on and enjoy the ride.

  They reached the top. It wasn’t very big. There was a small cottage at the top, and in front of it, looking very bored, a hamster and a hydra were playing cards.

  “Whoa!” said the hamster, staring at her. “Did you really manage to climb the mountain?”

  “Nothing to it,” said Harriet. “Are you Prince Wilbur?” The other hamster looked to be about her own age.

  “That’s me. I’ve got a crown around here somewhere . . .”

  “That’s the plan,” said Harriet, drawing her sword.

  The hydra hissed and dropped its cards. Harriet took a step forward.

  “Qweerrgg,” said Mumfrey, which was Quail for “I’m going to sit this one out, my feet are tired.”

  A head darted at her, jaws snapping. Harriet slapped it away with the flat of her sword, careful not to cut the beast, for fear of spawning another head.

  The princess gritted her teeth. Why hadn’t she brought torches? What was a little burned fur, really? It grew back eventually! She was going to have to try to knock it out with her sword hilt, which is a lot harder when there are five separate heads you have to whack.

  Wilbur stepped hurriedly in front of the hydra. “No! Wait! Don’t hurt Heady!”

  “Look,” said Wilbur, “I’ve been up here for months. Since my twelfth birthday. Heady and I play cards. She’s really nice. And she bakes great cookies!”

  The hydra blushed and tried to look modest.

  Harriet rubbed her face. “Okay. Well, I’ve got no beef with Heady . . . I just need a prince.”

  Wilbur narrowed his eyes. “You don’t want to marry me, do you? Because I’m really not interested in getting married. I’m sure you’re a very nice princess—”

  “Ha!” said Harriet.

  “—but I’m twelve.”

  “I need you to break a curse,” Harriet said.

  “Oh. Is that all?” Prince Wilbur relaxed. “Of course I’ll help! Curses are no fun. What do I need to do?”

  “There’s this magic sleep, and the only thing that can break it is a prince’s kiss.”

  “And everyone else in the palace,” said Harriet. “There’s a hundred and seventeen of them.”

  “You know, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay here with Heady,” said Prince Wilbur. “There is entirely too much kissing involved in this curse.” He made a face.

  “It’s not all the same to me,” said Harriet. “You’re the last prince I’ve got. The others all laughed at me or made their butlers tell me they weren’t at home. They wouldn’t even listen about the curse.”

  “That was pretty awful of them,” said Wilbur sympathetically. “They’re not very nice princes, though. They won’t talk to me either, because we’re poor.”

  “Yeah. And your mom—the queen—asked me to come and get you off this mountain.”

  “Oh, Mom . . .” Wilbur sighed. “I hope she’s okay. What’s your name, anyway?”

  Harriet sighed. “Princess Harriet.”

  “You mean—”

  There was a brief silence. Harriet’s face felt hot.

  Wilbur scuffed a toe along the glass and said, “I always thought you sounded awesome.”

  Harriet blinked.

  “You got to have such cool adventures. You fought ogres! And jousted! And they say you dove off the Cliffs of Perdition, which are like eight hundred feet high!”

  “Nine hundred twenty-three,” mumbled Harriet, staring at her feet.

  “I always wanted to do that kinda thing,” said Wilbur. “But it never happened. I mean, we couldn’t afford a riding quail or anything. And I had to get a paper route so we could afford to fix the castle roof. So I never did get to have any adventures.”

  Harriet felt as if she had been carrying around a heavy rock, and someone had just told her that she could finally set it down. She reached out and took Wilbur’s hand.

  “Well,” she said, “now you get to have one.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The trip back to Harriet’s kingdom took a lot longer than Harriet was expecting.

  It wasn’t that anyone tried to stop them. Bandits would occasionally try to hassle a hamster girl with a sword, but nobody was going to mess with a hamster riding a hydra. On at least one occasion, thugs jumped out of the woods, took one look at them, apologized, and asked if they knew the way to the cabbage festival.

  No, the problem was that Prince Wilbur just wasn’t used to adventures.

  He tried. He really did. Harriet tried to be patient, because she knew he was trying, but she still occasionally wanted to dump him off a cliff for being useless.

  Where Harriet had spent the last two years pretty much living in Mumfrey’s saddle, Wilbur could only ride Heady for a few hours before he needed a break.

  Harriet bought a few goosedown pillows at the nearest town, and they tried to pad the saddle. It helped, even if it looked ridiculous.

  Heady was a surprisingly good cook, so there were no problems with the quality of the food—although Harriet never got used to seeing the
hydra scramble an egg with a whisk in one set of teeth and the frying pan in another—but camp at night was tough too.

  “We may have been poor,” grumbled Wilbur, “but we always had beds.”

  “You get used to it,” said Harriet.

  Keeping her temper had never been one of Harriet’s strong suits, but she gritted her teeth and tried not to scream. It wasn’t his fault. She hadn’t been very good at the adventuring life at first either. Her first week, she’d been so bad at cooking that she had to share Mumfrey’s birdseed a couple of times.

  Wilbur was trying. He didn’t mean to whine. She kept telling herself that.

  And he was . . . well, to give Wilbur credit, he was nice. When someone saw Heady and screamed and ran away, he would spend hours consoling the poor hydra and telling her that people just needed to learn to see the beauty inside. Harriet couldn’t have told anybody that, at least not with a straight face.

  Other than being screamed at by the occasional terrified citizen, Heady was thrilled to be out. She hadn’t been off the glass mountain in ages, and was excited to see the world. She and Mumfrey had struck up a friendship, based largely on comparing how bony their respective rider’s rear ends were.

  The princess had other problems too. She kept worrying that something was going to get into the castle, past the thorns, and get her parents. What if somebody decided to take over the kingdom? Sure, they’d need a couple dozen men with axes, but that wasn’t hard to come by, was it?