“More in there,” he gasped, and dove back into the earth, like a fish into water.
Wilbur and Harriet scrambled to the hole. The faces of a half dozen mice, covered in dirt, looked up at them.
Harriet counted the butler, a cook, and two more guards. She gave the cook a hand up.
“Stop that!” yelled the mouse king. “Get back here!”
“You can stop this!” shouted Harriet. “August, tell him!”
“I’m not going to marry Gemini, Dad! Get out of the castle!”
The shaking intensified. The mouse king clutched at the windowsill to keep his balance.
More moles came out of the earth, leading more mice behind them. Princesses and guards straggled across the lawn, hand in hand.
Aries the mole looked around, saw Harriet, and saluted again.
“What now?” asked August, inching toward the palace. The earthquake slowed but didn’t stop.
Harriet sighed. “When I said I was going to bring the tower down around his ears,” she said, “I was really hoping to do it metaphorically.” She waved August forward. The rumbling in the earth began to quiet.
“You can’t tell me what to do!” screamed the mouse king.
The princesses were coming toward them, gathering around August. Harriet looked from mouse to mouse.
They were all dirty from climbing through the tunnels, but on every face was an identical expression of determination.
“I haven’t been out of the palace this far in years,” said January.
“I’ve never been out of the palace,” piped up December.
“Do you want to go back?” asked Harriet. “Because frankly, I’d just as soon knock the whole place down, but you live there. I think the spell will break if you go far enough from the symbol underground, but I can’t swear the castle won’t fall down first.”
The princesses looked at one another.
Harriet smiled.
“Aries!” she called. “Gemini! Go get the king!”
“No, you don’t!” snapped Molezelda.
Harriet drew in a breath. She’d almost forgotten the mole witch.
Molezelda pointed a heavy claw at the mouse king. “That man is the first person I’ve met who understands the importance of color-coding library books. I will get him out of that castle!”
And she dove into her burrow, while Harriet stood with her mouth hanging open.
“I thought she just wanted the princesses to power her spells,” she said. “I didn’t realize she’d be interested in the mouse king . . .”
On the other hand, she did name her sons after the signs of the zodiac . . . maybe she and the mouse king were meant for each other.
It did not take very long at all. A determined mole witch can move through earth faster than a quail can run.
“You will get back here!” the mouse king was yelling. “And you will be grounded for the rest of your lives until the wedding and then grounded some more and then—YRRRK!”
(The yrrrk! was the sound he made when Molezelda came up through the trapdoor and grabbed him.)
September giggled.
The sound of the giggle had barely faded from the air when Molezelda delivered the furious, bedraggled mouse king onto the lawn.
“There,” said Harriet with satisfaction. “Everybody’s out.”
The princesses looked at one another.
“C’mon,” said August to her sisters, and all twelve of them joined hands.
They walked across the lawn, away from the castle.
The tower fell down behind them, with a crash that rattled windows a mile away, and not a single one of the princesses looked back.
CHAPTER 16
You owe me three weeks’ worth of wages,” said Wilbur grumpily as they rode away from the mouse kingdom a week later. “They did not pay me.”
“Hey, they owed me half a kingdom,” said Harriet. “It’s not like I got paid either. I mean, I was going to give it back to the princesses, but it’s the principle.”
All in all, it had seemed like a good idea to leave town as soon as the dust had settled. The twelve princesses were doing just fine. August was opening a florist shop and March was apprenticed to a master chef. May had gone off to train as an assassin in the next county over, which had horrified Wilbur and delighted Harriet.
January, it turned out, had been secretly engaged to one of the guards for over a year, and he had taken the youngest mice to his mother’s house. (It was a very large house.)
January, as presumptive heir to the throne, had repealed the law about mandatory dance lessons, “to prevent future magical incidents.” Harriet approved of this enormously.
The mouse king and Molezelda the witch might have had something to say about it, but they were spending their honeymoon repairing the castle. The tower’s falling had damaged part of the main castle, so they were rebuilding, organizing everything first by color and then alphabetically. Molezelda’s underground cavern had survived the earthquake and she was paying for the reconstruction effort with silver trees.
“It’ll keep them occupied for years,” Gemini told Harriet a few days later. “But . . . err . . . we’re all going to find our own patch of dirt while they’re busy. In case they get any ideas.” He tugged on his snout. “You might want to go too. Mom’s in love with the mouse king, but she’s got a long memory.”
This was extremely good advice. Harriet took it to heart.
She’d left a note with August to keep an eye on Molezelda. If the mole witch got the idea to power her spells using unwilling dancers again . . . well, August had promised to send word.
Harriet nudged Wilbur. “It was time to leave anyway. Heady’s egg will hatch soon. Besides, you got a battle quail of your very own. That’s got to be worth something.”
Hyacinth preened. Mumfrey made besotted qwerking noises at her.
“It was nice of August to give her to me,” Wilbur admitted. “I suppose you don’t have much time to ride quail when you’re a florist.”
“We didn’t do so bad,” said Harriet cheerfully. “You got a quail, I saved my kingdom’s future . . .” (Gemini had also promised to take a look at the basement of Wilbur’s castle, but Harriet was keeping that as a surprise.)
They came over the rise and saw an ancient shrew sitting by the side of the road.
“Princess Harriet!” called the shrew, waving.
Harriet reined in the quail. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I wondered if you’d show up again . . .”
“Indeed,” said the shrew, fixing her with one bright eye. “Indeed. The mouse king didn’t give you a reward, did he?”
“Well, he let me leave the kingdom without throwing things at my head,” said Harriet. “Does that count?”
The shrew fairy snorted. “No.”
“But my kingdom’s okay now? Not going to fall in a handful of generations, however long that is?”
“It looks okay,” said the shrew. “I mean, it’s still squishy, but it’s a better sort of squishy.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
The shrew nodded. “We’ve taken the liberty of punishing Molezelda,” she said. “She probably hasn’t noticed yet, but she won’t be able to borrow anybody else’s power ever again. If she tries, her fur will all fall off.”
“Yeesh!” said Harriet. “Why didn’t you do that before?”
“Had to catch her in the act,” said the shrew, shrugging. “And it might have been a little tricky if she had all those dancers to call on magically. But never mind that! I have come to reward you, Princess! For your valor in breaking the spell and freeing the mice and moles from bondage! And also to take back the Poncho of Invisibility.”
“You lost the Poncho of Invisibility, didn’t you?” said the shrew.
“I had a lot on my mind!” said Harriet. “T
here were people yelling and battering rams and more yelling and things falling down! I think I did very well, considering!”
“Those don’t grow on trees, you know,” said the shrew. “We can’t just hand them out like candy.”
“Sorry,” muttered Harriet.
The shrew studied her for a minute, then her expression softened. “Well, you did do very well. Considering. A lot of other heroes wouldn’t have done as well. I admit, pulling half the castle down was a little extreme—”
“It was only a quarter of the castle! At most!”
“—but it taught the mouse king a very good lesson,” finished the shrew. “So I’m giving you a gift.”
“Eh?” said Harriet.
The shrew beckoned. Harriet drew closer to the ancient fairy. “Kneel, hero,” intoned the shrew.
The shrew reached out, tapped Harriet’s crown, and said, “I grant you a very limited charm. You can cliff-dive again safely.”
“Really?” cried Harriet. “Cliff-diving!?”
She could have hugged the old fairy, but the shrew vanished in a puff of smoke that smelled like cupcakes.
Harriet hopped up onto Mumfrey’s back, grinning from ear to ear. She could cliff-dive again! Nothing could ruin her mood, although Wilbur did try.
“I can’t believe you lost the poncho,” he said.
“How will they find it? It’s invisible!”
“The mouse king will probably find it and alphabetize it or something.” Harriet waved her hand. “Who cares? I can cliff-dive again!”
Mumfrey set off, chirping. They passed a small clump of blue flowers by the side of the road, which neither of them noticed. Thirty years later, August, by now the queen of florists, would come by and collect the seeds. She would grow the seeds in her garden, and a handful of generations hence, Harriet’s great-great-granddaughter would give them to a dragon in return for a very important favor.
But that’s another story, and the future is always squishy.
In this time and in this place, atop two very happy quail, Harriet and Wilbur rode away into the sunset, and on to the next adventure.
ABOUT the AUTHOR
Ursula Vernon (www.ursulavernon.com) is an award-winning author and illustrator whose work has won a Hugo Award and been nominated for an Eisner. She loves birding, gardening, and spunky heroines. She is the first to admit that she would make a terrible princess.
*Squidweights are more or less like squid, but they crawl around on land and make puddles out of ink. When things fall in and drown, the squidweight eats them. Harriet’s squidweight had been the size of a cow, and defeating it had taken three hours and a snorkel.
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