Knight-napped!

by Ursula Vernon

  “It’s no worse than the Sargasso Sea,” he said, not very convincingly.

  “. . . riiiiight,” said Wendell.

  Danny twisted to look up. They were about twenty feet from the drawbridge. The walls were slick with moss. They didn’t look very climbable.

  “We have to get around to the tower,” he said. “But we’ll have to find another way in.”

  “Maybe you could find it and come back and tell me,” said Wendell. “I’ll wait.”

  Danny heard a distant clanking sound.

  “Unless you want to wait inside the cell, I think we better go!” he said. “Before they wonder what the splashing is!”

  He took a deep breath, wriggled through the window—and dove into the moat.

  The water was warm and sticky.

  Really sticky.

  Danny had never before contemplated what it would be like to swim in a giant booger. It couldn’t be much worse than the moat.

  There was a splash—more of a splorch!—and Wendell landed next to him.

  Moving in the water wasn’t quite like swimming. You didn’t sink. It was so thick and slimy that you just floundered on the surface.

  Danny squelched toward the drawbridge. He didn’t know if there were any knights about, but if so, he wanted to be able to hide under the drawbridge while they passed. Wendell flailed after him. The surface of the moat squelched closed behind them.

  “It’s not like it’s just slime,” said Danny. “It’s got layers and everything.”

  The sludge around his legs felt like mud, then there was a layer that felt almost like tapioca pudding. His stomach was in something watery, and a green skin of algae was sticking to his armpits.

  “I am getting new and exciting diseases,” moaned Wendell.

  They reached the underside of the drawbridge. Big stone pilings held up the castle side of the bridge. There was just enough of a ledge to crawl up on.

  The iguana looked miserable. There was duckweed stuck all over him, like green measles. He tried to clean his glasses on his shirt, but they only got slimier. “I think we should go home and get some grown-ups.”

  Danny shook his head. “We might not get back in time to save Spencer.”

  Wendell groaned. “Danny, if it was you, that’d be one thing, but I’m not sure your cousin’s worth it.”

  “We don’t have any choice,” said Danny. “Look, he annoys me too—you think I like having somebody go wa-waaaaah . . . every time I lose a life on a video game?—but still. He may not be much, but he’s family.”

  He didn’t always like Spencer, but leaving him in a castle where they stuck dragon heads on the walls—no. Just no. Danny Dragonbreath had his limits. He was going to get to Spencer if he had to climb up the outside of the tower by himself.

  “You can’t climb up the outside of the tower by yourself,” said Wendell.

  “Are you gonna come with me?” asked Danny. “You said yourself that Spencer wasn’t worth it.”

  The iguana shook his head slowly. “I dunno. But if you go yourself, you might get caught, and then I’d have to try and rescue you, and I’m not good at daring single-handed rescues.”

  Danny hid a grin. “Well, maybe not. But I bet you could write an awesome paper about it.”

  “Best bibliography in town,” said Wendell.

  The two reptiles gazed up the tower wall. From underneath the drawbridge, they had swum (more or less) to the tower.

  Maybe it was just the angle, but it looked a lot taller from down here.

  It was nearly dark, but Danny could make out the shape of stones in the wall.

  “I think we can climb it,” he said. “It looks old.”

  “Yeah . . .” said Wendell. “Then we just need some way up from the moat.”

  “I guess even castles need rain gutters,” said Wendell.

  “After all, I bet if the basement here floods, it really floods.”

  The rainspout got them up on the roof. The stones were so large and the mortar so old that once they were past the ring of slime from the moat, it wasn’t much harder than climbing a ladder.

  Danny pulled himself up the last few feet and fell over the top of the battlements. He’d been afraid that some knights might be patrolling them, but apparently they’d all gone inside for dinner or something.

  Wendell, alas, did not have it quite so easy.

  “Dude,” said Danny. “You’ve gone three feet. It’s way easier than climbing the ropes in gym.”

  “Do you remember the last time we did the ropes in gym?”

  It would have been really dark, but the knights of Castle Wanderpoll were apparently quite modern in some regards, and there were lights flanking the drawbridge and the driveway. They cast an eerie orange glow from below.

  Eventually Wendell crawled to within a few feet of the top, and Danny pulled him up and over. The iguana sagged against the battlements. “That was awful,” he said.

  “Come on, that was nothing. You couldn’t have fallen if you wanted to. You could have taken a nap on some of those ledges.”

  A pair of headlights flashed into view. Danny and Wendell flattened themselves behind the ramparts.

  The car wound its way up the drive and parked in front of the castle. They heard a door slam, and then the creak of footsteps across the drawbridge.

  “I guess somebody just came home?” said Wendell.

  “Yeah—or they’re getting an audience together to watch a knight skewer Spencer.”

  They hurried along the battlements to the tower, keeping low in case any more cars came. At the base of the tower, they looked up.

  “Shouldn’t be hard to climb,” said Danny. “There are even gargoyles to grab on to if we need it.”

  “It looks different from up here,” said Wendell.

  “You’ll be fine,” said Danny. “Just don’t look down.”

  “Why does everyone always say that?” asked Wendell. “It doesn’t matter if I look down or not. I’m thinking about down!”

  “Well,” said Wendell, “I guess that means we’re on the right track.”

  They kept climbing. The stones had slimy patches that skidded under their fingers. Wendell yelped whenever he encountered one.

  They were almost halfway up the tower when there was a crunch of gravel and headlights swung into the driveway.

  “More cars!” hissed Danny. “Quick, go around the back!”

  The headlights washed over them and moved on. Danny and Wendell waited, not daring to move. The slam of the car door seemed very far away.

  The drawbridge door opened. There weren’t any loud voices or alarms. Danny relaxed. Wendell sagged. Fluffy cooed.

  A breeze started up. This was refreshing for about the first five seconds, and then Danny started to worry it would blow them off the tower. The pigeon flapped its wings for balance.

  Wendell let out a terrified meeping noise and wrapped his arms around the nearest gargoyle.

  “Come on, Wendell!” said Danny. “We’re nearly at the top!”

  “That only means we’re really, really far from the bottom!”

  “You can’t just stay there,” said Danny. “I mean, I suppose you can, but we don’t have much time to save Spencer—”

  “You go save Spencer,” said Wendell, eyes tightly shut. “I will stay with the gargoyle. I will name him Mister Scowly and we will be friends.”

  “But how are we going to get you down?”

  “When you’ve saved Spencer, get the fire department to bring out a ladder.”

  Danny rubbed his forehead with his free hand. “Seriously?”

  Wendell clung more tightly to Mister Scowly.

  “What happens when you have to go to the bathroom?”

  The iguana opened one eye. “Oh. Hmm.”
/>   “Dude, the window is five feet from here.”

  The breeze whipped around them. Wendell sighed from the bottom of his toes.

  “It better only be five feet,” he muttered.

  “Four and a half, tops.”

  “Good-bye, Mister Scowly. I’ll always treasure our time together.”

  It was more like six feet, but Wendell’s vision wasn’t that great, even with his glasses. Danny climbed into the tower window and reached down to pull Wendell up.

  Wendell rolled over the edge and sank down onto the floor, dripping moat slime all over the carpet. Fluffy took off, flapping around the room and cooing excitedly.

  “I’m getting some mixed signals here,” said Danny.

  Actually, he was a bit miffed. He’d just escaped from a dungeon, swum a moat, and climbed a tower, all because Spencer had sent him a note saying he was in trouble—and his cousin didn’t seem very happy to see him.

  Now that he looked around the tower, it was a lot nicer than the dungeon too. Spencer had a bed and a TV—with a video game system, no less! In fact, it looked like he’d been in the middle of a game when they came in the window!

  “Didn’t you send me that letter?” asked Danny. “By pigeon? That you were kidnapped?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Spencer. “I mean, Fluffy was living up here anyway, on the window ledge, and he was really nice and I drew him a little picture of you—”

  “It’s okay,” said Danny hurriedly, not wanting to be exposed to Spencer’s art.

  “It’s really cool! You’re trying to breathe fire and you can’t and Wendell’s pointing at you and there’s one of the alien tripods from Night of the Living Tripod 4 in the background—”

  “Anyway,” said Spencer, “when Fluffy came back, I thought maybe you weren’t coming, or had gotten lost or grounded or something.”

  “I wasn’t just gonna let you get kidnapped by knights,” said Danny, annoyed. “How did that happen, anyway?”

  “Oh,” said Spencer. “See, I made this friend at after-school care—his name’s Freddy, and he’s a knight!”

  “He totally understands what it’s like to be semi-mythical!” said Spencer. “He is too! It’s awesome! And his mom’s super-nice. Only I came over for a sleepover, and his granddad realized I was a dragon, and . . . well . . .”

  “He kidnapped you,” said Danny grimly. “Are you sure that wasn’t this Freddy kid’s plan all along?”

  “No!” said Spencer. “He’s my friend! And his mom’s an environmentalist!”

  “Oh,” said Spencer. “Well, see, Freddy’s still my friend—but his granddad’s really scary! I mean, it was fine at first, because we were having popcorn and watching a Fists of Newt-Addled Fury marathon, but then his granddad saw me and wanted to put me in the dungeon—he’s super-old and super-strict, and he was saying all these things about, I don’t know, traditions and knights and something stupid like that—and then Freddy’s sister convinced them to just put me up here in the tower, not the dungeon, she’s super-nice, even if she’s kind of a know-it-all—but then I talked to Freddy and he had an idea—I had already sent you the note, though, after I got locked in the tower, but before I talked to Freddy—”

  Danny’s eyes were starting to glaze over. He pulled himself together. “His sister locked you in the tower?!”

  “Only because it wasn’t the dungeon! They don’t have cable in the dungeon or anything!”

  “Do you know they have dragon heads in the library here?!”

  Spencer’s eyes went wide. “No way! Freddy never said anything about that!”

  Danny sighed. “Look. Knights . . . knights are bad news. We have to get out of here. We can go back out the window—maybe if we knot the bedsheets together—”

  There was a distant thudding as a door opened and closed somewhere at the base of the tower.

  “Oh no!” said Spencer. “The knights are coming! Quick, you two, hide!”

  Wendell dove under the bed. Danny sputtered. “But—we’re here to rescue you! We need to leave right now!”

  “Later!” said Spencer. “If they find you, it’ll ruin everything!”

  Danny might have argued further, but Spencer’s face was starting to screw up and turn red the way that indicated he was about to have a serious tantrum. Danny would almost rather face knights. He crawled under the bed next to Wendell.

  Spencer picked up the video game controller and turned his back to the door.

  The door opened. The castellan—the knight with the big plumy helmet who seemed to be in charge—came in. “Dragon!” he boomed. “It is time to end your foul life!”

  “Okay,” said Spencer, sounding bored. “Just let me save my game.”

  He clicked a few buttons, then scrambled to his feet.

  The knight swept Danny’s cousin out of the room, not bothering to close the door behind them.

  Danny waited until he heard the door at the bottom of the tower slam, then climbed out from under the bed.

  “We have to follow them! They’re going to slay him!”

  “I don’t think he even knows what slaying means! He probably thinks they throw you a party or something!”

  Wendell rubbed the back of his neck. “Didn’t he watch you play Monster Slayer IV: Battle for the Chimera Throne? That was like wall-to-wall slaying.”

  “Yeah, well, he was too busy telling me about how his friend played it faster and better and had all the cheat codes. Come on! This Freddy kid’s obviously convinced him it’s going to be okay when it’s not. We’ve got to save him!”

  Sneaking through the inside of the castle was, if possible, even more nerve-wracking than sneaking up the outside. On the one hand, there was a chance of guards around every corner, hardly anywhere to run, and the possibility of unexpectedly locked doors.

  On the other hand, your arms didn’t get as tired and there wasn’t nearly as much wind.

  The castle looked like you’d expect a castle to look, full of tapestries and long winding carpets and flagstone floors and big iron candlesticks.

  Well . . . mostly.

  What Danny hadn’t expected to find in a medieval castle were quite so many posters.

  They weren’t bad posters. Most of them were of sad-eyed baby seals, and some of them were of the planet earth with a faucet on it, and little educational notes about how many gallons of water got wasted every day watering the lawn.

  “This one’s outdated,” whispered Wendell. “They banned DDT years ago. Pelican populations have bounced back wonderfully.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Danny.

  “It was supposed to kill bugs. But it made the pelican eggshells super-thin, so they were laying, like, scrambled eggs.”

  “That’s tragic,” said Danny. “I feel terrible for them. I will go and hug a pelican as soon as we’re out of here. In the meantime, do you think maybe we could, I don’t know, find my cousin before somebody shoves a lance through him!?”

  “You don’t have to get all snitty about it . . .”

  They snuck down another hallway. It had three suits of armor, an iron maiden, and a very depressing poster about the Amazon rainforest.

  “What are you talking about? There were all those knights!”

  “Maybe,” said Wendell dubiously. “But I’m starting to wonder if there aren’t that many knights. I mean, how many have we actually seen?”

  “Um,” said Danny. “There were three who dragged us in, plus the castellan. Plus this Freddy kid and his sister.”

  “That’s four and two halves,” said Wendell. “That’s really not a lot of knights for a place this size. And have you noticed how run-down everything looks? The carpet’s worn through here and the wallpaper in that last room looked older than my mom.”

  “There could be a lot more knights that we don’t know about,�
� said Danny. “Dozens. Hundreds! Anyway, they all look alike in the armor. We’ve only seen like four in one place.”

  “You’re the one always saying knights are an endangered species . . .”

  Still, it was starting to seem like Wendell might be right. They crept from shadow to shadow, doorway to doorway, poster to poster . . . and didn’t see a single knight.

  “Maybe they’re all at the arena,” said Danny grimly. “Watching Spencer get slain.”

  “But where’s the arena?”

  With a flutter of wings and a worried coo, Fluffy settled atop a nearby statue.

  “Fluffy!” said Danny. “I wondered where you’d got off to!”

  “I suppose he’ll come in handy if we’re attacked by corn,” said Wendell.

  “Pfff. I’ll ask him where the arena is.”

  “Their brains are the size of a cashew . . .” said Wendell, not quite under his breath.

  “Don’t listen to him, Fluffy,” said Danny. “You’re a great pigeon.”

  The pigeon fluttered to Danny’s head and extended a wing. “Coo-oo—OO!”

  “Thataway!” said Danny.

  “Thanks,” said Wendell, “I could probably have figured that one out, even without awesome rat-speaking powers.”

  Dragon, iguana, and pigeon took off at a jog.

  Fluffy directed them through a long hallway, down a flight of stairs, and through another set of doors.

  “It just occurred to me,” said Wendell, “that if we go tearing into the arena, all the knights are going to be there.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Danny. “Your point?”

  “Like, a way that doesn’t get us immediately re-captured?”