Whiskerella Read online

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Ursula Vernon

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399186578

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Design by Jennifer Kelly

  Version_1

  For Carlota, who probably has a pair of glass slippers somewhere

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  The castle of the hamster king was a bustle of activity. Servants ran back and forth, carrying tablecloths and platters of food, hanging banners from the battlements, and scouring the countryside for extra tables.

  “Harriet!”

  Through this controlled chaos, the voice of the hamster queen cut like an ax through warm butter.

  “HARRIET!”

  “I’m up here, Mom!” yelled Harriet Hamsterbone, princess of the hamster kingdom, slayer of Ogrecats, bane of giants, breaker of curses, and recreational cliff-diver.

  “Are you ready?” called her mother, climbing the stairs to Harriet’s bedroom. There were only ten stairs, since Harriet had moved out of the tower bedroom following the incident with the thorn hedges. “The guests will be here soon! You’ll need to get . . .”

  The hamster queen put her hand over her eyes. “Yes, but meeting the ambassador is only an excuse for the ball, dear.”

  “It is?” asked Harriet, still dangling from a curtain rod by her ankles.

  “Yes. We’ve invited all the princes, you see.”

  “They don’t like me, Mom.” (The feeling was mutual, but Harriet didn’t want to get into that with her mother.)

  “They’re just intimidated by you, dear,” said the hamster queen.

  “And rightly so!” said Harriet, unhooking her ankles and falling in a heap on the floor. “I’m very intimidating! If you intimidate monsters, sometimes you don’t even need to fight them. They just apologize and go away.”

  “Yes, dear,” said the hamster queen. “But we’re hoping that one of these princes will marry you.”

  Her mother sighed heavily. “Well then, you’ll need someone to look after the castle while you’re away.”

  Harriet was forced to acknowledge the logic of this. She climbed to her feet. “Okay, maybe. But not one of these princes. They call me Crazy Princess Harriet. None of them are going to talk to me.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” said her mother. “They won’t know who you are. It’s a costume ball!”

  Harriet clasped her hands together, delighted. “Ooh! Really?”

  Visions of costumes whirled through her mind. She could be a vampire—a witch—a ferocious Battle Hamster of the North, who wears a helmet with twisting horns and speaks in verse—

  “Yes,” said her mother. “The bat ambassador is very fond of costume balls, and everything came together beautifully. So everyone will be masked, and then—”

  “Awwwwwwww,” said Harriet. “Moooooom!”

  “Don’t Moooooom me, young lady! This is your chance to meet some nice young princes without terrifying them!”

  Harriet groaned, her visions of Genghis Prawn slipping away. “But you always told me to be myself!”

  “Yes,” said her mother. “You should be yourself. It’s just that when you are being yourself, it can be very alarming for innocent bystanders, and the stories tend to grow a bit when they’re repeated. So this way, we’ll all be masked and the princes can get to know you without your—ah—reputation preceding you. And if you hit it off with some nice young prince, by the time of the unmasking, the stories won’t matter at all!”

  Harriet felt that on some level this was completely wrong. But she also knew that there was no point in arguing when her mother had this look in her eye.

  CHAPTER 2

  The ball was going well by Harriet’s mother’s standards, which meant that Harriet was about to die of boredom.

  She had talked to the bat ambassador at great length. He was a good-natured, inverted fellow very interested in opening up trade with the hamster kingdom. Her mother wouldn’t let her hang upside down to talk to him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Alas,” said the bat ambassador. “I fear that sonar is a difficult skill to learn.” He sipped his drink neatly, holding the glass right way up, and took a bite of a bug canapé. “And would you truly wish to sit and practice clicking at a very high pitch, when you could be dancing with princes?”

  “Absolutely,” said Harriet. “One hundred percent. No question.” The ambassador laughed.

  There were, in fact, three princes at the ball whom Harriet knew already. Their names were Archibald, Bastian, and Cauldwell, and Harriet thought of them as Princes A, B, and C. She recognized them at once in spite of the masks. No one else had that same air of bored superiority.

  She detested the princes cordially, because she had asked them for help long ago when the hamster kingdom had been trapped under a spell of sleep, and they had laughed at her. (Her mother insisted on the “cordial” part. Harriet would have preferred to detest them actively, possibly with screaming, but since their parents ruled neighboring kingdoms, this was not considered diplomatic.)

  Harriet had been pretending that they did not exist all night. This was known in royal circles as “giving them the cut direct.” Unfortunately, they hadn’t noticed her, which is known in royal circles as “being oblivious.”

  Her mother showed up to talk to the bat ambassador. Harriet slouched off, looking for someone to talk to. Eventually she saw the only prince she really liked, her best friend Wilbur, who was lurking near the punch bowl. His mask was rather threadbare and could not hide his perpetually worried expression.

  “Wilbur!” she said. “It’s me!”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” said Harriet. “Lots of princesses walk like that.”

  Wilbur gave her a look. “Sure,” he said. “And most of them have a sword stuffed under their ball gown too.”

  Harriet hastily adjusted her skirts to hide the sword, which was sticking o
ut behind her like a long, slightly lopsided steel tail. “Yeah, well . . . I told Mom this wasn’t going to work. What are you doing here? You don’t like balls any more than I do.”

  “Ratpunzel wanted to come,” said Wilbur. “She’s never been to a ball before, so Mom asked me to come with her and make sure she was okay. Plus, the rat prince was going to be here, and she’s still madly in love with him.”

  Harriet looked over to where Ratpunzel was dancing with a tall rat in a mask. She was immediately identifiable by her enormously long tail, which she carried looped over her shoulder. She looked like she was having a great time.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here. I was getting bored.”

  Wilbur did not reply. Wilbur appeared to have briefly lost the power of speech.

  Harriet turned and followed his gaze. And blinked.

  There was a hamster in a mask at the entrance to the ballroom. Her fur was gray, her dress was white, and she was absolutely stunning.

  She was wearing shining glass slippers.

  CHAPTER 3

  Harriet did not often think about beauty, but she was generally considered a classic hamster beauty. She was round and fluffy, and her nose was perfectly twitchy and pink.

  Being Harriet, she had worked hard to overcome this with interesting scars and a faint, lingering odor of quail, but was still at the very least quite lovely. It was just that people were generally too afraid to say so.

  The hamster on the stairs, however, was in a class by herself. She looked like a small, fuzzy star. She had enormous eyes and eyelashes that could slice cheese. Her nose was orchid pink and her ears looked like tiny seashells. Her dress was studded with gems so that she seemed to move in a cloud of dazzling light. Her whiskers shone like spun glass thread.

  She was so beautiful that the butler had forgotten how to announce her and was saying “Uh . . . the uh . . . the . . . a . . . Lady . . . uh . . .”

  You couldn’t even be jealous. It would be like being jealous of a sunset or a flower. She was beautiful in a way that seemed to have nothing at all to do with the person looking at her.

  “Whoa,” said Harriet.

  “Who is that?” whispered Wilbur.

  “I have no idea. I know all the princesses for miles around, and I don’t know her. I’ll ask.” She made her way through the crowd to the new arrival.

  The hamster girl was swept away by Prince A. Harriet blinked.

  She tried again when that dance had ended a few minutes later. “Hi there! I’m—”

  The rat who had been dancing with Ratpunzel cut in and pulled the hamster into a waltz.

  Harriet raised her eyebrows.

  The third time was the charm, and only because Prince B and Prince C both leaped to claim the stranger’s hand for a dance and ran headlong into each other. (It is possible that Harriet’s foot might have helped this along.)

  “Come on,” said Harriet, taking the stranger’s arm. “You’ve been dancing all night. You need some punch.”

  “I—oh, I shouldn’t!” A line formed between the hamster’s eyes as she frowned. Even her frown was elegant. “I’m supposed to be here to meet princes . . .”

  “I’ll introduce you to the one by the punch bowl, then,” said Harriet cheerfully. “His name’s Wilbur. I’m sure he’d love to dance with you, but he’s shy.”

  The stranger perked up. “I’d love to meet him!”

  “Great!”

  She steered the hamster in glass slippers to the punch bowl.

  Harriet waited for a moment, and then, when it became obvious that Wilbur was not going to make anything but strangled gurgles, said, “He’s pleased to meet you. What’s your name?”

  The stranger smiled through her beautiful whiskers. “It’s a costume ball,” she said. “I could be anyone.”

  And then, before Harriet could think of an answer to that—and before Wilbur could think of anything at all—another prince descended and swept the stranger off to dance.

  CHAPTER 4

  What gets me,” said Harriet, a few hours later, sitting on a bale of hay in the stable, “is that not even Mom knew who she was. She wasn’t on the guest list or anything. She crashed the bat ambassador’s ball.”

  Harriet, Wilbur, and Ratpunzel had relocated to the stable. The castle was full of people running around cleaning up and lost party guests stumbling around trying to find their way to the bathroom or the exit (or both) and it was just easier to go down to the stables and get out of everyone’s way. Plus it meant that Mumfrey, Harriet’s beloved battle quail, could poke his head over the stall door and get his beak scratched.

  “Was the ambassador mad?” asked Ratpunzel, round-eyed. She was a very sweet mouse who had grown up in near-total isolation, so people being angry upset her a great deal.

  “No, no,” said Harriet. “He thought it was all hilarious. He thinks everything is hilarious, I think. No, what worries me is that we had an intruder and nobody noticed!”

  “They certainly did notice,” said Wilbur, scratching Mumfrey. “Everybody noticed her!”

  “Qwerk,” said Mumfrey, which was Quail for “A little to the left.”

  “Okay, okay,” Harriet admitted, “once she came in, sure. But how did she get in? And how did she get out again before the unmasking?”

  Because that was the crux of the mystery. At exactly midnight, everyone was supposed to take off their masks. Then, in theory, everyone would discover whom they had been dancing with, and there would be some hilarious misunderstandings and possibly a few unexpected romances.

  In actual practice, everybody knew their friends (and enemies) perfectly well. To actually disguise Harriet would have required a lot more than a small eye-mask. (She figured that she could do it with full-body bandages, like a mummy, if she only communicated in groans. She had gotten about three words into this suggestion before her mother had vetoed the entire thing.)

  But at this ball, the real question was the identity of the mysterious and beautiful stranger—and she had vanished.

  “Oh, that,” said Ratpunzel. “She left about twenty minutes early. In a big round carriage pulled by two white quail.”

  “Qwerk?” said Mumfrey, suddenly interested.

  “How do you know that?” asked Harriet.

  “Um. I saw it?” said Ratpunzel. “One of the princes stepped on my tail and it got tangled up, so I had to go rewrap it.”

  “Is your tail okay?” asked Wilbur.

  “Oh, yeah. You have people climb up and down a tower using your tail, you’re not gonna care about the occasional foot.” Ratpunzel patted her tail. “Anyway, I got lost trying to find the powder room—it’s such a big castle!—and wound up in the tower.”

  Ratpunzel had lived almost all her life in only three rooms and got turned around easily in large buildings.

  Harriet nodded. She approved of this sort of action.

  “While I was out there I saw her come out of the castle and get in a carriage with white quail.” Ratpunzel sat back. “And then I went inside, and we all unmasked and the rat prince danced with me again!”

  “We could ask the grooms,” said Wilbur. “They had to put the quail in the stables and bring them around for people. They’re sure to remember white ones.”

  “Good idea!” Harriet slid off the hay bale and went to go find a groom.

  The groom frowned. “Odd sort of thing . . .” he added.

  Harriet leaned forward. “What? What was odd?”

  “Well . . . it was probably nothing, Princess . . .” The groom shifted nervously. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “This goes no further,” Harriet promised. “Nobody’ll get in trouble.”

  “It was the fellow driving the coach with the white quail. Big white mouse in a hat with a plume. He parked the coach and then he just sat there on it.”

/>   “Now that is odd,” said Wilbur.

  “It is?” said Harriet, who did not know much about parking coaches.

  “Well, think about it,” said Wilbur. He had worked as a stableboy not that long ago and knew things that the usual sort of prince didn’t know. “You park the coach and then you have to wait for the ball to be over so that you can take the prince or duke or whoever home, right? But who wants to sit on a coach for six or seven hours? So what usually happens is that you unhitch your quail so that they don’t have to stand around waiting, and then you get down and go into the stable yourself and wait for the prince or the duke to call for you. Otherwise you’re sitting around in the cold with nothing to do.”

  Ratpunzel blinked. “You mean he held it the whole time?”

  Harriet did not really want to speculate on the bladder capacity of coach-mice. “Did he do anything else strange?”

  “Well, he didn’t talk to anybody,” said the groom. “But there’s some as are shy, and some as can’t talk, so I didn’t think much of that. But sitting on the coach all that time . . . that was odd.”

  Ratpunzel and Harriet and Wilbur looked at one another.

  “Odd,” said Harriet. “Odd. Yes.”

  “The ball’s over, though,” said Wilbur, “so I guess that’s the end of that.”

  “Maybe,” said Harriet. “But I still get the feeling we haven’t seen the last of our mystery hamster. . . .”

  CHAPTER 5

  It took three days for Harriet to be proven correct, and it happened over breakfast.