Knight-napped!

  For Ben

  DIAL BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street • New York, New York 10014

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2015 by Ursula Vernon

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  Knight-napped! / by Ursula Vernon.

  pages cm. — (Dragonbreath ; 10)

  Summary: “Danny Dragonbreath must save his cousin from the ultimate enemy: knights!” —Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-698-17582-2

  [1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Knights and knighthood—Fiction. 3. Cousins—Fiction. 4. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V5985Kni 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013027094

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  A New Dance

  A Strange Message

  A Surprise Ancient Enemy

  Fluffy to the Rescue

  Storming the Castle

  Dungeons and Lackeys

  Fire!

  Lady Wanderpoll Strikes

  Squelch!

  Meeting Mr. Scowly

  The Unwanted Rescue

  Coo!

  Die, Foul Dragon!

  Dragon vs. Knight

  Good Enough

  Homeward Bound

  About the Author

  The bird was large and gray and had a purplish-greenish shine across its feathers. It was definitely a pigeon.

  It was also very definitely sitting on Danny’s head.

  “Technically it’s a rock dove,” said Wendell the iguana helpfully. “Columba livia, to be exact. They nest on cliffs, and when people started building skyscrapers, the pigeons starting nesting on those too.”

  “Wendell,” said Danny.

  “Yes?”

  “Why is there a pigeon on my head?”

  Wendell rubbed his chin. “Good question. Maybe it thought your head looked like the Empire State Building?”

  Danny Dragonbreath had enough problems. He was the only dragon in a school full of frogs and lizards, he couldn’t breathe fire very well, and he was pretty sure that he had just flunked a pop quiz. Having a pigeon on his head was one problem too many.

  He tried to pull it off. It latched on to his scales with its feet and made happy pigeon noises.

  “I think it likes you,” said Wendell.

  “Get it off!” yelled Danny. “Lunch will be over any minute now! I can’t go back to class with a pigeon on my head!”

  “Errr . . . tell everyone it’s a hat?” Wendell flapped his hands at the pigeon. “Go on, shoo!”

  The two-minute bell rang in the distance.

  The pigeon finally got the hint and took off, flapping. “Coo!” it said reproachfully.

  “That was weird,” said Wendell. “Even by your standards.”

  Danny rubbed his head and grumbled.

  They were nearly back to class when a familiar shape loomed in front of them.

  “Hey, Dorkbreath,” said Big Eddy.

  “Big Eddy,” said Danny.

  He poked Danny in the chest with one finger. Since Big Eddy was a Komodo dragon, his fingers were the size of bratwurst. “You a dancer now, Dorkbreath? You gonna invent a new dance and put a video on the Internet so we can all laugh at you?”

  He poked Danny again.

  “We’re gonna be late . . .” mumbled Wendell, trying to slide sideways around Big Eddy.

  Danny rolled his eyes. “Obviously there was a pigeon on my head. You need to pay closer attention.”

  Big Eddy blinked.

  The school bully was very large but not very bright. It was sometimes possible to stun him by uttering something so unexpected that he took a few minutes to process it.

  “Pigeon?” he said.

  “It’s a new thing. Head-pigeoning. I thought you would have heard of it by now.”

  “Head-pigeoning?”

  The bell rang again.

  “Gotta go!” said Danny, and ran off to find out how badly he’d flunked the quiz.

  Danny and Wendell got off at the bus stop near Danny’s house. The dragon got about five steps before something warm and feathery settled on his head.

  “It’s the pigeon again, isn’t it?” said Danny grimly.

  “Yep,” said Wendell. “Or a pigeon, anyway. I suppose there could be more than one.”

  This was not reassuring.

  Danny hunched his shoulders and stalked down the sidewalk. There was probably no point in trying to get it off until he was close enough to the house to duck inside.

  A passing car slowed down to stare at him.

  Danny was no stranger to having cars slow down to stare at him, but usually it was because he was doing something awesome like standing on a rooftop wearing a cape or building a giant snow platypus. Merely having a pigeon on his head didn’t qualify.

  “Wendell! Hey, Wendell!”

  Wendell slowed down. Danny sighed and turned around.

  Christiana Vanderpool, the only person in school nerdier than Wendell, ran down the sidewalk after them. “Hey, Wendell, can I borrow that book on the Burgess Shale?”

  “Sure!” said Wendell.

  “The what?” said Danny.

  “Very old rock. Had lots of squirmy things fossilized in it. Stuff nobody’s ever seen on earth before. Or since, for that matter.” She paused. “Did you know there’s a pigeon on your head?”

  “Columba livia—”

  “Yeah yeah, so Wendell said.”

  “Quite a nice specimen,” said Christiana. She stood on her tiptoes and scratched the pigeon’s head. “Who’s a good widdle pigeon, den?”

  “You want the pigeon? It’s yours. You can teach it to fly mazes or something.” Danny tried to pry the pigeon off his head again. It flapped hard a few times, then snuggled down against his scales.

  “I think it likes you,” said Christiana.

  “Yeah, it sat on my head at recess too.”

  “Is this why Big Eddy was wandering around with bread crumbs on his head? I was wondering about that, but I didn’t want to ask him.”

  “Did it work?” asked Wendell.

  “Well . . . sort of. . . .” She scratched her head. “He didn’t get pigeons, he got starlings. A bunch of them. And you know what they do when they get excited . . .”

  “Squawk?” guessed Danny.

  She gave him a look. “No. They poop.”

  “The pigeon followed Danny home from school,” said Wendell proudly. “And it hasn’t pooped on him once.”

  “Maybe it’s a homing pigeon,” said Christiana. “Although they usually go to places, not to people. There are reports of homing pigeons flying thousands of miles with i
mportant messages. They navigate by magnetic fields.”

  “Hey, that’s a good thought,” said Wendell. “We should check it for messages.”

  “Why would someone send a homing pigeon after me?” asked Danny. “I don’t know any pigeons.” He paused. “Unless . . . there’s an evil genius about to take over the world using pigeons, and this one’s just the first, and pretty soon everybody will have a pigeon on their head and then we’ll be helpless when he deploys his orbital moon laser!”

  “Or her orbital moon laser,” said Christiana. “I hear more women are breaking into mad science all the time.”

  “There’s a note tied to its leg,” said Christiana. “C’mon, little guy, let me just untie this . . . there’s a good pigeon . . .”

  The note was tiny and rolled up like a scroll. She smoothed it out and handed it to Danny. “It’s addressed to you.”

  Danny scratched his head, moving the pigeon slightly. “Okay . . .”

  Dear Danny,

  Help! I am stuck in a castle full of knights and they say they’re going to slay me. I don’t know the name of the castle, but all the flags have a spotted chicken and a carrot on them. I am in a tower and it is drafty and cold and there is no TV.

  Whatever you do, DON’T TELL MOM!

  Love,

  Spencer

  P.S. The pigeon’s name is Fluffy.

  “Fluffy?” said Danny. “Who names a pigeon Fluffy?”

  Fluffy the pigeon cooed happily at him.

  “Seriously, you’d name a pigeon—Flappy or Pidgy or—or—Mister Feathers, not—”

  “Not to interrupt,” said Wendell, “but your cousin Spencer has apparently been kidnapped.”

  “Oh, yeah, that.” Danny shrugged. If there had been a world championship for Most Annoying Cousin, Spencer would win every time. Then he’d whine until somebody carried the trophy for him. “I mean, I suppose that’s awful . . . in theory . . .”

  “I thought you were friends after we all went to Camp Jackalope together,” said Wendell.

  “Yeah. Then he came over for three days at Thanksgiving and made that wa-waaaaah . . . noise every time I died playing Super Mech Unleashed. And then when I tried to get him to stop, he told his mom, and his mom told my mom, and there was a lecture about sharing and—look, we sort of un-bonded.”

  “A spotted chicken and a carrot . . .” said Christiana to no one in particular.

  “You can’t let your cousin get slain by knights.”

  “They probably won’t slay him. Anyway, knights are an endangered species. If they need to kidnap Spencer to survive, it’s the circle of life or something. I can’t believe, after all the times you’ve been like ‘Nooo, Danny, we can’t interfere with the natural order!’ that you want me to go pester some knights.”

  “You wanted to cross my goldfish with a potato!”

  “I was going to start a mutant fish-and-chip farm.”

  “You were using masking tape.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to go check it out,” Danny said. “But how do we find the castle?”

  “Heraldry,” said Wendell. “We’ll go to the library and find a book on heraldry, and we’ll see who has a spotted chicken and a carrot on their coat of arms, then we’ll look up their castle—”

  “It’s Castle Wanderpoll,” said Christiana. “And it’s not a carrot, it’s a parsnip.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Danny.

  “Did you have to do a paper on coats of arms?” asked Wendell.

  “Um,” said Christiana. “Not exactly . . . ?”

  “So let me get this straight . . .” said Danny.

  Christiana sighed.

  “Your family just happens to own a castle?”

  “Not my family,” said Christiana. “I mean, we don’t own the castle. We don’t even own our house. But—look, you remember in fourth grade when we had to do the project where you draw your family tree and write everybody’s names down?”

  “I remember,” said Wendell.

  Danny had a hard time remembering homework from the day before, let alone from previous grades. He moved the pigeon to the other side of his head. His scales were getting sweaty.

  “Right,” said Christiana. “So I went digging and apparently ‘Vanderpool’ used to be pronounced Wanderpoll and there was a coat of arms with a chicken and a parsnip and a knighthood and a castle. I’ve never been there. We’re only sort of related. They’re like my great-great-great-cousins eight or nine times removed. But . . . well . . .”

  “I guess it can’t hurt to go to the castle and look around,” said Danny. He sighed. He knew that if Spencer really was in trouble, he’d have to rescue him—it was just what you did—but the thought that Spencer might be locked in a tower over, say, the critical week of spring break when he usually visited Danny, was certainly appealing.

  But his aunt would probably worry. And then she’d tell Danny’s mom and Danny’s mom would have a Talk with him about Why We Do Not Go Off and Leave Our Cousins in Horrible Danger. He sighed again.

  “We’ll go tell my mom,” he said. “You guys can call from our house.”

  “Is your mom going to let you stay at a castle overnight?” asked Christiana as they walked in Danny’s front door.

  “Sure,” said Danny. “This is the easy part.”

  “Sure,” his mom called from her office. “A castle! Sounds exciting!”

  Christiana stared at him. “I don’t even know these cousins!”

  “It’ll be fine,” said Danny. He shoved most of a box of snack cakes into his backpack. “We’ll just take some food in case we miss dinner.”

  He zipped up the backpack just as his mom entered the room.

  She was carrying a coffee mug. She looked at Danny and tilted her head slowly to one side.

  “It’s School Spirit Week,” said Danny. “You know. Tuesday was ‘wear pajamas to school’ day, and Friday was ‘wear a pigeon on your head’ day.”

  Mrs. Dragonbreath’s gaze traveled slowly over to Christiana.

  “Don’t look at me,” said the crested lizard. “I don’t do Spirit Week. It’s like brainwashing without the fun bits.”

  Danny’s mother went to the coffeemaker. “In my day we just dressed up like our favorite fictional character,” she said. “Getting old, I guess . . . Have fun storming the castle . . .”

  “Thanks, Mom!”

  It took three bus transfers to get to Castle Wanderpoll.

  “Not bad for a castle that’s technically in Austria,” said Wendell.

  “It’s a good bus system,” said Danny.

  They both looked at Christiana and waited for her to protest how impossible it all was.

  She stared out the window and didn’t say anything.

  This was worrisome.

  She didn’t say anything when they got on the bus. She didn’t say anything when they got off the bus. She didn’t say anything when they got on the next bus, or the one after that.

  The bus drivers did say something, but that was another matter.

  (That last bit was particularly annoying. Danny had to pretend to be blind for the entire bus trip, and Wendell had to lead him to his seat.)

  “You think Christiana’s okay?” whispered Wendell.

  “How should I know?” Danny whispered back. “She’s not yelling at me, so that’s probably a bad sign.”

  “Sorry,” said Wendell. “But you haven’t said anything for hours. I mean, we transferred at the Black Forest and the Carpathian Mountains, and you didn’t say a word.”

  “Oh. Right.” She waved a hand. “It’s impossible. Laws of physics. Buses. Very upsetting. Completely unprecedented. Et cetera.”

  She went back to staring out the window.

  Danny and Wendell exchanged concerned looks. This w
asn’t like Christiana at all. Normally if you broke the laws of physics around her, you needed a signed note from the universe saying that it was okay.

  “Is something bothering you?” asked Wendell worriedly.

  Christiana finally stopped looking out the window and turned around to glare at them.

  “No, I’m just fine! Finding out that your relatives are in the habit of kidnapping little kids and imprisoning them in towers isn’t upsetting in the least!”

  “Look,” said Danny awkwardly, “it’s not like it’s . . . y’know . . . a normal little kid. It’s Spencer. I’m not saying it’s not bad, but . . . well . . .”

  “It’s Spencer,” said Wendell.

  “This is not a compelling ethical argument,” said Christiana, but she looked a little more cheerful anyway.

  “Besides,” said Danny, “for all we know, we’ll get there and they won’t really have kidnapped him. He’ll be sitting in the basement watching cartoons.”

  “You’re right,” said Christiana, sitting up straighter. “This could all just be a misunderstanding. A good scientist shouldn’t make assumptions until she has all the facts.” She nodded once. “Thanks, Danny.”

  Being thanked by Christiana was such a novel sensation that Danny was too busy enjoying it to say anything else until the bus driver called “Castle Wanderpoll!”

  They had arrived.

  Castle Wanderpoll was perfect.

  If you were going to take a photo of a castle to go in the dictionary next to the word “castle” you couldn’t do any better than Wanderpoll. Danny, Wendell, and Christiana stood at the foot of the road leading to the castle and stared up at it.

  “Wow,” said Danny.

  “That’s the place,” said Christiana. “Parsnip flag and everything.”