Ratpunzel Page 4

  “Oh, yes,” said Harriet. “Just try to stop us. But we should probably be going now.”

  “Yes,” said Wilbur. He was starting to look a bit overwhelmed. “Yes.”

  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” said Harriet.

  “That sounds lovely,” said Ratpunzel. “We can have tea, and I’ll show you my plans for the cake!”

  She lowered them back down on her tail and waved from the window as they walked away.

  When they were out of earshot, Wilbur sagged a little and said, “So the prince is stuck in a tree. How is she doing it?”

  Harriet shrugged. “I’m not a witch! For all I know, turning people into trees is . . . like . . . super-basic evil witchcraft!”

  “Is there someone we could ask?”

  “I’m more interested in Ratpunzel,” said Harriet. “She’s a bit odd, isn’t she?”

  “I think she’s sweet,” said Wilbur. “She’s been stuck in a tower her whole life. You have to make allowances.”

  “Mmm,” said Harriet. “You’d think she’d figure out that there’s something weird going on.”

  “Not everybody is as suspicious as you are,” said Wilbur. “Anyway, maybe in her world it’s normal for people to leave and then a carving to show up. She probably thinks that everybody does that.”

  Harriet snorted. “You might be right.”

  “But what are we going to do?” asked Wilbur. “Even if we took the egg—we can’t just leave Ratpunzel there!”

  “No,” said Harriet. She squared her shoulders. “No, we can’t.” She’d rescued plenty of princesses. A few of them had even been glad to see her. The others had just been grumpy that she wasn’t a handsome prince. “We’ll just have to find another way.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The next morning, they got up early and went back to the clearing.

  “Ratpunzel!” called Harriet from the foot of the tower. “Psst!”

  She appeared in the window. “Hello! It’s all right, she’s not back yet.”

  A moment later, she had hooked her tail over the bar and dropped it down the side of the tower.

  “It really doesn’t hurt when you do that?” asked Harriet, once she reached the top.

  “Nope!”

  Wilbur was puffing by the time they pulled him up. “If I keep doing that, I’ll need to get in much better shape . . .”

  Harriet slapped him on the back. “Have a seat. Ratpunzel, would you mind if I . . . uh . . . made some tea?”

  “No,” said Ratpunzel. “Go ahead.” She smiled.

  She was very sweet and very eager to please. Harriet almost felt guilty about the fact that she was taking advantage of Ratpunzel’s good nature.

  Almost.

  Gothel started it by stealing Heady’s egg. We’re just stealing it back. And we’re going to rescue Ratpunzel too.

  She left Wilbur and Ratpunzel talking and hurried down the stairs. She could hear their voices from behind her, echoing down the stairwell.

  “So what is your day like?” asked Wilbur.

  “Oh, not nearly so exciting as yours, I imagine,” said Ratpunzel. “I wake up and make breakfast for myself. If Mother Gothel is home, I make breakfast for her. And then I do a few laps of the tower, and practice cartwheels. I can do a no-handed cartwheel!”

  Harriet was vaguely envious. She could never manage a no-handed cartwheel. Gravity was not kind to solidly built hamsters.

  “And then I read up on the history of cooking for a little while, and then it’s time to make lunch . . .”

  Harriet reached the kitchen.

  She filled the teakettle and set it on the stove to heat, then made her way toward Gothel’s bedroom door.

  It was locked.

  This would stop many princesses, but Harriet was a special breed.

  “And then I read cookbooks some more . . .”

  “That’s . . . a lot of cooking . . .” said Wilbur.

  Harriet pulled a piece of metal out of the lining of her sleeve. (She had taken to keeping one there after she had been arrested and thrown in a dungeon, on charges that she had been almost completely innocent of, except for the bit with the chicken.)

  “That chicken needed smacking, Your Honor,” she muttered. “And the pastrami sandwich was all I had to smack it with. No jury in the world would have convicted me.”

  It was a very simple lock. Well, Gothel had only Ratpunzel to worry about—no point in putting a massive padlock on everything.

  “And then it’s time to make dinner. I’ve read all my cookbooks cover to cover, of course, but sometimes Mother Gothel brings me new ones. Though I can’t always get the herbs. I’ve never seen cilantro.”

  Harriet slipped into the witch’s bedroom.

  The tower was clearly tapering as it went up, so each room was smaller than the one beneath. Despite sharing this floor with the kitchen, Gothel’s bedroom was enormous. She had a four-poster bed with curtains around it and a wardrobe large enough to store the clothes for an entire legion of gerbils.

  “And then Mother Gothel goes to bed and I read for a while. Unless it’s Sad Story Time, of course.”

  “Sad Story Time?” asked Wilbur.

  Harriet was barely listening.

  She’d found Heady’s egg.

  It was just as large as she remembered. Gothel had set it carefully in the corner. When Harriet touched the surface, the shell was hard, but warm.

  “Reptile eggs get hard before they hatch,” she muttered. “Hydras are reptiles, aren’t they? More or less . . .”

  She tapped on the egg with a claw and listened.

  There was no answering tap. Harriet sagged with relief.

  If the baby hydra had been preparing to hatch, it would have tapped on the shell. Snakes and lizards and alligators always tapped. They had to chip their way out of the egg with a special tooth.

  “And then I cry, of course,” Ratpunzel was saying matter-of-factly. “The one about the lost orphans in the woods always makes me cry. Then we harvest the tears and then I get a happy story. How do you do Sad Story Time?”

  Harriet, who had been only half listening, came suddenly alert.

  Sad Story Time? Harvest the tears? What?

  “We, uh, don’t have Sad Story Time,” said Wilbur worriedly.

  “You don’t? But how do you get the tears?”

  “Uh . . . we don’t . . .”

  “But doesn’t everybody save their tears?”

  “I don’t,” said Wilbur, sounding very confused. “I just wipe them away.”

  Ask the question, Wilbur! Harriet wanted to yell. Ask her why Gothel harvests the tears!

  “But Mother Gothel says that tears are precious! It’d be like wiping diamonds on your sleeve. And you have to save them because what if you ran out of tears?”

  “That’s an . . . interesting . . . way of looking at it . . .” said Wilbur.

  There was something strange and witchy at work here. Harriet’s whiskers were tingling. She turned toward the door, ready to go up and ask more questions about the tears, but then she heard the one sound she had been dreading most in the world.

  “Ratpunzel! Ratpunzel! Let down your tail!”

  Mother Gothel was back.

  CHAPTER 10

  Oh no!” Ratpunzel said. “If she finds you here, it’ll ruin the surprise! Hide!”

  There were scurrying sounds from upstairs.

  Harriet took a step toward the door. There hadn’t been anyplace in the kitchen to hide, but if she could get up the steps . . .

  “Ratpunzel! Where are you?”

  “Coming, Mother Gothel! I’m sorry, I was in the bathroom . . .”

  No time!

  Harriet shut the door, muffling the sounds from overhead, and locked it. It wouldn’t do for Gothel to discover that someone ha
d been snooping.

  Now, for someplace to hide . . .

  She threw open the wardrobe.

  “. . . um,” said Harriet.

  Gothel didn’t keep clothes in the wardrobe.

  Instead, both doors were covered in tiny stoppered vials. Each one had a neat, handwritten label on it, with a date. They were full of clear liquid.

  “This has taken an unexpected turn,” muttered Harriet.

  Directly in front of her, inside the wardrobe itself, were a small table, a pair of gloves, and a book.

  The book was open. Harriet scanned the words frantically.

  Being an Infallible Potion to Trap One’s Enemies in the Hearts of Trees read the title.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Mother Gothel!” said Ratpunzel, directly overhead. Her voice was loud enough to be a warning.

  To open the tree, place three drops of the essence upon a knife blade and slice open the bark. Thrust your enemy within the hole, then throw the essence upon them, and the bark shall close again. The tree shall hold them fast, and none shall be freed, even unto the end of the world, except by the essence itself.

  A recipe followed.

  Harriet palmed a vial of the liquid—you never knew what might come in handy—and shut the wardrobe.

  Footsteps came down the stairwell. Harriet looked around wildly for another place to hide.

  She dove under the bed.

  It was dusty under there, and she had an immediate desire to sneeze. She watched the door from under the bedskirt and tried to breathe through her mouth.

  There was a rattling at the door as Mother Gothel unlocked it, and then it opened. “I’m going to bed,” said Gothel over her shoulder. “It was a long walk. I can’t believe we ran out of flour.”

  “I made sugar-and-shrimp pancakes while you were gone,” said Ratpunzel. “Several times.”

  “Make fewer pancakes!” She slammed the door.

  Harriet’s nose was really starting to itch now.

  The elderly gerbil dropped a pack by the door and went to the egg.

  Harriet raised her eyebrows.

  “You’ll be so beautiful,” crooned Gothel. “So many heads! And you’ll guard the tower so well, and you’ll be able to cook. That idiot hamster I knew in college went on and on about how well your mother cooks. I’m so tired of Ratpunzel. She can’t follow a recipe to save her life. She keeps trying to add trout flakes and squid ink. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  Please, thought Harriet. Please don’t tell me that Gothel kidnapped Heady’s egg so that she could get a better cook!

  Harriet was used to villains having very weird motivations, but there were limits. She’d once had to fight off a dragon who was kidnapping people because it wanted their hats. It didn’t realize that the hats came off, so it had amassed quite a collection over the years, both of hats and disgruntled prisoners.

  This was, if anything, worse.

  “You’ll guard the castle,” Gothel told the egg, “and we won’t have any more of these foolish princes coming along to make googly eyes at Ratpunzel. I am getting so tired of dealing with princes.”

  Aren’t we all? thought Harriet. But we don’t go sticking them in trees!

  “You’d think they’d stay away from a tower in the middle of nowhere! How do they even find the place? It’s like there’s signs up saying ‘Hey, magical maiden held in a tower, this way!’”

  (Harriet actually had noticed this phenomenon. If you wanted to hide something, the worst possible place you could put it was an isolated fortress in the middle of nowhere surrounded by monsters. Heroes would drop out of the sky to find it. If Harriet had wanted to hide something, she would have gone to a busy marketplace in the middle of the day and just thrown a tablecloth over it.)

  “There are so many things I could be doing with her tears!” said Gothel, rapping on the egg with her knuckles. “You don’t even know!”

  Well, obviously it doesn’t know. It’s an egg.

  “It’s the whole reason I kidnapped her,” Gothel informed the egg. “I just thought she’d be a better cook.”

  Harriet rolled her eyes under the bed.

  Gothel paused. “. . . well. And I suppose Ratpunzel too. We’ll need to keep the source of the tears around. Maybe we can keep her in the basement or something.”

  Yikes! thought Harriet. Bad enough to keep her in a tower all her life, but then to exile her to a basement?

  She must have made some small, stifled sound, because Gothel looked up suspiciously.

  She pushed away from the egg, looking around the room. Harriet tensed.

  I’ll jump out. I’ll charge her. I’ll knock her over before she knows what’s happening. I hope she can’t do anything witchy on short notice. Bark is not my color!

  Gothel moved toward the bed.

  And then, from the next room, came an earsplitting shriek.

  CHAPTER 11

  It was the teakettle.

  Gothel groaned and changed direction. She flung open the door. “Ratpunzel!”

  “Sorry!” cried Ratpunzel from upstairs. “I’ll get it—just a minute—I have to finish picking up my tail—”

  The teakettle continued to shriek.

  Gothel stalked into the kitchen. “Stupid girl! How long does it take to pick up your tail?”

  “It’s a very long tail, Mother Gothel . . .”

  SHRIIIEEEEK! went the teakettle.

  Harriet saw her chance.

  She lunged out from under the bed and scurried to the door.

  Mother Gothel had her back to Harriet and was rummaging through the drawers. The kettle wailed like a hungry ghost.

  One chance . . . thought Harriet, and tiptoed for the stairs.

  Harriet went up the stairs and met Ratpunzel coming down. They exchanged wide-eyed looks.

  “Ratpunzel!” screamed Gothel. “There are no potholders in this kitchen!”

  “I usually use my tail, Mother Gothel . . .” She hurried down the steps with her tail curling and wriggling behind her.

  Harriet made it up the stairs, walking as lightly as she could. With all the racket, Gothel probably couldn’t hear her footsteps, but she would have hated to be wrong.

  When she reached the top, she looked around wildly. “Psst! Wilbur? Are you here?”

  “Up here!” whispered Wilbur.

  Harriet hurried up the ladder to Ratpunzel’s sleeping loft. She didn’t see Wilbur.

  “Wilbur?”

  “You’re under the pile of cookbooks?” she whispered.

  “Yes, the corners are awfully pointy! And I think I just learned a new way to slice avocados!”

  Harriet hunkered down behind the pile.

  The teakettle stopped.

  “You can’t just turn the kettle on and forget it, stupid girl!” Gothel growled. “You’ll burn the tower down!”

  “Sorry, Mother Gothel . . .”

  “Oh yeah,” whispered Harriet, to herself as much as to Wilbur. “We’re getting her out of here.”

  They heard Gothel stomp across the floor and slam the door. A few minutes later, Ratpunzel came up the ladder. “Stay quiet,” she whispered. “She’ll be asleep soon.”

  “How will we know?” whispered Wilbur, somewhat muffled by cookbooks.

  And indeed, after a few minutes a noise began to drift up the stairs that sounded vaguely like a goose being squashed in an accordion.

  Ratpunzel beckoned them down the ladder. Wilbur emerged from his hiding place, shedding cookbooks.

  In silence, Ratpunzel draped her tail over the bar on the window.

  She and Wilbur climbed down. The tip of Ratpunzel’s tail waved to them as they hurried away into the forest.

  CHAPTER 12

  Okay,” said Harriet. She began ticking things off on her fingers. “We need to ge
t Ratpunzel out.”

  “Yes,” said Wilbur.

  “Qwerk,” said Mumfrey.

  “Qwerrrk,” said Hyacinth.

  “And we need to get Heady’s egg out of the tower.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Qwerk.”

  “Qwerrrk.”

  “And we need to get both the egg and Ratpunzel to someplace safe.”

  “Right.”

  “Qwerk.”

  “Qwerrrk.”

  Harriet looked around the circle of faces, two quail, one hamster, all watching her expectantly.

  “So . . . anybody got any ideas?”

  Harriet sighed.

  “Well, I can figure out the first one,” she said. “And maybe even the second one. And then . . . um . . . we’ll improvise, I guess.”

  She twiddled her fingers a bit.

  “The biggest problem,” she said finally, “is getting into the tower.”

  “Well, that’s not hard,” said Wilbur. “You go up and ask Ratpunzel to let you in.”

  Harriet shook her head. “No, I mean getting into the tower another way. We’re super-vulnerable climbing up and down, and I can’t possibly carry that egg myself.”

  “But you heard Ratpunzel,” said Wilbur. “There’s no other way in.”

  “That’s your problem, Wilbur,” said Harriet. “You’re so trusting. And so’s Ratpunzel. I mean, it’s sweet, don’t get me wrong, but seriously.”

  Wilbur blinked.

  “Look, think about it,” said Harriet. “You build a tower, right? And then you want to put a stove and a bed and a bunch of other stuff in it. How are you gonna do that if there’s no way up?”

  “Errr . . . ladders?” asked Wilbur.

  “You ever tried to carry a stove up a ladder? And even then, how would you fit it through the window?”