The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo Page B

them has taken your daughter and if you will send —”
    The king started humming. “I can’t hear you!” he stopped to shout. “I cannot hear you! And anyway, what you say is wrong because you are a rodent and therefore a liar.” He started to hum again. And then he stopped and said, “I have hired fortunetellers. And a magician. They are coming from a distant land. They will tell me where my beautiful daughter is. They will speak the truth. A mouse cannot speak the truth.”
    “I am telling you the truth,” said Despereaux. “I promise.”
    But the king would not listen. He sat with his hands over his ears. He hummed loudly. Big fat tears rolled down his face and fell to the floor.
    Despereaux sat and stared at him in dismay. What should he do now? He put a nervous paw up to his neck and pulled at the red thread, and suddenly his dream came flooding back to him . . . the dark and the light and the knight swinging his sword and the terrible moment when he had realized that the suit of armor was empty.
    And then, reader, as he stood before the king, a wonderful, amazing thought occurred to the mouse. What if the suit of armor had been empty for a reason? What if it had been empty because it was waiting?
    For him.
    “You know me,” that was what the knight in his dream had said.
    “Yes,” said Despereaux out loud in wonder. “I do know you.”
    “I can’t hear you,” sang the king.
    “I’ll have to do it myself,” said the mouse. “I will be the knight in shining armor. There is no other way. It has to be me.”
    Despereaux turned. He left the weeping king. He went to find the threadmaster.

THE THREADMASTER was sitting atop his spool of thread, swinging his tail back and forth and eating a piece of celery.
    “Well, look here,” he said when he saw Despereaux. “Would you just look at that. It’s the mouse who loved a human princess, back from the dungeon in one piece. The old threadmaster would say that I didn’t do my job well, that because you are still alive, I must have tied the thread incorrectly. But it is not so. And how do I know it is not so? Because the thread is still around your neck.” He nodded and took a bite of his celery.
    “I need the rest of it,” said Despereaux.
    “The rest of what? Your neck?”
    “The rest of the thread.”
    “Well, I can’t just hand it over to any old mouse,” said the threadmaster. “They say red thread is special, sacred; though I, myself, after having spent so much time with it, know it for what it is.”
    “What is it?” said Despereaux.
    “Thread,” said the threadmaster. He shrugged and took another loud bite of celery. “Nothing more. Nothing less. But I pretend, friend, I pretend. And what, may I ask, do you intend to do with the thread?”
    “Save the princess.”
    “Ah, yes, the princess. The beautiful princess. That’s how this whole story started, isn’t it?”
    “I have to save her. There is no one but me to do it.”
    “It seems to be that way with most things. No one to do the really disagreeable jobs except oneself. And how, exactly, will you use a spool of thread to save a princess?”
    “A rat has taken her and hidden her in the dungeon, so I have to go back to the dungeon, and it is full of twists and turns and hidden chambers.”
    “Like a maze,” said the threadmaster.
    “Yes, like a maze. And I have to find my way to her, wherever she is hidden, and then I have to lead her back out again, and the only way to do that is with the thread. Gregory the jailer tied a rope around his ankle so that he would not get lost.” As the mouse said this, he shuddered, thinking of Gregory and his broken rope, dying, lost in the darkness. “I,” said Despereaux, “I . . . I will use thread.”
    The threadmaster nodded. “I see, I see,” he said. He took a meditative bite of celery. “You, friend, are on a quest.”
    “I don’t know what that is,” said Despereaux.
    “You don’t have to know. You just have to feel