But what Despereaux had come to say to the king had to be said and so he tried again. “Excuse me,” he said. He wasn’t certain, really, how a mouse should address a king. “Sir” did not seem like a big-enough word. Despereaux thought about it for a long moment.
He cleared his throat. He spoke as loudly as he was capable of speaking. “Excuse me, Most Very Honored Head Person.”
King Phillip stopped beating his crown against his chest. He looked around the room.
“Down here, Most Very Honored Head Person,” said Despereaux.
The king, tears still falling from his eyes, looked at the floor. He squinted.
“Is that a bug speaking to me?” he asked.
“No,” said Despereaux, “I am a mouse. We met before.”
“A mouse!” bellowed the king. “A mouse is but one step removed from a rat.”
“Sir,” said Despereaux, “Most Very Honored Head Person, please, you have to listen to me. This is important. I know where your daughter is.”
“You do?” said the king. He sniffed. He blew his nose on his royal cloak. “Where?” he said, and as he bent over to look more closely at Despereaux, one tear, two tears, three enormous, king-sized tears fell with an audible
“Sir, Most Very Honored Head Person, sir,” said Despereaux as he wiped the king’s tears out of his own eyes, “she’s in the dungeon.”
“Liar,” said the king. He sat back up. “I knew it. All rodents are liars and thieves. She is not in the dungeon. My men have searched the dungeon.”
“But no one really knows the dungeon except the rats, sir. There are thousands of places where she could be hidden, and only the rats would know. Your men would never be able to find her if the rats did not want her found.”
“Accccck,” said the king, and he clapped his hands over his ears. “Do not speak to me of rats and what they know!” he shouted. “Rats are illegal. Rats are against the law. There are no rats in my kingdom. They do not exist.”
“Sir, Most Very Honored Head Person, that is not true. Hundreds of rats live in the dungeon of this castle. One of 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.
42
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 compelled to do the thing, the impossible, important task at hand.”
“Impossible?” said Despereaux.
“Impossible,” said the threadmaster. “Important.” He sat chewing his celery and staring somewhere past Despereaux, and then suddenly he leapt off his spool.
“Who am I to stand in the way of a quest?” he said. “Roll her away.”
“I can have it?”
“Yes. For your quest.”
Despereaux put his front paws up and touched the spool. He gave it an experimental push forward.
“Thank you,” he said, looking into the eye of the threadmaster. “I don’t know your name.”
“Hovis.”
“Thank you, Hovis.”
“There’s something else. Something that belongs with the thread.” Hovis went into a corner and came back with a needle. “You can use it for protection.”
“Like a sword,” said Despereaux. “Like a knight would have.”
“Yes,” said Hovis. He gnawed off a length of thread and used it to tie the needle around Despereaux’s
