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“It is!”
“It isn’t!”
“It is!”
Oh dear. This could go on for quite some time. Clearly someone is confused. I’m going to request a spell-check to make sure I have the right words.
“This. Is. My. Fair. Herr!” Rapunzel shouted, stomping one boot-shod foot.
Ah ha! I see my error now. I thought she was saying hair, as in the thing that grows out of your head and on your arms and sometimes on your face far too early, as we will learn about much later. But really she was saying herr, which is the German word for “lord”!
“This is my fair Herr!” she said, almost at the end of the length of whatever was coming up through the window. “I won him at the fair, and he’s as lordly as any creature there ever was!”
The prince felt behind himself with trembling hands, trying to find the top of the stairs but too scared to turn his back on Rapunzel and her pet. By now, the undulating, wriggling coils filled most of the floor. He really should have asked me to clarify which type of fair Rapunzel had been referring to! And asked for spelling. Spelling things wrong can be very dangerous. (That’s why you have so many spelling tests in school. It’s not to be exasperating; it’s to potentially save your life in a situation exactly like this.)
The prince swallowed nervously. “Why do you live in this tower?”
“Because my stepmother wasn’t going to let me keep him anywhere else!”
“Why not?”
Finally, she finished pulling. Over the sill came the largest, hissingest, angriest head of a snake the prince had ever had the misfortune to see.
“Well, because my fair Herr has a terrible appetite. And look! You upset him so much, you made him throw up his supper. Poor Herr!”
The prince remembered the wriggling sack. He remembered the witch—the stepmother—muttering about a vile creature. And he remembered the odd lump he’d climbed past on his way up. He didn’t want to imagine what was now in a partially digested pile at the bottom of the tower.
(Don’t worry! Because the small pig had been so recently ingested, he survived. He was, at this very moment, running home to his dirt burrow. He couldn’t wait to wash snake spit off the hairs of his chinny chin chin, then tell his two brothers they really needed to invest in better building materials for houses: straw. Sticks. Maybe even bricks! Anything to keep them out of the bellies of other animals.)
Rapunzel, unaware of the fate of the little pig’s chinny chin chin, glared at the prince. She stroked her fair Herr on his head. His yellow eyes stared unblinkingly at the prince as his long, forked tongue tickled the air.
Did you know snakes smell with their tongues? I wonder what he thinks the prince smells like!
“Ssssssssssupper,” the snake answered.
Oh. Oh! Well. That’s unfortunate.
“My stepmother won’t be back for a few days. And my fair Herr has to eat. He’s not picky. He’ll eat anything.” Rapunzel raised an eyebrow at the prince. The snake had no eyebrows, but if he did, they would have been raised as well.
The prince’s eyebrows would have been raised in terror, but they were oddly missing. Like they had been burned off or something. But his forehead was definitely terrified.
The fair Herr slithered closer.
So the prince, who knew a thing or two about towers and gravity, did the only thing he could think of. He threw himself down the stairs. Falling was faster than walking. Each stone step jarred and bruised him, and he hit
every
single
step,
from the
top all the
way down to
