The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom Read Online Free Page A

I’d try Sturmhagen. Head south.”
    “But Sturmhagen? Isn’t it supposed to be full of monsters?” Frederic said, his eyes growing wider by the second.
    “Ride fast,” Charles the groom called out. “With any luck, you’ll catch up to Lady Ella before you reach the border.”
    “I can’t ride fast ,” Frederic said. “I’m trying hard to make sure I ride forward .”
    “Then so far you’re succeeding,” Reginald yelled. “Stay strong!”
    Frederic gripped his horse tighter, wondering what in the world he’d gotten himself into. Within twenty-four hours, he would be sniffling through a rainstorm, wishing he’d never left home. In a little over a week, he’d be quivering in the shadow of a raging giant. Another week after that, he would end up at the Stumpy Boarhound. But for now, he was on his way to Sturmhagen.

2

    P RINCE C HARMING D EFENDS S OME V EGETABLES
    S turmhagen wasn’t a big tourist destination, mainly because of all the monsters. The kingdom’s thick and shadowy pine forests were crawling with all sorts of horrid creatures. And yet, that fact never seemed to bother the people who lived there. For most Sturmhageners, the occasional troll attack or goblin raid was just another nuisance to be dealt with, on par with a mouse in the pantry or a ferret in the sock drawer. These are tough folks we’re talking about. Take the royal family, for instance: King Olaf, at age sixty, was seven feet tall and capable of uprooting trees with his bare hands. His wife, Queen Berthilda, was only two inches shorter, and once famously punched out a swindler who tried to sell her some bogus “magic beans.”
    Prince Gustav, who stood six-foot-five and had shoulders broad enough to get stuck in most doorways, was nonetheless the smallest member of his family. Growing up as the “tiny” one among sixteen older brothers, Gustav felt a desperate need to appear bigger and more imposing. This usually involved puffing out his chest and speaking very loudly: Picture a six-year-old boy standing on top of the dining room table, posing like a statue of a war hero, and shouting, “The mighty Gustav demands his milk cup be refilled!” This didn’t make him look impressive—it made him look strange. His older siblings mocked him mercilessly.

    Fig. 4 Prince GUSTAV
    The more people laughed at him, the more distraught Gustav became. He stuffed balls of yarn into his sleeves to make his muscles look larger (and sadly, lumpier). He tied bricks to the bottom of his boots to make himself taller (and clomped around like a sumo wrestler in a full-body cast). He even grew his hair long, just so he would have more of something . Unsurprisingly, his brothers continued to tease him.
    In his later teen years, Gustav became a frustrated, angry loner. For as much of the day as possible, he avoided contact with other people (which was not necessarily a bad thing for the other people). He would roam on horseback through the pine forests of Sturmhagen, hoping to find some creature he could fight—and thereby prove his strength and heroism. One day he stumbled upon something incredible.
    There was a tall tower standing all by itself in a forest clearing. Oddly, it had no doors and no stairs. But it did have a girl stuck up in a room at the very top—a girl with eighty feet of hair. She lowered her shimmery blond locks down to Gustav, and he used them as a rope and climbed up to her. Once inside the small tower room, Gustav learned that the girl’s name was Rapunzel and that she was the captive of an evil witch.

    Fig. 5 TOWER
    Now, Gustav was not exactly a ladies’ man; in fact, this may have been the first time he’d ever made eye contact with a girl. But he was struck by Rapunzel. She was so different from the girls he’d seen around the castle, especially his brutish cousins, who liked to hold him down and smack him with their thick, whiplike pigtails. Rapunzel was all soft, pillowy curves and delicate, graceful movements. She