Silvia, Princess Silver

12. Gluttony

"I'll eat you up, like a little tasty snack!" the monstrous beast growled as Silvia, wind whipping her hair into her face and making her shirt and jeans flap wildly, fell tumbling past him.

"Ahhh!" she screamed as she realized that the eagle's aim was right on target and she was about to fall onto the remnants of the floor of her old prison cell. And then she thought of a rhyme: "Falling fast, falling slow, stopping where I want to go!" She gasped as her body jerked suddenly to a slower speed. And then she was falling gently, like a leaf fluttering from a tree.

She touched down softly on the stone floor.

She sat up, quite out of breath, and pushed her hair out of her face.

"Hi!" It was Copper, sitting with his back against the wall, smiling at her. All around him were a great many plates and platters containing all sorts of lovely deserts: Cookies, pies, cream puffs, tall cakes with multi-colored icing, and even a silver bowl of ice cream, its sides frosty with cold.

"What in the world are you doing!" Silvia demanded.

"I was hungry," he explained with a shrug. "So I made up a rhyme. It was about how I would hide from that beast. And, of course, have a feast. Good rhyme, right? Help yourself." He gestured toward the food and smiled.

"I'm not hungry. What happened to the door?"

"It disappeared when I worked my spell. To hide me, of course."

"If you could do all that, why didn't you just use your magic to escape?"

"See, that's the thing about magic. If you do something too big and use up your power, then you can't do anything else. Not for a while, anyway."

"So you wasted your magic making deserts appear?"

Copper shrugged. "They're delicious," he pointed out, reaching for a chocolate chip cookie.

"Put that down! We have to get out of here. Again!" Silvia glared at him. "And you're absolutely no help at all."

Copper stood up. "I thought of another rhyme," he said. "I just didn't have the power to work it."

"All right, what is it? But no more food," she warned.

"It's all about food," he said. "See, that's what the Count and I have in common."

"What, you both eat?" Silvia sounded quite annoyed, but then again, the day had not been going all that well.

"Well, we're both kind of greedy. Me, I just like sweets. But the Count, he wants more and more of everything. He's not happy with his land up north. He wants to take over this land, too. He's like a monstrous baby who just keeps eating and eating and—"

"Okay, I get the simile," Silvia said, holding a hand up to stop him. "But so what? How's that going to help us get away?"

"See, I remembered one of the things Mom taught me about fighting. She said you have to turn your opponent's strength into his weakness."

"Huh. And how will you do that?" Silvia asked.

"Like this," Copper said:

"We all know the Count's

just a greedy old mouse

If his castle were cheese

he'd eat his own house!"

"Hah! That's clever. But nothing happened."

"It's a big working. Maybe I don't have the power. Repeat it."

"What, the rhyme?"

Copper nodded.

"Oh, all right." And she did. When she got to the end, she added a verse of her own:

"And make him so greedy

So full and so cheesy

That he can't speak a verse

No matter how easy!"

Still, nothing happened.

Copper took a bite of a cookie. "I think," he mumbled, his mouth full, "that we still have to turn the castle into cheese. There was an if in my verse."

Silvia nodded. "Allow me:

"Cheddars and stiltons

Swiss cheese and bries

Let the change take hold

of whatever he sees!"

The walls shook. The thud, thud of cannon fire stopped. The floor suddenly felt oddly squishy. And then there came a powerful smell, like the scents of dozens of different kinds of cheeses all at once.

"Oh no!" Copper said, tossing his cookie aside. "I hate blue cheese."

Silvia smiled. His entire feast was cheese. So were the blocks of the wall. She punched one and it fell to the floor. "Bang on the cheddars, they're crumbly," she instructed, and soon they had fought their way through and emerged onto a smelly corridor made up of more blocks of cheese.

"Uh, maybe this isn't such a good idea," Copper said. "Cheese isn't nearly as strong as stone, is it?" The ceiling and walls were drooping.

"Out, I think," Silvia said, pushing back through the hole they had made and tugging Copper with her. They stood panting on the ledge, which was also sagging. Above them, on the walls, they could hear men and foxes screaming.

"We better be going," Copper said. "I hope you have some power left."

Silvia frowned. She had a feeling that turning an entire castle into cheese was about as much as she would be able to do. But how to get down? "Just so long as we don't fall," she muttered. "That's getting old."