Chester Cheshire grinwild's Arc

Chapter 9 of 15

Chester climbed to the top of his tower and looked down. The wide cobblestone square stretched out under him, gray and littered with stray cups and crumbs from the last attack. The winding table sat in the middle. Two chairs were full. The rest were empty. From this height the empty seats looked like missing teeth. Rapunzel's frosting shop glowed at one end. Harrietta sat at the table with her arms crossed, watching the sky for more trouble. A party of two was not a party. Soon they would run out of things to say, and Harrietta would walk back into his house and shut the door. He paced the tower floor and ran through stories in his head. A wolf. A fox. A boy with a wooden nose. None of them felt right. Then a line surfaced on its own, clear as a bell. 'Tis true, you happen in this present instance to be all in the right, and have only considered the subject under different circumstances, but, pray, for the future allow others to have eyesight as well as yourselves; nor wonder if every one prefers the testimony of his own senses to those of another. Chester stopped pacing. He knew that voice. The chameleon. The one who was green and gray at the same time, depending on who looked. He ran down the stairs to his desk. A fresh book sat on the blotter, its cover the color of seawater, gold letters reading Aesop's Fables. The raven watched from the shelf. Chester rolled up his sleeve and pushed his hand through the cover like it was water. He felt scales. He closed his fingers and pulled. Out came a chameleon, small and sketchy, lines still wet, as if someone had just lifted a pen off its tail. It was white as paper, with faint pink under the skin. It blinked at him with one eye, then the other. Chester laughed. He carried it down to the square in both hands. Harrietta stood up when she saw it. The chameleon did not look at her. It looked past Chester, straight at Rapunzel, who had come out of the shop to see what the noise was. It leapt from Chester's hands, crossed the cobblestones in quick darts, and climbed her hair like a rope. Rapunzel froze. Then she smiled. She walked back into the shop with the chameleon curled at her ear. She came out an hour later carrying a cake as tall as her chest. Three tiers, white icing, flowers piped along the edges, and a green and orange chameleon coiled down all three layers in sugar. She set it on a stand outside her door, in plain view of the empty square. "For the next ones," she said. Chester counted the chairs again. Three full. He had bait now, and a reason for strangers to come closer.