He thought to address her by her first name would be too informal, so instead he called, "Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!"
There was a moment of silence. "Are you kidding?"
Nervous that the guards would hear him, he called back, "It'll be easier than me climbing up all those stairs."
"It'll ruin my hair!"
3052 steps gives you very sweaty armpits, came to mind. "It'll be a lot easier, please!" Ike persisted. He didn't want to be sweaty when he met the princess.
"Do you know how long my hair takes to wash?"
"You'll have plenty of time to wash it once you're free!" Ike smiled.
"I like it here!" she replied. Ike frowned. That wasn't how he'd imagined their first conversation. He went round the side of the tower and tried the door. Locked. Firmly. He returned back to where he was standing before.
"The door's locked!"
"You'll just have to go then!"
"This may be the only chance you have to leave the tower!" he pleaded. She took a moment to consider this.
"How many wives have you got exactly?"
"What? None!"
This was followed by a barely discernible, "Oh."
"Please, hurry!" A long pause. Ike shifted nervously on the spot.
"Get out of the way and don't you dare look up my dress!" she yelled. Moments later she was climbing down the side of the tower; having anchored the end of her plait somewhere inside the room she now used it as a rope to lower herself down. After a long and painful wait she was standing in front of him. She tried to walk away from the tower but her hair held her fast. Without thinking, Ike drew his sword and cut her free, giving her an instant bob. Her eyes widened in horror.
"My hair!" she screeched. This time the guards fell silent and Ike heard footsteps. Casting an anxious glance over at the direction of the sound he grabbed her arm and dragged her towards the horse before lifting her onto it, ignoring her protests at being so roughly handled. Then he got on behind her and quickly spurred the horse onwards. After a while she seemed to recover from the shock of losing so much hair and said,
"You have a beautiful unicorn!"
"Unicorn? You call this thing a unicorn? She's an inbred disaster with a skull malfunction!" he called back, urging the so called inbred disaster into a gallop as he sped out of the fortress and across the bridge.
"You're my knight in shining armour!" she exclaimed, ignoring his comment, holding tightly onto him so that she wouldn't fall off.
"Knight? How dare you! I'm a lord, I'll have you know. I'm only wearing this horrid silver thing because my black armour had hinge issues!" he informed her. "I hate silver! My mother's cabinets were full of it – so boring and monochrome, always 'look but don't touch, dear'. Very irritating."
She seemed taken aback by his revelation, and was silent as the inbred disaster reached the road of Pain and Destruction. As they passed by all the beheaded weeds, she said,
"You're very smart you know, to know to cut of the heads of the Jurjian plants."
"The what?"
"Jurjian plants!"
He assumed she meant the weeds. "How is that clever? I was just neatening up the road to finish the job of the poor gardener."
"What? We don't have a gardener!"
"But there was a man in just tattered undergarments lying at the start of the road…"
"He's that intruder that came riding towards the fortress about a week ago! The guards took him down."
"But I thought he got injured because he had been trying to cut down the thorns?" Ike cried, slowing down the inbred disaster to a steady canter.
"No – the guards cut down the thorns to get to him! They're kind of stupid!" She frowned. "So you thought you were just… weeding?"
"Yeah." He shrugged.
"What about the Giant Centipede? How did you know the answer to the riddle without even having to hear it?"
"What riddle?"
"The riddle! Where you have to throw your boot into the lake to stop him from eating you," she explained, sounding worried at his ignorance.
"I had a stone in my shoe! I took it off to remove the stone, I saw the beast, panicked, and dropped it in the lake!"
"But, but…" she struggled inwardly for a moment and then said, "And what about the courtyard? How did you know standing on that faulty paving stone would jam the mechanics of all the booby-traps?"
"I didn't! It was a fluke!" he acknowledged easily as they approached the end of the road.
o
Marth panicked. It couldn't be true. Perhaps this Lord was just being modest. He couldn't have saved him by… by chance. No, that wasn't how the stories went! This wasn't the fairy tale he was after. The knight was meant to get the princess after showing wit and giving amazing displays of strength and perseverance! He choked back tears and hit the man's back with all the effort he could muster.
"Take me back to the tower! I don't like you!"
The horse didn't slow. "Well you're mine now anyway. You don't have to like me."
Marth was confused. "What? But aren't we going to get married?"
"Are you kidding?" The man laughed. "I'm going to hold you hostage and only give you back for all the money I can get."
"Wh-what?" he croaked, beginning to cry. "Wh-why?"
"Oh for goodness' sake." The horse came to an abrupt halt and the man got off before taking rope out of a saddle pack and tying it around Marth's wrists, and then tying a gag around his mouth.
"Name's Ike, by the way," he told him as he got back on the horse.
