I promise that, in return, I shall run away with you tonight, and pay for your tuition as a cartographer. If you refuse . . . "
you shall have to face that wicked old thing, my father the king. Gunther paled again at this! He was so unnerved that this time all he could get out was a hemidemisemiquaver
of agreement. So they set off back towards his flower-covered hill. She was too polite to ask why he kept poking his ribs as though they were borax, but she did wonder.
Gunther was wondering, too: how on earth he was going to
explain the absence of a dragon at his home, for he was not
a cartographer yet!