The Prince Problem

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Although her wrists were still right up against each other, Amelia strained to pull her hands as far apart as she could—both an instinct to avoid the dog’s teeth and to get the most out of any weakness in the rope.

  Another strand came apart, and this time Amelia’s wrists separated just the tiniest bit.

  The dog whimpered in frustration.

  “Easy, girl,” Amelia urged in a whisper.

  The dog reversed the upright ear and the floppy ear and looked at her with an expression that could only be interpreted as disapproval.

  “Or boy,” Amelia corrected. The nighttime shadows were still too deep to see details, and in any case, Amelia wasn’t certain that a princess should be looking.

  Apparently satisfied, the dog resumed tearing at the rope.

  Finally her wrists sprang apart, and the rope dangled loosely.

  The dog moved to her feet, but Amelia sat up and whispered, “Let me just pick at the knot.”

  Her captors were not careful people—evidenced by the fact that they were both sleeping, with neither set to watch—and the knot was not a complicated one. In just a few moments, Amelia kicked the rope off her legs. She paused long enough to give the dog a quick pat on the head, then she tugged off the dress with which the men had covered her own simple but still aristocratic gown.

  She noted that the dog had sat back on its—his, apparently—haunches and was watching, clearly interested.

  She bunched up the dress, then placed it under the blanket the men had provided for her. This couldn’t fool anyone for long, but she hoped that, to someone just glancing in this direction, it would appear she was still here and asleep. It might gain her a moment or two.

  She looked where the men lay sleeping. Amelia was not the kind of person who could take up a rock and crack somebody over the head. Even if she could bring herself to do it, there was no way she could incapacitate both men at once. Her best option was to flee as quickly as possible, knowing that they could bestir themselves at any moment.

  The dog was on his feet, quivering in anticipation.

  Because of the river, and because of her studies, she knew exactly where she was in relation to both her own Kingdom of Pastonia (upstream) and Prince Sheridan’s Bittenhelm (across the water and downstream). Should she take the horse? No, too old and too slow, she estimated. She could probably make her way more quietly and efficiently on foot. But looking at the horse made her notice the cart. The barrels from the back had been unloaded. Why would her abductors have done that, unless the barrels had been hiding something, just as the straw in the wagon had hidden her? She glanced around to see what the men had concealed beneath the barrels, only to unload here. There it was: a little rowboat on the river’s bank, waiting for morning light when the men could set it to water and paddle toward Bittenhelm.

  Amelia took two steps toward the river and found the dog clinging to her skirt, holding her back.

  “Let go,” she demanded in a whisper.

  The dog sat down, still holding the edge of her skirt. To move, she would have to drag him across the grass.

  If he was a guard dog working for the men, he would never have released her. Was he expressing his opinion that she should use the path?

  “We’ll take the river,” she explained. She felt silly, justifying herself to a dog, but he seemed to understand because he let go of her skirt, then ran ahead and jumped into the boat.

  “Fat lot of help you are,” she complained as she shoved the boat over the grass and stones that bordered the river at this spot.

  The dog may or may not have looked apologetic.

  Once the boat was floating, she managed to climb into it without too much difficulty, though the skirt of her gown was soaked up to her knees. She used the oar to push off from the bank, as though this was a punt rather than a rowboat. But it got the job done. Soon they were in water deep enough that the current carried them downstream.

  The dog paced nervously, which put them in danger of capsizing.

  “Sit!” Amelia commanded.

  The dog sat.

  Did he look sulky at her abrupt tone?

  Don’t be silly, she told herself.

  Amelia started rowing. She knew how to row, but it wasn’t one of her favorite activities. Still, living in a kingdom that had a river as a border, it would have been negligent not to know how to row, or to swim.

  The dog looked back and forth, from upriver to down.

  “We’re going to use the same trick the men did,” Amelia explained. Again she felt ridiculous explaining her plan to an animal, no matter how smart it appeared. “Just as they headed back toward Pastonia to confound pursuers, so we will go the opposite way they’d expect us to flee: away from my father’s lands and toward Prince Sheridan’s.”

  The dog looked ready to leap overboard.

  Amelia finished quickly. “Except we’ll bypass Bittenhelm and stay on the river until we get to Fairhaven, which is ruled by King Humphrey, who is an ally to my father. He’ll send word to my parents to let them know what’s happened and will see me … us … safely home.”

  The dog had given what almost looked like a nod at the name of King Humphrey of Fairhaven, as though to say he knew the king, or that he approved of Amelia’s plan.

  Obviously the henbane hadn’t cleared out of her system as thoroughly as she’d thought, or she wouldn’t be attributing all these human reactions to a dog.

  Still, he was a very nice dog. And for whatever noble canine reason, he had helped her escape.

  The river meandered around tree-lined bends, so already there was no way for the kidnappers to be able to spot them. Besides, they would be searching in the opposite direction. Amelia didn’t need to break her back rowing, because the current would carry them downstream. She set the oars down where she could easily reach them, to adjust the course of the boat as needed.

  She dipped her hands into the water and scrubbed the last of the remaining berry mixture—and the dog slobber—off her cheeks.

  The dog was yawning. Perhaps, in his own way, he’d had as difficult a night as she’d had. Despite all the henbane-induced sleeping she had done, she was exhausted. It couldn’t hurt to rest her eyes for a moment …

  * * *

  “Princess Amelia,” a voice spoke, calm and gentle. “Don’t be alarmed.”

  Amelia knew how things worked. That warning meant there was something to be alarmed about.

  Her eyes flew open. She should be in a rowboat with a dog, escaping from Prince Sheridan’s men …

  Yes, to the rowboat, no, to the dog.

  There was a young man sitting on the bench opposite her.

  “What have you done with my dog?” Amelia demanded. The dog wasn’t, legally speaking, hers, but he had helped her and now she felt responsible. Who was this person? How had he gotten here? Was he one of the kidnappers? He was! She’d seen him in the straw wagon. What had he done to the dog? She could still smell the faithful though odiferous creature, so if this young man had thrown him overboard—which seemed the only possible explanation, even if she hadn’t heard the splash—it must have been only a moment ago.

  But Amelia could see no sign of the dog bobbing in the water.

  Still speaking in that infuriatingly let’s-all-be-calm voice, the intruder said, “I’m Prince Telmund of Rosenmark, and I’m under a spell that transforms me—”

  “Transforms?” As an explanation of anything, this was the most preposterous lie she’d ever heard.

  Amelia picked up one of the oars and smacked the dog-endangering liar on the arm.

  “Ouch!” he cried. For a ruffian, he was decidedly not as robust as he should have been. And he was inept. He lunged to prevent her from hitting him again, tipping the boat precariously. He was as unwise about the way a boat worked as the dog had been.

  Amelia took advantage of his being off balance and she used her foot to sweep him off his feet. Into the water.

  “Help!” he sputtered as he bobbed momentarily
to the surface. “I can’t swim!”

  “A likely story!” she jeered. “This same river runs through Rosenmark! If you really came from there, you’d know how to swim!”

  He went under again, and came up hacking and slapping ineffectively at the water.

  So maybe that part of his story was true. “Well, not learning how to swim was very shortsighted of you,” she told him.

  But he really was in trouble; she could tell by his panicked flailing.

  “Oh for goodness’ sake.” She extended the oar for him to grab hold of, but he was so frantic he couldn’t see it. Or maybe he thought she meant to hit him again.

  Amelia couldn’t just let him drown.

  “Porridge for brains,” she mumbled. And she wasn’t sure whether she meant him or herself.

  She jumped in the water and tried to catch hold of him, but he was coughing and thrashing and kept slipping underwater. By the time she did get her arm hooked around his neck, the rowboat had continued too far downstream to catch, so she dragged him, swimming with only one arm, to the nearer bank.

  By then, he was limp and not breathing.

  Amelia sat on his back and pounded until the unlikely henchman coughed up several mouthfuls of river water.

  “There!” she said. “Now you’d better explain—”

  But even as the words were passing her lips, she was sliding off his back, which was growing taller, wider, and rounder. There was no other word for it: He was transforming.

  Telmund was pleasantly surprised to find that he was alive. Not only that, but he was on solid ground. Both of these were good things, even if the princess was hitting him, beating on his back. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was trying to knock air into him after nearly killing him by drowning.

  Still, this was not the way rescued princesses in stories generally acted.

  “I’m all right now,” he said.

  Except it didn’t come out that way.

  It came out as a bark.

  How did that happen?

  True, he’d been a dog, but that had stopped when he’d fallen asleep in the rowboat and awakened as himself.

  Which, he supposed, could be disconcerting to a delicate princess, so maybe he should have been better prepared for a startled reaction from her.

  Not that Amelia was delicate, he had to admit. Telmund remembered seeing her dive into the water to rescue him. Nor had he been much use in helping her accomplish this, he grudgingly acknowledged: He may well have hit her with all his arm-waving and floundering, although he’d been too busy screaming for help to be sure. This was not traditional behavior for a story hero. And yet she’d still managed to pull him to shore.

  He had no memory of that part of the adventure.

  But then he should have turned into another animal, not gone backward into being an animal he’d already been.

  Was he a different type of dog?

  Princess Amelia was looking at him with a horrified expression, but that could be because of the transformation itself. Or because he was a big, fierce mastiff. Or maybe a wolf. It might be nice to be a wolf. Did wolves bark?

  “Am I a wolf?” he asked. It came out as a strange hollow bark that was not reassuring.

  He stretched his paws in front of him to get a look.

  Apparently he was a breed of short-legged dog, for he couldn’t see anything.

  He stretched more, and a startled bark escaped from deep in his chest.

  He was an injured dog. Or a malformed one. Or … or …

  What was wrong with his paws? They didn’t even look like paws. They were not individualized into toes. He could push his body up onto them—and it was a massive body, he could tell—but walking was very slow and cumbersome. His back legs were doing little more than dragging.

  He looked backward along the length of his sleek, fat body. His back legs were as misshapen as his front. They looked less like a dog’s paws than the fins of a big fish, like a sturgeon.

  Princess Amelia, who had instinctively backed away from him, now knelt beside him and rested her hand on his head. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  That was a fine thing: a princess telling a prince not to be afraid.

  Except, of course, he was afraid.

  “You’re a seal,” she told him. “I’ve seen drawings. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  How could she tell that was what was terrifying him?

  He was reassured, even though he’d never heard of a seal, except for the kind of seal placed on official documents. What was the matter with that witch, turning him into a creature he had never heard of?

  “They mostly live on the coast,” Amelia told him. “But they can be by lakes, too. They live in the water and on the land. I’m told they’re quite graceful in the water.”

  She didn’t have to add, But not so much on the land. Telmund had already experienced that.

  “I think you’ll feel better in the water,” she said.

  He held up his front leg for her to see how ineffective it was for getting to the water.

  “That’s a flipper,” she said. “Dolphins and whales have them, too.”

  Flipper? Flapper would have been more descriptive, as his limbs flapped pointlessly. And where had Princess Amelia learned this obscure information about all these exotic animals, anyway? She must spend all her time with her nose in exactly the kind of books he avoided: the fact-filled kind that were supposed to teach you something.

  Telmund used his flippers to ease himself into the water.

  She was right: He was immediately more at ease. He darted back and forth in the comfortable river water, up and down, shallow and deep. He even swam in a circle.

  “Very good,” Amelia encouraged him.

  But it wasn’t very good. For one thing, being changed into this bizarre creature opened up all sorts of awful possibilities. What if he hadn’t been close to the water when he’d become this seal-thing? What if he changed into a fish when there wasn’t water? Was the witch out to kill him, or was she simply careless?

  Also, it wasn’t good if he could travel only by water. He didn’t have a real sense of where King Humphrey’s land of Fairhaven was, having only visited it once, when he’d been much younger. There was a moat, but he knew he didn’t remember a river anywhere near the castle.

  He waddled to the shallows closest to the princess, looking first in one direction, then the other.

  “You’re right,” Amelia told him. “We would have been leaving the river soon and heading inland. We’re close to the southern border of Bittenhelm, and we need to go east for Fairhaven.”

  It wasn’t exactly what he’d been wondering, but close enough. Telmund heaved himself out of the water and felt the full weight of his clumsy body.

  “No,” Amelia said. “You can’t travel overland.”

  He barked at her and proved she was wrong by dragging himself three times the length of his body. Then, exhausted, he had to lie down and rest.

  Amelia sat down next to him. “This is the easy part, right by the riverbank, where the ground is smooth. How far do you think you’d get in the forest with all the roots and uneven terrain, and the sharp rocks and twigs?”

  Telmund looked at the trees that grew very close together.

  “You’d hurt yourself, and you couldn’t travel far in any case. Better for us to wait until you change again. You will change again, won’t you?”

  Telmund bobbed his head and barked.

  Amelia winced at the piercing sound. “Do you know how long it will be?”

  Telmund closed his eyes and rested his head on his flippers, but Amelia guessed wrong about what he was trying to say.

  “Yes,” she said. “Rest. I’ll stay here with you. That will give my clothing a chance to dry.”

  Telmund shook his head and barked again, even though he knew the sound hurt her ears. It was too dangerous for her to linger with him—even if the thought of being alone and having to find her once again w
as disheartening.

  “You’ve been tracking me for a while, haven’t you?” she asked. She tapped the side of her nose. “I’ve smelled you here and there. You’ve been trying to rescue me, haven’t you? While I’ve been totally unmindful of your efforts and even hindering them.”

  He couldn’t argue with her about that.

  She smiled, and she had a very nice smile for such a bossy princess. “At least our little swim washed off whatever it was that you’d gotten into, so that’s a good thing. And I smell better for my bath, too.” She nodded, having made up her mind. “I’ll stay,” she repeated firmly, “now that you need help. I’m indebted to you. You rest.”

  Resting was exactly what he needed. The question was: Should he stay on the land, which was hard and lumpy and seemed to drag down his body? Or should he go back to the water and swim and swim and swim until he wore himself out with exertion?

  He waddled back into the water.

  Upstream and down, he swam, and from one bank to the other, though never far enough to have her out of his sight. He caught several fish, which he ate raw, and he even tossed one over for the princess, thinking she must be hungry, too. The fish hit her on the back of the head as she was looking around, which she frequently did, clearly on the watch for pursuit. Maybe she didn’t know she was meant to eat it, or maybe she preferred her fish cooked. At home, that was the way he’d always had it, but once he got back, he would encourage the kitchen staff to try serving it raw. For now, Amelia flung the fish back at him, looking annoyed.

  Telmund was just thinking that the time might be right to lie on the mud by the river’s edge and let the sun—which was almost directly overhead—warm his bones and make him grow sleepy.

  But just as he started toward the bank, Amelia stood up. “Stay,” she commanded unceremoniously in a fierce whisper. “Don’t show yourself.”

  Before he could take offense, Telmund heard what Amelia had clearly heard before him: men talking and laughing, approaching through the woods.

  Amelia ran down a length of the bank, then up into the tree line, clearly intent on hiding till she could determine whether the approaching party were the kind of people to be trusted.