Fair Peril

by Nancy Springer

  “Sit, you ninny,” Fay told the frog. “Rescue, my sweet patootie. This Murphy person summoned me, that’s all.”

  “Huh?” Buffy said.

  “But how should she have access to the Pool? I am the archetype!” Adamus caromed yet more crazily, splattering water onto his putative fairy godmother. “I am the handsome Jung prince! You must rescue me!”

  “Would you stop it?” Being showered by eau de frog, stepping away, Fay slipped on the freshly slimed mud and lost her temper. “SQUAT!” she bellowed.

  Adamus squatted instantly, silent and motionless except for the throbbing of his throat.

  The gilded godmother turned on Buffy. “And you call yourself a storyteller,” she barked. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Are you going to kiss him?”

  “Hell, no!” Aside from being irritated by the uncanny presence of this whatever-she-was, fairy godmother-in-law, Buffy felt heartily annoyed that Adamus had actually obeyed Fay. Whose frog was this, dammit? Fay had always tried to take over everything, and Buffy had always put up with her bossiness, but no more. Been there, done that. Buffy squared off, hands on her considerable hips. “I am not going to kiss him and nobody else is going to kiss him.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “He’s mine. Like I would kiss the goose that laid the golden egg?” Ow. Bad metaphor. But Buffy forged on. “He’s my lucky frog.” And she deserved some luck, dammit, after Prentis. “He’s gonna help me quit the day job.”

  It would have been nice if Fay had argued. But Fay merely became suddenly disappointingly calm. Fay caressed her own golden hair with golden fingernails and contemplated both Buffy and the frog with glittering indifference. Did they make golden contact lenses? The woman’s eyes looked strange.

  She coiled her metallic tresses into a bedspring curl around her forefinger. “You know what you’re getting into, of course,” she said to Buffy with irony coiled in her tone. “You know there’s nothing cute about fairy tales. You know about the fair peril and the punishments. You know that everything is itself and something else as well. You know about the resonances. You are, after all, a professional storyteller.”

  “I am a professional storyteller and I don’t have a clue what I am getting into and I don’t care.”

  “Really.” Fay’s golden eyes narrowed to shining slits. “You summoned me here. What do you want?”

  Clueless, as she had said, Buffy could think only that she wanted nothing from Prentis’s mother, nothing, not a thing more than she wanted from Prentis himself. Sarcastically she asked, “Can you fix the refrigerator?”

  “For heaven’s sake.” Fay lifted her enormous purse and swung it as if disciplining a mugger, thwacking the hulking white mass of the fridge. With a submissive whimper it chugged back on. Simultaneously the Gro-Lite flickered into glowing life, an anonymous borborygmus started somewhere in the basement, and the answering machine beeped to attention. Fay rolled her eyes and minced toward the door.

  “Uh, Fay, wait.” Buffy began to feel, queasily, that she was in trouble. “Listen, how do you know this frog? What’s he talking about, access to the Pool?”

  “Fairy Godmother! Don’t leave me with her!” Adamus quavered at the same time, breaking his terrified silence.

  Fay gave them both a bored aureate glance and walked out.

  Three

  Captive, Adamus thought, quivering to his heart, gulping to force air into his lungs. Hostage. Prisoner. Again. Still. Odd, how the unbearable had become familiar, therefore comforting, and how the familiar had become ennobled to the dignity of a doom, a fate. Was he fated never to be free? It seemed so. Ever since the beginning, even in that first life, that pitifully brief life, he had been a captive. At the mercy of his mother, at the mercy of his father, and then there had been the dungeonlord dreadful and kind, the prisoner’s heart quivering with terror and love—

  Here she came now, the doomster, the storyteller, here she came toward him after locking the door, here she came with her sad, vehement, symmetrical face and her wild silver-black hair and her footsteps like thunder and her thoughts like flowers and lightning and her body a harshly clad, cream-colored, world-sized warmth that he both feared and craved.

  Even in that first brief life, the dungeonmaster had betrayed the love; Adamus had looked for an adoptive father and found a doomster. Then, in that next, uncanny life—at the first fiery touch, the brand of eerie lips on his forehead—captive again. At the mercy of the unseelie mother. Quivering with love and terror again. And then—doom anew. Life anew. Terror anew. Captive in the body of a frog.

  To be a frog was to be loved by no one.

  To be a frog was to be soft of belly. To be a frog was to be cold. To be a frog was to be always naked. Always afraid.

  She was walking toward his glass prison. She was moon and sun in one. He could not bear it. His dogged, imbecilic heart shook anew, looking for a goddess, a true love, a mother—but he knew the fate. She would be his doomster.

  God, if there is a God for frogs, help me.

  To be a frog was to be—helpless when the urges came. The seasons. The necessity to burrow in the mud, or emerge from the mud, or sing and fall in love.

  To be a frog was also to be smooth. To be quick. The naked have their ways of covering up.

  Was it useless to fight fate? Was it useless to try to escape the doom? Perhaps. But Prince Adamus d’Aurca was not yet finished with fighting.

  “What the hell does Fay have in that purse?” Buffy asked no one in particular.

  Naturally, no one answered her.

  She focused on her talking frog. “What does she mean, I summoned her?” she demanded, perforce assuming that he knew more about fairy godmothers than she did. “How did I summon her?”

  “Ribbet,” Adamus said.

  Buffy scowled. Aside from being imperious and arrogant, the frog was a smart-ass. He was not croaking, but saying “ribbet.” He precisely enunciated the word.

  “Stop that,” Buffy commanded. “Answer me. What is the Pool?”

  “Ribbet,” said Adamus in bored tones. “Ribbet, ribbet, ribbet.”

  “Talk, dammit!”

  The frog ogled her in mock terror and started gabbling at once. “What a fool to school in a pool, agog I slog through a bog; dreams must explain themselves and a soul has to cast a two-legged shadow, go west Jung man and learn to distinguish between a frog and a fairy tail; in a word, it’s absurd when a bird—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Buffy jabbed the TV’s power button to drown him out. Cable news blared on.

  Adamus screamed.

  Buffy had heard that sound once before, when she was just a kid, just another feral thing prowling the swamp, and she had one day witnessed a frog being speared by a bittern. Since then she had forgotten how a frog in extremis screamed like a human child. The sound, the wild despair of it, shook her so much that she jabbed at the buttons six times and succeeded only in turning the volume down; the TV did not click off. What made it worse was that the politician on the screen, confabulating sincerely, was her ex, Prentis Sewell, wannabe state representative.

  In the aquarium, Adamus had squashed himself into the farthest corner, his throat palpitating. Buffy cried, “Adamus, what’s the matter?”

  “Wha-wha-what—”

  “The television?”

  “A—a visitation,” Prince Adamus said, tremolo. “A manifestation, an epiphany. With a voice as of ten thousand chariot horses bugling. Shining brighter than the sun.”

  “For God’s sake, it’s just my husband,” Buffy complained. Husband? The slip made her irritated with herself. “My ex.” With the volume down, Prentis’s voice was a distant quacking as he promised, maintaining eye contact, that he was going to change things. “I’m the storyteller!” Buffy burst out. “I’m the storyteller, and there he is on cable telling political fables.”

  “Make it go away!” Adamus begged.

  “Gladly.” Annoyed now and therefore calm, Buffy shifted her finge
r to the correct button and turned Prentis off. To hear him tell it, she had been turning him off for years. An actual mind in a woman will do that to some men. But closer to the truth, or perhaps another way of saying the same thing, Buffy thought: Prentis had dumped her in favor of politics. A mind makes a political wife a liability; what if some reporter asked her something and she actually, God forbid, said what she thought? Besides, she was not decorative enough. He had tried some image enhancement on her, but ineluctably, Buffy’s idea of dressing up was to throw on a denim skirt.

  “I’m surprised the Trophy wasn’t with him,” she muttered. The Trophy was an asset. Decorative and docile. With men, that was. With Buffy, she was the cat who had called her Madeleine.

  Better goddamn take care of returning that phone call while she was thinking of it. Buffy turned to the phone and stabbed her finger at the buttons. She knew the number by heart. It used to be her own.

  “It—it talked,” Adamus said, quavering. “It was full of light. Was it—was it a god?”

  “Prentis? I used to think so.” The hausfrau—make that haus slut—had picked up. “Hello, Tempestt? This is Buffy. Congratulations.” She poured on the honey. “On the first anniversary of my divorce. Don’t you remember? That made it legal. So you and Prentis could go out and get married instead of just shacking up together … goodness, I didn’t mean to offend. I just called to let you know I’ll be there for Emily’s party on Saturday; what time? Fine. No, no charge, I’m doing it for Emily. No, absolutely not, I will not accept money from you. Congratulations again. See you Saturday. Don’t call me Madeleine. Bye.”

  She hung up. “I feel a sudden profound need for lasagna,” she said to the frog. “You hungry?”

  He squatted, trembling, in his corner. He whispered, “The god—the god in the box of light—is your husband?”

  What? Oh. The TV. For God’s sake. “Adamus, forget it,” she told him. “It’s just a machine. Aren’t you hungry?”

  He did not answer, but she went ahead and made the lasagna anyway. En-Cor, frozen, in a cardboard pan, in the microwave. When it was ready she offered the frog a share and he ate it, sitting up on his tautly muscled haunches and stuffing noodles into his wide mouth with the pinky fingers of both dainty hands. He ceased trembling; his sleek green flanks relaxed. She offered him more lasagna. He ate more. He ate almost as much of it as she did. She offered him Italian bread and he ate that too. Lettuce-carrot-cucumber salad with garlic croutons? Yep, sure, you bet. Dessert? Some chocolate silk pie, some ice cream, some Nilla wafers? Yes’m. He ate.

  When he had finished his meal, in lieu of an after-dinner mint he took a great gulp of air, swelled himself even more than he was swollen already, split his skin, stripped it over his head and down his torso with his clever little hands, stepped out of it like a blasé lover stepping out of his trousers, wadded it up, stuffed it into his mouth, and swallowed it.

  “Ewwwww!” exclaimed Buffy, suddenly wishing she had not eaten so much.

  Glistening in his fresh green skin with cream-colored underbelly, a half size larger than before, Adamus lounged seductively at poolside, smirking at her. “Kiss me,” he invited.

  Searching her mental database for a sufficiently down-putting retort, Buffy discovered that there simply wasn’t any.

  She did the dishes. Didn’t want to turn on the TV, not if it was going to scare the frog to death. The radio made a poor substitute. With nothing to do except housework, and who the hell wanted to do that, she sat around for a while and then went to bed early again. She was tired. Hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.

  But once more, as soon as the lights were out, Adamus began his ranine serenade.

  Buffy yelled, “Your royal Princeness, please shut up!”

  He did not shut up. Nor was the word “croaking” sufficient to describe his virtuosity. He wonked, he honked, he bawled, he boomed, he tooted like a tuba and groaned like a bassoon, he sang like a donkey, he mourned like a dove, he moaned a bass melody, he bellowed like Bruce Springsteen with a head cold, he roared out his aria of froggy yearning. He had grown even louder and more resonant than the night before. Buffy could not even feel sure that he heard her shouts. She tried cotton in the ears, head under the pillow—no use. With each sob he vibrated her bed.

  Sob? She must have been dozing, dreaming.

  It was 2:37 A.M. by the curtly precise readout of the digital clock on her nightstand. Buffy sighed. As she turned over, Adamus let out a lamentation so intense that it shook the cobwebs loose from her ceiling and showered them down upon her. She thumped out of bed and padded forth to remonstrate with him.

  “Dammit, Adamus.” She clicked on his Gro-Lite to see if he had thrown himself upon a sword or something. No such luck. He sat in the shallows staring back at her with eyes like golden amulets, mystery symbols, pagan rings.

  Sleep deprivation and the deep of night do strange things to a storyteller. Buffy found that she was no longer angry at all. Rather, gazing fascinated into those black-and-golden orbs, she felt a sense of great echoing distance, then a rush of sudden insight, almost a vision—of a time when the nights were bottomless shadows lit only by fire, a time of tiny villages isolated amid leagues and leagues of primordial forest, a time when children who wandered off were never seen again, a time when a traveler rode out of the woods maybe once a year to tell new stories to help the old ones hold the world at bay—the time a little boy, Prince Adamus, was born into.

  Awed, she whispered, “Addie. Tell me your story.”

  He stared back at her.

  “I mean it. What is your story? Tell me all about it.”

  He did not speak, but in his silence and the night, she knew well enough: in order to deserve his story, she had to give him one.

  She stood barefoot in her dirty kitchen, facing him, yet she knew herself to be the minstrel visiting his palace. His regal gaze upon her was the same color as the torchlight; she felt her own shabbiness, her clothes worn from years of travel, her thoughts worn and shabby, so that nothing in her repertoire of stories—shaggy-dog stories, folk tales, ghost stories for children’s parties—nothing in her shopworn supply was good enough to offer him. She knew she had to offer him something deeply true. In order to deserve his story, she had to give him her own.

  “Once upon a time,” she told him softly, “there was a little girl named Maddie.”

  His pale throat throbbed like a white heart. His golden eyes watched her.

  “And Maddie looked like most little girls, round pink cheeks and wise eyes, but there was something odd about her. Maddie looked at the sky and saw stories about wind angels. She looked at the sea and saw stories about wild horses in the waves. She looked at the hills and saw stories about stone giants. She thought in stories. The world was made of stories to her. Some of the stories came to her easily like sunshine and some were dark and difficult like stormy nights. But any kind of story, all of them, she gathered like bright chewing-gum wrappers and ladybugs and dandelions to carry in her pockets and keep in her room and heap in her bed at night when she slept.”

  Buffy paused, collecting the pieces, because this was one of those difficult-in-the-night stories. She was coming to the hard part, when one day, she couldn’t say exactly which day, some wind shaped like her mother had blown into her room and said, “What is all this mess?” and swept all the stories away.

  It hadn’t happened exactly like that, of course. She wasn’t going to be able to tell it exactly the way it had happened. But that didn’t matter. Her story would not be accurate, but it would be true.

  “Each day Maddie would offer a bouquet of stories to her mother,” Buffy said, “and her mother would say, ‘That’s nice, dear,’ and drop it in the trash can. So she carried a story in her cupped hands to her father. But he said, ‘Go do the dishes.’ So she brought stories to the other children. But they said, ‘Let’s play something else.’ In school she was always watching for stories, for truth, not for facts, so the teachers thought she
was stupid. When she grew to be a big girl, not a little girl any longer, the boys she dated wanted her to give them access to her anatomy, not stories. When she grew to be a very big girl and got married to a man who said he would take care of her, he did not want her stories, either. He did not like them cluttering up the bed. So Maddie gave up gathering stories anymore.”

  Buffy hesitated again, because she did not yet know how the story ended. Though she did know—she had given up her stories, but they had not given up on her.

  “But the stories would not let her alone. The wind angels whispered in her ears. In her dreams the wild horses ran out of the waves and up the beaches and carried her away. The hills called to her, the stone giants told her stories that rang like stone hammers in her mind, dark and difficult. Once upon a time there was a girl named Maddie, the stone giants said. Maddie was a storyteller. Now Maddie was dead. She threw away the bright chewing-gum wrappers and the ladybugs and the dandelions and she grew up into a fat, boring person named Buffy. Maddie the storyteller was no more.”

  The frog gave a sudden leap to sit at the apex of his brick-and-rotten-board throne, staring at her.

  “So she …” Buffy’s voice began to misbehave, and she found that she could no longer maintain the storyteller’s distance and tone. She was losing it, damn it. “So I’m trying very hard to bring her back to life, you see.” In a pathetic whisper, not at all like a professional minstrel, she said, “I’m trying.” Damn it, she was screwing up. What was going on?

  “Addie,” she appealed.

  His throat swelled like white bubble gum. He resonated with a tremendous froggy burp. The glass of the aquarium rattled.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Shaken loose from her—reverie, whatever it was—Buffy could have smacked him. Stupid frog. What was she doing standing there spilling her guts to a stupid frog? She clicked off the Gro-Lite and went back to bed.