Fair Peril

by Nancy Springer

  “Well, don’t grope me!” She knelt beside him. “Are you all right?”

  “I—I sneer at wounds,” he said shakily. “I am a prince of the house of Aurca.”

  She saw no damage. He seemed fine. Already getting his attitude back. “Prince, my patootie,” Buffy grumbled, saggy with relief. “You’re still a frog. I always knew that throw-him-against-the-wall thing was a euphemistic crock.” The sleep-with-the-princess version had a lot more of the knell of truth about it. It wasn’t the prince who was supposed to get knocked up.

  “Try it again,” he said with apparent sincerity. “Harder.”

  What was this, S and M? “No, thank you. You sure you’re okay?” Gently she picked him up, holding him at a safe distance from herself. “Nice to see ya. Where you been keeping yourself?” His skin was slimy-wet and smelly. “Ew!” She stood up and headed toward the bathroom, plopped him into the bathtub, and hit the light switch.

  In the sudden glare he cringed again. “Mercy, massive lady.”

  “Mercy yourself.” Now she could see that his smooth jade skin was dewed with punky water and smeared with a reddish clay she knew she should recognize. She did recognize it. “Oh, for God’s sake, you were in the sump hole?”

  “Princess, prithee kiss me. Your song in the night has enslaved me.”

  “Give me a break.” Buffy reached for a washcloth.

  “Your power turns my bones to jelly, but I know that your soul must be as generous as your flesh. Kiss me and let me cling to you, let me cling to you for a week and make milt.”

  “Addie,” said Buffy sternly, “this is sexual harassment, and I hate to tell you, but you’re not worth it; all you’ve got is a cloaca. Knock it off.” She twisted the spigots, turning on the bathwater.

  “But—but that is wonderful. You make the silver pizzle pee in the white pond. Ow!”

  “Too warm? No, too cold. Poor baby.” Buffy knelt by the tub and started sloshing water over her dirty frog.

  “Don’t! Don’t wash it off.”

  Buffy held off with the washcloth but wrinkled her nose. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Evidently clay that smelled like rotten mushrooms was perfume to him, like ripe, dead, road-killed ground hog to a dog.

  “You don’t like it, sweet lady?”

  “Nooooo, why should I not like it? You just stay here and be stinky. I’m going back to bed.” It was no use trying to put the frog back in the aquarium, as big as he had grown. Buffy snapped off the light, leaving him in three inches of water in the bathtub, and closed the door on him to keep him there.

  No sooner had she positioned her head on its pillow than the croaking began. Ribbet, Adamus sang, riiiibbet, oh RIIIIIIBBBETT RRIBB RRIBBB RIIIIIBBET. And if aquarium-sized Adamus had been able to vibrate the house, bathtub-sized Adamus sounded capable of launching it right through the pearly gates.

  Buffy smiled. “Music to my ears,” she whispered. She stuffed her forefingers into her ears, thrust her head underneath her unsanitary pillow, and went peacefully to sleep.

  The first thing the next morning, Buffy faced a moral dilemma: what to do with Adamus while she used the bathroom, for which her need was urgent. “Turn your back, please, your Princeness,” she told him.

  He did not turn. With a blank, suffering look on his broad face, he whispered, “I’m hungry.”

  “I don’t know whether I should feed you!” She stood jiggling her legs and biting her lower lip; more damn problems. Her food seemed to have an alarming effect on Adamus. He was discernibly larger than he had been the evening before. If this didn’t stop, he would soon be human-sized. And what if he didn’t stop then?

  “I’m starving, puissant lady!” Buffy heard a catch in his voice. “I can’t help it. I am not trying to grow so greatly.”

  “It’s not your idea?”

  “No!”

  Maybe it was the damn additives, chemicals strange to his medieval body. Damn processed food. Nothing she could do anything about.

  “If I promise to make you waffles, will you wait outside the bathroom?”

  “Yes.”

  He flopped wetly down the stairs after her, and she stuck some Aunt Jemimas in the toaster. Shuffling around in bathrobe and cow-nosed slippers, she cleared a patch of plastic tablecloth for Adamus to squat on. She set a plate in front of him, and one for herself, then brought on the waffles and the strawberry syrup. They ate—he used knife and fork, which at first she didn’t even notice, eerily unsurprised. They ate rapidly, silently, and single-mindedly. Two of a kind. Sometime during the second batch of waffles Buffy realized that she ought to be getting ready to go to work, and sometime during the third batch she realized that she had no intention of doing so. The plastic-food people needed her and she needed their money; nevertheless, she was not going. For reasons unrelated to logic, conscious choice, or her storytelling career, she could not bring herself to leave Adamus home alone. Suppose he got out of the house; suppose she lost him? She couldn’t risk it.

  The realization made her peevish. Realizing they need someone has that effect on some people. While Adamus finished his fourth batch of waffles, Buffy sat back, swung her feet onto an empty chair (her cow-nosed slippers, upright, peered at her stolidly), picked up the large green book LeeVon had given her, and leafed through it.

  “Batracheios,” she read aloud; she knew that reading aloud was an annoying habit, had always pissed the hell out of Prentis, and she was doing it for that reason. “Subtitled, ‘A Compendium of Froggery.’”

  Adamus ate doggedly, or perhaps froggedly, ignoring her.

  “It says here,” she remarked, “to cure rheumatism, roast a live frog and apply it to the sore area.”

  Gumming a soggy waffle, Adamus missed a mastication.

  “To cure warts, rub a live frog over them, then impale it on a thorn to die.”

  The frog stopped chewing, set down his fork with a clunk, and stared at her.

  “To cure whooping cough, place a small frog in a box tied around the sick person’s neck. As the frog decays, the cough will go away.”

  “Stop it,” Adamus said.

  “Oh, beg pardon. Let me see what else is in here.” She flipped through the pages, some of which were pulpy and covered with print and some of which were glossy with bright pictures of various famous frogs—frogs who went a-courting; Beatrix Potter frogs; Jim Henson puppets, which Adamus would probably loathe; others—interspersed among quotations and verse, the latter being mostly bad, doggerel (froggerel?) except for the poetry of Anne Sexton, which was frightening and sublime. Buffy forbore from reciting the poetry, leafing past it to a section devoted to technical esoterica. “Izaak Walton on how to rig up a live frog as bait for bass—”

  “Stop it!”

  Buffy had sufficient mercy to desist, but continued to read silently, then reread, fascinated: Thus use your frog: put your hook through his mouth and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg with only one stitch to the arming wire of your hook, or tie the frog’s leg above the upper joint to the armed wire; and in so doing, use him as though you loved him.

  It made her shiver. Thus use your frog. Use him as though you loved him. She read the passage a third time.

  Was she really a user, as Emily claimed?

  Speaking of Emily. “Tomorrow is Emily’s party,” she said to Adamus.

  “Good. You go. Have a nice time.” He had given up on finishing his fourth waffle and was sitting lumpen on the table. Nothing sits quite as lumpen as a frog.

  “You’re invited, remember? She specifically asked for you.”

  “I am not going to be made a show of.”

  Buffy read, “To secure a reluctant lover, catch a frog, wrap in white cloth, put onto an anthill after sunset. The frog croaks in agony as ants eat it—”

  “Stop it!”

  She realized that she was being as offhandedly cruel as Izaak Walton, but could not seem to help it. Adamus had kept her up at night. Adamus had frightened
her. Adamus had left her and made her cry. Moreover, this was too good. “—and the lover suffers the pangs of love. Finally all that is left of the frog is a small bone in the shape of a hook. Fasten it to the clothing of your reluctant lover, who should cleave to you, suffering like the frog.”

  “Lady,” said Adamus in a trembling voice, “you can make me suffer. And you can make me go to your daughter’s festivity, and you can humiliate me, and you can make a show of me. But you cannot make me speak.”

  His eyes, rings of ancient gold floating on black pools, black wells as deep as time—seeing herself reflected in those eyes, Buffy experienced a sudden, slewing disorientation as her point of view skidded out of control and did a 180. She closed Batracheios and held it in her lap, looking into her frog’s wide, distraught, lichen-colored face.

  She said softly and slowly, waiting for the right words, “Once upon a time—there was a prince—who was turned into a frog—and forced to go from his bright palace to live in a dark swamp in a rank and wildering forest.”

  Addie stared sullenly at her.

  Buffy found more words. “There he shivered in peril of everything from snakes to otters to men who hunted him with spears for the sake of his meaty thighs. Fishes in the water and foxes in the forest and ospreys in the sky all prey on frogs, for frogs are small and thin-skinned and sweet.”

  Addie, no longer sullen, had lifted his heavy, dewy head to gaze at her intently.

  “But the frog prince became clever; he survived. All alone he lived there for a thousand years.

  “Then one day a small girl like a sunbeam came toddling to the dark pool where he was hiding. He rested on his log and looked at her, unafraid because she was merely a babe, like the babies in their long white christening gowns he remembered from his princely palace—but he underestimated her. She reached for him all too quickly and caught him in her questing hands, as dainty as a raccoon’s hands. She lifted him and kissed him, but because she was so young and innocent, her kiss had no effect; he remained a frog. Yet from that moment he became her baby, for even though she was only a baby herself, she was as much larger than the frog prince as the other humans, her family, were larger than she.

  “So she took him home in a pocket of her apron and dressed him in baby doll’s clothes and gave him a doll’s cradle to sleep in and mothered him the way her mother mothered her. And he lived in terror of her love, for her power over him was immense. She was his goddess. At any time she could have killed him with a hug.”

  Adamus’s golden eyes glittered like beer-bottle caps flattened on a black road.

  Buffy said, “Yet he survived. And he had hope, for if he could live with her another thousand years, until she grew less than innocent, then one day she would kiss him and he would transform, and she who had been his mother would become his bride.”

  There was a long pause as Buffy waited for the rest of the story to come seeping out of her and Adamus waited for Buffy to tell it.

  Buffy said slowly, “One day the frog crept out of his cradle to see the sunbeam girl, his goddess, all swaddled and smothered in a dress of white lace as if in a rain cloud, veiled in white lace, weeping bitterly. Also in the room stood a personage three times as tall as she, all draped in black lace, and this was her terror, her mother. And the mother took the child by the hand and led her out of the room and away.

  “Then the frog was smitten with fear—for himself, for her—and with a sense of what it means to be a prince. He followed, leaping along the hallways. He saw her sitting small and white and veiled in a carriage, and he leaped to cling and ride along as the strong gray horses pulled it away.

  “The carriage rolled faster and the gravel flew up and pelted him where he clung until he knew he would have to let go and fall and be killed, a frog lying small and flat and brown on the roadway—but he did not let go; he hung on. The dust choked him until he knew he would have to let go and fall and be killed, a frog lying dry and dead in the weeds beside the road—but he did not let go. He clung until finally the carriage slowed and stopped at the tall stone entrance of a great palace the frog recognized from long ago. His heart pounded in his frail chest, for the sunbeam girl had brought him home.

  “Then she descended from the carriage, her glow all veiled in cloudy white, weeping like rain.

  “Her mother draped in black led her into the palace by the hand, and the frog followed, leaping like a shadow behind her. Surely, he thought, they had brought her here for some religious rite, a baptism, a communion, to enter into a white-clad cloister, perhaps—for he knew she was far too young, too innocent, for that other white-clad rite. She had kissed him only that morning, and he had felt her innocence like dawn dew upon her lips. She remained nothing more than a girl child, and he remained nothing more than a frog.

  “Still, his heart pounded hotly in him, for deep in his belly a thought squirmed like a hookworm, that she might be meant for him. This was his home.

  “Then he saw the bridegroom awaiting her. A man four times her size, harsh and gouty, like a toad.”

  Buffy stopped abruptly, realizing with a shock what she was doing, whose story she was telling. The toadlike man—it was her father, whom she remembered with more ambivalence than affection. She carried his picture clearly in her mind as she spoke, as clearly as if he lay in his coffin before her. There was no mistaking him.

  The child bride was her mother.

  Nobody had ever told Buffy in so many words, but families have their own ways of conveying stories. She knew well enough: they had made her mother marry him. A bride at the age of fourteen. Given away by a widowed mother to a man who promised to take care of the child and give her everything she needed.

  By the standards of the day, he was a good man. A good provider. He had provided his wife with a nice, hot kitchen, a new baby once a year, a whack on the mouth if she talked back.

  What that wedding night must have been like.

  “The mother let go of the girl’s hand,” Buffy said in a low voice to Adamus, “and the bridegroom seized it, and he took her away to the inner sanctum, and when she came out, she was not a sunbeam girl anymore.”

  Buffy ended the story there, folding her hands on top of the green book in her lap.

  “But the prince, the frog!” Adamus exclaimed. “What happened to him?”

  “She could not see him anymore. The tears had washed all the light out of her eyes. She no longer talked to him or sang to him or rocked him in her arms. She would never kiss him. So he went back to his pool in the forest.”

  Taut and quivering, rearing on his fingertips, Adamus stared at her. “You are two people,” he said nearly in a whisper. “I do not understand you.”

  “I’m two people?” She spoke gently. “You should talk.”

  “But—but you are a woman.”

  “So?”

  “How can these thoughts be in you? How can you be like me?”

  She contemplated several levels of meaning to that. “Addie,” she said sweetly, “go jump in a lake.”

  “How can I? You hold me a prisoner here.”

  So that she would not have to listen to him any longer, she opened Batracheios again, but something had changed: instead of the usages of frogs, a list of punishments confronted her. “The evil mother was brought before the court and put into a barrel that was filled with boiling oil and poisonous snakes.” “They put her into a barrel studded with nails on the inside, hammered on the lid, and rolled it down the hill into the river.” “In the red-hot slippers she danced until she fell down dead.” “Burned at the stake until she was ashes.” “And the pigeons pecked out her eyes.” Sickening punishments. From the fairy tales; Buffy recognized this Grimm stuff. And it was always a wicked mother/stepmother/witch who was getting the business. How come? Why not a wicked father once in a while? Sexist folklorists.

  Hastily Buffy turned the page.

  She was rewarded. An interesting headline caught her eye. She read silently. Very interesting indeed.

/>   All that day between baby-sitting her frog, she read her swamp-green book, and the more of it she read, the more there was. Like Adamus, Batracheios seemed larger each time she looked, and harder to understand.

  Five

  “Pickle-faced scant-hearted prickmedainty thick-necked ogress,” Adamus hissed snakelike between his gums.

  “I can’t make you speak, remember?” Buffy rang the doorbell of the house that used to be hers, trying not to wonder what sort of personality defect caused her to be there. Trying not to think how idiotic it felt to be standing on the doorstep of that big pseudo-Tudor house, listening to the door chimes sounding inside—she had always loathed door chimes. Dingdong bell, pussy’s in the well, whoa, contemplate that. Come to think of it, the really bizarre thing would be to move back into this overwrought faux-genteel mansion. Come to think of it some more, the most bizarre thing of all was that she was standing on the doorstep with a forty-pound, two-foot frog in a rented mini-tuxedo standing erect and volubly outraged by her side.

  Emily opened the door, sweet and regal in a wheat-colored tunic and leggings.

  “Hi, tootsie. Happy unbirthday.” Emily’s birthday was not until August, when she and all her friends would be away at various camps and resorts; she always had her party in the spring. Seeing the unbirthday girl, Buffy felt a warm upheaval swell her ribs and tried to snag the kid in a hug. Whenever she was around Emily, child, daughter, her chest ached for contact, her arms ached. She reached out. But with a quelling glance Emily eluded her. Preserve that teenage cool.

  “Mom,” Emily protested, “I wanted you to bring the real frog.”

  Buffy tried to salvage some of her own cool. “Define ‘real.’”

  But Emily had no patience with ontology. She gave her mother a blank stare. “You know what I mean. Your frog frog, not some sort of a puppet.”

  A quintessentially froggy voice quoth, “’Tis I, Princess Emily.” Adamus swept her a bow.

  “Oh!” It was such a childlike gasp that Buffy had to smile. Emily’s hands flew to comfort her mouth, which seemed uncertain whether to shape delight or fright. “How, uh, how—”