Fair Peril (24 page)

And it had better stay that way. So the cop had better not say “frog” again.

The cop was so frustrated he was attacking the bed now, pounding it with his fists. The attendant pulled out his keys to lock the door on him for the time being. The attendant tightly gripped his keys, because keys were sanity. Keys were the only thing that kept him from being the same as the cop.

Pounding the bed, the cop yelled, “Fricking frog!” The cop yelled, “Fricking fracking freaking big FROG!”

The attendant threw the keys at him. The attendant screamed. Screamed. They were coming, the authority figures, the white-coated doctors on duty, he could hear the running feet, but he could not see anything except green, and he could not stop screaming.

The Queen of Fair Peril lifted her white hand in a gesture of dismissal, and that was the last Buffy saw of her. Magenta sunrise spun around and she felt herself falling through a distance much greater than she liked. Her arms shot out in a monkeylike reflex and her mouth opened to scream, but she sputtered instead. Soaked, drenched, soggy, sopping wet, wet, wet. She was goddamn underwater. Kicking hard, she surfaced and discovered that she was drippily back in the Mall freaking Tifarious. The Queen had plunged her into one of the fountains.

Except it was not a fountain, of course. Deep. A pool. She was in Fair Peril, and from rocks at the edge, a bearcat's round, fuzzy face peered at her.

Laboriously, struggling to stay afloat in her waterlogged clothing, Buffy swam toward shore. But as soon as she got within six feet of the edge, the bearcat lifted its adorable whiskers and snarled at her.

“Oh, for God's sake.” Treading water, Buffy studied the bearcat uncertainly. Bearcats, plural. Several of them. They were cute animals, but big. Like her, cute and big, right? And look at all the damage she had done. Buffy swiveled and tried for shore in a different direction.

Just as her hand reached for the rocks, an excessively large hedgehog appeared upon them with an expression of great decision upon its geeky concave face. It swelled to a sudden forbidding prickliness, and Buffy retreated.

She was beginning to get it. “Guys,” she pleaded, “I need to get out of here! I'm not a goddamn amphibian; I'll—
blub
!” Already, getting tired, she was going under. Was the Queen trying to drown her? Panic gave her kick enough to surface again and hastily slough off her sneakers; the socks went with them. Panting, then holding her breath as she ducked beneath the surface of the water, she wrestled with her heavy jeans and got them off. Her waterlogged shirtsleeves dragged at her arms. She yanked the shirt open, ripping buttons, and got rid of it.

Trapped in deep water, naked except for cotton panties (probably with stains on them or holes in them, a disgrace and a scandal, just as her mother had always feared) and industrial-strength bra, half-naked and vulnerable, all wet, Buffy felt—not frantic, as would have seemed appropriate, but suddenly and illogically light and lucid and free.

Free. It was like those times way back when she was a little girl and took off her dress and ran around the neighborhood. Or took everything off and sat in the grass and sang. Back before anybody had yet succeeded in making her ashamed of her body, though already poor Mama was working on it.

Mama. Back before anything, there was Mother. Cradled in the watery embrace of the pool, Buffy did not care that the bearcat had snarled at her; she could swim forever, and she wanted to. Lolling at her ease, she smiled up at the lavender sky.

All in due time she rolled over, put her face in the water, and looked for a shining fish.

It was wonderful down there. The deep, limpid water magnified the round coppery pebbles seeming to swim on the bottom, the waverings of lime-green, feathery waterweed, the flickerings of minnows. Snails clustered on boulders, pewter spirals that left pewter squiggles of slime. A turtle lazed past, bubbles trailing off the yellow-rimmed scales of its shell. The turtle had ponderous clawed feet that paddled lightly for such a heavy thing. Wonderful, that something so shelly, lumbering, cumbersome, could swim so—so much like a certain middle-aged woman. Or a fat bearcat, or a seal. Heavy and lumbering on land, lithe in water, free of the weight of self.

Her clothes were not down there anywhere. Sneakers, jeans, shirt had simply disappeared. Buffy didn't care. They would have looked all wrong smothering the plumy green waterweed, clunked down amid the shimmering pebbles and the snails.

Buffy came up for air and noticed the feathery waverings of reflected forest on the pool's surface, the silver flickerings of ripples. Again she put her face beneath the rumpled surface of the water. This time she saw a shining fish. She saw tadpoles clustered in a belly of sunlight. She saw the yellow-footed underside of a duck. She saw the hair on her own arms white and wavering and feathery with bubbles. Lifting her head for air again, she saw in the scintillations on the water the white snake wrinkling away from her.

She followed.

Paddling like a turtle, kicking like a frog, splashing like a walrus, she followed to the central island where the tall, empty pedestal stood. Odd; had the island been there before? She hadn't seen it when she had been thrashing around, about to drown. Not that it would have mattered; there were guardians on the boulders of the island too. A black-crowned night heron stood with swordlike beak at the ready. A badger glowered, flexing its Schwarzenegger shoulders, sharpening its massive claws on the rock. A skunk basked like a black-and-white flower. More animals ringed the place: sable and ermine, an egret, a black jaguarundi. All made way as the white snake glided ashore and passed between them to the base of the pedestal. All watched—and from the water Buffy watched raptly—as the white snake flowed in a milky spiral up the tall wheat-colored shaft and coiled itself into a perfectly symmetrical truncated cone, its head at the apex, atop the plinth.

Buffy came ashore.

For the first time in her life sorry that she was wearing Fruit of the Loom instead of Victoria's Secret, she clambered onto the island, streaming like a porpoise. The guardians let her pass, as she had known they must, for the white snake awaited her. He awaited her, the immaculate serpent on his throne.

Barefoot, she walked up the rough slope and bowed herself into a properly obsequious lump at the base of the pedestal.

Conjuror woman. You are supposed to be dead.
As before, the dry, black-tongued voice sounded directly inside her head.

“I know it.” She kept her head down and did not look at him. A breeze blew; snaky sensations tickled her skin. Her bra and panties, she noticed without caring, had grown lustrous watery streamers of silver-gold veiling; she was crouching there in a glittery silk belly-dancing outfit, with her embonpoint billowing out all over it. Lord. What did this snake want from her? Too late she realized that she had sounded abrupt; she should have called him “Your Snakiness” or something. What was the proper mode of address for a supernatural ophidian? She did not know. Good grief, what use was a public school education, anyway?

You have great power.

Was he offended? Buffy could not tell from that dry, uninflected, incorporeal voice.

Where is your stellated gown?

She lifted her head. “I left it behind.”

Brave of you. Or foolish.

“Yes.” Buffy tilted her head far back to look, seeing little but that frightening blunt head atop the white circinate mound of coils, those cold golden eyes. The white snake was much, much bigger than she remembered. She had to force herself to speak. Her voice came out a grainy whisper. “Please tell me, where is my daughter?”

Why should I?

He did not deny that he knew. But then again, why should he deny anything?

How have you deserved my help?

It was a farce, of course. Buffy had gone to Sunday school; she knew that the idea of praying was not to deserve. The concept of praying, petitioning, begging, pleading, boon-craving, sucking up, was not to earn anything, but to confess oneself undeserving and thereby toady the tyrant, deity, lord, politician, suckee into such spasms of ego gratification that he felt like giving you what you wanted. It was a joke. A game.

Yet—Buffy felt a chilly sense that in Fair Peril it might not be a game. She whispered, “So far I've gotten by on telling stories.”

Suppose I don't want to hear a story. Why should I divulge anything to you?

“Because I need to find Emily.”

You need? I am not concerned with what you need.

“But—she might be hungry.…” “Hungry” was the least of Buffy's fears for her daughter. In all-too-vivid fast-forward sequence, as if watching the movie preview from hell, Buffy imagined Emily starved, imprisoned, abused, molested, tortured, and it was as if a wasp the size of a poodle had stung her—no way could she whisper anymore. She rose up on her hind feet like a rearing stallion. She shouted, “Doesn't anybody but me goddamn care? She's just a girl, a child. She might be cold. She might be hurt. She might not be eating right. Her asthma might be acting up. Some cretin might be taking advantage of her.” She knew that this was the white snake, she knew it would be wise to bespeak him softly, but she could not. If her life depended on it, which it very well might, she could not be ladylike any longer. She bellowed, “This is EMILY damn it my DAUGHTER my BABY my CHILD and I want to know, WHERE IS SHE? WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO HER?” Buffy shouted so loud that the guardian birds flew up with craking cries, the otters and bearcats splashed into the water. “IS SHE OKAY? IS SHE HAPPY? WHERE IS MY LITTLE GIRL?”

Ssssilence!
The white snake convulsed under the impact of her shouting, his perfectly coiled symmetry destroyed. His anterior half rippled down over the edge of the plinth and swayed tautly in air with his tumid corpse-colored head thrust toward her, his black tongue flickering nearly in her face.

Buffy knew that he meant to bite her if she went on. And this time he would make the punissshment stick. She knew it.

But she could not stop. To stop would have been to be a lost soul, a toy, a squatting frog like Adamus, not Buffy, not Madeleine. She roared, “I DON'T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO ME! NOBODY BETTER DAMN MAKE EMILY CRY!”

Sssorrow,
the snake promised, pulling back like a fist to strike.

Like angel bells from on high, a blonde young voice called, “Mom!”

Bullheaded as Buffy was feeling, the white snake probably could not have made her flinch away. But that voice jerked her around like a golden chain. “EMILY!” Where was she, where was Emily? Stumbling back, frantically looking, Buffy did not even notice that the white snake jabbed at her and missed.

“Mom! Mommy!”

The voice came from the sky. The wise-eyed stag flew in on eagle wings. And riding on his back, gowned in samite and hanging on to his antlers like they were a steering wheel, was—

“Emily! EMILY!” Tears flooded Buffy's face so that she could barely see to avoid the rocks as she ran toward her daughter.

Fourteen

Prisoner
.

Walking between lavender trees, Adamus realized that his present circumstances—garments of velvet and gold, magical food to eat, mystical woods for the wandering—he realized that the luxury of his non-life would not have seemed like durance vile to most people, and the realization did not comfort him. Most people would have traded places with him, and most people were fools. They did not understand: waiting, tortured by hope, was prison. Excruciating boredom was prison. Prison was his inability to go, to do, to act.

He talked to the trees. “Emily,” he whispered. Thinking of her—
Where is she?
—tightened invisible chains around his chest, making him moan. He wanted to go forth, find her, save her, be her love, her hero, but he could do nothing. The storyteller had not yet changed the story. To be a fairy-tale prince was to wait, like a doll swinging from a vendor's stall, until someone or something reached out and snatched you.

And even then, what followed might not be pleasant. Adamus felt quite sure the Queen was not done with him. Ye gods and little fishes, he had come before her in smallclothes, and then he had given her Buffy's message, which had sent her shooting off in a fury, galloping away in her chariot of air. Probably, having dealt with Buffy, she was just now contemplating his condign punishment.

Buffy, I'm sorry. I warned you.

The storyteller had not yet changed the story, and probably now she never would.

Emily's mother.

“Emily …”

Chains tightened again, threatened to make him sob. With shackles on him no one could see, Prince Adamus d'Aurca walked deep into the mystical woods. No one could see the chains, but they hurt like real steel. He still had his pride; he wanted to be far from anybody, alone with his misery.

Aimlessly walking, he found a pretty forest glade full of statuary—a long, straight, shady glade—and he wandered down it, his footfalls soft and silent in wildflowers as thick as a carpet. Great beeches towered on each side, their silver trunks softly gleaming, their leaves rustling overhead, translucent, golden, though not with autumn. To either side stood white marble ruins, columns and cornices in pale arcades beneath the beeches, and the shafts of the columns were sometimes fluted pillars but more often white presences, caryatids and telamones, stone youths and maidens half naked beneath carved draperies. Beautiful youths, lovely maidens. Adamus walked on with slow steps and looked at them with some curiosity. He had thought he knew all of Fair Peril, but this was not a place he had ever been before.

Buffy shrieked, “Emily!” She could not seem to stop her unseemly noise, Emily, Emily, Emily! and the tears brightening everything to a wavering watery glory. Oh God oh joy oh God—but could this be the real Emily, this warm princess, hugging her? Hugging her with utter abandonment of adolescent dignity? Looking back at her with a starry light in those midnight-blue eyes?