Fair Peril (28 page)

“The daughter's name was Emily,” Buffy went on. “And Emily also swam in Maddie's dreams, for just like a hundred thousand thousand dreaming mothers before her, Maddie had made a rosebud of a girl into a golden princess. So how was Addie to help falling in love with her, when Maddie loved her so much? Of course the Princess had to meet the Prince. Of course Mother Maddie had to be the wicked witch who tried to keep them apart. Of course they had to hate her, and of course they had to kiss. Of course they had to run away together and leave her all alone.

“Then all the mirrors turned their faces to the walls, and Maddie lived in a dark, dark house. She might as well have been buried in a grave.”

Adamus regarded her steadily with a troubled, waiting gaze.

“Buried alive,” Buffy said, keeping it very quiet, very level. “It's enough to drive a person crazy. So she cried out. She called out for someone to help her, save her, love her. She screamed for her prince to come. And someone came, but it was a stranger dressed all in white. He had kind eyes. He took her away to his white mansion with many rooms and spoke to her gently and offered her pills to stop her crying. His big house was a genteel place where everyone said please and thank you, but there were locks on the doors and bars on the windows and Maddie could not get out.

“She stood at the window and looked at the sky, where starlings were flying. I am a prisoner, she cried to the starlings. I am a prisoner, she cried to her prince, come set me free. And from far away far far dark inside her, Addie cried out in answer, I am a prisoner more truly than you are. La Belle Dame Sans Merci has me in thrall. Cold old queen, you own me.

“Maddie did not want to listen. She looked at the sky, where sparrows were flying. I am a prisoner, she cried to the sparrows. I am a prisoner, she cried to her daughter. Emily, come back, comfort me. But from far away far far dark inside her, Emily cried out in answer, I am a princess now. I am more of a prisoner than you are. Here I starve on my pedestal. Cold old queen, you own me.

“Maddie looked at the sky, where frogs were flying. There is no one to help me, she cried. Story of my life. A white snake flew past her window on golden wings. We are all prisoners, it said to her. We are the stories we tell, it said to her. Change the story.

“So she bent her mind upon the bars and broke through them and went forth to look for her daughter.”

“Mother,” Emily whispered.

Buffy looked at her daughter. Emily looked back with liquid eyes, deep eyes like midnight pools mirroring the stars. Buffy reached out and hugged her.

“Mom, Mom, Mommy!” Emily returned the hug, then stiffened. “Ew, Mom.” She pulled away. “You're all dirt.”

It felt so good Buffy could have bawled. She forbore to hug Emily anymore, but cried, “You're back!”

There was an irritable siffilation of white scutes as the most crucial personage in the audience stirred. “Ssssilence,” the snake-queen hissed.

“No.” Buffy turned to face her, trying not to show her fear. “The story is not over; it is still going on. I am Maddie. I am here to set my daughter free.”

“What about me?” Adamus whispered, his exquisite face taut.

“Of course you, Addie. Especially you. If you are sure you want to be mortal and real.”

“I am certain.”

The snake-queen reared up like a cobra, speaking so vehemently that her black forked tongue rattled her starched lace collar. “These are my subjects! My chattels! My playthings, my froggies, my pets! How dare you encroach? You shall not take them from me!”

“How could I, your puissant Majesty?” Buffy said quietly. “But I have come to set them free from
me.
”

“Sssstoryteller—”

“Maddie journeyed far, far dark inward,” Buffy said to Adamus, to Emily. “And she found her animus and her princess daughter, and she spoke with them. And she said, I do not own you anymore. Live your own stories now. Love each other if you want to, but only if you want to. Cleave to each other if you want to, or go your own ways if you want to. Be free of my dreams for you. Be free of my dreams for us. I will dream for myself now. I will tell new stories. I will no longer attempt to use you. I will not constrain you to love me. I will learn to live on my own, I will be as free as a wild goose on the wind, and I will always love you.”

There was a crash of stone and a crackle of glass; cornices fell down, and the tinted dome overhead spider-webbed and burst apart; the rainbow shards flew like doves. Caryatids and telamones cried out like the donkeys of God, flung off their burdens, and began to dance. Beech leaves turned to butterflies. Stott bugled. Adamus threw back his head and shouted a wordless yawp of joy.

The white queen shrieked and coiled to strike.

“ONCE UPON A TIME,” Buffy bellowed. “THERE WAS A REAL WORLD.”

Adamus grabbed Buffy's hand and Emily's hand just in time as, with a thunder roar like the sky pouring in and a starry blackness and a whirling vertigo, quiddity imploded upon them.

Sixteen

It was not one of those slip-in-slip-out-again transitions to which Buffy was becoming accustomed. This moment between realities was noisy, violent, and felt quite final. Fair Peril had tried to swallow her, but was spitting her out instead.

Then quiddity steadied, and there was a profound prismatic silence.

Buffy opened her eyes. She and Emily and Adamus were standing in the ornamental-plasterwork store, under the pallid and incurious gazes of gargoyles and horses and Venuses and cocky Davids and paunchy eunuchs and steatopygic cherubs perched on sconces, and entirely too many plaster-framed Art Nouveau mirrors.

“Ew!” Emily complained. “I hate this place. Everything's icky white in here.” She headed out toward the mall mezzanine.

Looking around him wide-eyed, Adamus followed. Heads turned; shoppers stared at him. Even if he had not been wearing an amethyst velvet tunic with gold embroidery, white silk tights, and dove-colored doeskin boots, people would have been staring at him, because he was too eerily beautiful to be real, as if he were a living, moving publicity still with all his pixels Scitexed. “What is he, some soap opera dude?” Buffy heard somebody ask somebody else.

“Prithee, Princess Emily,” Adamus whispered. He sounded frightened.

Emily turned to him. She wore a rumpled white shirt from the Gap, jeans, sandals. Just a normal teenager, which was to say, supremely beautiful—to her mother. With no such delusions concerning herself, Buffy was flapping along in bare feet and her hideous caftan.

“I'm not a princess,” Emily told Adamus gently.

“I—I know that, but—” He looked around as if something might be stalking up behind him, a harpy, a doomster, a snake. His hand reached out to her yet faltered in midair, a lost thing.

“But he's still a prince,” Buffy said in a low voice, stopping beside Emily. “He's having trouble with the transition.” Perhaps never in his millennium of existence, Buffy realized, had Adamus made a full transition. As a frog, he had talked, he had still been Prince Adamus. In her experience his princely garb had never changed, whichever world he walked in. Always he had felt the unseen chains of the cold old Queen around him. Now they were gone.

Freedom can be terrifying.

His shadowed gaze turned to her, so intense that the golden rings of his irises seemed to pulse. “Milady, please. Help me.”

“How, Addie?”

He seemed not able to say, but stood with his lips parted, his breathing ragged. Buffy saw his shoulders trembling.

Emily saw it too. “Mom, do something!”

“Like
what?
”

Adamus's otherworldly face was so pale and translucent that Buffy could see the white, winglike angles of his lovely cheekbones, the blood pumping dark in his temples, the Queen's mark on his forehead pulsing to the same panicky drumbeat.

That raw mark. How could she have done such a thing, putting her brand on him?

Impulsively Buffy stepped toward him, captured his head gently between her hands—the texture of that golden hair between her fingers, hot and silky as sunlight, was like nothing else she had ever felt—and drew him toward her so that he bowed his head. Just because it was the motherly thing to do—to make it better—she kissed the red mark on his forehead.

She felt the change before she saw it, through her hands.

There was a jolt, like electricity, or a twinge, and then the texture of his hair was just—hair. As satisfactory and normal as a horse's mane. Buffy's startled hands let go of him, and she stepped back, wide-eyed. The mark was gone from his forehead. Utterly gone. So was the sheen of golden glamour. So was his eerie, extravagant beauty. And so was his fear. A freckle-faced young hazel-eyed man looked back at her, quizzical, as if to say, What the hell are you doing, lady?

“Addie?” Buffy whispered.

Yes, it was him, all right. In some ineffable way Buffy recognized the clownish mouth that was quirking into a smile. Only a person who had once been a frog could own such a droll mouth. But other than that, he was just a nice-looking kid, nothing special. A few pimples. Hair the same khaki color as his eyes. He wore a faded purplish chambray shirt, blue jeans, running shoes that had probably been white once upon a time.

He said, “Did I ask you to kiss me?”

“Uh, no, not really.” Hastily Buffy stepped back, although there had been no tinge of challenge or rebuke in his tone, just bemused inquiry.

In the same polite, bewildered way, he inquired, “What did you call me? Addie?”

Buffy nodded.

“Is that my name? Do you know me?”

Butty's mouth sagged open and stayed that way; she couldn't say a word. Beside her stood Emily, similarly incapacitated.

Addie—or this new creature based on Addie—could see that they were flabbergasted. “I guess I'm being a dork,” he said cheerfully. “See, I can't remember. Don't know where I am. Don't know how I got here, and—” A sudden wide, whimsical smile. “And I sure don't know why I feel so good, 'cause I ought to be upset, shouldn't I? Considering that I can't remember a blame thing.”

Emily got her mouth moving first. “But you do feel okay?”

His smile, unbelievably, spread yet wider. “I feel
fantabulous.
”

“Then maybe not remembering is better.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged, looking around him happily, taking in the bright sights of the mall like a child at a carnival. “So, do I know you people?”

“I'm Emily, and this is my mother.”

He offered his hand to Buffy. “Nice to meet you, Mrs.—uh—”

“Murphy.” Buffy managed to get herself functioning, though her voice croaked. She shook his hand. “Buffy Murphy.”

Emily put in, “You're, um, you're my boyfriend.”

That smile of his would have lit up a dark winter night and warmed it too. “Really?”

“Um, yes.”

“You look way too sexy to have a boyfriend named Addie.”

“Adam,” Emily said. She reached around him with easy familiarity and pulled a wallet from his back jeans pocket. She opened it and showed him his driver's license. “There. Adam Prinz. See?”

“Hey!” He regarded his own unflattering mug shot with huge satisfaction. “There I am. And there's my birthday. And that's my address, right?”

Peeking at the address, Buffy saw that it was hers. “Hoo boy,” she said.

“Right,” Emily said. “C'mon, we were just heading there. Right, Mom?”

“I released him,” Buffy said, “and now I get to rehabilitate him, is that it?”

“Don't ask me, Mom.” Emily rolled her eyes and started walking. Her putative boyfriend followed. Sweet kid. Buffy barefooted along rapidly in her hideous caftan, watching Addie from behind as he gazed all around him. More than sweet; he was an innocent, like a newborn. And he had the right attitude. It was not a half-bad world, really, with sunshine sifting down through the tinted-glass domes and a robin flying around. It looked like the thing was nesting on one of the pedestals. Oh, goodness. Oh, wow. It was a
wonderful
world; the damn bird was nesting in the frog king's crown, pooping on his fat verdigris face. Hallelujah, there was justice in the universe.

“You've lost weight, Mom,” Emily remarked.

The kind tone, the smile, the compliment, from Emily, felt so wonderful Buffy could barely speak.

“Thanks,” she managed. “Good.”

“Huh?” Adam turned in surprise. “What's good?”

“I've lost weight.”

“But—” His mouth faltered and his hazel eyes lost focus as he struggled to chase down what he wanted to say. “But—why do you want to lose weight? I mean, back in the—” He looked disoriented, almost frightened, but he struggled on. “In the Middle Ages, or, like, you know, the Renaissance, women were supposed to be big, you know? Like you.” He blushed and looked down at the floor.

With force and clarity as if a white snake had bitten her, Buffy did know. She knew several things at once. She knew that Adam almost remembered but did not quite remember that he had been Adamus d'Aurca, a Prince of Fair Peril, a thousand years old instead of eighteen. She knew that he almost remembered but did not quite remember that he had been Addie, her frog and her pet. She knew with an exaltation of her heart that she had been beautiful to him.

She knew that he had loved her.

She knew that his almost-memories would quickly fade.

She knew that it was better that way.

“Adam,” she said firmly, “you're quite right. I'm big and I'm gorgeous.”

Adam threw back his head and laughed. His just-born joy rang through the mall like golden bells. People turned their heads to smile at him.

“Gonna take that boy in hand,” Buffy said to Emily or anybody who happened to be willing to listen. “Gonna take that boy home and feed him soul cake.”

Bent like a fishhook, Mom shuffled across the nursing-home lawn, her hands dragging the grass like grappling tackle. “Must get it done,” she droned. “Must get it done.”