Fair Peril (5 page)

She felt more surprised to find her at her door.

“Fay,” she said, trying not to sound either too falsely welcoming or too nonplussed. “What can I do for you?” The relationship between her and her mother-in-law had been cautiously cordial but never warm. This was the woman, after all, who had raised Prentis to be the way he was. Mama's little crown prince.

“Power outage, my sweet patootie,” said Fay severely. “Power outrage, is more like it. Power scandal.”

“Huh?” Buffy absorbed little of this, being hung up on the sweet patootie. I wrinkle, therefore I yam? “Sweet
what?
”

“Fairy tale is NOTHING TO BE SCOFFED AT.” Fay advanced upon the door, and Buffy was sufficiently flabbergasted to back up. A white-and-golden frigate, Fay sailed into the kitchen.

In the aquarium, Adamus leaped about like oversized green popcorn, yelping, “Fairy Godmother! Fairy Godmother! Fairy Godmother!”

“It's just my mother-in-law,” Buffy protested.

“Fairy Godmother!” the frog appealed like a tattling kid. “Make her kiss me. Get me out of here!”

Fay was looking around as if she saw no frog, heard no frog. “You've got mud on your floor,” she said, apparently to Buffy, though she was looking at the mud. “And what's that, dead beetles?”

The unspoken message came through loud and clear: No Wonder Prentis Left You. Buffy allowed herself to be rude. “Fay, what are you doing here?”

Looking around, perhaps mentally cataloging the cobwebs in the corners and the grease on the stove, Fay did not answer, but Adamus leaped at the glass and shouted, “She has come to rescue me!” Leap. “I am Prince Adamus d'Aurca!” Leap. “You warthead, don't believe in anything, how do you think I talk?” LEAP leap. “A frog can't talk. A frog has no ribs. But
I
have ribs.” The frog ricocheted wildly, splashing water out of the aquarium onto the muddy floor. “A frog has barely any brain. But
I
have access to the biggest brain there is. I—”

“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 finger 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.