Fair Peril (9 page)

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—”

“Steroids,” Buffy said. And the girl would probably believe her and think, Ew, gross; my mom, what a user. “May we come in?”

“Uh, sure.” Emily regained her poise. With a toss of her honey-tressed head she turned, leading the way past a vast parlor and a glassy dining room to the informal living room, where a group of teenage girls clustered in front of the large-screen TV. “You're going to have to wait until we watch the end of this movie,” she told Buffy.

Thumping along behind her, Adamus lifted his head, saw the image of Winona Ryder flash before him, and screamed. Simultaneously, several of the girls turned bored heads, saw him, and, no longer bored, screamed as earnestly as he did. Some of them scrambled away from him, but as far as Buffy could tell, he did not notice. Squatting on the Oriental carpet (a tax shelter) in his tux, he was staring raptly at the screen as Winona, in charming dishevelment, closed in on her lover.

“That's just my mom's frog,” Emily said. For just a nanosecond Buffy heard a hint of little-girl approval in those two important words “my mom,” and she was so touched that—standing there in her clownish storytelling outfit, pigtails bow-tied with fluorescent-pink shoelaces, black sweatshirt puffy-painted with dancing pigs, wide black pants edged with multicolored braid—she glowed like the ever-ingenuous Winona. Her child had smiled; her frog, like a two-year-old in front of Sesame Street, was temporarily pacified; life was good.

Right on cue to pop her bubble, Tempestt came flitting in, carrying snack mix and drinks on a lacquered tray.

Tempestt, in a froth of curls and a ruffled silk romper. Even if Buffy hadn't detested her already, the romper would have done the job. “Oh, good, Madeleine's here!” Tempestt announced, dulcet to the max. “This is Madeleine Murphy, our storyteller. Such an interesting puppet! Are we all ready for some stories?”

“Sure,” one of the guests responded in tones of existential ennui.

“Spiffy-diffy,” added another equally morosely. The movie had ended. Sluggishly the kids rearranged themselves in a semicircle on the carpet, facing Buffy sullenly.

It was Emily's party, Buffy reminded herself.
Smile. Be good.
And tell one hell of a good story. But not for the first time she wondered, why had Emily invited her? Storytelling as entertainment was not Emily's style.

Give it your best shot.

She told them the one about the ghost of Toad Road. Did the voices, the sound effects, the gestures, the thrilling scream. They listened with reasonable attention and clapped politely when she was finished. But before she could begin her next story, Emily asked, “But what about the frog? When does he get to talk to us?”

So that was it. Emily didn't really want a storyteller at her party. She wanted Addie.

Damn.

“Is he going to tell us a story?”

Clueless in that regard, Buffy said, “Ah, uh, ah, he, uh—”

Emily leveled her midnight-blue eyes at Adamus and asked him directly, “Are you the frog from the frog-prince story? The one with the golden ball?”

Adamus looked back at her. Then he stood up and walked forward on his long, green hind feet. And despite the fact that he was a mere two feet tall, he advanced with such presence, such statesmanship, that Buffy stepped back. He took her place and faced the damsels fair, his courtiers clad in denims from the Gap.

“Sweet Princess Emily,” Adamus addressed her. “Lovely maidens. I am not a frog. Or, I was not always so. I was born a prince. I am Prince Adamus d'Aurca de la Pompe de la Trompe de l'Eau.”

The damsels did not all appreciate the solemnity of this moment. Most of them giggled or sat stolidly. But, seated on the carpet at his feet, Princess Emily gasped and gazed.

Tempestt laughed and clapped. “Oh, how clever. It really looks as if the puppet is doing the talking!”

“Shut up,” Emily whispered without shifting her gaze from Adamus.

“I am a fairy-tale prince,” Adamus continued. “I have been a prince for over a thousand years, yet I have never led a charge into battle, never met with advisors, never sat at the head of a banquet table, never pronounced judgment or ordered an execution. I have never wooed a lover, married, or sired children. I have never in a thousand years danced for joy; I have never in a thousand years grieved. I am immortal, yet it has been a long, long time since I have lived. I have no more soul man an angel.

“But it was not always so. I was born a mortal prince, fourth son of a minor Austrian royal in a chilly castle along the Danube.”

Tempestt tittered. “Madeleine, I never knew you were such a ventriloquist. Excuse me.” She fluttered out. But Emily's blue-velvet gaze never strayed from Adamus's blunt green face.

The frog's quiet baritone voice went on. “The first ten years of that life were much as might have been expected. Feasts and fasts, games, friends, teachers, lessons, thrashings. I remember those good years when I was a mortal boy as if they were a bright dream. So long ago. They came to a swift end. My father's ambition had led him into war with a neighboring principality, and he was bested. There was a meeting, a treaty, and I was sent to live in the enemy king's castle as a hostage to ensure my father's promise of peace.”

This was, Buffy realized, a true story. Starkly factual. But even beyond that, deeply true. It curled her toes.

“Truth to tell,” Adamus continued, “he was kinder to me than my father had ever been, that king. He was a gentle enemy. For a winter he was kind, and I began to hope—but then in the spring my father's armies came and surrounded his stronghold and besieged it. Then—no more kindness. He thundered with anger, and seized me, and ordered me to be bound so that I would not flee or hide, and bespoke my father from the ramparts. ‘You have betrayed your word of honor,' he roared as I lay trembling on the stones. ‘Withdraw at once, or I will use your son as a missile to hurl upon you.'

“And I heard my father's voice for the last time, cool and clear on the dawn air: ‘Do with him what you like. I have the hammer and the anvil still to make better ones than he.'”

Emily gasped and murmured, her wide eyes dark with stormy emotion.

“So they took me and placed me in the sling of the engine of war—” Adamus spoke slowly, hesitantly, as if this part were causing him some difficulty, even after a thousand years had gone by. “They placed me bound in the ballista, and I felt its great muscles clench and spring and hurl me high, high over my father's army. My terror was so great that I wished I would faint, but I did not. And then there was a moment of soul-sickness at the height of the arc. And then even greater sickness unto death as I began to fall.”

He paused. There was not a sound in the room. Emily's lips had parted, flower-soft. Buffy stood stricken by the story, the cruelty, the danger—she was beginning to sense the danger. Yet she did not move or speak.

I wanted to hear his story. I am hearing it.

“The angels were too appalled, I think, to save me.” Adamus paused again. “But the Queen of the Realm of Fair Peril happened to be driving past in her chariot of air. And she saw fit to take me. I do not—I do not think I died. I think I fainted. And when I awoke, I was lying in her hard white arms.” Adamus spoke more easily yet more low. “And she kissed me like fire and put the mark of her lips upon me.” He touched his forehead. Above his eyes—or in back of them, as he was a frog—Buffy saw a brown mark she had not previously noticed amid his other mottlings, a dark smudge like a brand. The place where eerie lips had burned? Buffy was not convinced. The smudge was shaped somewhat like a lipstick mark—but then again, people were always getting on the front page of the Life and Weirdos section of the newspaper by digging up potatoes shaped somewhat like Elvis.

“And so I became a prince of Fair Peril, the place that is not a place, where everything is itself yet something else.”

“Fairyland,” Emily whispered.

“In a sense. When I was a mortal boy, I listened to fairy tales, I shivered, and now I know why: they are such tales as the unseelie folk would tell if they had the heart to understand mortal longings. But for a thousand years I heard no such tales. The people of Fair Peril do not tell them. Mortals do.”

Buffy felt her own eyes going as wide as Emily's.

Adamus said, “In mortals there is a dream and a reality only story can tell. I became such a quiddity in such a story. I will live almost forever. As long as there are people mindful of the tale. And I will never grow old.” Adamus tilted his heavy head. “Another name for the Realm of Fair Peril is the Realm of the Ever Young. Princes and princesses do not grow old there. They do not grow at all.” He spoke quite softly. “The Queen's kiss made me a comely youth fit to serve her, but after that—nothing. I did not change.”

Emily leaned toward him. “But—but you're a frog now.”

His golden gaze focused on her, calling upon her to understand. He said slowly, “The Queen of Fair Peril is a jealous majesty. As beautiful as the dayspring and very jealous.”

“You—she—”

“It is hard to explain.” His voice grew more intense. “There were no chains on me, yet I had no freedom. In that place it was all mist rising and talking trees and silver lilies and gray steeds galloping, it was lovely, I had everything, yet—I had nothing.”

Like a lovely, expensive house, provided by an expensive marriage.
I had everything,
Buffy thought,
yet I had nothing. I had no selfhood. I had no freedom.

Her toes curled tighter. Today the frog was a better storyteller than she was.

“Or, I had only myself,” Adamus said. “No more soul than an angel. Body was all I had, all I could call my own. So when the Queen demanded the usage of my body, I refused her.”

This time it was Buffy who spoke, quietly. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci thee had in thrall.”

“No, she didn't.” He turned to her, his golden eyes glittering with defiance. “I am no one's chattel. I cried out to her, I told her, ‘Send me home, I want to go home, send me back.' Back to the earth from which she had taken me, even if I were only rotting bones or a foul semblance of my former self—for, you know, in Fair Peril wishes have a way of becoming punishments. But still, I risked it. I wished to breathe changeable air again, feel the chill of winter, the sweat of summer.” Adamus turned back to the damsels in denim, toward Emily. “I wanted to know mortal transience, mortal joy and grief, mortal love. And the Queen said to me angrily, ‘I will grant your wish—if you can find a mortal willing to love a frog. Otherwise, may you remain a prince in green breeches forever,' And I became as you see me.”

“Oh, poor prince,” Emily whispered. She stretched out her hand to him. Then she rose to her knees to reach for him with her hand. And with her mouth. And, apparently, with her heart.

So seductive was the spell of the frog prince's tale that Buffy nearly did not react in time. For a moment she stood mesmerized, looking upon a tableau suspended in fairytale timelessness: Emily, as lovely as a lily, with her soft lips parted to kiss, and Adamus standing in holy rapture, his homely head tilted up to receive her.

“No!”

Buffy yelled just in time, and sprang. Just before they could touch, she leaped forward, knocking them apart, sending both of them sprawling. Her daughter gawked up at her from the rug. Buffy turned on the girl and, on the cusp of the moment, shouted the most stupid, childish utterance she could possibly have offered to Emily and the world.

“
My
frog!”

At that moment something top-heavy, wrinkled, and garishly golden walked into the room: Fay. Catching the ex-daughter-in-law at her very worst, of course.

Simultaneously Buffy saw a green, tuxedo-clad blur hurtle up from the rug: Adamus, launching himself toward Emily like a missile. He'd had practice, but Buffy had bulk. She blocked his leap, then pounced as he fell. “Fairy Godmother!” he bawled to Fay, squirming fiercely in Buffy's two-fisted grip. “Fairy Godmother! Make her let Princess Emily kiss me!”

“Grandma!” Emily wailed at the same time to the same person, “I want to kiss him! Tell her to stop interfering!”

What made them think Fay could tell her to do anything?

“Let go!” the frog demanded.

“Grandma!” Emily whined.

Emily's friends had formed a front row, watching the entertainment with a lot more interest than they had shown for the storytelling.

“Fairy Godmother, make her let go of me!”

“
Grandma!
”

“Good God, she's not a fairy godmother!” Buffy snapped. “And, Emily, this is not a fairy tale. This is real life.” Yeah, right. There she was, down on the floor wrestling a forty-pound frog who was trying to bite her. “Stop that, you toad!”

Adamus went rigid in her grip. “I am not a toad!”

“You can call me an ogress, I can call you a toad.”

“I AM NOT A TOAD!” He swelled enormously in his indignation. With a shriek of polyester, his rental tuxedo split and fell off him. Buffy gawked, too startled even to worry that she was now going to have to pay for the ruined costume. Too startled to speak. Primal silence gripped the room as everyone gawked at the naked frog.

Everyone except Fay. She spoke with annoying calm and condescension. “Ms. Murphy. As this is not a fairy tale, why do you seem to think that something untoward will happen if Emily kisses the frog?”

“I don't want her kissing
anything
till she's twenty-one.” Buffy wedged Adamus, who felt rather like an inflatable doll from the Porn Corner, under one arm, then lumbered up and reached for her prop bag. “We're leaving.”