The Prince Problem

by Vivian Vande Velde

  The horse didn’t have the option to flee, fastened as it was to the ruins of the cart on which the dragon still sat. The horse tugged futilely, then lay down on the road, perhaps preparing to die.

  “Good job, Telmund,” Amelia said, trusting what he had told her about sharing his brain with whatever animal he’d turned into. Of course, the henbane madness might be confusing things. Not that she could have run away, in any case, with her hands tied. “Good job. You’ve scared them away. Now we can head off home.”

  The dragon looked at her with unblinking eyes.

  “It’s me, Telmund,” she said. “It’s Amelia. You’ve been working very hard to rescue me, and now you have. You truly are a hero, and now we can go home.”

  The dragon looked up into the sky. Either his eyes were much better than hers or he wasn’t really looking at anything. Nothing that was there, anyway.

  “Good job, Telmund,” Amelia repeated. It couldn’t hurt to keep using his name, to remind him who he was. “Thank you for rescuing me, Telmund. Let’s go home now.”

  The dragon sighed, emitting smoke only, no flame, and settled down into the splintered wood that had formerly been the cart.

  “Or sleep,” Amelia said. “That’s good, too. But before you fall asleep …” She held her bound wrists out to him, thinking his multitude of very sharp teeth would make short work of the rope.

  But it was already too late.

  “Telmund,” Amelia called. “Telmund.”

  Would the men come back? Amelia doubted it, not with a dragon having chased them away.

  In any case, she was fairly confident Prince Sheridan would not. And certainly his men had seen they had no reason to be loyal to him.

  But she also knew people did not always act the way you might expect them to.

  “Telmund,” she urged.

  His body deflated, shrinking and twisting. The scales lost their luster and melted into one another, until they weren’t scales at all anymore but had transformed into skin and clothing.

  He turned back into a boy but never was fully awake enough to respond.

  “Telmund. Telmund. Telmund.”

  His shape changed again—the process made her slightly queasy, but she couldn’t look away—with some parts thickening and others thinning, and fur sprouting everywhere. He woke up briefly as a goat, just long enough to eat through her bindings.

  She left the goat sleeping and released the horse from what was left of the cart.

  The horse seemed to have gotten over having been so close to a dragon. It stood calmly, while Amelia did the best she could with shortening its reins. She had never ridden bareback before—if you didn’t count being scrunched in front of Prince Sheridan’s saddle, which she certainly didn’t want to count. But even with just about no bareback experience, she knew she should not stay here, nor could she travel by foot with Telmund, whose senses wouldn’t return till tomorrow.

  She went back to where she’d left the goat and found a snake. Well, a snake would be easier to pick up than a goat—or a boy, for that matter. As uneasy as the thought of picking up a snake made her, she told herself she was fortunate she’d missed a couple transformations.

  Amelia had to tell herself this a total of four times before she could actually pick up the snake.

  “Everything is fine, Telmund,” she assured him.

  Luckily, he wasn’t a very long snake. She draped him over the neck of the horse (the horse was not overjoyed, either), and then Amelia scrambled up behind him. “Adders are not aggressive,” she told the horse, told herself. “And, even if they do bite, their bite isn’t usually fatal.” She repeated this, too, for good measure. “Not usually.”

  Then, with one hand on the snake so he wouldn’t slide off, she got the horse moving in the direction toward Pastonia. She could tell exactly where they were by the shape of the mountains in the distance and the knowledge that the river was to her right.

  Telmund woke up midmorning as himself and spent a little time sitting up with Amelia on the horse’s back, her arms holding him steady as he babbled about the fact that he would not be good to eat.

  “Definitely not,” Amelia reassured him. “I know. You’re safe with me.”

  Her voice seemed to soothe him.

  “Tell me a story,” he mumbled.

  “Oh,” she had to admit, “I don’t know any.”

  His voice a hoarse whisper, Telmund said, “Tell me one anyway.”

  She couldn’t very well tell the little bit of the story that she’d remembered earlier, in the straw wagon, the story that her father had upset her with when she’d been a small child: Once upon a time, there was a little pig who built his house of straw. Because straw is a very inadequate building material, a wolf came along and ate him up, but apparently another pig survived.

  To keep him calm, and to help pass the time, and because she suspected he wouldn’t remember a word of what she said, Amelia started telling the only story she knew: her own. “Once upon a time,” she told him, because as little as she knew about stories, she knew that’s the way they start, “there was a princess whose parents were perfectly lovely people. But this was a problem, because their total loveliness made them unrealistic in their outlooks. They assumed everybody else was perfectly lovely, too, and that, therefore, nothing truly bad could ever happen. Yes, there would be minor setbacks and inconveniences, but a pleasant disposition and a sunny outlook could help fix just about every problem, and eventually all lives would always reach the stage of ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ ”

  She thought once again about that one story and amended: “Except, maybe, for certain pigs. Anyway, their daughter, the princess, recognized that her parents loved her, just as she loved them, no matter how different she was from them. But she didn’t feel she was as safe as they kept telling her she was. She felt that if she understood the world, she would be better prepared. Prepared to protect herself and her kingdom and even her parents. And so she devoted herself to the gathering of facts.”

  Amelia stopped talking. She didn’t know where the story would go from there.

  Either Telmund was very patient or he hadn’t been listening. He didn’t urge her to continue.

  In fact, he was growing more and more droopy. At the same time, the landscape was growing more and more familiar.

  Amelia kept a careful watch on him as he slept and saw the moment he twitched once, then began to shrink.

  The next moment, she was holding a hedgehog.

  Her fingers, already sore from holding on so tightly to the reins, keenly felt the prickles of his spines. But she was more than willing to forgive him, for his newly wiggly nose was absolutely adorable.

  She fashioned a sling by ripping material from the bottom of her dress, and that was how she and Telmund arrived at the castle.

  “Your Highness!” The men from the guard stationed at the gate shouted at her in a tone she interpreted to mean that they had never thought to see her again.

  Just as noticeably, they had never thought to see her astride a horse, and bearing a sleeping hedgehog.

  Amelia dismounted and handed the horse’s reins to one of the guards. But she didn’t hand over the hedgehog.

  “Send word to my parents that I will join them as soon as I can. But there is one thing I must do first.” She knew her parents would be sick with worry, and she had never been more eager for anything than she was to see them, to hug them, to tell them all that had happened, and to be comforted by them.

  But she owed Telmund a debt that must be repaid.

  She’d thought about his fairy in the garden for much of the while she had ridden, and she realized how unmindful she must have been the night of the ball. So now, instead of entering the castle, she returned to the bench where she’d been sitting when she’d met the strange ageless girl.

  “Animal in trouble!” Amelia called out. “Hedgehog in dire danger!” The men accompanying her looked at one another fretfully, obviously concerned for her wi
ts. “Fairy needed!” Amelia called. “Where are you? This hedgehog needs assistance!”

  “The hedgehog is fine,” a quiet voice said from behind her—which meant Amelia had walked right by her without noticing. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”

  The guards were clearly taken by surprise to find a stranger this close to their just-recovered princess. They went to draw their swords, but Amelia held her hand out to forestall them.

  How could she not have noticed the wings, even given that the night had been dark? And the hair wasn’t light blonde bleached by the moonlight: It was unmistakably silver.

  “He’s not supposed to be a hedgehog,” Amelia said. “There’s nothing at all fine about his situation.”

  “Not my spell,” the fairy told her. “Nothing I can do about it.”

  “But he’s in danger,” Amelia said, “because he’s supposed to be human.”

  “But he’s not in danger as a hedgehog,” the fairy insisted. “Not unless you drop him.”

  “I will,” Amelia threatened. “I’ll throw him.” He was sound asleep, curled up into a tight, if prickly, ball.

  The fairy gave a knowing smile. “No, you won’t,” she said with total confidence.

  Amelia held the hedgehog in her hand. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, for what if the fairy still didn’t intervene? It was Telmund’s best chance, but it was too big a risk. “You’re not exactly tenderhearted, are you?” Amelia pointed out.

  The fairy shrugged. “I did give your wish a nudge,” she said.

  “My—?” Amelia remembered meeting the fairy girl the night of the ball. They had talked about wishes. And Amelia had said that—if she believed in wishes—what she’d wish for was a solution to the problem of Prince Sheridan. She said, “If that was you, that was a rather inefficient, thoroughly distressing, and potentially disastrous way of causing my wish to come true.”

  The fairy shrugged again. “It was a nudge.”

  Was it anything to do with her? Amelia wondered.

  But just then she heard her mother cry out her name. She looked up and saw both her parents were running toward her. A moment later, when she tried to find the fairy again, she was gone.

  And then Amelia was enveloped in her parents’ arms.

  Telmund opened his eyes. He waited to get hit by the muzzy, head-stuffed-with-something-that-was-simultaneously-jagged-and-squishy-and-whatever-else-it-was-definitely-unpleasant sensation that came from whatever Willum had dosed him with. But that didn’t happen.

  He let his eyes focus.

  He was in his own room. His mother was sitting across from him, working on a piece of embroidery. Though he hadn’t made a noise, she chose that very moment to look up at him—or maybe she was constantly looking up to check on him. That is, after all, what mothers do.

  A thirteen-year-old youth, even one who wasn’t trying to be the hero of his own life story, shouldn’t be so relieved to see his mother, he told himself as his eyes filled with tears that then began running down his cheeks.

  It’s probably not even really her, he told himself next. In another moment she would burst into being a singing geranium—this had actually happened one of the previous times he’d thought his head was clear.

  But it hadn’t felt this clear, and in the next instant his mother set down the cloth she was stitching, stood, and placed a cool hand on his forehead.

  “Are you back, Little One?” It was the name she’d had for him before Wilmar had been born. It was silly to be jealous of his younger brother over this, but that was just the way things were.

  She used the end of her sleeve to mop up his tear-and-snot-dampened face. “There, there,” she cooed. “You’re back. You’re safe. It’s all over.”

  Much as he wanted to keep hearing her murmur reassurances, Telmund shook his head. “I’m not. It’s not. I have a spell on me. Unless we can somehow find—”

  “Shhh,” she hushed him. “We know all about that. We’ve been hearing all about how brave and resourceful and persevering you’ve been. Your father and I—the whole family—we’re all so proud of you.”

  Telmund didn’t think he’d ever been told this before. Maybe his mother had been proud of him for little childish accomplishments, but not his father. Not his brothers.

  And there was no reason for them to be proud of him now.

  He didn’t know what they’d heard, but once he explained what had really happened and how he’d muddled through everything, they’d all say, “Oh. Well. That sounds more like the Telmund we know.”

  Princess Amelia must have escaped capture and gotten help after he’d allowed himself to be ambushed by Prince Sheridan’s men. Then she’d arranged for him to be brought home. It was embarrassing to think he needed to be rescued by the princess he’d hoped to rescue. And it even sounded as though she’d done her best to hide how not-up-to the adventure he’d been.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that—even if the nightmares about singing geraniums (not to mention the tiara-wearing hens who’d kept asking him, “Who do you think you are?”)—even if that part of the ordeal was over, as soon as he fell asleep, he’d wake up as yet another creature.

  Words failed him, and Telmund shook his head.

  His mother turned away from him, no doubt dismayed by his self-pity.

  But it turned out she was simply gesturing for someone behind her to approach.

  Wilmar came up beside Telmund’s bed. “Hello, Telmund,” his little brother said softly, as though afraid sheer volume of voice might cause Telmund to break.

  Set a good example, Telmund told himself. Stop sniveling.

  Before he had a chance to act on this, he realized that Wilmar wasn’t alone—someone was coming up behind him.

  Telmund hoped he hadn’t been making such an unseemly show of himself in front of his father, or one of his brothers, or even Princess Amelia—not that she had any reason to be here.

  Which was sad. He hadn’t even had a chance to say good-bye. He wouldn’t have told her this, but he had actually begun to … get used to her.

  All right, all right: to admire her.

  Maybe even (he was never going to see her again, so he could admit it to himself) … to like her.

  But it wasn’t father, brother, or princess who came up behind Wilmar, resting hands on the boy’s shoulders and giving Telmund a not-one-whit-apologetic smile. It was the old witch from the festival grounds.

  If Telmund had been able to burrow backward through his mattress, he would have.

  Let this be another of my crazy-headed visions, he prayed, along with the jousting worms riding on the backs of ladybird beetles.

  “Now, now,” the old witch said, showing her crooked gray teeth. “Don’t be alarmed.”

  Wilmar proudly announced, “Look, Telmund! We didn’t have to find her. She found us.”

  The old witch nodded.

  If that was meant to reassure him, it did the opposite.

  “Don’t be cranky, now,” the old witch said. “I’m not the one who threw you into the river.”

  “I told them that,” Wilmar said. “I told everybody everything.” He leaned forward to add in an impressed whisper, “The steward has been put on rat-grooming duty for what he did.”

  That was so unexpected and perplexing, Telmund was jolted a little bit out of his oh-no-what’s-she-going-to-do-to-me-now anxiety. He asked, “He’s on what?”

  “Rat-grooming duty,” Wilmar repeated. “He has to capture all the rats he can, and he has to do it without harming them. And he has to bathe them and brush them and feed them and house them in nice clean cages and keep them company and talk agreeably to them. Father decreed it while you were missing, because we didn’t know how far away you’d gone, so any one of the rats could have been you. Once you came back, the steward asked if he could stop now, but Father says he must continue for ten times as long as you were gone.” Wilmar looked over to where their mother was standing and added, “And Mother told h
im he must sing lullabies to the rats every night.”

  Their mother waved her hand airily, as though none of that was important. “Mistress Elmina came forward when we were looking for you.”

  “I kept hearing all these nice things about you,” the old witch said. (Telmund could not think of her as anything but the old witch.) “It’s not uncommon for parents to be hoodwinked by their thoroughly wicked children, but people in the town were singing your praises, too.”

  Singing geraniums, Telmund thought, because his thinking wasn’t quite as clear as it could have been.

  The witch said, “And I thought to myself: What if I’ve been unduly hasty? So I went back to that merchant who was selling wooden bowls. He was hiding in the corner of his booth with a blanket over his head after hearing that I was looking for him. But once I ferreted him out, he told me what he had seen that day. Then I sought out young Wilmar here. He told me much the same story. Everybody tells me you’re not a bad boy; you’re not a bully. Maybe not the born leader people might expect a prince should be, nor the bravest, nor the smartest, nor—”

  Telmund’s mother cleared her throat.

  “All right, all right,” the witch said. “So I went to your parents, and I explained that I could still feel the spell out in the world, so you had not drowned in the river, and all these older brothers of yours came to town along with their assorted wives and children and fellow monks, and they all joined in scouring the banks of the river searching for you, until someone found you in Pastonia. Seems the princess there had brought you back to her parents’ home. You were a swan by the time you got back here.”

  “Of course I was,” Telmund said wearily.

  The old witch finished by saying, “So, Telmund, if you can prove to me you’re not a bully, the spell will go away.”

  Prove? Telmund thought. How am I supposed to do that?

  Wilmar said to the witch, “But I already told you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And there could be many reasons you might tell me something untrue.”