She scarcely listens to herself, or to me. I am nothing but a frog, I while away the time eating flies, swimming in the slime, sitting in the reeds and croaking. Her pearls might resemble the translucent eggs of frogs, but I would have no real interest in them. Yes, of course I can be her playmate, her companion; she has had fantasy friends before. Yes, I can eat out of her plate; they all do. Yes, I can drink from her cup. Yes, I can sleep in her bed—yes, yes, anything! Just stop croaking and fetch my ball for me.
I drop it at her feet. I am no longer visible; I have become a fantasy, a dream. A talking frog? Don’t be silly, frogs don’t talk. Even when I cry out to her as she runs away, laughing and tossing her ball, that’s what she knows: frogs don’t talk. Wait for me! I cry. You promised! But she no longer hears me. All her fantasy friends vanish when she no longer needs them.
So it must have been with a first, faint sense of terror that she heard my watery squelching across the marble floor as she sat eating with her father. They were not alone, but who among her father’s elegantly bored courtiers would have questioned the existence of a talking frog? The court went on with their meal, secretly delighting in the argument at the royal table. I ate silently and listened to their discreet murmurings. Most took the princess’s view and wished me removed with the salmon bones, the fruit peelings, and tossed unceremoniously out the kitchen door. Others thought her father right: I would be a harmless lesson for a spoiled daughter. Most saw a frog. A toad with its poisonous skin touching the princess’s goblet, leaving traces of its spittle on her plate? Unthinkable! Therefore: I was a frog. Others were not so sure. The king recognized me, of course, but, setting aside the fact that I could talk, seemed to believe that for all other purposes, I would behave in predictable toad fashion toward humans, desiring mainly to be ignored and not to be squashed.
But the princess knew: to journey up the stairs with me dangling between her reluctant fingers would be to turn her back to that fair afternoon, the sweet linden blossoms, the golden-haired child tossing her ball, spinning and glinting, toward the sun, then watching it fall down, light cascading over leaves into shadow, until it fell, unerringly, back into her hands. When the ball plummeted into the depths of the well, she wept for her lost self. Faced with the future in the form of a toad, she bargained badly: she exchanged her childhood for me.
Who am I?
Some of the courtiers knew me. Their wealth and finery did not shelter them from air or mud, or from the tales that are breathed into the heart, that cling to boot soles and breed life. They whisper among themselves. Listen.
“Toads mean pain, death. Think of the ugly toadfish that ejects its spines into the hands of the unwary fisher. Think of the poisonous toadstool.”
“If you kill a toad with your hands, the skin of your face and hands will become hardened, lumpy, pimpled. Toads suck the breath of the sleeper, bring death.”
“But consider the midwife toad, both male and female, involved with life.”
“If you spit and hit a toad, you will die.”
“A toad placed on a cut will heal it.”
“If you anger a toad it will inflate itself with a terrible poison and burst, taking you with it as it dies.”
“Toads portend life. Consider the Egyptians, who believe that the toad represents the womb, and its cries are the cries of unborn children.”
“She is life.”
“It is death.”
“She belongs to the moon, she croaks to the crescent moon. Consider the Northerners, who believe she rescues life itself, when it ripens into the shape of a red apple and falls down into the well.”
“She is life.”
“It is death.”
“She is both.”
To the princess, carrying me with loathing up the stairs, a wisp of linen separating the shapeless, lumpy sack of my body from her fingers, I am the source of an enormous and irrational irritation. I rescued her golden ball; why could she not be gracious? I would be gone by morning. But she knew, she knew, deep in her; she heard the croaking of tiny, invisible frogs; she recognized the midwife toad.
If she had been gracious, I would indeed have been gone by morning. But her instincts held fast: I was danger, I was the unknown. I was what she wanted and did not want. She could not rid herself of me fast enough, or violently enough. But because she knew me, and part of her cried Not yet! Not yet! she flung me as far from her as she could without losing sight of me.
Changing shape is easy; I do it all the time.
The moment she saw me on the floor, with my strong young limbs and dazed expression, rubbing my head and wondering groggily if I were still frog-naked, she tossed her heart into my well and dove after it herself. She covered me with a blanket, though not without a startled and curious glance at essentials. She accepted her future with remarkable composure. She stroked my curly hair, whose color, along with the color of my eyes, I had taken from her favorite doll, and listened to my sad tale.
A prince, I told her. A witch I had accidentally offended; they offend so easily, it seems. She had turned me into a toad and said…
“You rescued me,” I said gratefully, overlooking her rudeness, as did she. “Those who love me will be overjoyed to see me again. How beautiful you are,” I added. “Is it just because yours is the first kind face I have seen in so long?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “No.” Somehow our hands became entwined before she remembered propriety. “I must take you to meet my father.”
“Perhaps I should dress first.”
“Perhaps you should.”
And so I increase and multiply, trying to keep up with all the voices in the rivers and ponds, bogs and swamps, that cry out to be born. Some tales are simpler than others. This, like pond water, seems at first glance as clear as day. Then, when you scoop water in your hand and look at it, you begin to see all the little mysteries swarming in it, which, if you had drunk the water without looking first, you never would have seen. But now that you have seen, you stand there under the hot sun, thirsty, but not sure what you will be drinking, and wishing, perhaps, that you had not looked so closely, that you had just swallowed me down and gone your way, refreshed.
Some tales are simpler than others. But go ahead and drink: the ending is always the same.
Copyrights and Acknowledgments
“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” copyright © 1982 by Patricia A. McKillip for Elsewhere Vol. II, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Arnold.
“A Matter of Music” copyright © 1984 by Patricia A. McKillip for Elsewhere Vol. Ill, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Arnold.
“A Troll and Two Roses” copyright © 1985 by Patricia A. McKillip for Faery!, edited by Terri Windling.
“Baba Yaga and the Sorcerer’s Son” copyright © 1986 by Patricia A. McKillip for Dragons and Dreams, edited by Jane Yolen, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.
“The Fellowship of the Dragon” copyright © 1992 by Patricia A. McKillip for After the King, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.
“Lady of the Skulls” copyright © 1993 by Patricia A. McKillip for Strange Dreams, edited by Stephen R. Donaldson.
“The Snow Queen” copyright © 1993 by Patricia A. McKillip for Snow White, Blood Red, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
“Ash, Wood, Fire” copyright © 1993 by The Women’s Press and Patricia A. McKillip for The Women’s Press Book of New Myth and Magic, edited by Helen Windrath.
“The Stranger” copyright © 1993 by Patricia A. McKillip for Temporary Walls, edited by Greg Ketter and Robert T. Garcia.
“Transmutations” copyright © 1994 by Patricia A. McKillip for Xanadu 2, edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg.
“The Lion and the Lark” copyright © 1995 by Patricia A. McKillip for The Armless Maiden, edited by Terri Windling.
“The Witches of Junket” copyright © 1996 by Patricia A. McKillip for Sisters in Fantasy, edited by Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg.
“Star-
Crossed” copyright © 1997 by Mike Ashley and Patricia A. McKillip for Shakespearean Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley.
“Voyage into the Heart” copyright © 1999 by Massachusetts Convention Fandom, Inc. and Patricia A. McKillip for Voyages, The 25th WFC.
“Toad” copyright © 1999 by Patricia A. McKillip for Silver Birch, Blood Moon, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
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