Fair Peril

by Nancy Springer

  Neither Fay nor Prentis heard her, of course. “Can we just get on with it?” Prentis grumbled.

  Fay sat down with her coffee. “You can’t hurry this book.” It lay open on the table; she might have been scanning it for some time. Now she picked it up in both hands, balancing the base of its hefty spine on the table. Big book. Big green book. Buffy did not have to look closely to know: Batracheios.

  In Fay’s hands the green cover seemed to turn golden, like green leaves turning golden in late-day sunlight. Standing in the glass prison, looking on, Buffy shivered with cold.

  “I’ve been looking all morning,” Fay said in tones of mild annoyance, “and I still can’t find where Emily might have gone if she ran off with a frog.”

  “What’s it matter,” Prentis said. “She’ll come back when she wants to. She likes her car, and we’ve got her car. She likes her clothes, and we’ve got her clothes. Tell you one thing, it’s a lot more peaceful now she’s not in the house.”

  “YOU COCK-UP!” Buffy yelled hot and loud as a volcano—but they couldn’t hear. They’d never been able to hear, neither of them, what she was really trying to say. Prentis, sitting there, no health-club pose when he was around his mom, just being his lumpen, jowly self—Buffy wanted to bite him and give him rabies. She wanted to chew his nose off.

  But his mother put down the book and gazed at him solicitously. “Emily made it hard for you and Tempestt?”

  Prentis just gave her a look.

  “It’s frustrating when you’re a new couple,” Fay said.

  “Just shut up and find me an answer, would you, Mom?”

  “Well, I need to know what kind of—”

  “I just want Tempestt to get more interested in me and less in the goddamn money!”

  Buffy sank down to sit on rotting wood, weak with exhaustion and astonishment. Neediness, in Prentis? Truth, in Prentis?

  Silence, as Fay flipped slowly through Batracheios. Prentis jiggled his leg.

  Fay beamed, as befitted an ormolu presence. “Here we go. This ought to do it. Okay, first you’re supposed to take your frog and drive pins into it.”

  Buffy started to shake.

  “That’s supposed to make your beloved feel pangs of love,” Fay continued with no apparent levity. “Then, when it’s stuck full of pins, you’re supposed to bury it alive. Then after six weeks you’re supposed to come back and dig it up and it’s supposed to be dead and decayed and there’s a little bone like a hook. You’re supposed to hook that on your beloved someplace, like on her belt or something, and that’s supposed to do the trick. Okay?”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “Fine. Where’s Murphy keep her pins?” Fay laid the book down. “Where’s her sewing basket?” On golden spike heels she clicked into the next room. Hunched in a corner of the aquarium and shaking, Buffy could hear her moving things around in there, searching. Sewing basket, what did Fay think this was, a nunnery? Buffy hadn’t owned a sewing basket in years, but she knew exactly where there were some straight pins, in an orange juice can along with three slowly petrifying pencils, a few thumbtacks, and some paper clips, in plain sight on the kitchen windowsill, and she prayed Fay wouldn’t think to look there.

  “This place is a cesspool!” Fay called from the next room. “Prentis, do you know where she—”

  He bawled back, “How the hell would I know! Just find something, Mom, wouldja?”

  Something dark and desperate in his voice made Buffy start to scrabble and claw at the glass walls of her prison, even though she knew she could not possibly escape.

  Fay moved on toward the bedroom. “I suppose we could use a brooch or something from her jewelry box, if I can figure out where that might be—”

  “God’s sake, Mom, just skip the pins and come on!”

  Prentis had always been impatient, and Buffy had never previously found this trait the least bit attractive in him. Now, however, she stopped clawing at the walls and whispered, “Bless you, Prentis!” Skipping the pins sounded like a wonderful idea.

  Rooting in the bedroom, where there might—oh, God, please don’t let her notice them—there might be a few pins under all the junk on the dresser, Fay called, “Just give me a minute!”

  “Buffy might waltz in here any minute!”

  “Not likely.” Fay spoke to soothe. There, there.

  “Who says? We don’t know where she is!”

  “I’m right bloody here!” Buffy shrieked, but of course they didn’t hear. Might as well talk to trees. They kept on bickering.

  “Whose idea was it to do this here?”

  “Look, we couldn’t do it no place where people might see!” Prentis’s grammar always fell apart when he got himself exercised. “Wouldja come on?”

  “Murphy is miles away from here. May I remind you that she doesn’t have her car anymore.”

  “Mom,” Prentis bellowed, “all I need is the goddamn bone. Just come on!”

  Fay minced back into the kitchen, disapproving. “I thought you wanted Tempestt to love you.”

  “Not if she’s gonna pang at me. I hate it when women pang. Goddamn pain in the ass. Just grab something and let’s bury this frog and get out of here.”

  “Well, get it out of the aquarium, then.”

  Buffy scrambled around as much as she could, with bitterly unsatisfactory results; despite her best effort, they had no trouble catching her. “I’m a person, damn it!” How could they look at her and think she was a frog? A frog wouldn’t be wearing a disintegrating nightgown. A frog would have done a better job of giving them a hard time. “I’m human!” Kiss me, I’ll be human, I promise. I’ll be a princess, I’ll be good … screw that. Why should being human or not matter? What they were willing to do to an inoffensive frog was unthinkable. “You can’t do this to me!” She tried to bite. Her teeth could not penetrate Prentis’s fat fingers. “Gimme an F—” But she knew right away it was no use. A little filthy, squirming thing couldn’t do spells worth squat. No presence. Not appropriately garbed.

  They put her into the white box with its familiar feel of imprisonment, carried her out to the back yard, got a shovel from the cellarway, and buried her.

  Buried her.

  This, too, felt awfully familiar. I can deal with this somehow, Buffy kept telling herself as the dirt thudded down, shaking her cardboard coffin, shutting her into a blackness more absolute than any she had ever seen, so black the white snake could have been in there with her and she wouldn’t have known. I can deal with this—it’s better than pins. I can deal … The hell she could. She screamed. Screamed, feeling the box shudder and flex; any moment it could collapse, she could be crushed under the weight of too much heavy, uncaring earth. If not that, then she would die of suffocation. There wasn’t enough air. She must not scream. She screamed anyway.

  “Help me!” she screamed. “Somebody, somebody help me!”

  Nobody did, of course. She thought briefly, crazily, of Addie. But he was so far away he might as well have been a golden dream.

  What was the name of this white nightmare?

  Punissshment.

  When her throat closed and she could not scream any longer, she sank down and panted, and maybe the air was getting bad already—or maybe she was just very, very tired. She lapsed onto the bottom of the box. Cold. Soggy cold. She curled, fetal, and imagined that the white snake was burrowing to crawl in there with her, but she didn’t even care. After a while she stopped noticing the blackness anymore.

  Twelve

  It was like being woken up from a very bad sleep, except that the person with the panicky voice was not merely joggling her but seemed to be trying to haul her up by the arms. Resisting, Buffy thrashed, bumping against something damp and sticky, then opened her eyes to find herself nose to a wall of dirt. Even before she remembered, she screamed. A rush of adrenaline sent her scrambling out of her open grave. “Addie, they—” But the sight of his beautiful, frightened face undid her. She sobbed and clawed at the grass. Adamus gath
ered her up gingerly, as if he were trying to hold a big mess of dirty laundry together, and she bawled on his shoulder.

  “They—no matter how loud I yelled, they—” Crying kept her from saying much.

  “The white snake gave you a poison dream,” Addie told her gently.

  “But—it was real!” Quaking with sobs, Buffy turned her head against his shoulder to look down into the hole she had just crawled out of. It was quite deep and quite real. Dirt was mounded all around. She could feel the stickiness of dirt all over her.

  “Of course it was real. You are the storyteller.”

  “But—” The hole in her backyard, the grave—it was a six-foot rectangle, maybe more than six feet. Not the right size. Or rather, how had it gotten to be the right size? Or how had she? Buffy wailed, “I don’t damn understand!”

  “Shhhh.”

  “It was not all in my mind!”

  “I am real,” Addie said, holding her. “I am in your mind. I have been real in people’s minds for a thousand years.”

  “They were—they were giants!”

  “Yes. I saw.”

  Buffy managed to stop most of her bleating and shuddering and gulping, then pulled back and looked at him. Day was over, darkness falling; he shone like water in the twilight. More quietly she said, “Addie. What are you doing here?”

  He looked not at her, but past her. “I saw the giants pick you up.” His voice had gone very low. “I could not fight them, but I—I tried to follow. I could not run fast enough. Then—I did not know where else to look for you, so I came here, I saw. It took me far too long to dig you out.” His golden eyes turned to her, wincing, wet. “I thought you would be dead.”

  Quite unequivocally, he had saved her life. There he knelt in her backyard, all besmirched with dirt, her snot and tears matting his velvet tunic. “I’m humbly grateful,” she said, her voice thick; it had been a long time since she had said anything so sincerely. “But I mean—I’m the one who put you in that fish tank, made you wear that awful tux—why are you here?”

  “Oh.” He understood. “Because I am a prince from out of the primal Pool.” He gave her a wisp of a smile, but there was sadness in his voice now. “You shape me, my lady.”

  He was a prince, all right. “That’s why you saved me?”

  “You are the storyteller. I am what you want me to be.” Now his eyes were dry, wry, bleak. “I think you are mixing me up with the brave woodcutter, my lady, or the wandering soldier.” His smile turned into a wince. “We fairy-tale princes don’t usually get to be heroes. We don’t do much. We are golden trophies, we wait for a taker. Look at me.” Bitterness. “Lollygagging around the court, crying for Emily, instead of questing forth to find her.”

  He flung his head back like an impatient colt and got up, holding out his hands to help her do the same. Implications astounded her. She could not stand without swaying. She could not think of what to say to him.

  “Change the story,” he said, so quietly the words came and went like a breath, a breeze in sere golden grass. “Please. I need to find her.”

  “But—I—”

  “I think you want to keep me for yourself.”

  It was so level and selfless and true that she cried out, “If storytelling can make it so, then why can’t I just find her?”

  “Because we are all trapped in my story. Make a new story.”

  She shook her head; she could not think or comprehend; she reeled like a drunk as she tried to walk. In the house, she grabbed the sugar bowl with shaking hands and gulped from it like a dog.

  “We must return to Fair Peril soon,” Adamus said. “You must appear again before the Queen.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” She had, of course, utterly forgotten. She wanted to scream with weariness but knew she had to go. Had to keep going. Had to find Emily. She mumbled, “I’d better get cleaned up.” Even the magic of Fair Peril might not be sufficient to transform her filthy self into something presentable at court.

  Walking a little more strongly since her sugar fix, she went and showered, leaving her starry, starry nightgown on the bedroom floor with a sense of finality; with sudden intuitive certainty she knew she didn’t want to turn any more people into frogs or fogs or even rutabagas, not ever again. She would take her chances. She would risk being her unmagical self. After her shower, feeling more fit to cope, she dressed in blue jeans, a chambray shirt, her newest, whitest, cushiest tube socks, and white sneakers. Padding out to the kitchen again, she pulled on a purple windbreaker, grabbed a box of graham crackers from the cereal cupboard, and asked Addie, “You want anything to eat?”

  “No, thank you.” God, was he gorgeous. It seemed inconceivable that any male so gorgeous should be there in her kitchen, sitting at her table.

  You want to keep me for yourself.

  She tried to keep her thoughts, not to mention her feelings, from showing in her face. “Okay, let’s boogie.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let’s go.”

  She left the house door unlocked. No clue to where her wallet and keys were, proofs of sanity and humanity; so what. No car, either. They walked. Buffy munched graham crackers. Between streetlamps Adamus looked at the sky.

  He said, “The nights are very different in your realm.”

  “You sure you don’t want something to eat?” Buffy had munched an entire packet of grahams and still felt hungry.

  He shook his head. “I cannot see the stars.”

  “Too much light.”

  “Yes. The sky is full of a haze like milk smeared on black glass. You people have chased back the night and many of the old demons along with it.” He sounded uncertain. “No trolls here.”

  “Yes, there are. We grow our own.” Home-grown trolls sounded both safer and scarier to her. She peered at Adamus, seeing him clearly by his own glimmering sheen. What was going on in his head? He sounded wistful. She asked, “You want trolls?”

  “No. I mostly just want the velvet sky. And the stars.” Looking up, as if it were the same thing he said very softly, “I want Emily.”

  As if it were a reasonable question Buffy asked, “Why?”

  His perfect head swiveled; he looked at her blankly. “Pardon?”

  “Why do you want her, Addie? Really?” She had cried in his arms; perhaps for that reason she was now able to ask, not at all harshly, “Have you coupled with her?”

  He merely stared, though not as if offended. He did not answer.

  Buffy said, “I don’t want that for her. Not yet. She’s too young. A child bride.” She said, “That’s what my mother was. A child bride. Got pregnant and married my father when she was only fourteen. Not old enough to stick up for herself. She might as well have been a slave.” Her voice was gentle, almost tender. “Is that what you want for Emily? Is that what you want Emily for? Addie?”

  “I—” He faltered to a halt and stood facing her under the lavender glow of one of those tall, looming streetlamps they call cobra lamps. So softly she could barely hear him, he said, “I just want somebody to—” His voice hitched, but he got the word out. “To love me. That’s all.”

  Buffy found that she had to turn away or she would have bawled on his shoulder some more. She walked on, and he walked beside her.

  Silence. She could not look at him. She could not face his neediness; it would have meant facing her own.

  She could not say it. She was not as brave as he was, or as honest.

  She had to say it.

  She tried three times. Finally her mouth obeyed her and formed the words, though she could not quite say the most dangerous word, the l word. “That’s all I want too,” she said. “The same thing.”

  Emily lay asleep and dreaming that she was still on the damn pedestal. From a pedestal you can see far, far, you can see clearly, but you cannot do a godforsaken thing. She could see the thin, bone-white, hook-shaped form of her grandmother out on the benighted lawn of the nursing home, picking at the dirt of the world, picking at the dirt, pic
king at the dirt. She wanted to tell her, It’s all right, stop, rest; but she could not. Even if she had been kneeling at Grandmother’s creaky, knobby feet, she would not have been able to tell her. Or rather, she could have said the words, but Grandmother would not have been able to hear her.

  From the pedestal she could see Adamus weeping, and her heart beat like wings, and she wanted like fire to put her arms around him, but she could not reach him. She could not comfort him.

  From the pedestal she could see her mother searching, searching for her, hardly crying at all but searching night and day. Her heart hovered like a hummingbird, watching. Could it be that her mother loved her?

  Could it be that her mother, who searched, loved her better than her prince, who wept?

  If only she could decide, Emily knew in her dream, then she would be able to call out. But meanwhile, she could only watch. There was Mother getting closer, Mother with her coarse no-style hair, Mother in a T-shirt and jeans not big enough to hide her bulges, Mother in those awful, dorky shoes. Mother looking in all the wrong places. Emily had to decide. If she could really believe that her mother loved her, she would call out, Here I am! She would cry, Mother, here I am!

  The problem was … calling out was not enough. It was not fair that she could do nothing, nothing, except call out.

  And even if she called … would her mother hear her?

  Yes … no … Her heart’s wild beating woke her up.

  Her eyes snapped wide open, saw a pale attenuated heart floating in the night: the breast of a bird perched above her. Her rapid breathing slowed down as the scents of mint and timothy comforted her. It had been only a dream. She was not on the pedestal any longer. Her pounding heart calmed down. She lay in a nest of grasses at the edge of a forest meadow, with friends slumbering all around her.

  Emily closed her eyes again but knew she was not likely to go back to sleep.

  These creatures … they had saved her, they were beautiful, they were kind to her, and their kindness should have been enough. She felt ungrateful that it was not. Was anything in life ever going to be enough for her?