Fair Peril

by Nancy Springer

  “Look at the big eyes,” the Frog King remarked to the Queen. “Like two big jelly eggs. He always was a pitiful little polliwog.”

  Do with him what you like. I have the hammer and the anvil still to make better ones than he.

  Adamus surged to his feet, his teeth clenched. He wanted to shout, roar, rage, but passion choked him; he managed only a single word. “Betrayer!”

  The Frog King knocked him to the ground with a single clout of a green fist. With the breath walloped out of him, Adamus could not speak, lay struggling to get up. The Frog King bellowed with laughter.

  “Blind mudpuppy!” he boomed, laughing. “You finally recognize your sire, do you?”

  Adamus sat up, gasping like a fish, finding just enough breath to pant, “You’re—no father—of mine.”

  “I’m not? I am, though.” In an instant like a flash of lightning the Frog King stopped laughing, crouched, and thrust his great mushroom of a head toward Adamus. He roared with bulldog vehemence, “You think you can disown me? You can’t. I’m in you. I disowned you first.”

  Adamus rose only to his knees. “You’re a frog. You’re a frog in a crown and a clown suit.”

  Somebody laughed again, but this time it was the Queen, laughing like bluebells pealing.

  The Frog King rolled his tarnished eyes toward her as she laughed. He said nothing to her, but cuffed Adamus on the side of the head; Adamus stolidly withstood the blow. The Frog King barked at him, “You toadlet, who are you to tell me what I am? I am the Frog King, that’s one thing, and I am Daddy, that is the other. I’m every mad bad Daddy, and you know what?” He ogled Adamus fiercely. “You want love, don’t you, you puppy? Forget love. Whatever you want, I will take away. If you love something, it’s mine. What Daddy wants, Daddy gets.”

  Sears itself, remarkably, worked out a lot better than Buffy had expected. After the transition, she found herself near the dressing rooms. She was able to duck straight into one without attracting the attention of anyone likely to call the police. Emily went and purchased a truly hideous caftan and brought it to her there. “Is this your revenge for something I’ve done?” Buffy inquired, putting it on over her belly-dancing getup.

  “Just come on. Shoe department.”

  Emily’s sense of urgency had to do with Adamus, Buffy decided as she grabbed herself a pair of canvas slip-ons. “Explain to me what’s going on with Addie.”

  “It’s the Queen,” Emily said, heading toward a cashier with the shoes.

  “Well, what else is new.”

  But Emily never got to explain any further, because a large napiform dazzlement darted from behind a Totes display and grabbed her by the elbow.

  “Grandma!” Emily gasped.

  Buffy was too startled to move or think anything but, Damn, should have known Fay shopped at Sears.

  Gripping a white sweatshirt with puffy glitter trim in one hand and Emily in the other, Fay snapped, “Emily! Where do you think you’re going? Everybody’s waiting for you!”

  Hardly the way to greet one’s long-lost granddaughter. Standing there quite flat of bare feet, Buffy blurted out, “What do you mean? What’s going on?”

  “You!” Fay wheeled on her, showing remarkable athleticism and presence of mind for a woman her age; in the same peevish movement she swung her massive gilded purse. She didn’t even let go of Emily or drop her new sweatshirt to do it. Her elbow whipped around, and mass times acceleration equals force or maybe it had something to do with angular leverage but who cared, the effect being the same whatever you called it, which was that the purse being pendulous upon Fay’s arm whipped around like an absolute sonuvabitch and conked Buffy on her head and shoulder hard enough to make her see stars. Buffy did not fall, but she definitely felt the store floor shifting under her feet as she gazed in fascination at the special effects. Lichen-colored splashes. Exploding celadon glass. Green-white fireworks starry-starry on a black flannel background, shades of her discarded nightgown. She could hear Fay scolding at her, but she couldn’t talk back. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see.

  “Bad bad bad bad bad!” Fay was barking. “Ungrateful cow! Did she tell you what she did to your father?” This last was apparently aimed at Emily.

  Emily said, “Let go, Grandma, you’re hurting my arm.”

  Hard to tell star-dazzle from Fay-scintillation, but Buffy could see enough now to tell that Fay did not let go of Emily’s arm. Rather, Fay started propelling her granddaughter toward an exit. “Move, young lady, you’re late. They’re all waiting.”

  “Who? Waiting for what?”

  “Your guests, Emily! Not to speak of your bridegroom. Your wedding!”

  Emily’s mouth softened into childish bewilderment. Being hustled out, she looked back over her shoulder at her mother for help, her dark eyes wide.

  With a struggle as if tearing loose from concrete, Buffy started forward. “No!” she shouted. “Let go of her!”

  “Slug! Twerp! You don’t tell me what to do!” The purse of doom struck again, harder this time. Buffy saw fireballs and volcanoes now, not just stars. She could not move or speak as Fay led Emily away.

  Fifteen

  With an effort sharp enough to make her scream, Buffy broke free from her purse-induced paralysis and got herself moving.

  “Emily?” Oh, dear God. “Emily!”

  The canvas slip-ons the girl had been about to buy for Buffy lay in an inadequate trail, as if Hansel and Gretel had had only two size-ten bread crumbs, one for the accessories aisle, one for the store entrance, or as if a really megapod Cinderella had lost both slippers this time.

  “Emily!”

  Buffy knew damn well it was already too late, but she could not seem to stop calling. “Emily?” She thundered out into the mall. No Emily there, either. “Emily …” Damn. Tears. Buffy’s head hurt as if a thousand Fays were still whamming it, ached almost worse than her heart, but she knew she had to stop crying and think. Do something. Fast. “Stott? Anybody?” She looked down the mall; all the pedestals were empty. Everybody had gone to the wedding but her.

  Emily’s wedding? Could Fay be serious?

  Cold prickles in her palms told Buffy that yes, indeed, Fay could.

  Next question: wedding to whom, or what? Adamus, one would assume. Yet—could one assume anything?

  Only one thing seemed certain: Emily was in peril.

  In Fair Peril.

  And Buffy couldn’t get there to help her. She could not seem to make the transition. Wide awake, in a panic, she saw only the bright banalities of the Mall Tifarious—kitschy coffee mugs, rock star T-shirts, key chains—she could not conceptualize the other reality. It was terrifying, like that time when she was a child coming home from summer camp on the train and her parents had told her to meet them in front of the station, and she waited and waited, looking out at the parking lot, the cars, the road, where was her family, where were the people who were supposed to love her, they had forgotten her, disowned her, moved someplace else while she was gone—and everything looked familiar, parking, cars, road, yet queasily strange, until at desperate last she had set off with suitcase in hand to walk home and the streets were ordinary-looking yet strange, nothing seemed right. A large man in a white collar had stopped her, questioned her, escorted her back to the train station and showed her: two fronts, two parking lots, two roads, mirror images, almost identical—but her family was not there in front of the othergates door, either. They had gone home, she was too late … The damn mall felt that same way, like a waking, heartbreaking nightmare monument to her own stupidity. If she could just understand, if she could just see whatever it was she wasn’t seeing, just fight free of the mind-set and see—

  “Bridal shop,” she muttered, and with bare feet flapping on the flooring and caftan snapping around her thighs, she set off.

  Bridal shop. Maybe seeing the white gowns, maybe thinking of Emily, the child bride, all dressed in lacy white, white as death, maybe then she would be able to find her way to Fair P
eril.

  But a score of ranked television screens confronted her now. Big screens. Some sort of entertainment store. Desperately urgent, Buffy could not stop, but—on every single screen her ex confronted her.

  “Prentis.”

  Only this could make the day more surreal than it was already: thirty or more super-sized Prentises were talking with their giant wet, lippy mouths choreographed like that snarkiest of all sports, synchronized swimming. Multifarious Prentises. The effect was so mesmerizing that Buffy slowed to a halt and stood watching too many Prentises with fascination, as if Fay had whacked her over the head again. It was a live broadcast, some talk show; evidently Prentis had managed to get himself defrogged. Perhaps Tempestt had done her kissy duty after all. Buffy was so upset she could not follow what Prentis was saying, but she gathered that he was exhorting and being sincere; promising to cut taxes, probably. Back in the frog race. How dreary to be somebody, how dreary to be Prentis frog, telling his name the livelong June to the admiring public bog. Prentis was the real frog king. He and Tempestt had gotten married at a froggie resort under a froggie moon in June. But it wasn’t June bride time again already, was it? It couldn’t be June yet. Where was the bridal shop? But maybe it didn’t matter. Everything seemed hazy. Starting to fade. Transition.

  Oh, please, let it happen. Calm down. Breathe. Lamaze, help me now. Breathe. Again. Breathe.

  As if she were seeing the too-many Prentises through a fly’s eyes with many facets, Buffy watched as he loomed, shifted like a kaleidoscope, and turned into—okay. God bless America. There was a Prentis-sized frog talking to her, quacking something about family values.

  It was like being trapped by a boor at a cocktail party. Buffy dodged past him quite rudely. He didn’t matter. She had to find Emily.

  But he seized her by the hair and yanked her back to face him again. “How dare you, wench.” And his voice was dank and stony and nothing like Prentis’s voice. “Attend when I speak to you.” His murky eye froze her. Then she saw, how could she not have seen it before? The terrifying serried crown perched above that eye.

  And she remembered that she had seen the third pedestal empty. And she knew she was up against an untried peril here. The Frog King.

  “No,” Adamus said to the Queen, still kneeling before her. All parts of him ached from holding that position, except his lower legs, which had lost all feeling. He had been kneeling for hours. Seemed like years. About a thousand years.

  “You shall do as I say.” The Queen’s voice cracked like a whip, stinging him; spear-straight and stiff with wrath, she kept her regal seat, but Adamus felt the fiery impact of her anger, not for the first time, across his shoulders.

  “No. I cannot.” The words were like river stones, settled, worn smooth of all passion by many repetitions.

  Death, the Queen threatened. The word, a whisper, a breath, a siffilation, sounded right inside his head. She had that power.

  The cold old witch. Adamus lifted his head to look at her. There she sat in her ermine cloak on her white-stone woodland throne, quite simply being what she was, with not even a gravedigger’s understanding of why he couldn’t just be what he was, too. Could no one understand? Adamus cried out, “I cannot do that to her! You think I’m a fool? She would never marry me of her own free will; I know her. She’s a wise child, she’s her mother’s daughter, she would never throw away her freedom just to serve some fairy tale. And even if she would, I would not do that to her. She is young and beautiful and I love her.”

  Golden leaves rustled overhead, silver beeches sighing like a presence. “You would rather be one of them?” The Queen raised her fierce porcelain hand and pointed at the ranks of marble columns that flanked her throne, at telamones, caryatids, stone youths and maidens looking on with dead eyes, bearing their forever load with ever-young, lifeless bodies. “You think you are the first? Behold. Other young fools who thought they would be human and have free will.”

  Then Adamus began to breathe hard, knowing that each sweet breath might be his last, and he flexed his feet to drive away the stony feeling; pain surged through him instead, bowing his head—but pain was better than not feeling, than not being. Pain proved that he was not an automaton. Not just a boy doll for the Queen to play with. Not just a golden trophy waiting on the shelf.

  Not entirely a Prince of Fair Peril.

  Pain—but there was too much pain. Too much struggle against too heavy a weight of history, story upon story upon story. The storyteller had to be dead. Otherwise, why had she not yet changed the story? But she had not, he could tell she had not, and now she never would; there was no hope for him. He was still the Prince. The weight of his golden fate lay upon him like a slab of granite.

  “You shall do it,” the Queen said.

  “No,” Adamus whispered, but he knew he would not be able to hold out much longer.

  “Let me go!” Buffy tore free of the Frog King’s grip and lunged away from him. He was loathsome. He had called her wench. And now that she had been irredeemably rude to him, he could go milt himself. He didn’t matter.

  Behind him in the lavender forest, waiting at the end of an aisle of beeches, stood a young woman in a white lace dress.

  “Emily?” Buffy ran to her. “Emily! What’s happening? Are you okay?”

  She smiled but did not answer. It was Emily, yet—not Emily. Emily’s indigo eyes, Emily’s creamy skin, Emily’s face, but—this was someone who would eat flowers, if she ate anything at all. A star of gold glimmered on her forehead. Her hands, curled like ivory rose petals, did not move. Her white dress floated as crisp and ethereal as starlight, without a single redeeming smear of chocolate on it.

  Worst of all, her VISA Gold Card lay abandoned on the grass at her feet. Not Emily.

  This was the Princess.

  Puffing and pompous, in green suit and fishbelly-white waistcoat, walking humanwise, the Frog King lurched up to them. “Begone, beldam,” he commanded Buffy, “or I will put you on my enemies list.” Then he turned his back on her. To the Princess he offered his arm. She smiled a soulless, docile smile and placed her dainty hand in the bight of his thick green elbow.

  Somewhere, lute music played. Emily and the frog wheeled and began their promenade down the aisle.

  “No!” Buffy shouted. The Frog King did not turn his head. Neither did Emily. “No, it’s not right!” She shouted again, louder. But no one paid any attention to her or her noise, just like when they used to get mad and shut Maddie in the closet, and that had to be because she was a bad person, she had always been a bad person, she did not count. She was living inside an Anne Sexton poem and her guilts were being catalogued. “Emily, don’t marry that thing! Kill it!” Take a knife and chop up frog. Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is—father’s genitals.

  Father. Was it Prentis?

  Oh, nausea. At the feel of frog the touch-me-nots explode like electric slugs. Slime will have him. Slime has made him a house. He says: Kiss me. Kiss me.

  Buffy felt so sick she could not move.

  At the golden end of the silver beech aisle, the wedding party stood ceremonially ranked under an archway of golden roses. Buffy saw that ormolu ogress, Fay, holding a huge bouquet of exceedingly phallic calla lilies and showing her gleaming teeth in a smile. She saw Stott posing like a lawn guardian. She saw, amid miscellaneous courtiers, some bearcats and ferrets and a carefully groomed hedgehog or two. At the exact geometric center of the silent arrangement, straight and severely symmetrical and taller than the others, the Queen of Fair Peril waited to officiate.

  On the Frog King’s arm, Emily—or this automaton called Emily, this plaster Princess, this articulated trophy—walked down the aisle on a carpet of heather and saxifrage to stand in front of the Queen.

  “No!” Buffy leaped out of her trance of horror like a deer, took one running stride, stomped on the hem of her—gown; her caftan was now a heavy gown larded with gaudery, as befitted the mother of the bride—pitched forward, and
fell flat in the loamy aisle. Struggling up, lavished with dirt, she did not take time to brush herself off but yanked her skirt above her unlovely knees and sprinted forward to—well, to do something. Somebody had to do something. What, she didn’t know.

  “Choose,” the Queen’s hard white voice was saying to someone as Buffy ran forward.

  “Mercy, O my Queen.” The voice was so soft and strained with pain that she didn’t recognize it.

  “No. I have been more than patient and merciful. Choose now. Obey, or be stone.”

  Buffy saw him then, saw his shoulders quivering as he knelt before the Queen, and the shock stopped her in midstride. She stood halfway up the aisle, panting, mostly with emotion.

  He did not speak, but lifted his head and turned it to look behind him.

  Adamus.

  His pale, taut face was turned not toward her but toward Emily, or the docile creature called Emily, standing there on the arm of the Frog King. Adamus looked, and the Frog King glowered back at him, but Emily only smiled her brainwashed smile, and Buffy saw Adamus wince as if he had been struck.

  Then he turned his shadowed eyes to her, the storyteller.

  He looked at her, and she could not think what to say to him, what to do. As if she had never seen him before, she stood startled and doltish in the presence of Prince Adamus d’Aurca’s supernatural perfection, the thoughtless balletic beauty of his long thighs in their tight white hose, the slim wedge of his torso under its velvet tunic, his strong shoulders, his wide, wild mouth. His pagan cheekbones and temples and brows. The brand of his Queen’s lips a romantic, never-healing wound on his forehead. His wide golden eyes pooled with black.

  Pooled deep with despair.

  He looked at her for a harsh moment, then turned away from her and back to the Queen. In an empty, wintry voice he said, “I will do it.”

  Off in the goldengrove somewhere, a bird gave a melancholy cry.

  “Very well,” said the Queen of Fair Peril, blasé. “You may live, then, Adamus, to carry on with your function.” She raised one hand in a kindly, dismissive gesture to the Frog King. “Very well, Batracheios, we shall not be needing you after all.”