Free Fair Peril by Nancy Springer

With a blank, suffering look on his broad face, he whispered, “I’m hungry.”
    â€œI don’t know whether I should feed you!” She stood jiggling her legs and biting her lower lip; more damn problems. Her food seemed to have an alarming effect on Adamus. He was discernibly larger than he had been the evening before. If this didn’t stop, he would soon be human-sized. And what if he didn’t stop then?
    â€œI’m starving, puissant lady!” Buffy heard a catch in his voice. “I can’t help it. I am not trying to grow so greatly.”
    â€œIt’s not your idea?”
    â€œNo!”
    Maybe it was the damn additives, chemicals strange to his medieval body. Damn processed food. Nothing she could do anything about.
    â€œIf I promise to make you waffles, will you wait outside the bathroom?”
    â€œYes.”
    He flopped wetly down the stairs after her, and she stuck some Aunt Jemimas in the toaster. Shuffling around in bathrobe and cow-nosed slippers, she cleared a patch of plastic tablecloth for Adamus to squat on. She set a plate in front of him, and one for herself, then brought on the waffles and the strawberry syrup. They ate—he used knife and fork, which at first she didn’t even notice, eerily unsurprised. They ate rapidly, silently, and single-mindedly. Two of a kind. Sometime during the second batch of waffles Buffy realized that she ought to be getting ready to go to work, and sometime during the third batch she realized that she had no intention of doing so. The plastic-food people needed her and she needed their money; nevertheless, she was not going. For reasons unrelated to logic, conscious choice, or her storytelling career, she could not bring herself to leave Adamus home alone. Suppose he got out of the house; suppose she lost him? She couldn’t risk it.
    The realization made her peevish. Realizing they need someone has that effect on some people. While Adamus finished his fourth batch of waffles, Buffy sat back, swung her feet onto an empty chair (her cow-nosed slippers, upright, peered at her stolidly), picked up the large green book LeeVon had given her, and leafed through it.
    â€œ Batracheios, ” she read aloud; she knew that reading aloud was an annoying habit, had always pissed the hell out of Prentis, and she was doing it for that reason. “Subtitled, ‘A Compendium of Froggery.’”
    Adamus ate doggedly, or perhaps froggedly, ignoring her.
    â€œIt says here,” she remarked, “to cure rheumatism, roast a live frog and apply it to the sore area.”
    Gumming a soggy waffle, Adamus missed a mastication.
    â€œTo cure warts, rub a live frog over them, then impale it on a thorn to die.”
    The frog stopped chewing, set down his fork with a clunk, and stared at her.
    â€œTo cure whooping cough, place a small frog in a box tied around the sick person’s neck. As the frog decays, the cough will go away.”
    â€œStop it,” Adamus said.
    â€œOh, beg pardon. Let me see what else is in here.” She flipped through the pages, some of which were pulpy and covered with print and some of which were glossy with bright pictures of various famous frogs—frogs who went a-courting; Beatrix Potter frogs; Jim Henson puppets, which Adamus would probably loathe; others—interspersed among quotations and verse, the latter being mostly bad, doggerel (froggerel?) except for the poetry of Anne Sexton, which was frightening and sublime. Buffy forbore from reciting the poetry, leafing past it to a section devoted to technical esoterica. “Izaak Walton on how to rig up a live frog as bait for bass—”
    â€œStop it!”
    Buffy had sufficient mercy to desist, but continued to read silently, then reread, fascinated: Thus use your frog: put your hook through his mouth and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg with only one stitch to the arming