Free Fair Peril by Nancy Springer Page A

wire of your hook, or tie the frog’s leg above the upper joint to the armed wire; and in so doing, use him as though you loved him.
    It made her shiver. Thus use your frog. Use him as though you loved him. She read the passage a third time.
    Was she really a user, as Emily claimed?
    Speaking of Emily. “Tomorrow is Emily’s party,” she said to Adamus.
    â€œGood. You go. Have a nice time.” He had given up on finishing his fourth waffle and was sitting lumpen on the table. Nothing sits quite as lumpen as a frog.
    â€œYou’re invited, remember? She specifically asked for you.”
    â€œI am not going to be made a show of.”
    Buffy read, “To secure a reluctant lover, catch a frog, wrap in white cloth, put onto an anthill after sunset. The frog croaks in agony as ants eat it—”
    â€œStop it!”
    She realized that she was being as offhandedly cruel as Izaak Walton, but could not seem to help it. Adamus had kept her up at night. Adamus had frightened her. Adamus had left her and made her cry. Moreover, this was too good. “—and the lover suffers the pangs of love. Finally all that is left of the frog is a small bone in the shape of a hook. Fasten it to the clothing of your reluctant lover, who should cleave to you, suffering like the frog.”
    â€œLady,” said Adamus in a trembling voice, “you can make me suffer. And you can make me go to your daughter’s festivity, and you can humiliate me, and you can make a show of me. But you cannot make me speak.”
    His eyes, rings of ancient gold floating on black pools, black wells as deep as time—seeing herself reflected in those eyes, Buffy experienced a sudden, slewing disorientation as her point of view skidded out of control and did a 180. She closed Batracheios and held it in her lap, looking into her frog’s wide, distraught, lichen-colored face.
    She said softly and slowly, waiting for the right words, “Once upon a time—there was a prince—who was turned into a frog—and forced to go from his bright palace to live in a dark swamp in a rank and wildering forest.”
    Addie stared sullenly at her.
    Buffy found more words. “There he shivered in peril of everything from snakes to otters to men who hunted him with spears for the sake of his meaty thighs. Fishes in the water and foxes in the forest and ospreys in the sky all prey on frogs, for frogs are small and thin-skinned and sweet.”
    Addie, no longer sullen, had lifted his heavy, dewy head to gaze at her intently.
    â€œBut the frog prince became clever; he survived. All alone he lived there for a thousand years.
    â€œThen one day a small girl like a sunbeam came toddling to the dark pool where he was hiding. He rested on his log and looked at her, unafraid because she was merely a babe, like the babies in their long white christening gowns he remembered from his princely palace—but he underestimated her. She reached for him all too quickly and caught him in her questing hands, as dainty as a raccoon’s hands. She lifted him and kissed him, but because she was so young and innocent, her kiss had no effect; he remained a frog. Yet from that moment he became her baby, for even though she was only a baby herself, she was as much larger than the frog prince as the other humans, her family, were larger than she.
    â€œSo she took him home in a pocket of her apron and dressed him in baby doll’s clothes and gave him a doll’s cradle to sleep in and mothered him the way her mother mothered her. And he lived in terror of her love, for her power over him was immense. She was his goddess. At any time she could have killed him with a hug.”
    Adamus’s golden eyes glittered like beer-bottle caps flattened on a black road.
    Buffy said, “Yet he survived. And he had hope, for if he could live with her another thousand years, until she grew less than innocent, then one day she would kiss him