Fair Peril Read online

  No, LeeVon most certainly did not want to croak, not in any sense of the word, not anymore. But his whole body was one terrified spasm of trembling. His throat constricted, emitting a terrified ribbet.

  Instantly those searing eyes swiveled and found him.

  Oh, God. Oh shit oh cloaca doing exactly that oh God. “Mighty one, I’m very very very sorry I bothered you,” LeeVon gabbled. Oh, God, was he sorry. He was trembling so violently that all his little facial rings jingled, ethereal, like the fabled ringing of bluebells that lured unwary mortals to a supernatural death. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean—”

  “Silence!” bellowed the mighty one.

  LeeVon shut up but couldn’t be silent enough. He quaked. He jingled. He was trying so hard to disappear under the boulders that he was bruising himself.

  Hard eyes regarded him. “If it were not that you are afflicted with disgusting excrescences,” the mighty frog said in harsh and measured tones, “you would be eaten.” Then there was a horrible blur—its pale sticky tongue, as long as a spear, shooting through the darkness straight at—

  LeeVon screamed.

  And damn near fainted. But the tongue didn’t quite reach him. The god-frog let out a roar that might have been a laugh and turned its vast back. The next moment, amid a great roiling of water, LeeVon saw it fly up.

  It was impossible. That hulk, flying? Yet it flew. The huge thing had little wings—what LeeVon had taken to be a cape was its folded wings. It flew heavily and unnaturally, like a bumblebee. Its flying was a perversion of the graceful flying of frogs without wings, their balletic leaps, their trapeze-artist trajectories, and their sometimes deaths. Flights unto smashed landing. Leaps unto asphalt doom.

  LeeVon let out a shivering sigh and extracted himself from his hiding place as gently as he could, trying not to leave too much of his thin green skin behind.

  To be a frog was to be always frightened. Even the god of all frogs was just another predator. Already LeeVon’s memories of the great ranine presence were fading, his terror was lessening, because such extreme terror would not allow him to survive. LeeVon perched on his wet rock again, watching for a minnow to swim by, settling down to working on another hour or two of survival.

  Getting into the mall at 4 A.M. turned out to be not as much of a problem as Buffy had envisioned, simply because the cops were there ahead of her. Searching the place. The main doors to the anchor store hung wide open, guarded by empty cruisers with their flashers going reddy bluey reddy bluey. Buffy walked in, positioned herself in the women’s fashion department, wrapped her black plastic inclusively around herself, and became an avant-garde display.

  None too soon. Voices coming.

  “Probably that damn bird,” one of them was saying as a squadron of thick rubber soles tramped past. “A goddamn robin got in somehow, it’s nesting on a strut or something. It doesn’t fly around at night, but it poops and the motion detectors go crazy.”

  “Not to speak of the interior decorators.”

  “And the people who get pooped on.”

  “Yeah, well, shoot the damn bird, would you?”

  “How can we? Fancy glass all over the place. Anyway, shoppers don’t like it when Mr. Robin flutters down all bloody. Ruins the ambience.”

  There was a volley of male laughter. Cops and security guards stood outside the entrance exchanging friendly fire. “At least you guys got here halfway fast this time,” one of the security guards said.

  “Well, one of the wack trackers got loose from the wacky ward tonight. We thought it might be her.”

  Their backs were turned. Still wrapped in her black plastic, looking rather like an Iranian woman in a chador, Buffy shuffled quietly away. “Is she dangerous?” somebody was asking.

  Ask Prentis.

  Once safely around the corner, Buffy let her makeshift cloak fall away from her face and hustled down the mezzanine, past the first fountain, where the giant frog crouched heavily on its pedestal. She glanced up. Odd; the frog’s mottled metal body shone wetly, as if it had just been in for a swim.

  The sculptor, whoever it was, had made the thing about the same size as the other components of the conceptual triptych, the deer and the princess—which meant that, though deer and girl were the right size for themselves, the frog was the wrong size for a frog. Way too big. Why was it that changing the right size of something should make it loom so? The statue of a deer, life-sized, had seemed sweetly beautiful; the princess, life-sized, likewise—but this frog’s oversized, lumpen, wetly shining presence was so disturbing that Buffy stopped and stared.

  There was not much light. Shadowy, the frog towered against the glass dome, a squat, gargoyle silhouette topped by the glint of a golden crown. Why hadn’t the sculptor understood that frogs should be sleek, not gross and flabby? Leaden, fleshy, massive, it was an ugly statue. Buffy felt as if its murky eyes were watching her.

  Jesus. She had no time for this kind of crap. She got herself moving again.

  She hustled to the next fountain and crouched by its rim. “LeeVon!” she whispered as loudly as she dared.

  “Buffy? Oh, Best Beloved. Thank God.” Buffy could not see much—it was dim in the mall despite the security lighting—but she could hear the plash of water as LeeVon swam over to her, sleek, comely, gleaming, all that a frog should be.

  “Are you all right?” She held out her hands.

  “No, I’m not all right. I’m starving.” LeeVon tried to clamber out of the pool and fell back into the water.

  “LeeVon!” She grabbed him and cradled him in her palms, where he crouched and shivered and dripped.

  “Starving,” he said rapidly but intensely. “It is not a good thing to be a frog with a stud in its tongue, Best Beloved.”

  “God, I’m stupid. I never thought.” Buffy had imagined every other kind of danger for LeeVon—getting stepped on; killed by mall security; captured by some Norman Rockwell-style boy who wanted a frog to thrust all too symbolically at girls—but she hadn’t realized he might starve. The omission made her upset with herself. “Pork for brains. Duh. There’s no flies in a mall.”

  “There are, Best Beloved, there are beautiful flies! Dragonflies hovering over the lily pads, lacewings clinging to the rushes, mayflies—but I can’t catch them.” LeeVon’s voice rose deliriously, as if he were crazy with hunger, hallucinating.

  Except Buffy knew it was not just a hallucination.

  “Shhhh. Ogres on the prowl.” In the dim 4 A.M. light she, too, began to be able to see the lily pads, the rushes, and, beyond the fringes of the pool, the clusters of coltslip folded until dawn, the lavender-shadowy forest looming. Quickly, afraid the pillar might somehow disappear if she were not quick, she looked upward for Emily, the princess on the pedestal; was Emily hungry? Could Emily lie down on that narrow plinth and sleep? Was she lonely? Would there be something soft wrapped around her, a quilt, a comforter?

  Buffy gasped. The tall pedestal rose empty. She forgot ogres; only shock kept her from shouting. “Emily! She’s gone!”

  “Is she? I—I can’t see that far.”

  “Yes, she is! There’s nothing up there, nothing at all! Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know? You were right there all the time.”

  “I’m a frog,” LeeVon said, “and I’m starving, and I had a few other things to think about, such as staying alive and not getting eaten by a hedgehog or some goddamn thing.”

  “But you had to notice how she came down from there!”

  “Don’t tell me what I had to do.” True to the company he was in, LeeVon began to sound hysterical. “I had to dig in the mud for worms, was what I had to do, and then I had to bite the back ends off while the front ends were still burrowing, and then I had to try not to puke. I need food, dammit! You want me to pee in your hands?” Buffy could feel him quivering like lime Jell-O.

  “All right, okay.” At least Emily was down off the pedestal, free. She might be better of
f.

  Crap, no, it was not okay. Buffy was going to have to find the girl all over again. Start all over.

  “Goddammit.”

  “Best Beloved, please.”

  “Okay, chill out.” She could feed LeeVon while she was deciding how to start. “Let me see if I can locate the food court.” All the vendors would be closed, of course, but even so, a person or a frog ought to be able to scare up something to eat there.

  Buffy headed upstairs. Or, more accurately, up trees.

  She stowed LeeVon in her bra. Clambering up a huge vine spiraling around an even more massive beech trunk, halfway to the top it occurred to her to be surprised that she was wearing one; since when did she wear a bra under her nightgown? She glanced down at herself and nearly lost her grip. The frog-toting device was a black-sequined bustier that complemented her starry velvet gown. Her smelly plastic cape had somehow turned into a shimmering black cloak that hung in perfumed folds from her shoulders down to her feet. Forget sneakers; her footgear had transmogrified like the rest of her clothing, so that she now wore dainty black leather boots. Yes, dainty, on her size-ten feet.

  Voices sounded ahead. And music.

  Not cop voices. Not jukebox music. These were voices the color of dark honey. Lute and mandolin music.

  LeeVon heard, too. “What the muck?” he croaked.

  Lights sifted lavender blue, lavender green through the leaves. Buffy said, “We’d better sneak a peek.” Hoisting herself a few more feet upward, she inched her head to where she could see what was going on.

  She had attained the canopy of the huge, convoluted trees, yet she found herself standing at the edge of a vaulted hall brightly lit by golden orbs and—people, tall, fair, arrow-straight princes and princesses. Dancing or talking or eating, they themselves illuminated the ballroom with the golden, shimmering faerie glamour that emanated from them, every one, and the fey comeliness that would never grow old. People? But they were fetches, peris, shining eidolons in shining clothing—gleaming gowns streaming down, cerulean, celadon, aubergine, yellow wine; crimson silk tunics taut over broad shoulders; fringed, creamy silk sashes flowing down to brush against hard thighs in lustrous smoke-gray hose. There was too much to see: tall burgundy leather boots; long flaxen and russet and chestnut hair twined with flowers, bittersweet, feathers; stunning bodies, stunning faces—Buffy could not take it all in. And mingled with all the shimmersheen there came to her the aromas of roast suckling pork in crabapple sauce, poached fish with parsley and coriander, chicken simmered in perry, cinnamon rolls, baked quail stuffed with mushrooms and apricots, garlic snails, butter-top bread, strawberries and chocolate—she could not sort it out. Only gradually did she notice the booths lining the sides of the great hall, and the small tables, and the musicians plucking away, and presiding over it all, a personage on a seat elevated above the rest. A golden chair. A throne.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she whispered. “The food court.”

  “Will they give me something to eat?” LeeVon quavered. Despite his extremity, he, like Buffy, had been transfixed by the sight of the food court, silent and staring.

  “I’m not sure whether we should go in there, dude.” Buffy’s life had been so screwed at the time a talking frog entered it that she had not been fazed. She had not been totally staggered by all the ramifications since. But looking upon the uncanny court, she knew to her bones, as she had not known before: she was standing at the edge of something she might not be able to handle. That monarch on that throne, majesty of this place that was not a place, ruled by whims that were as sudden and wild as hawk plummet. Buffy remembered the tales of potentates who would get up one day and decide to kill all their children and grow hybrid tea roses instead. What if she failed to curtsy with sufficient grace? What if someone took a dislike to her graying hair, her opinions, her overweight body, her hippie soul? This was what Fay had been talking about: the punishments, the risks.

  This was the Realm of Fair Peril.

  Buffy told LeeVon softly, “You know as well as I do, all the old tales say that if you eat the food in a place like this, you can never go home again. I don’t think—”

  Then she saw Adamus.

  Ten

  Buffy reared up like a warhorse, stepped away from her concealing tree, and strode forward.

  How could they all be so different from one another, yet all be so beautiful? They were exquisite. Adamus stood among them, exquisite in his loneliness. Ineluctably he was the shadowed one; something of late-day sadness in his aureate glow had let Buffy pick him out, a hint of patina in his golden hair, darkness under his golden brows, dusky amethyst velvet under his golden tabard. He walked alone, straying from group to group, and even when he stood and exchanged greetings with the others, he gave the sense that he stood apart.

  Madeleine Buffmeister Murphy strode toward him with her black cloak lifting to reveal the lambent stars on her midnight velvet gown.

  Courtiers’ perfect oval faces turned to stare. The crowd parted.

  Adamus stood alone.

  He was so beautiful, even with clothes on, that Buffy felt her heart thudding. But she hardened her face.

  “Great lady,” Adamus whispered. He dropped to one knee and bowed his head.

  The rest of them, every gorgeous one of them, stood staring, and the lute music faltered to a halt; silence held the great hall in thrall. It had to be the black, glittering gown. Amazing what the right clothes could do.

  Or the right accessories. Buffy became aware that there was a live and wriggling frog protruding from her bosom. It was hard to concentrate on the business at hand with that thing squirming between her breasts.

  “Great lady,” Adamus was pleading, “where is she? Please, where have you taken her? I cannot live without her. I cannot bear it.”

  Utilizing posture learned in a paramilitary high school phys ed class, Buffy stood majestic (she hoped) but speechless. She had expected princely arrogance of Adamus, not this appeal from the heart.

  “Excuse me.” LeeVon spoke feebly but with dignity from her cleavage, addressing the court. “Fairies one and all, I am an ensorcelled librarian. Does there happen to be any epicene male among you who would care to kiss me?”

  “Lady,” Adamus begged.

  Buffy found her voice. “You parked her up there on that miserable pedestal!”

  “No, I did not, gracious lady! Not of my own will. The way I feel about her—I didn’t know it would do that to her. You think I wanted to imprison her? I hate myself. I am going insane.”

  “Anybody? Please?” LeeVon asked the assembly. “Kiss me and I will renew your overdues. No? Well, then, can somebody get me a French fry?”

  Buffy said to Adamus, “You didn’t put her on that pedestal, or order it, or intend it?”

  “No. Things—things happen around here.”

  “I see.”

  “Or a cheese cracker?” LeeVon sounded increasingly desperate.

  “Where have you taken her?” Adamus begged again. “Please, I must see her, I must talk with her.”

  He was an unconscionably handsome young man, yet somehow he was still Addie, her sincere bigmouthed Addie, now no longer obnoxious, only forlorn; Addie in love. She had missed him. And how could she not adore him when he had the good sense to adore Emily? Buffy did not entirely trust him, but she could not remain angry at him. Anyway, she decided, she could use him. She could make him help her find Emily.

  “A corn curl?” LeeVon croaked.

  Buffy lifted her hands and gently extricated LeeVon from her bustier. “Is it safe for my friend to eat here?” she asked Adamus. “Will eating turn him into one of you?”

  “As if I’m not already?” LeeVon yelped before Adamus could reply. “I’m in a fairy tale, for God’s sake. I’d rather stay than be dead.”

  Buffy looked at him.

  “Wearing tights would be an improvement,” he said.

  He seemed quite vehemently sincere. All right, okay. Buffy thrust him at Adamus. “W
ould you find him something to eat?”

  Adamus received LeeVon gently in his hands but stood cradling him without apparent comprehension, looking up at Buffy like a golden-eyed puppy. “Where’s Emily?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Buffy told him quietly. “I thought she was with you. Would you get up off the floor and feed that frog, Addie? We’ve got problems.”

  “The gay blade in the periwinkle tunic with the tushie slits,” Adamus was telling LeeVon, “he’s the one you want to approach.”

  “Oooooh.” It was an appreciative sigh with a lot of throat flutter. Apparently LeeVon liked the tushie slits, of which he had a clear view from the table atop which he squatted by Adamus’s elbow. Also, he had eaten honey bread and roast suckling pork and spiced apple and several other sorts of goodies and was feeling much better.

  “But not in front of the others,” Adamus went on. “We’re medieval here.”

  “Yes. This mall is certainly a Grimm place at night.”

  “Yes, it is. And ‘fairy’ is a dangerous word. Never use it.”

  “Okay,” said LeeVon meekly. “Thank you.”

  Sitting opposite Adamus at the small table, Buffy had not eaten, and was listening to this exchange with no more than a quarter of her attention. She was trying to figure out how to find Emily. The first problem, as she analyzed it, was that fundamental information was missing: Emily could have gone back to the “real” world or she could be wandering in the Perilous Realm, and neither Buffy nor Adamus knew which. This initial difficulty might be solved if they could figure out how Emily came to be missing from her pedestal. Had the mall removed her for cleaning or repair? Had someone stolen her? If so, then Buffy needed to search for her daughter in the mundane world. Or had Emily somehow gotten down on her own? Then she was in the Realm of Fair Peril—but the sticking point was, LeeVon could hardly have helped but notice if Emily or anyone else had splashed through his pool, yet he had seen or heard nothing of essence. This had already been discussed. There had been a terrifying blue fox. There had been a terrifyingly nimble raccoon. There had been a consummately terrifying giant frog which Buffy correctly interpreted as the frog-king statue from the neighboring pedestal, but knowing this did not help her. The statues were statues yet themselves as well; so what? It was nothing she didn’t already know.