Fair Peril (27 page)

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.”

The Frog King bowed his hulking bulk. “I give this Princess to be married to this Prince,” he said in a bullfrog's throaty roar. “And I crave vengeance for the insolence of an interloper in our midst.”

“Later,” said the Queen. “Let the nuptials proceed.”

Batracheios stepped back. Adamus rose and took the bridegroom's place.

Buffy wobbled on her feet with a sort of cowardly relief. Sometimes you take what breaks you can get. Adamus would be kind to Emily; of that much she felt sure. Far better that Emily should be given to Adamus than to that horrible Frog King. Besides, Adamus was so beautiful—if he married Emily, that would mean Buffy would get to see him. It would keep him around. It would be a kind of vicarious way of having him for herself.

Fine. Good. Buffy felt shaky and stone-bone-weary; maybe she could just sit down and watch her daughter's wedding? Emily had walked down the aisle on her father's arm, in a sense. Emily was to be married to a prince with kind and beautiful eyes. It was the fairy-tale ending; why fight it?

Courtiers, deer, frog, hedgehogs looked on. So did the statues. Many statues of young and beautiful youths and maidens stood watching with blind stone eyes. Adamus and Emily, just as young and beautiful, seemed only marginally more alive.

With the look of a trapped wild thing, Adamus faced Emily and reached for her hands. As automatically as if he had pressed a switch, she lifted them and placed them in his.

Why fight it?

Buffy found herself choking back a sob.

Why fight it?
Because coiling inside her, coiling and stirring and swelling and hissing like stormwind and stinging her heart with thunderbolt rage was a wild black emotion of which she did not yet know the name. As wild and black and bleak as the wintery anguish in Prince Adamus's eyes.

Adamus. He had looked at her, then turned away.
Betrayer,
that look had said.

She had failed him.

He gave up. He gave up on me.

Addie. Her Addie.

“Let the nuptials proceed,” the Queen was saying. “Adamus and Emily, repeat after me—”

“No,” Buffy whispered. She knew the name of the black snake inside her now. It was despair. Or desperation.

It was knowing it was all her own goddamn fault.

Her. Being a jerk.

Her problem.

Her brain farting.

“
NO!
” she shouted, and she strode forward.

In his modest third-floor apartment, LeeVon stood quite seriously holding both of the blond young man's hands and looking into his beautiful eyes.

It was a nice apartment for a librarian. Lots of built-in bookshelves, good lighting, a window nook, a pleasant bird-chirpy yard to look down into. Friendly junk lying around: a working model of a roller coaster, a 3-D puzzle of the City of Oz, a ceramic bust of Kipling. Escher posters on the walls. Newspapers piled on the kitchen table, magazines in the bathroom, books everywhere else. LeeVon felt quite happy to be back in his own apartment, almost as happy as he was to be back in human form. But both of those happinesses put together did not equal the happiness he felt about the blond young man, whose ponytail was undone at this moment so that his hair hung in a most appealingly tousled fashion around his bare shoulders.

“Richard,” LeeVon said, for that was the young man's name, “you have to understand, what I said—I meant it.”

“I know,” Richard said almost in a whisper. LeeVon loved the youthful tremor in his voice. He loved the delight and alarm in his gray eyes. He loved his thick, tawny eyelashes. He loved everything about him.

He said, “I've imprinted on you just like a goose. Which I resemble in other ways, actually. I'm silly about you.”

“I think I could learn to like that.”

“You're free, you know,” LeeVon said, knowing with a pang of joy that he himself was no longer free. That was the secret, to be willing to risk. Give away freedom for a chance at—this. “Free to go, free to come back whenever.” But LeeVon did not let go of his hands.

Richard shrugged his bare shoulders, an act LeeVon watched with appreciation. Richard said, “What if I just hang around?”

“Even better.”

“Okay.”

“I want to marry you.”

Richard smiled. “They're not about to let us do that.”

“Stupid laws. What's the big problem with a marriage of equals? Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.”

“Who said that?”

“I just did.”

“No, I mean, who said it before?”

“How should I know? I'm just a librarian. Children's. Romance is not in my department. Velvet's not my usual scene.” LeeVon found himself anxious to correct any possible misconceptions. “I'm more into leather.”

“Leather is the coolest, man.”

LeeVon felt warmth swelling in his chest and a loopy smile growing on his face. He moved closer. But then he winced. “Ow.”

“What's the matter?”

“Sudden headache.” He flinched as it intensified. “Buffy's shouting somewhere.”

“Buffy? Who's Buffy?”

“A friend. One of those people who makes you wonder why you need enemies.” Having been turned into a frog was a consideration that kept LeeVon from worrying much about what was going on with Buffy at this point. He was home again, and she had her own story to pursue and he, blessedly, had his. “We happen to share a collective unconscious. Ow.” LeeVon was forced to let go of Richard's hands and rub his own head. “Ow, she's loud. Damn. I wish she'd get over it, whatever it is, and shut up.”

“NO!” Buffy strode forward. “NO, IT'S NOT FREAKING RIGHT!” She shoved her large self between Adamus and Emily, neither of whom resisted her. Emily turned bland eyes toward her; Adamus, tormented ones. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY DAUGHTER?” Buffy demanded of the Queen.

“Silence, you insolent fool.” The Queen spoke with the perilous patience of a middle-school teacher. “Don't you see her? Right beside you?”

“Murphy, you jerk, shut up!” Fay shrilled at the same time.

“Buffy,” Adamus whispered, “help. Change the story.”

Buffy listened only to Addie, turning to him. “What's going on? What's happened to Emily?”

“She's trapped in happily-ever-after, just like I am.”

There wasn't a whole lot of time to think, to sort it out. Fay had relinquished her bouquet of calla lilies in favor of her fearsome handbag and was advancing; the Queen of Fair Peril was growing exacerbated, her face stretching taller and narrower and more like a white snake every moment; Buffy looked to Stott to see if he might help, but the stag stood ornamental and useless, like Emily.

The hedgehogs were rattling their quills.

The sky was darkening. A rising wind rustled the beech leaves.

The Frog King's mouth opened as wide as the maw of hell, and he started to laugh.

Buffy roared, “ONCE UPON A TIME!”

Everything stopped. The ormolu ogress stood with her golden weapon upraised; the white snake coiled rigid where the face of the Queen had been; Adamus stood like a gallant statue, as if he had stopped breathing. Silence hung like mist in a spiderweb. The Realm of Fair Peril stopped because Buffy had spoken words of consummate power. In the Perilous Realm, the greatest power is that of the storyteller. For only in story is there life.

And death. The storyteller's is the greatest power, and the greatest peril: the storyteller faces the terrors of the mind. Anne Sexton had killed herself.

“Once upon a time,” Buffy said more quietly, “there was a real world. And in this real world ordinary people lived.”

She fingered the dirt clinging to her bodice as she spoke.

“One of these ordinary people was a middle-aged woman named—named Madeleine,” she said. “Maddie. And hoo boy, was Maddie mad. Pissed off. Ticked. Bummed, peeved, sore, miffed, nose out of joint, disgruntled. She was mad because she was getting fat and wrinkly and old. She was mad because somebody was supposed to love her and nobody did. Her mother was supposed to love her, but she got Alzheimer's. Her husband was supposed to love her, but he got himself a gold-plated, midlife replacement wife instead. Her daughter was supposed to love her, but her daughter preferred Daddy. So-Maddie found somebody to love her. Somebody young and cute who adored her and would do anything for her. Kind of a private friend, a secret playmate. Maddie had an animus, and Maddie called him Addie.”

For the first time, Emily's velvet-blue eyes focused on Buffy. Emily started listening.

“Addie,” Buffy said. “Adam, swimming in the dark pool of her mind like a frog in a well.” Everything in that well was itself and something else. “Swimming in the black, starry water of her dreams like a soulmate in her womb. Addie, her animus, her man. Everything she would have liked to be if she had been born a boy instead of a girl. Just like a hundred thousand thousand dreamers before her, Maddie made him golden and beautiful and ardent and a prince.”

The Queen—or the white snake, for the Queen was herself and that serpent as well—the white one listened rigidly, her golden eyes cold on Buffy, gelid. How far, Buffy wondered, could she interlope; how much ownership of Adamus could she claim before the Queen of Fair Peril struck like a white whip, a white snake, a lightning bolt smiting her down?

Too bad for the Queen. Understanding the Queen all too well, Buffy said, “Addie was the mirror, mirror she kept in thrall to tell her she was beautiful. Gold-framed trophy on the wall. Mirror, mirror with no soul of its own.” She paused. The Queen stood like white crystalline poison, Lot's wife on drugs, but too bad for her and too bad for Buffy; the story was coming alive, the storytelling was as irreversible as parturition, had to go on. Screw the Queen. Buffy shifted her attention to Emily.

Emily, gazing back at her, all dressed in white, gloved, corseted, far too tame; Buffy remembered the real-world Emily. Buffy said, “So everything was hunky-dory for a brief while. But then there was the daughter. There's always a daughter, isn't there, when there's a pissed-off, getting-older woman looking for a reassuring mirror? The daughter was, of course, a rosebud just opening, dewy-new and beautiful and rebellious and thoughtlessly cruel, a mirror to tell her mother she was ugly. And Maddie hated her as much as she hated herself, but loved her more.” More than she loved herself; far more than she hated her. And, thank the love and the hatred, Emily was beginning to respond. Blue vexation flared in her eyes. Her rosebud mouth opened just a little, as if she wanted to rebut or interrupt, though she did not.