Fair Peril by Nancy Springer Page B

shifting her gaze from Adamus.
    â€œI am a fairy-tale prince,” Adamus continued. “I have been a prince for over a thousand years, yet I have never led a charge into battle, never met with advisors, never sat at the head of a banquet table, never pronounced judgment or ordered an execution. I have never wooed a lover, married, or sired children. I have never in a thousand years danced for joy; I have never in a thousand years grieved. I am immortal, yet it has been a long, long time since I have lived. I have no more soul man an angel.
    â€œBut it was not always so. I was born a mortal prince, fourth son of a minor Austrian royal in a chilly castle along the Danube.”
    Tempestt tittered. “Madeleine, I never knew you were such a ventriloquist. Excuse me.” She fluttered out. But Emily’s blue-velvet gaze never strayed from Adamus’s blunt green face.
    The frog’s quiet baritone voice went on. “The first ten years of that life were much as might have been expected. Feasts and fasts, games, friends, teachers, lessons, thrashings. I remember those good years when I was a mortal boy as if they were a bright dream. So long ago. They came to a swift end. My father’s ambition had led him into war with a neighboring principality, and he was bested. There was a meeting, a treaty, and I was sent to live in the enemy king’s castle as a hostage to ensure my father’s promise of peace.”
    This was, Buffy realized, a true story. Starkly factual. But even beyond that, deeply true. It curled her toes.
    â€œTruth to tell,” Adamus continued, “he was kinder to me than my father had ever been, that king. He was a gentle enemy. For a winter he was kind, and I began to hope—but then in the spring my father’s armies came and surrounded his stronghold and besieged it. Then—no more kindness. He thundered with anger, and seized me, and ordered me to be bound so that I would not flee or hide, and bespoke my father from the ramparts. ‘You have betrayed your word of honor,’ he roared as I lay trembling on the stones. ‘Withdraw at once, or I will use your son as a missile to hurl upon you.’
    â€œAnd I heard my father’s voice for the last time, cool and clear on the dawn air: ‘Do with him what you like. I have the hammer and the anvil still to make better ones than he.’”
    Emily gasped and murmured, her wide eyes dark with stormy emotion.
    â€œSo they took me and placed me in the sling of the engine of war—” Adamus spoke slowly, hesitantly, as if this part were causing him some difficulty, even after a thousand years had gone by. “They placed me bound in the ballista, and I felt its great muscles clench and spring and hurl me high, high over my father’s army. My terror was so great that I wished I would faint, but I did not. And then there was a moment of soul-sickness at the height of the arc. And then even greater sickness unto death as I began to fall.”
    He paused. There was not a sound in the room. Emily’s lips had parted, flower-soft. Buffy stood stricken by the story, the cruelty, the danger—she was beginning to sense the danger. Yet she did not move or speak.
    I wanted to hear his story. I am hearing it.
    â€œThe angels were too appalled, I think, to save me.” Adamus paused again. “But the Queen of the Realm of Fair Peril happened to be driving past in her chariot of air. And she saw fit to take me. I do not—I do not think I died. I think I fainted. And when I awoke, I was lying in her hard white arms.” Adamus spoke more easily yet more low. “And she kissed me like fire and put the mark of her lips upon me.” He touched his forehead. Above his eyes—or in back of them, as he was a frog—Buffy saw a brown mark she had not previously noticed amid his other mottlings, a dark smudge like a brand. The place where eerie lips had burned? Buffy was not