The cat dropped this very dead mouse at Anya’s feet and made a quick mewing speech.
“I didn’t kill him, Princess. I mean, I would have, but he was already dead. At least, I might not have killed him if I’d realized who he was in time, but when a mouse runs out of a hole behind the big kitchen stove and falls over dead in front of you, instinct takes over, the claws go out, a little swipe this way, a little swipe that … I’m sorry.”
Anya bent down and looked closely at the mouse. There was something about it that didn’t look right. It took her a horrified moment to realize that he had an almost human face on his mouse body. An extra-cruel flourish to make when transforming a human.
He was one of the under-cooks, an oldish man named Harris. Anya had not known him well, since there were four under-cooks at any given time in the royal kitchen. But he had loyally worked for her parents, and perhaps even her grandparents, and now he was dead. Killed by the Duke, or as good as killed.
It was the first time, as far as Anya knew, that the Duke had transformed one of the castle staff. Visitors, strangers … but never anyone so close to herself, even someone like this under-cook who she didn’t really know …
“I wondered what had happened to him,” said Tanitha. “He burned the Duke’s morning marmalade cake yesterday.”
“Heart attack,” said the cat professionally. Cats know a lot about death. “Couldn’t take the transformation. Big to small, small to big, places a great strain on the heart.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Anya, thinking of Denholm. This was another thing to worry about, besides him getting eaten. And then there was Gotfried. He was turning into an owl too often, being so frightened by the Duke.
“Oh yes,” said the cat, licking his paws. He was a sooty kind of gray-black cat, but his paws were pure white. Anya was fairly sure his name was Robinson, but the cats never liked to admit to names. Being named might lead to being held responsible for something.
“Transformation’s not good for the brain, either,” continued Robinson. “It gets confused. Don’t know if you’re mouse or man after a while. Depends on the individual of course. Well, I must be off. There’s starlings got into the observatory roof. Have to clean them out. With your permission, Your Highness, Your Dogship.”
“Yes,” said Anya and Tanitha together.
“Thank you for bringing Harris here,” Anya called out as the cat zoomed away. “We’ll … I’ll ask Cook to organize the funeral.”
“The Duke’s magic is growing stronger,” said Tanitha. “And he is using it more wildly. Let us go out into the world. The air is fresher where the Duke has not been at work.”
“I don’t like to just leave Harris,” said Anya, looking down on the little curled-up, dead mouse with its bald patch between the ears. “He is … he was … one of my people, after all.”
“Springer, go and tell Madame Harn what has happened, and ask her to come and put Harris in a little basket,” instructed Tanitha. “He can lie with the flowers in the still room until this evening, when we will bury him. You’d better tell Cook as well.”
Madame Harn was the castle’s herbalist. Anya didn’t like her very much, mainly because the woman was unfriendly to everyone. But she was efficient and would take care of Harris.
Anya and Tanitha crossed the drawbridge, but instead of walking down the cobbled road towards the village that lay in the valley below, they turned to walk alongside the moat, on the raised path between the flooded ditch and the water meadow that stretched beyond. There was no one else about, save a brown-shouldered kite high above, hovering in wait for some small creature in the grass.
“I don’t know what to do, Tanitha,” Anya confessed.
“Yes, you do,” said Tanitha. She paused to sniff a clump of grass by the side of the path, squatted, and left her own remark for some later dog.
“I don’t think I do. I mean apart from finding Denholm.”
“That’s the first thing established,” said Tanitha. “Find the frog prince.”
“Right … ” confirmed Anya, her troubled brow relaxing a little. “One thing at a time. I have to find the frog prince and turn him back. Which could be difficult, since Morven won’t kiss him for sure, and I used up all the lip balm … ”
“One thing at a time. Always eat the food in front of you first, before looking for more. Ah, here comes Gripper with a hazel stick, and young Ardent with the hairbrush … and a sock.”
Fortunately, Anya did not have to resort to looking inside Denholm’s sock for a toenail clipping or scrap of skin, as there were several long golden hairs caught in the hairbrush. Denholm’s name was also engraved on the back of the brush, with his coat of arms, so it seemed definite that this time the hair would be his.
It took only a few minutes to repeat the spell and re-create the frog-dowsing rod. When Anya stopped sneezing, she raised it up, expecting it to point to the moat. But the rod shook and twisted in her hands and she had to spin about to follow it, until the hazel stick was pointing with great certitude down the valley towards the village.
“Oh no,” groaned Anya. “One of the villagers must have caught him to eat.”
“But he is not eaten yet,” said Tanitha. “Or so I presume. The dowsing rod would not point to a dead person?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Anya.
At that moment, both of them caught sight of a man emerging from the water meadow and stepping onto the road that wound down to the village. He was barefoot and dressed in the traditional bright-yellow-and-green-striped cassock of a frog gatherer. He bore a staff over his shoulder that supported a dozen small wicker cages. Each cage contained at least one freshly gathered frog.
“Hey!” shouted Anya, springing off into a run, the dowsing rod quivering in her hand. “Frog Gatherer! Stop!”
Tanitha added some helpful barking and trotted along more sedately behind the princess. Ardent tried to run past her, but a nip at his tail made him fall into line behind the dog matriarch, where he added a few loud barks of his own. But the frog gatherer was some distance away, and evidently hard of hearing, for he did not turn around or answer Anya’s shouts.
It took five minutes for the princess to catch up with him, and even when she called out right behind him, red-faced and puffing, he didn’t turn around. In fact he didn’t stop until Anya raced past him, turned on the spot, and held up one small commanding hand.
“Stop!”
The man jumped in the air, almost dropping his staff and all the frog baskets that hung from it.
“Princess Anya!” he bellowed. “What are you doing here?”
“Chasing a frog,” Anya replied. She recognized him as the younger of the two main frog gatherers, a villager called Rob the Frogger. He hadn’t been deaf when she’d spoken to him before.
“What?” roared Rob the Frogger.
“I’m chasing a frog!”
Rob frowned, carefully laid down his staff and the baskets on the road, and extracted two plugs of what looked like dried pond-weed from his ears.
“Sorry, Your Princess-ship,” he said. “It’s the croaking, I can’t abide it. Gets me down, it does. Sometimes I think they’re complaining about how they’re going to be eaten. What was it you were wanting?”
“A frog,” said Anya.
“Oh, a frog! You’d better come down to the house—I’ve been fattening up last week’s catch. Some of ’em got legs like a chicken. Huge! Fried up with garlic, you can’t beat—”
He stopped as his voice was drowned out in a sudden cacophony of frog croaking. It did indeed seem they could understand him and were complaining about their fate.
“It’s one particular frog I want,” said Anya, brandishing her dowsing rod. “A prince, as it happens. Transformed.”
“Ugh,” shuddered Rob. “Nasty. Fair gives me the horrors, that does. What if I sells a frog to someone and they’re cooking it and it turns back—”
“I don’t think that would happen,” interrupted Anya fi
rmly. “Only true love or strong magic can reverse a transformation. Not cooking. Or garlic. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I need to find the prince. Could you please separate the baskets and I’ll dowse out which one is the prince?”
“Aye,” said Rob. He bent down and began to untie the baskets, setting them out in a line next to the road. “Be quiet!”
The frogs did not stop croaking. Anya looked at them worriedly. Surely they couldn’t all be transformed people, still able to understand human speech? As far as she knew, the Duke had only started transforming the castle staff that day, and there weren’t enough visitors to account for so many frogs.
Tanitha and Ardent came up as Anya was pondering what to do with so many potential transformees. Ardent looked like he was about to explode from being forced to walk at the old dog’s pace. As soon as Tanitha stopped and sat back on her haunches, he zoomed three times around the princess and four times along the line of frog baskets, sniffing wildly.
“Ardent!” Anya called out. “Calm down. And get away from the frogs.”
“Have you found the prince yet?” asked Tanitha.
“I’m just about to,” Anya answered. “But I’m wondering if more of these frogs are transformed humans. They seem to understand where they’re headed, and they don’t like it.”
“Hmm,” said Tanitha, getting to her feet again and going over to sniff at the frogs, while Anya restrained an indignant Ardent, who had instantly gone to copy the matriarch but with too much energy.
“There is only a faint scent of magic,” said Tanitha. “I doubt more than one frog is transformed. Find the prince and separate him, and we will be able to tell.”
Anya held out the frog-dowsing rod. It twisted in her hand, pointing to the middle of the line of frog baskets. She let it pull her ahead, until the end of the hazel stick smacked into the wicker sides of a basket that held a single large, somewhat yellowish frog, who flinched back from the sudden movement.
“That’s him,” said Anya. She bent down, detached the small basket from the carrying staff, and picked it up. Tanitha sniffed along the other cages from left to right then, to be sure, sniffed back the other way.
“No magic in the rest of them,” she reported. “They must be ordinary frogs. They’re probably just complaining about leaving the moat.”
“You can have that one for a shilling,” said Rob, indicating the transformed prince. “Normal price is a ha’penny, of course, but if he’s special—”
“Whose moat did he come out of?” asked Anya. “Besides, you can’t charge for a prince.”
“You might even be considered a prince-napper,” Tanitha pointed out. She leaned heavily against the frog gatherer’s knee and looked up at him, her tongue lolling. “I should get Ardent to arrest you.”
“C-can I? C-can I?” asked Ardent, bounding around in such a tight circle that he raised a small whirlwind of dust from the road.
“Oh well, can’t blame a man for trying,” said Rob with a sigh. “I don’t suppose you want any regular frogs? Because like I said, I’ve got some prize ones back home.”
“No thank you,” said Anya. “I’ve got enough to do with this one.”
She looked at the frog in the basket. Denholm turned and attempted to squeeze himself through the wickerwork. Duke Rikard’s spell was obviously at work, and he was trying to get away from anyone who might be able to change him back into a man.
“I will give you a shilling, Rob,” said Anya. “Because I want the basket, and Prince Denholm might have been harder to catch in the moat. But you’ll have to wait for the money. The Duke doesn’t give me my allowance.”
“Ah, the Duke.” Rob turned his head aside and spat on the grass. “You’re going to take care of him, though, when the time is right? You and your sister?”
“Yes, I hope so,” said Anya. She hadn’t thought the villagers would be much affected by the Duke, mainly because she didn’t think about anything very much outside the library and her own interests.
“There’s many afeared he might set himself up as king,” said Rob. “And then where would we be? It isn’t like the old days, as my grandam used to say, the lawful days. Now it’s them in charge doing whatever they want, and if they’re sorcerers to boot, what they want is not good for any regular folk. Still, I suppose as long as there’s dogs in the castle, all will be well. She used to say that too, my grandam. Anyhow, I must get these frogs down to my barrel.”
He bowed, picked up his staff and the hanging baskets, and firmly pushed in his pondweed earplugs as the frogs began to croak again. “Happy to help!”
“Well, that’s one thing done,” said Anya as the frog gatherer marched off. She hadn’t paid much attention to what Rob the Frogger had said, being intent on her more immediate problem of the transformed prince. Besides, how could there not be dogs in the castle? She couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“I suppose I’ll have to try to trick Morven into kissing Denholm,” she added. “There’s no more lip balm. And I have to work out how to avoid being sent away to school.”
“Without true love, Morven’s kiss will be useless. And in any case, you have something more important to do.” Tanitha lay down on top of Anya’s feet to indicate the significance of what she was going to say next. “The time has come when you must go on a Quest.”
“A Quest! I haven’t got time to go on a Quest, or even a noncapitalized little quest!” protested Anya. “I have so much reading to do—I mean when I can actually get back to it, after I sort out this frog … and I suppose I’ll have to hide in the library somehow and get you all to bring me food—ow!”
She stopped talking because Tanitha had leisurely nipped her above the knee.
“You can’t hide away,” the elder dog informed Anya. “You can’t even go back to the castle now. It is time that you sought help against the Duke. He grows in strength and power, and he clearly feels he can move against you and Morven now. This is your Quest: to find those who can help you defeat the Duke.”
Anya was silent for a moment, thinking about this. Tanitha watched her with her wise old eyes, while Ardent snapped at a confused dragonfly that had followed the wet frog baskets from the moat.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “But I don’t want to leave Morven here alone. I know you’ll look after her, but … ”
“The Duke is not threatened by Morven. He doesn’t need to transform her or kill her. He will merely distract her with his magpie prince.”
“I can’t go back? I need to talk to Gotfried, fetch the books I’m reading … ”
Anya’s voice faltered as she caught Tanitha’s eye.
“Why do I have to leave now?”
“Because it will surprise the Duke. He will expect you to hide in the library. If you go now, you may gain half a day’s head start on any pursuit.”
“Pursuit?” Anya did not like the sound of that.
“The Duke has his sorcery and controls the kingdom’s wealth. He will transform weasels and stoats into human hunters, and buy the services of bandits and the like. You will be constantly in danger.”
“Great!” said Anya bitterly. “I simply want to read my books and learn magic and get on with things and now not only am I saddled with a frog prince, I have to go on a Quest to save the kingdom from Duke Rikard and I’m not even the oldest. It’s so unfair! Why do I have to do it?”
“You don’t,” replied Tanitha. She paused to worry a little point on her back, teeth harrowing her hair, before turning around to the princess again. “It is entirely your decision.”
“Is it?” asked Anya. She extracted her feet with difficulty from under the dog and hunkered down next to her.
“It is,” confirmed the wise old dog. “I can merely advise.”
“What … what do you think my parents would tell me? My real parents.”
“I think you know,” said Tanitha softly.
“Father would tell me he trusted me to do the right thing, whatever it is,” said Anya with a sm
all sniffle. “I can’t … I can’t really remember Mother. I only sort of remember her voice. And something she said once, that I overheard. And her favorite shawl, the red woolly … ”
“The red woolly,” said Tanitha, nodding her head. “She wore it most evenings in winter, when her official work was done and she could put off the crown and the fur robes and play with you and Morven.”
“What would she say?” asked Anya.
“She would want you to decide for yourself,” said Tanitha. “I suppose you could even join forces with the Duke, if you really want to be a sorcerer.”
“I don’t want to be that kind of sorcerer,” said Anya swiftly. “Besides, you wouldn’t … you wouldn’t love me then, would you?”
“We will always love you,” said Tanitha. “But you would not know that if you become like the Duke. He has grown too cold from his magic, and has forgotten what it means to love.”
“I haven’t got any money, or spare clothes or food or anything,” said Anya, changing the subject. “I need to prepare, to organize lots of things … ”
Tanitha turned halfway around and pointed with her snout towards the castle. Anya looked up and saw three royal dogs trotting along the road, each carrying a small parcel in his or her mouth. She smiled tentatively, the smile getting wider as she saw an owl flying erratically along above them, a small book held in its powerful talons.
“I don’t know where to go,” continued Anya. “For help against the Duke, I mean. Who would help us?”
“The Good Wizard might, or perhaps a responsible dragon, a sensible knight, a great queen or king … You will have to seek out suitable allies,” Tanitha advised. “That is why it is a Quest and not simply a matter of writing a letter or asking random visitors if they could help you out for a moment.”
“I have to transform Denholm back as well,” said Anya thoughtfully. “I made a sister promise. I can’t forget that.”
“No, you musn’t break such a promise,” Tanitha agreed. “But you can do several things at once.”