Transformed: The Perils of the Frog Prince Read online

Only now did Grandmother Luffa move. She motioned to her guards, who stepped forward, seized Syrah by his arms, and marched him to the front doors of the Thatch. He was too shocked to fight them — he only twisted his head to look over his shoulder. His family watched him like a many-headed serpent, cold and pitiless.

  “This is Cava’s house,” said Grandmother Luffa. Both her voice and her eyes were like stone. “As she raised her sword to liberate it, so may she cast you from it.”

  “But —”

  The door slammed shut. The guards marched Syrah to a carriage that waited in front of the Thatch. People stopped to watch the spectacle. Gardeners. Passersby. Children with their parents, groups of whispering friends, and a scribe. The very same scribe to whom he had given Deli’s letter. Syrah tried to jerk his arms away from the guards, but no luck. They held fast.

  “What happened?” the scribe called out, jogging up to the guards. His floppy, graying hair jogged with him. “Did they blame you for the letter?”

  “You can’t write about this,” Syrah hissed, hot-faced.

  The scribe grinned and knocked his hair back. “‘Traitor Prince Tossed From the Thatch’ — that’ll sell some Criers.” The scribe jogged away again and climbed up into a carriage. “Follow the prince,” he said to the driver.

  The guards escorted Syrah into the carriage and shut the door, and the horses picked up at once. Syrah sat there, miserable and furious. It had not occurred to him — not for a second — that they would all turn on him like this.

  He’d teach them.

  The horses stopped. Syrah stuck his head out of the carriage window and saw that they were at a crossing, waiting for several wagons to pass by.

  He tested the door. The guards hadn’t tied him up or locked him in — they’d been told to escort him, apparently, not to arrest him. The moment the horses started moving again, he threw open the door, leapt into the road, and pelted with all his speed away from the carriage.

  “Halt!” he heard the guards shout. “Catch him!” cried the scribe. Syrah heard heavy footfalls behind him, but he was young and swift and more than capable of putting half a league between himself and his pursuers before he was even winded. By the time he glanced back to check where they were, they were too distant to be seen.

  Determined, he kept running until he approached the wooded acreage that lay just beyond the governor’s grounds, past the pumpkin patches and the rolling farmland that belonged to the Gourd family. He wasn’t quite sure where he was going. Where should he go? Far enough away to hide and scare his family into thinking he was really gone, that was for sure. When they regretted their decision and came looking for him, he didn’t want them to find him right away — he’d give them a good scare. He could find enough to eat, probably. There were farms all around, after all.

  The woods at the far edge of the governor’s vast property were cool and shadowy. When Syrah hurtled into them, he was dazzled by the bright, impossible greenness of the world around him. Soft emerald moss grew in a thick, rolling carpet over the forest floor, littered with leaves and dappled with sunlight. Everything was blanketed with moss here — the rocks, the fallen logs, the trunks of the trees. It was like a fairy glade — or what he thought one must be like. It felt like a magic place. He’d played here as a boy, with Deli. They’d played imps and fairies, hiding under leaves and inside hollow logs and way up high in the trees, happy to have a playmate of the same age who was equally physically fearless.

  His fists clenched. Deli was the traitor, not him. She was the one who had started this thing between them — he would never have bothered with her if she hadn’t thrown herself at him first. If she hadn’t been so crazy and pathetic about him, Nana Cava wouldn’t hate him, and his whole family wouldn’t be against him, and a scribe wouldn’t be writing lies about him. It was her fault, and now he had to pay.

  Syrah stumbled hard and dropped to his knees. He swore in irritation, then looked behind him and realized he’d been lucky. If he’d gone just one step to the left, he would have fallen into a near-hidden sinkhole, camouflaged by moss, that dropped suddenly away into the ground. Since childhood, he’d been warned about that hole. Its mouth was wide enough for a couple of grown people to fall right in, and it was darker and deeper than anything Syrah had ever seen. Many times, the hole had been covered for the sake of safety, and just as many times, those carefully constructed covers had simply vanished. Imps were doing it, some people said. Fairies were doing it, said others. Brownies, elves, and mortal mischief-makers were blamed in turn, but no culprit was ever caught, and no covering was ever allowed to close the hole for long. Once, the Gourds had even attempted to fill the hole with dirt, but the story went that no matter how much dirt they’d poured into it, the soil had only fallen into darkness.

  Syrah crawled to the edge of the sinkhole and peered down into it. Its depths were as dark and unfathomable as he remembered from childhood. Involuntarily, he shivered. Once, when they’d been five or six years old and playing hide-and-seek, he’d heard Deli scream, and he’d found her huddled and shaking right here, tears streaming down her face. She swore that she’d fallen into the hole. She said she’d been falling and falling forever, and then she felt hands lift her — and then she was out on the moss again, like nothing ever happened. It was magic, she’d insisted. A magic hole in the ground.

  Syrah had scoffed at her. There were no such things as magic holes in the ground — except wishing wells, but those were only legend. Everyone in Tyme knew that.

  Still, just now, he could have used a wishing well. A wishing well would have been perfect. He could’ve wished for Nana Cava to regret kicking him out. He could’ve wished for his whole family to turn into the snakes they were.

  Rain began to fall, dripping through the trees and onto his back, and Syrah scowled. With nowhere else to go, he was going to get soaked. He was going to have to stay out here for hours — even days, probably. He’d be wet and hungry, and nobody cared — and he hadn’t even done anything.

  He lay on his stomach, still staring down into that endless darkness.

  “Deli should be the one in trouble, not me,” he whispered into the sinkhole. “I wish people like that, who think they’re so special, would get what they deserve.”

  His whisper vanished into the darkness. He thought he heard a faint plink, like the echo of a distant coin dropping into water. And then he heard a watery roar from deep in the soil, as though the ocean itself were rushing toward him from beneath the ground. Instinct told him to get back — he pushed himself up, but too late —

  A geyser erupted from the sinkhole. It connected with his face like a fist and threw him back with such force that he was lifted off the ground. He scrabbled at the air as the water pushed against him, holding him hostage.

  Your wish is granted.

  He didn’t hear the words; he felt them. Like they were rushing into him through his skin, borne by the water itself.

  The geyser vanished. Syrah plummeted to the mossy forest floor. At the same time, an explosion of violet light lit the woods, throwing every plant and tree into relief. He tried to cry out in alarm but found that he had no voice. He was mute, and the world was changing — everything raced past him in a blur, all streaks of color and light. Abruptly, the movement stopped, and he sat there, panting, not certain where he was or why he felt so strange and sick. Everything was still green, but the landscape had changed; ringed around him were giant bushes made of tangled moss and massive toadstools, tall as trees. Beside him was a blade of grass as tall as the white columns of the sea pavilions at home. Syrah stared up at it, aghast. He opened his mouth again and tried to speak —

  “Ribbit.”

  He heard himself. He tried to scream.

  “Croak.”

  Syrah reeled. He tried to move. He felt himself bounce, higher than he ever had, as though it were nothing to him. He bounced again, in his panic, and flew into the blade of tall grass. It showered him with dew, and he bounced again to shake
the water out of his eyes. He tried to look down at himself but found that his neck did not bend. Or he had no neck. He could only roll his eyes downward, and when he did, he caught sight of his hands — and nearly fainted. Blood rushed to his head. For a moment, he stopped breathing.

  His fingers were green. There were only four of them on each hand, and they were green. They were also webbed, with gelatinous bulbs at their ends — he knew hands like this. He’d seen them many times. Just not on human beings.

  These were frog’s hands.

  Something enormous and wet struck him like a cold ocean wave, and he tumbled away, disoriented. No sooner had he found his feet again than he was struck by another wall of water, and he landed at the foot of another blade of endless grass. He must be really tiny, he realized, to be so much smaller than grass. He must be one of those minuscule frogs he had sometimes discovered in the vineyards back home. The kind so small it could sit comfortably on a grape. So small that even raindrops had the power to upend him.

  So small that no one would help him, because no one would see him there.

  But someone would help him, he thought frantically, even as the rain batted him into a rushing brook that bore him away. Somehow, his family would figure out where he’d gone. They’d get dogs and follow his tracks, and then they’d search for him, and they’d find him — and they’d fix him. They had to fix him. He couldn’t stay like this forever.

  He couldn’t.

  FIFTEEN months.

  Fifteen months, one week, three days, and about two hours. Syrah had felt every minute. Every minute that he hadn’t spent hibernating, anyway.

  He sat on a large, wet leaf, staring up at the rain and regretting, as he often did, the night that had brought him to this pass. It was Deli’s fault, he thought bitterly for the hundred thousandth time. If Deli hadn’t been such a witch, then he never would have ended up like this. He would never have been thrown out by his family or tricked by that rotten well — he would’ve stayed human, like he was supposed to.

  He sighed, just barely, as he thought of being human. He had never appreciated how wonderful it was. He’d had hands. A voice. He’d worn clothes and eaten cooked food.

  Out of the corner of his bulging eye, Syrah noticed the scuttle of a shiny red bug. Instinctively, he turned his head and unrolled his tongue. It still surprised him how efficient this method of hunting was. The bug was in his mouth in an instant, and Syrah swallowed. His eyes retreated into his skull and pressed the food down into his throat. He settled his belly and the undersides of his thighs into the rainwater that had collected in the leaf he was sitting in, and he absorbed a long cool drink through his skin.

  It was strange, what a person could get used to. He could never have imagined drinking through his skin, and the idea of swallowing live bugs would have once made him gag, but he did it all the time now, and it wasn’t anything, really. He preferred catching those tiny fish he sometimes managed to grub in a stream, but bugs were easier to find, definitely more appetizing than snails — and one did what one had to do to survive.

  Fifteen months as a frog had taught Syrah plenty.

  “Come here, Prince Frog.”

  Syrah hopped in a circle and looked up at the blond teenager who had been his protector for the past eight months.

  “Ribbit,” he said fondly, and Rapunzel smiled down at him.

  She was a good kid. Not perfect — she’d nearly let him freeze to death, once — but she cared about him, and in her possession, Syrah felt safe. Much safer than he’d been without her — and much safer too, now that he was normal-size. During his first few months as a frog, he had remained as tiny as the wishing well had made him, so minuscule that even minnows could have eaten him. Certainly enough of them had tried. Fish, birds, kittens — these were now the creatures of his nightmares. During the first months of his ordeal, mouths had lunged for him, claws had swiped at him, beaks had swooped to pierce him — and worst of all, enormous spiders had pursued him, their crazed, clustered eyes shining, their pincers raised like monstrous daggers. Syrah had never been afraid of spiders, but being the size of a thumbnail had altered his perspective. When he was human again, he would crush every spider he encountered. He would be the mad spider crusher of Tyme, exacting his revenge on every eight-legged creature. His sister Bianca would give him one of her speeches about how all creatures exist in balance. He would eat a bowl of live spiders in front of her face to shut her up.

  Several strokes of good fortune had finally landed him in Rapunzel’s pocket — though they hadn’t felt like good fortune at the time. He hadn’t felt lucky at all when a brook had washed him into a line of irrigation, which had carried him to a river, where he’d nearly been dinner for the fish. He hadn’t felt lucky when he’d finally washed up on shore and overheard a pair of hunters discussing the best game in the Redlands, which meant that he was a terrible distance now from Cornucopia.

  On the other hand, it had seemed like luck when he had accidentally found his way into the glade of the Red fairies. Surely, he’d thought, they would notice him. They would recognize that he was human, and they would help him. But the Red fairies had been consumed in their war against the witch Envearia. They had been haggard with fear, their magic had been weak, and they had paid no mind to the spellbound frog in their midst.

  And then Rapunzel had come to the fairy glade — and so had Jack, who noticed Syrah, and scooped him off the ground, and gave him to Rapunzel as a birthday present. The best moment of his frog life so far had come when the Red fairies restored Rapunzel to her human size. Inside her pocket, Syrah had grown into a frog the size of a fist, and his relief at the change was still fantastic. He was big. He was visible. He could crush most spiders with a single, vicious hop. Still, even as a normal-size frog, the world was too treacherous for him to risk traveling alone. He’d been biding his time all these months, and now he was close. So close.

  Rapunzel crouched before him now and extended her hand. Syrah hopped into it, and when his belly touched her palm, he felt and heard the thoughts inside her mind. I wish Witch could see me at the ATC, I miss her and it hurts, it hurts — Why can’t I work this stupid ring? I don’t want to miss the tournament.

  This too was something Syrah had gotten used to — or almost. It was still strange, absorbing people’s inner lives just like he absorbed water to drink. He doubted it was something all frogs could do — magic had made him a frog, after all, and so magic had also made him a little bit magical. It was a handy gift. It had allowed him, the first time Rapunzel ever touched him, to discern that he would probably be safe in her care.

  Now he stayed near her wrist and carefully avoided touching the fairy ring that flowed around one of her fingers. More than once, he had scraped his belly against the ring by mistake, and it had overwhelmed his mind with visions he could hardly bear. The birth of the Olive Isles as they burst from the sea. The first stars, flung violently into the night sky. And a great blackness — a living, breathing, unknowable blackness, hidden beneath a hill. Tyme’s oldest secrets were in that ring, and he wanted no part of them.

  “Are you ready to go?” Rapunzel asked.

  Syrah replied with his most affirmative croak, and Rapunzel set him on her shoulder, where he settled comfortably and surveyed the world from a proper human height. He was more than ready to go. He could scarcely wait another moment. Rapunzel and Jack were on their way to the All-Tyme Championships in Yellow Country. There, Syrah would finally find people who remembered him as a man. People who would help him.

  “You’re still using that ring wrong,” said Jack. “Let me see it.” He shoved his black hair to no avail. It fell down again immediately, shiny and straight, half obscuring his black eyes.

  “The Woodmother gave it to me,” said Rapunzel, rubbing the ring. “And Glyph said the trees would teach me where to go. If I just keep trying —”

  “Come on, you’ve had a thousand chances,” said Jack. “Let me try.”

  Syrah clung to t
he last scraps of his patience. He had never been long on patience, but his time with Rapunzel and Jack had forced him to build some.

  “Just wait!” Rapunzel cried, flipping her long braid back over her shoulder and nearly smacking Syrah in the face with it. He pressed closer to her neck and avoided the slap. He was attuned, by now, to her hair-throwing fits; he almost never got hit anymore.

  “Here’s a map,” said Jack, shoving a Ubiquitous one into Rapunzel’s face. “Here’s where we want to go.” He thumped the town of Plenty in Yellow Country, on the shore of Lake Tureen. “And here’s where we are now,” he said, crumpling the map into a useless wad and shaking it at Rapunzel. “We have no idea! The opening ceremonies are going on right now, and the delegates’ feast is tonight. I told you we should have taken that carriage when we were in Smoketree. At this rate, you’ll miss the whole competition.” Jack shoved the map into his rucksack.

  Rapunzel held up her hand in front of her eyes and turned it back and forth. The ring glinted. “I don’t want to miss it,” she said. “Purl is traveling all that way to see me play jacks.”

  “And Tess and my mother.”

  “But I need to figure this out by myself. Without any help. It’s important, Jack.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is.” She dropped her ringed hand to her side.

  Jack sighed. “Let’s just walk until we find a town,” he said. “Then we’ll take a carriage.”

  “Wait — where’s that book you brought?” Rapunzel asked suddenly. She made an impatient gesture with her fingers. “The one you borrowed from your mother.”

  “Why?” Jack asked, but he was already digging in his rucksack. He found the tattered little book and handed it to Rapunzel. The lettering was so faded that Syrah could barely make out the title. Edible Plants ~ An Illustrated Guide.

  “This says where different plants grow,” Rapunzel said, flipping through it. “We’re in the middle of the woods somewhere, so if we can figure out which plants these are, can’t we figure out where we are?”