“Best time to catch them is right after the sun sets,” Alric replied.
“I’m surprised your father allows you to go all this way at night without an escort.”
The prince chuckled. “He wouldn’t. I had to assure him I had a guard.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“But I’m not a guard yet!”
“Really? That’s strange, because when I told my father that Hilfred had agreed to ride out with us, he was fine with that.”
Reuben was stunned. “He thought you were talking about my father!”
“Really? You think so?” Alric was having a hard time keeping a straight face. “You know … you may be right.”
The three broke out in laughter again and continued to do so even as they tied their reins to a fallen tree on the edge of the pond, giving their horses a chance to drink. “It’s not my fault, you know,” the prince said. “Arista never told us your first name.”
“If my father thinks I was trying to impersonate him, he’ll kill me,” Reuben said.
“It’s not your fault either.” Fanen pulled his frogging sack off the saddle. “You didn’t know.”
“My father doesn’t like the idea of me associating with nobility, period.”
“Why not?”
“He thinks it will get me in trouble.”
“And so it has!” Mauvin shouted, and they all laughed again. “You have a wise father.”
“No sense worrying about it now,” Alric said, throwing his own frogging sack over his shoulder. “We’re here. Let’s get some frogs.”
“What am I to do?” Reuben asked.
Alric shrugged. “Guard us. So don’t forget to bring your sword.”
They laughed again.
The four of them slogged into the tall grass, using fallen logs as bridges and leaping from tufts of grass to rocks as they made their way deep into the misty bog.
“You really are awful at sword fighting,” Mauvin told Reuben. “And is it true what Ellison said? That you’re to be sworn into service tomorrow?”
Reuben nodded.
“So this is the quality of arms at Essendon, is it, Alric?”
“I’ll take it up with Captain Lawrence in the morning,” the prince said so seriously it worried Reuben.
“You’re not really going to, are you, Your Highness?”
Alric looked back at him and rolled his eyes. “We need to keep him around. This guy is hilarious.”
“Oh feathers!” Fanen exclaimed right after Reuben heard a liquid plunk. Glancing back, he saw the boy’s left foot was ankle-deep in water. “Foot slipped,” he said with a grimace.
“You need better balance, Fanen,” Mauvin said. “A mistake like that in battle could get you killed.”
Fanen pulled his foot out and shook it.
“Say, Hilfred.” Mauvin turned to him. “Your father is pretty fair with a blade.”
“My father is excellent,” Reuben corrected. “He’s known to be the best sword in the royal guard next to the lieutenant and the captain.”
“You’re talking to a Pickering, Hilfred,” the prince reminded him. “That’s like speaking to a family of Thoroughbred racehorses and saying your father is the fastest plow horse in the county. Their father”—Alric waved at the brothers—“is the greatest living sword master … anywhere.”
Mauvin ducked a branch. “My father started training all of us before we could even lift a blade. Even my sister Lenare, who I think can still best Fanen, although she no longer thinks sword fighting is ladylike.”
“You don’t have to tell everyone about that, you know,” Fanen said, his left foot making a slopping sound each time he stepped with it.
“Yeah I do—it’s funny.”
“Not so much, no.”
“So, okay, your father is better than my father,” Reuben grumbled.
“That’s not my point at all. I meant it as a compliment … that your father is fair with a blade—”
“That’s a huge compliment coming from him, trust me,” the prince said.
“So what are you getting at?”
“Well”—Mauvin paused a moment as he checked the support of a partially submerged log—“if your father knows how to use a sword, how come you don’t?”
Reuben shrugged. “He’s too busy, I guess.”
“I could teach you.” Mauvin steadied himself by grabbing hold of a fistful of cattails, then jogged up the log to a small patch of grass that formed an island near the center of the pond. “That is assuming you don’t mind learning from someone younger.”
“I’d accept,” the prince said. “When he turned ten, Mauvin bested our Captain Lawrence in a Wintertide exhibition.”
“That was two years ago,” Mauvin reminded him. “Father says I’ll master the first tier of the Tek’chin this month.”
“Nice.”
They each kneeled down, and Fanen lit a small lantern. The sun was well behind the forest now, leaving them in shadow. All around were the chirps and peeps of frogs.
“I see one!” Fanen whispered, pointing toward the water. “Go ahead, Alric.”
“Thanks, Fanen. Most noble of you.”
The prince left his bag and walked carefully with hands out like the claws of an attacking bear. He crept into the pond and in a fast grab scooped at the water, making a great splash. “Got him!”
Alric rushed back, cupping something, his tunic soaked. Fanen held the prince’s bag open for him and Alric deposited his prize. “Now we are even, my friend,” he said to Fanen. “One more and I will pass you. Then I’ll be setting my sights at replacing Mad Mauvin as the Frog King.”
This was obviously some great honor that Reuben had never heard of. Perhaps no one other than the three boys had.
“What kind is it?” Mauvin asked.
“A horned.”
“I have two of them.” Mauvin grinned.
Alric frowned, then turned to Reuben. “Let him teach you to fight—just don’t ever listen to him.”
Reuben sat on the mossy turf surrounded by the forest of cattails and floating lily pads, watching them hunt. He offered to help but was told that was against the rules. Reuben had no idea frog hunting had rules, but apparently it did. Being late in the season, most of the harvests were already in, and snow would be falling soon. But there, in Edgar’s Swamp, the place was alive with sounds—the swish of treetops, the brush of grass, and the deafening chirps and peeps of frogs. The carpenter knew his ponds.
Reuben marveled at his strange turn of fortune. Only a bit over an hour before, he had faced the certainty of a pounding—likely worse. Ellison might not have been kidding about cutting their initials into him. To them he was barely human and not worthy of sympathy. Yet now he was here, safe and surrounded by nobility, catching frogs with the prince of the realm. Just then Reuben was struck by the unique opportunity he had. “Hey, have any of you been to the room at the top of the high tower?”
“The haunted tower?” Alric asked without looking up from the surface of the water where he was stalking another elusive toad.
“Haunted?”
“Sure,” Alric said, creeping through the tufts, trying not to fall. “Nora tells the story every year about this time. I guess because it happened in the late fall.”
“What happened?”
“Nora said it was years ago, before I was born. A girl who used to work in the castle, a chambermaid, jumped to her death. She climbed the tower in just her nightgown. She set a lantern on the window ledge, then jumped. On windy nights you can hear the scream she let out as she fell … and the splat when she landed. They found her body, or what was left of it, on the cobblestones before the main doors.”
“Ewwww.” Fanen looked up from his bag of frogs and grimaced.