The prince swept a bow both to the poet and the fainted maid, saying, “Fair creature of untold beauty! How long have I awaited the deliverance brought by your sweet kiss?”
“Enough blathering,” snapped Eanrin, adjusting his hold on the girl, trying to brace her so he could stand. “She’s unconscious and cannot hear you. Just as well if you plan to speak in clichés.” He gave the girl a shake. “Come, this is ridiculous. One doesn’t faint upon waking from an enchanted sleep! Rise and meet your rescuer; there’s a good girl.”
Though her skin was dark, it wore a chalky pallor. Eanrin feared she had died from her fright, but when he put an ear to her mouth, he found she still breathed.
“Spitfire!” the poet swore in relief. With more sloshing and wallowing, he managed to get himself upright, the girl in his arms. Her neck was limp, and her mass of hair trailed over his arm. “Here,” he said to the prince. “Take her. I’ve had quite enough of this heroics nonsense. And have I mentioned that it’s none of my business?”
The prince blinked at him. “She isn’t mine.”
“She is now. She kissed you out of your froggishness, didn’t she? Take her and deliver her kingdom like a man, then marry her, why don’t you?”
The poet staggered a step forward, intending to drop the girl in the prince’s arms. But the prince stepped back. “M-marry?” he said. “Oh, now, Sacred Lights!”
Eanrin offered the prince the coldest possible of stares. “Don’t tell me you have any complaints?”
Thunder rumbled in the heavy sky above. Prince and poet startled and hunched their shoulders, as though afraid the heavens would drop on them. “Oh, I’m certainly not complaining,” said the prince. “Much obliged for the rescue, of course. But—”
“But what?”
“Well, marriage . . . I am expected to marry well.”
“To a princess, I would imagine?” Eanrin shrugged the girl in his arms. “This one is as much a princess as you’ll ever find. She drank from an enchanted River. Who but a princess does that? True, she’s not much to look on right now”—She wasn’t. The wet skins she wore stank of swamp and clung to her limbs. Her hair stuck to her face and neck and sagged in a heavy, tangled lump down to the swamp water. Mud covered every visible inch of skin yet failed to disguise the sickly color of her cheeks—“but she’ll clean up well enough. And she rescued you, by Lumé, from a fate amphibian! Just the girl to bring home to mum and dad.”
The prince rubbed the back of his neck. A drop of rain landed on his nose. More drops began to fall, dimpling the pools around them. The poet began to growl.
“The thing is,” said the prince, “I need to find myself a bride with a certain amount of dowry. Never mind why. But this girl . . . I mean, look at her. Princess or not, one must wonder if she’d recognize the value of a gold coin if it hit her in the eye!”
Eanrin felt the dampness of ChuMana’s realm seeping into his bones. Even his smile had been soaked from his face. “You won’t take the creature because she has no riches?”
“It’s a sad business, I know,” said the prince with a sigh. “But what is a man to do? So, I’ll just be moving along, then. When she comes to herself, give her my thanks. It has been a pleasure, and her kiss was nothing to frown upon, take my expert word for it. Farewell, princess! Farewell, stranger! I must take my leave—” He turned.
And found himself eye to eye with ChuMana.
The serpent looked mostly like a woman just then, but she smiled like a snake. “And where do you think you are going?”
“Oh, dragon’s—”
Her bite was swift, sinking with deadly accuracy into his shoulder. The prince had just enough time to give a startled yell. The next moment, a bullfrog sat once more in the water. It gave a mournful “GRAAAAP!” and hopped away with a splash, disappearing among the reeds. Its bellowing voice joined those of its countless brothers while the rain continued to fall.
“I like him better that way,” Eanrin said, looking down his nose at the frogs. “Some men are more natural for a little slime.”
ChuMana, hissing still, turned to the poet. “So, Eanrin of Rudiobus,” said she, “my debt is now paid.”
“Aye, that it is,” agreed Eanrin with something that was probably meant to be a smile but was much too soggy by now to count. “Always a great feeling, isn’t it, paying off one’s—”
“Away from my demesne!”
Eanrin needed no convincing. The laws of Faerie satisfied, nothing but quick feet would save him now. Without a thought, he slung the mortal girl over his shoulder and fled the swamp, avoiding the serpent’s parting kiss by no more than a hair’s breadth.
Thunder growled. Rain, free at last, beat down. ChuMana, the equilibrium of her realm restored, slithered into the darker reaches of her swamp, frogs scattering before her.
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