Frogkisser!
Garth Nix
It was the middle of an ice storm, the wind howling across the frozen moat to hurl hailstones against the walls of the castle and its tightly shuttered windows. But despite wind and hail and the full chill panoply of winter, it was deliciously warm in the Great Hall.
All four fireplaces were burning high, loaded up with double handfuls of small fir cones atop the great year-end logs. The scent of the cones was like incense, delicate wreaths of smoke leaving the fires to swirl above the wriggling mound of puppies that occupied the most comfortable place of all, on the carpet in front of the biggest fire.
There were at least two dozen puppies in the constantly moving pile, and one young human. A princess, though you’d never know it to look at her, since she was dressed like one of the garden boys. Unlike the puppies, she was sound asleep.
The puppies became quiet as a great old dog, her muzzle silvered, stalked into the hall and approached them. She sat down heavily on the carpet and gave a soft, low bark. Instantly, the puppies broke out of the pile and ordered themselves into two lines, ears up, all at attention.
The princess stirred a little at all the movement, and rolled onto her side. One of the puppies nudged her with his snout, and was about to nip her awake when the older dog spoke.
“Let the princess sleep. She is too young to hear what I am to tell you, and she needs to live without fear as long as may be. We will all need her courage in time to come.”
“What about her sister?” asked the oldest puppy, who often took it on herself to ask questions. “Should I fetch her?”
“No,” said the old dog. She sighed and paused to sniff at something that rolled out of the fire. As it wasn’t food, she continued. “No. For now we keep this between ourselves. It is a matter for the Royal Dogs, and no others.”
The puppies barely restrained themselves from leaping up and wrestling with one another. This was exciting! But the old dog fixed the most wrigglesome with her sheep-stunning gaze and they settled once more.
“The new Duke is a sorcerer,” said the old dog. “A real one. Not just a dabbler. His heart is cold now, and will only grow colder.”
The puppies growled and showed their teeth.
“He is allied with other sorcerers,” continued the old dog. “The most evil, the most scheming, the most dangerous sorcerers around. They are not yet powerful enough to act upon their plans, but in time … ”
“What do we do?” asked the next-oldest puppy, one who rarely spoke. “What can we do?”
“Watch. Wait. Protect the princesses. Keep them cheerful and unafraid. They will need whole hearts and the memory of happiness, at least, to have any chance of doing what must be done.”
The old dog spoke of both princesses, but she looked at the younger one, asleep on the carpet. The puppies all turned their heads and looked at her too, with love and adoration.
Perhaps their combined gaze had some peculiar energy, for the little princess woke up. She saw the old dog and squealed with delight, leaping up to hug her very energetically, receiving several welcoming licks to the face in return.
“A story!” exclaimed the princess. “Tell us a story!”
The scream was very loud and went on for a very long time. Princess Anya, who was reading in the castle library, ignored it at first but eventually lifted her head from her book to listen.
“That sounds bad,” said Gotfried, the librarian, in his quavering, high-pitched voice. Disturbed by the sound, he immediately turned into an owl and began to vomit up a nicely packaged parcel of bones from the mouse he’d had for breakfast. It was something he did when under stress. Turning into an owl, that is. The vomiting just came with the shape.
“It does.” Anya frowned. It was her older sister Morven screaming, which was not unusual, but the intensity and duration of this particular scream were quite out of the ordinary.
Anya shut her book with an emphatic thump and latched it closed, since it was a copy of The Adventures of a Sorcerous Typesetter’s Apprentice and the words inside would otherwise climb off the page and go wandering around the library. In fact there were still several words missing from an earlier reading, including the particularly troublesome pair of instantly and forthwith, which Gotfried now believed had escaped the castle altogether … or had been eaten by one of the dogs.
The screaming continued as Anya hurried out of the library, across the inner courtyard to the main part of the castle, and up the private stair to her sister’s rooms. Morven was the heir to the kingdom—at least theoretically—so she had more space than Anya’s little room. The sisters had not one but two stepparents, so the matter of lineage was a complicated one.
This was one of the most frequent questions Anya was asked later in life: How is it possible to have two stepparents and no actual parents? The answer ended up being rather straightforward: Their mother, who had been the ruling queen of the little kingdom of Trallonia, had died when Morven was six and Anya was three. Their father remarried a year later, to Countess Yselde.
So they had a stepmother, who was expected to be quite evil but mainly turned out to be a very enthusiastic botanist. She was not interested in the children at all, for good or ill. Only in plants.
But then their father died a year after his marriage to Countess Yselde, and their stepmother married Duke Rikard.