“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 firmly. “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.”