“I don’t eat frogs!” Ardent replied, instantly closing up on Anya’s heels.
As they left the garden by what had once been a guarded and locked postern gate but was now just a hole in the wall, the dog added, “At least I don’t eat frogs too often. They don’t taste very nice.”
“Better cooked,” confirmed Anya. The bank of the moat beyond the wall was muddy and sloped quite steeply, so she had to be careful not to slide in. The moat monster was loyal, like all the occupants of the castle except for Duke Rikard, but he was also very old, inordinately deaf, and rather blind. She didn’t want to get snapped up, become severely injured, and then have to sit through the monster’s tearful apologies as well. “Their legs anyway. Some of the villagers catch them here and cook them up.”
“Mmmmm,” said Ardent. He liked cooked food. Also raw food and semicooked food, and things that might be food and so were worth chewing on for a while to make sure they weren’t food.
Anya dipped the hazel stick in the moat. She supposed the flooded ditch would count as a pond. It was pretty stagnant and there were floating mats of what could only be pondweed. Quite a few frogs were lying on one nearby, taking it easy.
“Denholm?” called out Anya, but there was no answer, and none of the frogs moved off their weed island. “Oh, I suppose it would be too easy if he just answered when I called. Come on, Ardent. Back to the library.”
It was time for a spell.
In the library, Gotfried had not gone owl. But he was perched on top of his desk over an open book, with his head craned forward oddly and his back arched.
“Princess! I have found the spell. Here.”
He spun the book around so Anya could read it. Ardent reared up and put his forepaws on the desk so he could read too. The royal dogs were very smart and Tanitha, the matriarch of them all, was strict about the pups learning to read.
“Twine the hair around the pond-dipped branch … several minor words of power … ” Anya followed the instructions as she read. This wasn’t usually a good idea when casting spells. (You should always read all the way through first.) But she was in a hurry. Which is also not a good idea when casting spells. (Never be in a hurry. Being in a hurry makes things go wrong.)
Fortunately, it was a simple spell. Anya did everything in the right order and spoke the words of power, familiar ones she had used before. She felt a tingling in her throat as she said them, and afterwards she sneezed a few times, which was quite normal. Magic demanded a price, be it a minor allergic reaction for a small spell or a complete freezing of all good human emotion for a big spell, which was what had happened to Duke Rikard.
“I think that’s done it,” said Gotfried with satisfaction. “Look!”
The hazel stick was moving in Anya’s hand, twisting towards the door and the moat.
“Yoicks! Tallyho!” cried Ardent, launching himself out into the corridor. Anya heard his claws scrabbling on the flagstones as he stopped and turned himself around to wait for her to show him where to actually go.
“You might need this,” said Gotfried, handing Anya his butterfly net. “It should be strong enough to hold a frog, but you’d better take a bucket as well.”
Anya got a bucket from the kitchen on the way, the dowsing rod writhing and twisting in her hand in its eagerness to find the person whose hair was wound around it.
“You don’t need a net or a bucket,” said Ardent. “I c-c-an hold a frog in my jaws. Like this.”
He demonstrated by snapping at the leg of a kitchen stool, breaking it in half. Spitting out the broken pieces, he continued, “Not exactly like that. I mean more like—”
“No,” said Anya firmly. “We’ll use the net and the bucket. You stay back and do not—I repeat, do not—even nose the frog. Any frog. Stay away from all the frogs.”
“I c-c-ould do it.”
“I know you could,” Anya soothed. “I just want to do it my way. All right?”
Ardent mumbled something and spat out another small piece of wood. But he fell in behind Anya happily enough as she made her way back out through the walled garden and the hole in the wall to the moat. The dowsing rod was almost leaping from her hand, but it wasn’t until it nearly pulled her into the stagnant water Anya belatedly realized that of course she would have to go in. She didn’t mind swimming, but she didn’t want to swim in the weed-choked, slimy water of the moat.
Kneeling down, she slapped the water with her left hand in a careful rhythm, one-two-slap-slap-slap, paused for several seconds, then repeated it.
The frogs stopped moving around on the floating weed island, and a duck that was nearby quickly launched itself into the air as a vee of ripples disturbed it, the sign of something large moving under the water.
“Moatie!” cried Ardent happily, wagging his tail.
The ancient monster’s head rose out of the moat, water cascading off his long, scaly snout and spiky neck. His deep-set eyes glowed yellow like the hottest part of a candle flame. He looked extremely fearsome, an effect only slightly lessened when he opened his jaws to reveal a pink mouth and large square teeth more suitable for munching mounds of vegetable matter than rending flesh. They could still rend flesh if they had to, of course—hence only slightly less fearsome, because usually people expected really sharp teeth like those of a shark when they saw Moatie, and got a small and generally false sense of relief when they saw his square munchers.