A Prince among Frogs (6 page)

Four

W
hat do you mean, someone stole Felix?” asked Millie. “Are you sure, because one day last month I went to see him and he’d been fussy and his nursemaid had taken him for a walk. I was sure he’d been kidnapped until I found them in the garden.”

A middle-aged woman standing behind the queen wailed and buried her face in her hands. Sobbing loudly, the woman ran from the Hall.

“What’s wrong with her?” said Audun.

Millie frowned, staring at the door through which the figure had just disappeared. “That was his nursemaid. I guess that means she’s not with him. Can someone please tell me what happened?”

A tall, distinguished-looking man with white hair and a trim white beard had just come into the Hall through a different door. “I can tell you,” King Limelyn, her grandfather, said. “His nursemaid said she’d heard a strange sound in the corridor outside your brother’s chamber. She went into the hallway to investigate and found nothing unusual. When she tried to go back into Felix’s room, the door was locked. She ran down the corridor to call for the guards; the door was standing open when they arrived. They hurried in to investigate and found the baby’s crib empty. I’ve had my men search every floor, but so far we haven’t found even the smallest clue as to what might have happened.”

“I knew your mother shouldn’t go away!” the queen wailed. “Those old witches had no right to ask Grassina for help and she had no right to go. And then your mother went traipsing off after her! Both of my daughters are more interested in helping others than they are in seeing to their responsibilities here at home. If they had been here, none of this would have happened.”

“That’s not fair, Grandmother,” said Millie. “My mother does what she feels she has to and so does Great-Aunt Grassina. They work hard for Greater Greensward and you know it.”

“Your grandmother is just upset, Millie,” said the king. “We’re all very worried. If my men don’t find your brother, we may need to ask for magical help.”

“Audun and I can look, too,” said Millie. “There has to be something that can tell us what happened to Felix.”

Millie and Audun ran up the steps to the baby prince’s room. Guards were inspecting the doorway and the corridor, but the room inside was empty. The prince’s crib stood against the far wall, holding nothing more than a light silk blanket and a golden rattle shaped like a frog. “Poor Felix,” Millie said with a catch in her voice as she touched the blanket with tentative fingers. “Whoever took him had better not hurt him. If they do, I’ll hunt them down myself. This is my fault, you know. My mother asked me to look after Felix, and I let someone kidnap him!”

“You didn’t
let
anyone do anything,” said Audun, wrapping his arms around Millie and pulling her close. “Your mother also asked you to take care of the kingdom, which is what you were doing. And now we’ll deal with this. We’ll find your little brother before anything can happen to him.”

“But what if something already has?” said Millie.

Audun’s expression became cold and hard. “Then the monster who hurt that baby will have two dragons who won’t stop until every last scrap of him is torn to shreds. But before we plan his demise, let’s see what we can find. Our eyesight is better as dragons. Maybe we’ll see something everyone else has missed.”

Millie nodded. “Unless it was a ghost, he must have left some sign that he was here, and a ghost can’t carry off a baby.”

It took them only a moment to turn into dragons. The room had looked well scrubbed and spotless while they were human, but now Millie could see every speck of dust on the chair backs and the lid of the trunk, every smudge on the floor, and every piece of lint on the baby’s bedding. Her hearing was better, too, and she could make out the distinct sound of each raindrop hitting the wall outside the window.

While Audun inspected the area around the door, Millie moved toward the window, casting back and forth, with her nose inches from the stone surface. “Look here,” she finally said, pointing to a spot just under the window ledge. “There’s dirt on the floor here that I haven’t seen anywhere else in the room.”

“Let me see,” Audun said, lumbering toward her.

“What do you think?” Millie asked as Audun sniffed the dirt.

Using his talon, he poked the little clump until it fell apart. “Looks like dirt to me.”

Millie sighed and sat back on her haunches. “I don’t know what to do, Audun. If my mother were here, she could say a spell and have the walls tell us what happened.”

Audun laughed. “From what I know about the Green Witch, she could have the dirt talk to us and tell us where it came from. You should hear what the dragons back on King’s Isle say about her!”

“I wish she were here,” said Millie. “Grandmother was right, in a way. This probably wouldn’t have happened if Mother had been home.”

The rain that had been pouring so fiercely just minutes before had begun to slack off. Millie was looking out the window at the now-brightening sky when she heard the faintest of sounds.
Scritch! Scritch!
She turned around, bumping into Audun as he too turned to see what was making the sound.
Scritch! Scritch!
The sound came again.

“It’s coming from the trunk,” said Millie. “Maybe it’s a mouse.”

Something thumped in the trunk. “It would have to be an awfully big mouse,” said Audun. He lifted the lid and jerked his head back in surprise. “Millie, I think this might be a friend of yours.”

Millie peered into the trunk and gasped. Two small bats lay on top of the folded baby clothes. “Zoë!” Millie exclaimed. “Li’l! Who did this to you? Are you all right?” Her two friends were struggling to sit up when Millie reached into the trunk and lifted them out.

“I could hardly breathe in there!” said Zoë.

“Did you find your brother yet?” Li’l asked, her eyes frantic.

The air shimmered around Zoë as she changed back into her human form. Her mother, Li’l, had married Garrid, a vampire, which was why her children could become human.

“What do you know about Felix?” said Millie. “Did you see whoever took him?”

Zoë shook her head. She picked up her mother and carried her to the nearest bench. When Li’l fluttered to her daughter’s shoulder, Zoë sat down with a sigh and said, “We didn’t see much of anything.”

Li’l stretched her cramped wings, groaning softly. “That’s true. We were out catching bugs when we saw a strange light coming from that window,” she said, pointing with a wingtip at the only window in the room. “We flew in to investigate and a blast of air hit us.”

“It felt like a giant had slapped us to the ground,” said Zoë.

“When we came to, we were in the trunk—”

“Like old clothes,” Zoë added.

“And we couldn’t get out.”

“We could hear everything, though,” said Zoë. “We heard the guards talking about how Felix was missing. We both shouted, but I guess the rain was so loud that no one could hear us.”

“Whoever took your brother must have already been gone by the time we woke up,” said Li’l.

“So we’re no closer to knowing who took him,” Millie said.

“Yes, we are,” replied Audun. “Whoever took him must have used magic to do it, which was more than we knew a minute ago. We should go tell your grandfather so he doesn’t waste his time searching the castle.”

“And
we
should go home,” Li’l told her daughter. “Your father probably won’t be able to get a wink of sleep until he knows that we’re all right, and he should have gone to bed hours ago.”

Zoë stood and turned to Millie. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

“We will,” Millie promised.

A moment later Zoë was a bat again and she and her mother were flying out the window.

Millie and Audun went to the Great Hall, but it was nearly deserted. They learned from a passing guard that the queen had retired to her chamber and the king had gone into the dungeon.

“Do you suppose he went to consult with the ghosts?” Audun asked Millie as they descended the dungeon steps.

Millie shook her head. “Neither of my grandparents likes talking to the ghosts. My grandmother still tries to pretend they don’t exist. Grandfather isn’t quite so bad, but he avoids them whenever possible. I don’t think it would occur to him to ask a ghost for help or advice. No, I’m sure he’s down here for another reason.”

The dungeon felt especially damp after the downpour. Millie knew the dungeon as well as she did the upper floors of the castle and could find anything, even when errant magic had relocated the doors or opened holes in the floors. There wasn’t as much wild magic running loose in the dungeon as there had been when her mother was young, but it still showed up now and then. Because of the bottomless pits that appeared occasionally, it was never wise to run through the dungeon, no matter what was chasing you; when the air suddenly turned cold and an aged ghost came toward them, Millie told Audun not to move.

The ghost ran down the corridor, shrieking with rage at Millie and Audun. His long hair streamed behind him, and his ragged tunic flapped around the vague shape of his emaciated body. “Come to steal my medallion, have you?” he screamed, brandishing a ghostly pike. “I’ll show you what happens to thieves!”

Audun gasped as the ghost ran him through with the pike. The dragon looked down in horror, then glanced up in confusion when he realized that he hadn’t felt a thing.

“He can’t hurt you,” Millie told him. “Most ghosts can’t do more than frighten you into doing something foolish, in which case you might hurt yourself. Hubert,” she said, turning to the ghost, “why do you think we want to steal your medallion?”

“Because there’s a thief in the castle and it might be you!”

A tall, elegant-looking ghost dressed in a peaked cap and overtunic glided down the corridor to float between Hubert and the princess. “Hubert thinks that because someone took your little brother, they want to steal the valuables, too. If anyone is going to steal your medallion, Hubert,” he said, turning to the first ghost, “it would be the hamsters. If you’re so worried about your medallion, go watch over it and stop bothering the princess,” he said, making shooing motions with his hands.

Grumbling to himself, Hubert disappeared through a wall.

“Thank you, Sir Jarvis,” said Millie. “I didn’t know that Hubert was so worried about his medallion.”

The noble ghost sighed. “It was his most prized possession. The first princess Millie, the one you were named after, gave it to him for bravery. Just a few years before you were born, your family had the bones in the oubliette buried, but Hubert insisted the medallion stay here in the castle. Your mother hid the medallion in a special place. Though Hubert forgets everything else, he never forgets where that special place is located.”

“So you’ve heard about Felix,” said Millie. “Does anyone down here know who might have taken him?”

Sir Jarvis shook his head. “No one has been aboveground in days. Your great-grandparents are away at a meeting of the council of ghosts. We know only what we’ve heard people talking about when they visit the dungeon. Your grandfather passed through just a short time ago on his way to the secret passage. He was talking to his guards about your brother. They said—”

A roar so high pitched that it reached the very limit of what a human can hear echoed throughout the dungeon. Audun whipped his head around, and even Millie, who had heard it before, felt her heart leap in her chest. “That’s the shadow beast,” she said, taking a step toward Audun.

The air that had been cold before turned frigid as unseen figures rustled by them. Audun pulled Millie to his side when it sounded as if a crowd were passing them in the corridor.

“Everyone is headed toward the shadow beast. I’d better go help them,” said Sir Jarvis. “We’ve been trying to capture the beast for the last few days. All of us other ghosts stand watch over the secret passage and warn the guards when the wall between the dungeon and the moat springs a leak. We think it’s about time the shadow beast contributed, too, instead of just scaring our visitors.”

As Sir Jarvis floated away, Millie and Audun began walking toward the end of the dungeon where the secret passage was located. “You haven’t seen the shadow beast yet,” said Millie. “No one knows what it was originally, because all you can see of the beast are its eyes and a shadow. It’s a ghost, too, but the odd thing about it is that you can touch it, although only Grassina and my mother actually have. And if we can touch the beast, it can touch us, so everyone is afraid of it. The beast has never bothered me, but I’ve heard that it almost got my grandmother when she was young.”