The Phredde Collection (12 page)

But there was nothing that looked like a phaery castle. I mean it’s pretty hard to miss phaery castles if they’re around.

‘Er, Phredde,’ I said. ‘Are you sure we got off at the right stop?’

‘Of course,’ declared Phredde impatiently. ‘ANY stop is the right stop when it’s a magic castle.’

‘Then why did we have to get the bus at all?’ I protested.

‘I told you. Because it’s Australian.’

Sometimes I think Phredde overdoes this ‘Australian’ stuff. I mean I’m as Australian as bushflies in your eyes, except for Dad’s side of the family that are werewolves too, but even they’ve been here for generations, so they’re Australian werewolves—and if I don’t want to ride in a stuffy bus then I don’t see why I have to.

But Phredde’s stubborn about some things. Like Phaery Princes.

‘The castle’s up there!’ said Phredde.

She went PING! again, and suddenly there was the road to the castle, weaving up through the bus fumes to the sky.

It was pretty much like the road to our castle, and to Phredde’s castle too.

It was long, and curved, and reached up into the sky, except our road looks like it’s made of solid silver and moonbeams.

But this road was pink. Very, very pink. Pink like musk sticks, only pinker. And up at the top of it was
this great mass of green stuff leering down at us with even more blobs of pink dotted around.

‘Er, Phredde,’ I said ‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That pink and green stuff at the top of the road.’

‘That’s Cousin Pinkerbelle’s garden,’ said Phredde casually.

‘That’s a garden?’ I demanded.

‘Sure,’ said Phredde.

‘It looks hungry,’ I said.

‘Cousin Pinkerbelle’s been asleep for over a week. She hasn’t been able to fertilise it.’

I hesitated.

That garden didn’t look like it wanted fertiliser. It looked like it wanted meat. Preferably alive and bleeding.

‘What are those pink things?’ I insisted.

Phredde wrinkled her nose. ‘Roses. I told you Cousin Pinkerbelle breeds roses. The garden’s just a bit out of hand, that’s all.’

Out of hand? That garden looked like it had bitten off any hand that had ventured near it, then spat out the bones. Or maybe it had chewed them up and digested them.

‘Cousin Pinkerbelle’s been breeding these really tough, vigorous roses,’ said Phredde. ‘She says they’ll survive in any garden at all, no matter how little care you give them.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I just bet they will.’

So we stared walking—well, I walked, and Phredde winged her way beside me…up the pink road and past the smog layer, through a couple of frisky clouds that looked like they were playing catch across the sky, and suddenly there we were.

Not at the castle of course. You couldn’t even see the castle yet.

All you could see was the garden, and by garden I mean roses, and by roses, I mean ROSES.

I like gardens as much as the next kid. In other words, I can take them or leave them, which mostly means leave them, because who wants to spend good daydreaming/reading/hunting pirates time messing around with gardens?

But Mum likes gardens and Phredde’s mum likes them and even Dad likes them now he doesn’t have to mow the lawn. (Magic lawns never need mowing.)

But I wonder what they would have made of a garden like this.

It had grass, of a sort. I mean it LOOKED like grass, but it had a sort of nasty look in its eye, even though grass doesn’t have eyes. I suspected Cousin Pinkerbelle had been breeding really tough grass as well.

Pink grass.

Punk grass.

Pink punk grass with teeth.

And the roses, at least I supposed they were roses, didn’t look like any roses I’d ever seen before.

There were bushes of roses, sort of loitering like a gang of prickly-legged muggers wondering how they could steal your purse and stick you full of rose thorns at the same time.

There were climbing roses, clambering over what I supposed was the castle, except all you could see were leaves and thorns and more big blobs of pink, that somehow looked more like accidental bloodstains than the flowers you see down at the florist on the way home from school.

There were rambling roses that had spread across the grass and looked like they were planning to jump on us as soon as we turned our backs.

And all of the roses looked like they’d take a bite out of your jugular if you tried to sniff them…(Your jugular vein is the big one in your neck that carries most of your blood. It’s the best one to stick your fangs into, if you’re into that sort of thing. You learn all sorts of interesting facts like that when you have a vampire as a teacher.)

And every rose was jellybean pink, just like the road, except for the leaves of course, which were green, but a sort of ferocious green, like a swimming pool that’s been left without chlorine too long and decided to have a life of its own.

And the flowers were sort of mean-looking, too, like they were staring at you out of the corners of their eyes when you weren’t looking. (You may think flowers don’t have expressions. Well, you haven’t seen Cousin Pinkerbelle’s garden!)

‘Er, Phredde,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure about this garden.’

Phredde landed on my shoulder and looked at the roses thoughtfully. ‘Cousin Pinkerbelle sure has a green thumb,’ she remarked.

Green thumb? More like green tentacles.

‘What’s she been feeding these things?’ I asked.

‘Dunno,’ said Phredde carelessly. ‘Maybe they just feed themselves.’

Great. They probably captured burglars and postmen and trapped them with their thorns and then digested them.

I eyed the nearest rose warily. It gazed back at me with a blank bloodthirsty pink glare.

‘Phredde, how the heck are we supposed to hack our way through this lot and rescue your cousin?’ I demanded.

Phredde stared at me. ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘You’re the one that knows the story.’

‘But Phredde…’

‘How did the Handsome…’ Phredde gave a delicate shudder on my shoulder. ‘How did the Prince hack his way through the garden?’

I tried to remember back to when I was a little kid and Mum read me these dumb stories as a reward for not drinking the soapsuds in my bath.

‘I think he used his sword.’ I gave the rose next to me a look. ‘A really sharp big sword that went hack hack hack.’

The rose failed to react. It knew I was bluffing.

‘Oh.’ said Phredde.

I glanced at her. ‘Can’t you magic up a sword? Hey, how about magicking up a barrel of herbicide instead? We could splash it over everything then come back when it’s all dead.’

‘Pru!’ Phredde stared at me in horror. ‘Cousin Pinkerbelle would never forgive me! She won’t let anyone even pick the flowers in case they damage one of the new shoots!’

Well, from the look of her flowers I would have thought Cousin Pinkerbelle would have been more worried they’d have bitten someone’s arm off at the elbow, but I didn’t want to insult Phredde’s family, or their roses. And maybe I was just being paranoid. I mean they
were
just flowers…

‘Okay, if we can’t hack the undergrowth with a sword, and we can’t zap the whole place with
herbicide, how do you suggest we get inside the castle?’ I demanded.

‘Let’s try the back door,’ suggested Phredde reasonably. ‘Maybe Cousin Pinkerbelle left a key under a stone in the moat.’

Which sounded easy enough, but first we had to find the back door. I had a horrible feeling that Cousin Pinkerbelle’s garden extended all the way around the back of the castle too—it was the sort of garden that once it had swallowed a castle, it kept it swallowed. I mean it wasn’t going to regurgitate it easily.

But I just shrugged sort of peaceably and started to tramp my way across what might have been a lawn, if I hadn’t had the feeling the grass was trying to tunnel its way into my joggers and start digesting me.

The problem with magic gardens is that they just go on and on…

We slogged our way between the flowers for about an hour—well, I slogged and Phredde rode on my shoulder—and while we weren’t exactly attacked by mutant rose bushes I had the feeling they were thinking about it, and I was getting awfully sick of pink.

I reckoned we were maybe a quarter of the way around the castle and there was no sign of a break in the garden at all. I mean if anything the roses over the castle walls were even thicker.

‘I’m pooped,’ I said to Phredde. ‘I want a drink and something to eat and something to sit down on and…’

‘Okay,’ said Phredde agreeably. ‘How about that seat over there?’

I glanced at the seat suspiciously, in case it was really a carnivorous plant in disguise.

But it looked like an ordinary garden seat, except it was pink, by an ordinary garden pond, with ordinary lily pads and a tiny pink fountain and even a couple of ordinary lilies. Pink, of course.

It was all so ordinary I was worried.

‘Come on,’ said Phredde. ‘You said you wanted to sit down.’

She fluttered over to the seat and perched on the back and went PING! in a thoughtful sort of way, and there was a bottle of passionfruit and raspberry juice with all those lovely drips down the side you get when it’s really cold, and a great bowl of iced watermelon and a giant sponge cake oozing cream and strawberry jam.

So I ambled over to have afternoon tea.

It was sort of peaceful there in the garden, sitting with Phredde in the sunlight slurping away at watermelon and passionfruit and raspberry juice and getting splodges of cream and strawberry jam all down my T-shirt.

The only sounds were the occasional honk from the traffic down below, and the odd burp from the roses (I didn’t want to know what they were digesting) and the croak of a frog out on a lily pad…

‘Bruce…Bruce…Bruce…Bruce…’

‘Er, Phredde,’ I said.

‘Glup,’ said Phredde, her mouth full of sponge cake. She never accepts that since her mouth is tinier than mine, she has to take smaller mouthfuls.

‘Can you hear that frog?’

‘What frog?’ said Phredde, swallowing her sponge cake.

‘The one that’s saying: Bruce Bruce Bruce Bruce.’

Phredde blinked. ‘Bruce?’ she asked.

‘Bruce,’ I agreed.

‘BRUCE!’ croaked the frog, as it suddenly splashed off the lily pad and landed on the ground by my feet. ‘Bruce!’

I stared at the frog.

The frog glared back at me.

It looked just like any normal frog. It wasn’t even pink. It was sort of brownish-green with cream stripes and big fat googly eyes. Just an ordinary frog. Except this one was bigger than Phredde and it was glaring up at us.

‘Bruce,’ it croaked again.

I tried to think of something intelligent to say.

‘Um,’ I said.

The frog stared at me with its bulging eyes. Then it glanced at the sponge cake.

Then it glared at me again.

‘Look,’ it croaked. ‘My name’s Bruce. What’s yours?’

‘Um,’ I said again. I mean it had taken me by surprise.

‘It’s just good manners to tell someone your name when they tell you theirs,’ the frog added, in a self-righteous tone.

‘Er…I’m Prudence,’ I said.

‘And I’m Phredde,’ said Phredde.

‘Good,’ said the frog. ‘I’m Bruce. Now we’re introduced.’

He looked at the sponge cake casually. ‘You don’t have any of that spare do you?’

Well, we’d only eaten about four slices of it, so I passed it down to ground level.

The frog…Bruce…peered at it for a second with his froggy eyes. Then his tongue darted out and
glop!
Most of it was gone.

‘I didn’t know that frogs liked sponge cake,’ I said.

Well, I know it wasn’t the brightest thing to say, but what else can you say when you’re stuck in a magic garden with a phaery, ferocious-looking roses and a frog named Bruce?

‘They don’t,’ said the frog. ‘Frogs mostly feed on small insects, and occasional greenery, though some species have been known to…’

‘But you…’ I began.

The frog went
glop!
again with his tongue, and that was the end of the sponge cake.

‘I’m not an ordinary frog,’ he said, licking the last of the cream and strawberry jam off his chin.

Well, of course he wasn’t. He lived in a magic garden, for one thing. AND he spoke English. Even though I don’t know much about frogs I do know that most just speak frog.

‘I’m in disguise,’ said Bruce conversationally. He hopped up onto the seat beside me.

I moved away a bit…just a little bit, so he wouldn’t think I was rude. I mean I know frogs don’t really give you warts, but still…

‘What are you in disguise as?’ I asked.

‘A frog of course,’ said Bruce, affronted. ‘Can’t you tell? Actually I’m a
Crinea signifera. Crinea
means lily pad…well it might mean that, no one’s quite sure. And
signifera
means sign bearer, which refers to my markings. Actually the markings of all the
Crinea
frogs can vary considerably. You’ll find that…’

‘No no no,’ I interrupted the lecture. ‘I don’t mean what are you now! I mean, what were you before you were disguised.’

‘Me? I’m a handsome prince,’ said Bruce. That’s when Phredde screamed.

It took a while to calm Phredde down.

Meanwhile Bruce finished off the iced watermelon and was just starting on the passionfruit and raspberry juice (I’d have known he wasn’t a real frog by then even if he hadn’t told me—I bet real frogs don’t know how to drink out of bottles).

‘Hey,’ he asked. ‘Is there any more sponge cake?’

‘No!’ said Phredde indignantly.

She fluttered up onto the top of my head…she only does that when she’s really furious…and gazed down at him. ‘And if we’d known you were a handsome prince we wouldn’t have given you any to start with. So there.’

The frog…Bruce…blinked. It was a sort of frog-like blink, but it was human too. I guess frogs don’t blink the way we do.

‘Why not?’ he asked. He sounded hurt.

‘Handsome princes. Huh!’ snorted Phredde from her position on top of my head.

‘It’s not my fault I’m a handsome prince,’ said Bruce. ‘Anyway, that’s why I changed myself into a frog.’

‘Er…why?’ I asked

Bruce peered at me through his froggy eyes. ‘To escape from the Princesses of course. You know what my mum has by her bedside?’