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woman’s eyes looked strange.
    She coiled her metallic tresses into a bedspring curl around her forefinger. “You know what you’re getting into, of course,” she said to Buffy with irony coiled in her tone. “You know there’s nothing cute about fairy tales. You know about the fair peril and the punishments. You know that everything is itself and something else as well. You know about the resonances. You are, after all, a professional storyteller.”
    â€œI am a professional storyteller and I don’t have a clue what I am getting into and I don’t care.”
    â€œReally.” Fay’s golden eyes narrowed to shining slits. “You summoned me here. What do you want?”
    Clueless, as she had said, Buffy could think only that she wanted nothing from Prentis’s mother, nothing, not a thing more than she wanted from Prentis himself. Sarcastically she asked, “Can you fix the refrigerator?”
    â€œFor heaven’s sake.” Fay lifted her enormous purse and swung it as if disciplining a mugger, thwacking the hulking white mass of the fridge. With a submissive whimper it chugged back on. Simultaneously the Gro-Lite flickered into glowing life, an anonymous borborygmus started somewhere in the basement, and the answering machine beeped to attention. Fay rolled her eyes and minced toward the door.
    â€œUh, Fay, wait.” Buffy began to feel, queasily, that she was in trouble. “Listen, how do you know this frog? What’s he talking about, access to the Pool?”
    â€œFairy Godmother! Don’t leave me with her!” Adamus quavered at the same time, breaking his terrified silence.
    Fay gave them both a bored aureate glance and walked out.

Three
    Captive, Adamus thought, quivering to his heart, gulping to force air into his lungs. Hostage. Prisoner. Again. Still. Odd, how the unbearable had become familiar, therefore comforting, and how the familiar had become ennobled to the dignity of a doom, a fate. Was he fated never to be free? It seemed so. Ever since the beginning, even in that first life, that pitifully brief life, he had been a captive. At the mercy of his mother, at the mercy of his father, and then there had been the dungeonlord dreadful and kind, the prisoner’s heart quivering with terror and love—
    Here she came now, the doomster, the storyteller, here she came toward him after locking the door, here she came with her sad, vehement, symmetrical face and her wild silver-black hair and her footsteps like thunder and her thoughts like flowers and lightning and her body a harshly clad, cream-colored, world-sized warmth that he both feared and craved.
    Even in that first brief life, the dungeonmaster had betrayed the love; Adamus had looked for an adoptive father and found a doomster. Then, in that next, uncanny life—at the first fiery touch, the brand of eerie lips on his forehead—captive again. At the mercy of the unseelie mother. Quivering with love and terror again. And then—doom anew. Life anew. Terror anew. Captive in the body of a frog.
    To be a frog was to be loved by no one.
    To be a frog was to be soft of belly. To be a frog was to be cold. To be a frog was to be always naked. Always afraid.
    She was walking toward his glass prison. She was moon and sun in one. He could not bear it. His dogged, imbecilic heart shook anew, looking for a goddess, a true love, a mother—but he knew the fate. She would be his doomster.
    God, if there is a God for frogs, help me.
    To be a frog was to be—helpless when the urges came. The seasons. The necessity to burrow in the mud, or emerge from the mud, or sing and fall in love.
    To be a frog was also to be smooth. To be quick. The naked have their ways of covering up.
    Was it useless to fight fate? Was it useless to try to escape the doom? Perhaps. But Prince Adamus d’Aurca was not yet finished with fighting.
    â€œWhat the hell does Fay have in that purse?”