The Prince Problem Read online

  Except, of course, that it did make a certain kind of sense.

  Once people realized the princess had been kidnapped, anyone looking for her would assume she was being taken away. That meant they’d be closely checking any carts or wagons heading out from the castle. They would scarcely give a second glance to those approaching. It was the kind of subterfuge used in adventure stories.

  Good luck at last! Telmund didn’t need to look for the princess—he’d found her!

  The gravel-voiced man called Jud took several steps in Telmund’s direction.

  “Jud, you oaf!” his accomplice in the cart warned. “I’m gonna leave without you!”

  “Aw, Willum,” Jud complained, but he climbed back onto the cart.

  Telmund took a flying leap for the back, where the barrels were.

  But Jud had taken up the reins and snapped them, and the horse jerked into motion, yanking the cart away from where it had been a moment before.

  Telmund missed the edge of the cart.

  He ran after it, but his rooster legs weren’t even as long as his human foot. The farther he ran, the farther ahead the cart pulled.

  He stamped his rooster feet in exasperation.

  Telmund was so busy being frustrated and furious he didn’t hear the person coming up behind him. He was only aware of the danger when hands grabbed hold of him.

  “Look, Pa!” a boy’s voice called. “I caught ’im!”

  “Well done!” a second voice cheered.

  But Telmund didn’t see either one of his new captors, for someone slipped a sack over his head.

  “We gonna eat ’im tonight?” the younger voice asked.

  What was this with everyone wanting to eat him? Telmund wondered if it was God saying to him, Tell ME the only thing chickens are good for is eating. I spent time creating them, you know, same as I created you.

  “Naw,” the father said. “I’m thinking on a plan. This be a chicken rooster. We’ll borrow a chicken hen from Widow Nan, and we can start our own chicken flock. There be an old coop your ma used to tend, back behind the house. Carry that thing on home, and we’ll put ’im in that.”

  Telmund bounced back and forth in the sack on the boy’s bony shoulder blades as father and son started walking.

  “But, Pa,” the boy said. “Widow Nan don’t like us. She won’t never lend us no hen.”

  “Well,” the father said, “we’ll just have to borrow it without telling.”

  Fall asleep, fall asleep, Telmund ordered himself. He had just started to become interested in girls; the last thing he needed was girl chickens.

  But it was impossible to drift off with all the bouncing.

  Eventually, the sack was dropped to the ground.

  “Here we go,” the father said.

  “It don’t look too sturdy,” the boy said.

  “Just needs a bit of fixing up. Do we have a hammer?”

  “Don’t think so. Will a rock do?”

  Telmund heard some hammering. Some snapping of wood. Some cursing. Some more hammering.

  Eventually, the sack was picked up again, held upside down, and shaken.

  Telmund fell into a wooden cage that was only about twice as big as he was. The lid came down with a thud, and the father hammered that closed.

  The boy—he looked to be a year or two older than Telmund himself—peered through the slats. The young man’s nose twitched. “Chickens supposed to smell like that?” he asked.

  Diseased! Telmund thought at him. With something deadly and highly contagious! He flopped his head to one side and began walking in circles in his cage.

  The father sniffed in Telmund’s direction, then picked up the sack the two had carried him in. “We’re just smelling them rutabagas we had stored in here that turned bad.”

  The boy nodded. “What’s he eat?” he asked.

  The father scratched his head. “I think he’ll feed hisself on what he finds in the yard,” he said. “See, that circling around he’s doing means he’s looking for food now. Once we get the hen, they’ll be company for each other and won’t wander off during the day.”

  “Will we get to eat ’im eventually?” the boy asked.

  “Eventually,” the father assured him.

  The two of them walked into a peasants’ house made of twigs and mud that Telmund could see beyond the bare yard.

  He tried to squeeze himself between the slats, but they were too close together. He tried kicking at the slats, but they were too firmly nailed in. He tried jumping up against the ceiling of the cage, but the roof was too heavy to budge.

  Telmund sighed.

  He suspected a fox wouldn’t have trouble crushing the flimsy structure. That was one more thing to worry about.

  How do roosters sleep? he wondered. Lying down just felt wrong.

  In the end, he tucked his head under his wing and hoped he would wake up before morning.

  And before any foxes sniffed him out.

  Amelia’s thoughts were jumbled and bouncing about like marbles in a sack. She saw several contradictory things all at once. Prince Sheridan was tying ropes to her wrists and ankles, four different ropes, each attached to a stick. He spoke with the voice of his henchman Jud. “What if them rats come back and chew through these while we be sleepin’?”

  And he answered himself in Willum’s scornful voice. “Those rats was in the other wagon, mush-for-brains.”

  Then Prince Sheridan stood, and he was very, very tall. So tall that the top of Amelia’s head didn’t even come as high as his knees. He loomed over Amelia. Sticks in his hand, he pulled up her right foot, then her left. Right, left, right, left: He had her walk in a circle like a puppet. At the same time Amelia knew she was still lying down on the ground. Outside. Almost—though not quite—asleep.

  Even though he still controlled the movement of her feet from above, he also was standing in front of her, normal-sized.

  The Prince Sheridan above tugged on the rope attached to one of her wrists, moving one of her hands into one of the waiting Prince Sheridan’s hands. The other he placed on his shoulder. Right foot, left foot, around and around her parents’ ballroom she danced with Prince Sheridan.

  I don’t want to dance! Amelia screamed. But her voice had no sound, and she had no control of her dancing self.

  Everyone in attendance in the ballroom wore Prince Sheridan’s face—and each section of the room clapped each time she and the prince passed.

  And all the while the unseen Jud and Willum bickered in the background, first about dinner. (“We should of risked the chicken,” Jud whined.) Then about whether they should put the blanket over her as Prince Sheridan would have wanted—even though she was sticky with fruit compote. (Which, Willum smugly pointed out, had helped get them past the castle guards searching for the missing princess, just as he’d said.) Οr if one of them should take the blanket since she was, after all, asleep and would never know …

  Some nighttime predator—perhaps a fox or weasel, or maybe even an owl—landed with a thud on the roof of the chicken coop where Telmund slept with his beak tucked under his wing.

  The noise startled him awake. And the awakening transformed him into his human shape …

  Which was much too big for his cramped cage.

  The sudden change sent his feet shooting out against the slats of the door, splintering the wood. His arms flew wide and slammed into the sides of the coop, while his head crashed against the back wall, all of which reduced the chicken coop to broken shards.

  The force of the blows frightened away the creature that had come to investigate the newly inhabited coop.

  But it also knocked Telmund senseless.

  * * *

  After he came to, but before he opened his eyes, Telmund’s nose twitched. A fascinating stew of scents tickled his nostrils. There was the delicate aroma of river water, in which fish such as bream, pickerel, and minnows had swum, as well as ducks, geese, and small rodents.

  This was overlaid by the tart tang
of rotting vegetation—mainly alder, including leaves, wood, and bark, indicating a whole decaying tree—but also decomposing canary grass, horsetail, fennel pondweed, moss, and algae.

  Distinct from, but no less interesting than, the watery smells was a piquant whiff that came from straw that had been out in the weather for at least a year and had begun to molder. The straw was peppered with eggshells and chicken droppings from both hens and roosters—most of it also more than a year old.

  And then there was the fragrance of wood, which had been recently handled by humans.

  Most intriguing was a hint of weasel, both strong because the creature had passed by recently but also thin because he (Telmund could tell it was a he-weasel) had lingered only for a moment.

  Telmund sniffed again. The weasel had been startled away. But Telmund smelled nothing dangerous nearby. By the scent it had left behind, he could tell the weasel was a youngling, probably about three months or so, only recently out of its nest and away from its family. It was probably more skittery now than it would be later in its life.

  However, the strongest smell of all, though least interesting and not at all alarming, was the scent of dog. This scent was totally familiar, because it was himself.

  Telmund yipped, startled by the realization that he was a dog.

  He’d just been a chicken! Had he skipped a turn as a human?

  The soreness of his head and limbs, and the devastation of the chicken coop around him, hinted that he had been his own self, but only very briefly.

  He howled his frustration to the moon.

  Off in the distance—Telmund could tell exactly how many footsteps it would take to get there—another dog answered his distressed call, an assurance carried on the night wind that tomorrow would be another day, and probably a better one.

  It’s a sad state of affairs, Telmund mused, when you’re reduced to taking comfort from a dog you’ve never even met.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he commanded. There was nothing that could make up for having squandered a turn as a human, but being a dog was better than being a chicken.

  He scratched his ear with his hind leg, then marked the chicken coop as his territory. (He didn’t want the chicken coop, but it was his by virtue of his being there.)

  It was still dark out. His doggy sense told him the night wasn’t yet half over. But he didn’t need light to find the trail he was looking for: the path taken by the farmer and his son, carrying him as a chicken from the road. His nose told him exactly which way they had come.

  He took off at a loping run. The trail was so fresh he didn’t even need to pause to sniff the earth.

  The road wasn’t far at all. Once there, Telmund sniffed both ground and air. Many carts and wagons and walkers had passed this way, but he was able to single out the scent that he wanted as surely as a weaver would be able to pick a gold thread from among an assortment of blues and reds and yellows. The trail Telmund wanted smelled of princess and ruffians and strawberries.

  His tail wagged in joy. He marked the spot on the road, simply to share his joy—then he began running.

  As a dog, he was able to run faster than he could have as a boy, and he had greater stamina. In no time at all, he passed the spot where Princess Amelia had pushed him out of the wagon when it had been headed in the opposite direction. It was a bit disconcerting to catch hold of his human scent.

  He’d be human again, he assured himself. His dog self told him that this was a shame, but it couldn’t be helped.

  A rabbit dove into the tall grass by the side of the road, and Telmund veered off to chase after it. I was a rabbit, once, he told himself, but the memory didn’t stop him. Neither did the thought that he had more pressing business: to rescue a princess. Surely she can wait until after I catch the rabbit, Telmund told himself, but by then the rabbit had found one of the holes to its warren and disappeared underground.

  Telmund scratched at the entrance, but he knew this was a losing battle. He marked the area to warn off any other passing dogs, just in case he remained a dog long enough to come back when he had more time.

  Back to the road he went, and ran and ran.

  Eventually, still in the dark of night, he came to the environs of the castle where the princess lived. Lights were on, and people were roaming the streets, calling the princess’s name as though she might simply be lost, rather than stolen away.

  Some of the searchers had dogs, and that was a distraction, as Telmund and the dogs made one another’s acquaintance, sniffing at backsides and marking territory. I’m sticking my nose in other dogs’ private parts, Telmund thought. The idea would have been disagreeable except for all the information he was learning about each dog. Most of the dogs were friendly, except one supremely full-of-himself hound who yipped a warning to stay away because his master was the king, and that made him more important than any other dog, even if they were bigger or better trackers.

  Telmund left a “nobody-cares” puddle where that hound would have to walk through it, but he regretted it almost right away when he spotted a man who had to be the king. Telmund could tell by the respectful way people addressed him, just as most of the castle dogs walked respectfully around the unsociable hound. The king looked so sad, and Telmund remembered that it was his daughter everyone was looking for.

  He wondered if his own father looked as sad for missing him.

  Telmund gave a cheer-up yip! then kept on running. There were people and dogs searching at this end of town, too, but after a while Telmund was once again alone on the road, following the trail of the horse-drawn cart that carried the princess. He could tell it was the right cart because he recognized the scent of the horse—female, quite elderly, and with a little bit of a digestive problem—as well as the distinct smell of that particular wagon, the two men in it, and the strawberry-daubed princess.

  Dawn was not too long away when Telmund caught the bubbly scent of a running river. He hoped the men who had the princess hadn’t crossed the water. If they had, his only hope was that they’d gone straight across. Otherwise, it would be hard to know whether they had gone upriver or down. He would have to search in both directions and on either bank. He supposed that they were making for Prince Sheridan’s kingdom, but Telmund’s sense of geography was not all it should have been.

  Still, before he came to the river, the trail scent became very strong indeed.

  The horse that had been pulling the cart was on this side of the water, tethered beneath some trees. And there was the cart.

  Telmund spotted three lumps on the ground, all asleep: two men and one princess still bearing bits of berries stuck to her face.

  He knew it was her, but he sniffed her all over, because dogs like to be sure.

  She was lying beneath a too-short, too-thin blanket. Telmund grabbed one corner with his teeth to uncover her, and this revealed that her wrists were tied together. So were her ankles.

  Although his doggy brain protested, Telmund had to admit that his rabbit teeth had been better suited to gnawing through rope.

  Maybe, his doggy brain conceded. But I can still do it.

  Amelia woke up to alarming sounds close by—growly, moist, gnawing sounds—and the feeling that something was slobbering on her hands.

  If something was eating her, she tried to reassure herself that surely she would have felt it before hearing it.

  She opened her eyes.

  The nighttime sky was just beginning to turn pink from dawn, so it was hard to see what was crouched beside her. Not one of Prince Sheridan’s men—so that was good.

  Or maybe not. Was it a wolf?

  The creature heard the little squeal that escaped from her throat. It lifted its massive head and slavering jaws away from her hands and toward her face.

  Her own head, which had felt so full of stuffing for the past day, picked this awful moment to have cleared, and she knew for a fact she was not seeing some henbane apparition.

  This was no time for pretending to still be asleep
in order to try to fool her captors.

  But even as she inhaled to scream for help, the beast leaned in close—

  —and licked her cheek.

  That was so unwolflike a gesture that Amelia let the air out of her lungs in a silent sigh.

  Dog, she realized.

  Once she saw that, her estimation of its size—as well as its ferocity—diminished.

  Can dogs smile? She wasn’t sure, but this one certainly looked friendly, with its head cocked to one side, one ear up, the other down, and its tongue hanging out.

  Could it be one of her father’s hounds? She didn’t know them all, but this one didn’t look the least bit familiar.

  It smelled familiar, however.

  Was that stagnant-water odor a lingering effect of the henbane? She remembered smelling it in the straw wagon as she was coming around yesterday. The royal botanist had not mentioned henbane having such an effect, but surely this dog hadn’t been in the wagon yesterday, or the men would have noticed it. And friendly as it seemed, it hadn’t followed all day yesterday. Had it?

  Not that she had any right to be pointing fingers at smelly creatures. The dress the men had slipped over her own had not been clean to begin with, and the berry mixture they’d smeared on her face as part of her “disguise” added a peculiar fruity scent that overlaid but did not diminish the dress’s combination of sweat and dirt. She was itchy and sticky, too.

  The dog, however, didn’t seem to mind her unprincesslike state. It leaned in and gave her face another wet lick—was the creature friendly or was it simply enjoying the crusted remnants of fruit?—then it went back to gnawing at something near her hands.

  Her rope bindings, she realized. And it wasn’t that the dog was simply intent on chewing on the rope for some unknowable doggy reason, because it was carefully avoiding making contact with her skin. Somehow this dog gave every appearance of knowing she was in trouble, and in fact, it seemed determined to rescue her.

  She felt a strand of the rope give way. The bindings loosened, but not enough to wriggle her hands free.

  The dog nudged her side with its muzzle, perhaps telling her to have patience, then resumed chewing.