Page 59 of The Frog Prince

Here, the frog said.

“Thank you,” Alwin said, and the frog nodded before disappearing from sight.

“What did it tell you?” Otto asked, looking after the frog.

“It helped me locate the passage. I usually do it by feeling but this is faster,” Alwin said. “Follow me. It’ll be a bit tight.”

He turned sideways and pushed through the tiny slit, feeling as if he’d suffocate at any second as leaves and branches dragged across his skin and made passage even harder. He felt Otto following, grunting and groaning as he tried to fit his muscular body through the tiny space.

Alwin pushed the last of the way through and emerged into a clearing he hadn’t visited in years. He used to come here a lot. After getting permission. Foolishly thinking the magic of the place would somehow negate his own. Thinking if he slept there, it would make him wake up as himself again. That whatever the elves put in place to keep the other elves safe would somehow extend to him and help him feel like he belonged too.

It had never happened. The place remained beautifully secluded and guarded from nearly everyone else. And over the years, Alwin had stopped resenting it. But he had also stopped visiting. There was very little for him here.

He heard a gasp from Otto and turned around to see him staring at the clearing in awe.

Alwin could understand that. He tried seeing the place through Otto’s eyes. Seeing it for the first time again.

The space was tiny in comparison to the rest of the forest—a circle of short grass surrounded by tall, thick trees and the hedge they’d just come through. But the air inside shimmered. The sun hit the ground in a wide, sparkling beam, illuminating thousands of insects buzzing around an array of different flowers. It was a beautiful explosion of colors and scents and textures.

And the most special parts of it were the circles of dark-blue flowers. Barely an inch tall, similar in size to a common daisy, forming perfect hoops in the grass.

“Blue Moons,” Otto whispered in astonishment.

Alwin smiled. “Yes. I’ve never seen them anywhere else.”

“So many of them.” Otto seemed barely able to voice his thoughts as Alwin took a step toward the middle of the clearing. “Are we even allowed to take them?”

“They’re flowers, Otto,” Alwin said. “You won’t be hurting anything by picking a few. They will grow back.”

“I will only take a couple,” Otto said, more to the clearing itself than Alwin. Alwin smiled at that, at how fast he had taken to thinking of magic as a separate, almost sentient entity.

“Go ahead,” Alwin said.

Otto rushed forward before freezing in his tracks and turning back to Alwin.

“Thank you,” he said earnestly, a shy smile on his lips.

Alwin swallowed against the burst of emotion in his chest. “You’re very welcome, young master.”

“One day you’ll have to tell me why you’re calling me that.”

“Go pick your flowers, Otto.” Alwin shooed him away.

Otto chuckled, making the clearing appear five times more magical than it already did to Alwin.

Ten

Otto

It shouldn’t have surprised him, in hindsight. Otto had held out hope that what had happened in the forest would stay there. That he’d cross that shadowy border into his village and feel like himself again. Leave all the confusion and heat and want and need beneath the surface of the water inside the woods.

But it followed. Lingering on his skin and leaving a sweet taste in his mouth that he didn’t know the source of.

What they had done…no, what he had done, had left him feeling completely unmoored. He was barely coming to terms with the fact that his subconscious mind clearly had desires he had no knowledge of when his body decided to act upon them.

He had taken from Alwin, and even if it had been with his permission and gentle participation, it still felt selfish. Indulgent in a way Otto rarely allowed himself to be.

Now, as the forest followed their steps back to the village, Otto’s hopes of leaving it all behind were well and truly squashed.