Page 2 of The Frog Prince (The GriMM Tales #6)

“I’m glad I ran across you, Prince Adalwin,” she said conversationally, taking a winding path toward him like she was strolling through the palace gardens and had happened upon him by chance. “I was thinking about our last exchange, and it left me quite…unsettled.”

Alwin felt immediately uncomfortable, remembering the queen’s private chambers, her silky robe that had left nothing to the imagination against the burning orange glow of the fire. Her hungry gaze and the words that had dripped like honey from her lips as her hands roamed over his body.

Her salacious proposal.

“How did you come to be here?” he asked in shock, taking a step forward before stopping, his instincts screaming at him.

She curled her lip. “I believe the better question is, how did you come to be here?”

The words sent a shiver up his spine. The long hours of winding through the forest flashed through his mind; the countless detours and wrong turns.

“Did you lure me here?” he asked, and she tilted her head with a smile that didn’t touch anything else on her face but the corners of her lips.

She ran the tips of her fingers over the rim of the well, never breaking eye contact with him. “Do you happen to remember the last words you said to me?”

He had bid Her Majesty farewell upon receiving his brother’s letter the morning after their awkward encounter, as courtesy demanded, but Alwin was of a sharper mind than to reply with that. Her intentions were already beginning to take shape in the empty spaces where she said nothing at all.

“I refused you.”

She laughed lightly, the sound echoing around the well and ringing in Alwin’s ears.

“Refused,” she repeated, like the word was a foreign thing placed between her perfect lips and highly disfavored. “Do you know how many people have refused me, Prince?”

Alwin had heard of none.

Or at least…none who had lived to tell of it.

“I’m sure there aren’t many who would dare, Your Majesty.”

Her blue eyes narrowed. “Why is that, do you think?”

It was in this moment that Alwin realized it had grown eerily quiet.

He snapped his head around and saw no one, nothing but another passing shadow, until he looked down. Littering the ground like fallen leaves were his people, their bodies lying at awkward, unnatural angles, eyes staring unseeing into the distance.

He hadn’t heard a single sound.

His heart began to beat heavily in his chest, sickness climbing to burn his esophagus. It couldn’t be…

“Jurgen?” he called uselessly, dropping to the dirty ground at his oldest friend’s side to shake him desperately. “Farwin? Get up.”

They lay unmoving, heedless of their prince’s command in death.

Alwin couldn’t comprehend it.

Not a moment ago Farwin had been smiling proudly, his whole life stretching ahead of him. Jurgen, who had stood over him his whole life like an immovable mountain, had crumbled without a whisper.

Youth was supposed to linger. Mountains were supposed to hold.

He’d led them all so foolishly into a well-planned trap.

He’d walked them to their very deaths.

Despair rose, holding hands with a rage that crept along the edges of Alwin’s tear-filled vision until he was springing back to his feet and reaching for Jurgen’s sword.

It came free with a sharp, dangerous schwing and he pointed it straight at the queen’s throat. He bared his teeth, a single tear streaking down his cheek. “ You murdered them !”

The queen didn’t flinch. In fact, she stepped closer to the tip of his blade, hands folded in front of her regally. “I didn’t lay a finger on them.”

The shadow he kept seeing in his periphery moved again. Dangerous. Threatening. “Whatever that thing is it’s under your command!”

She scoffed. “What’s a group of mice to a cat if not to play with and kill when she gets bored?”

Alwin’s fingers started to shake with barely repressed rage. As the red veil of anger and grief descended, he tried to remember that he was a prince with his kingdom’s fate in his own hands. His hand was his kingdom’s hand, his decisions their own. If he harmed her, it could mean war.

Her smirk at his hesitation was as sharp as his blade, and she ran a nail over the sword’s edge as she proceeded forward.

The metal turned suddenly limp in his grasp, wilting over his knuckles like a plucked flower. He looked down in shock, her laughter echoing in his head and reverberating through the trees. Birds scattered, their sharp cries sending a warning he could not heed himself.

“Your punishment,” she whispered, just a step away from him. “For daring.”

Wicked nails dug into the back of his neck as a crimson mouth slammed into his.

Pain followed like a drumbeat, pounding through his veins. It felt like she was feeding him poison through her mouth, hot and acidic. He struggled against her, pushing away only for his legs to fold underneath him, his strength suddenly sapped.

He hit the sodden ground with a gasp, his circlet flying from his head and rolling through the water and mud. Agony built and he cried out as his very bones and muscles seemed to twist and turn on themselves.

She stood above him as he writhed, observing cooly like he was a fly caught in her web. The lipstick on her mouth wasn’t even smudged.

He clawed at the wet dirt, trying to drag himself away, but his eyes widened in horror when he saw his flesh turning green and his fingers blunting and transforming into something hideous and unnatural right in front of him.

Thunderous croaks began to echo in his ears, the rushing of water and the echoes from the well deafening him and matching every frantic beat of his heart. His vision began to narrow and change, warping strangely.

“What is wrong, Prince? Do you not think a frog a fitting creature?”

A frog?

No, a monster.

He screamed in horror as his body continued to move and change against his will. Until there was nothing left of him and something else was filling up the spaces where he’d once been, until he was choking on it.

She laughed until he was lying limp on the ground, reality fading in and out from the pain and horror, something else at home inside his skin with him.

“Please,” he whispered, the word distorted by a tongue that was too large, his voice a croak he didn’t recognize.

“Pathetic,” she said at last, circling him. “But now, now, I am not so terribly cruel. I will offer you a way to break this curse. If you can find a stranger who will love you as you are with all of their heart, your curse will be lifted.”

She bent at the waist and sneered at him.

“Offer them whatever they yearn for. Money. Power. Good health. You’ll have the power to grant them their hearts’ desires. But be warned, this magic only works at a cost. An exchange must be made. If the conditions are met, the magic bubbling in the well will let you make it be.”

Alwin could feel the echo of it in his head, a steady drip that called for a request.

“If they can look upon your monstrous visage and not feel disgust, revulsion, and fear, then you will be free. From the curse and the well.”

She straightened and walked leisurely over to where his circlet lay. She picked it up. Her shadow flanked her, a hazy figure Alwin couldn’t make out.

“See? I am not completely heartless. In fact, my heart will be full to bursting watching you squirm in the filth and muck for the rest of time.”

A lwin’s eyes sprang open, the mud and silt of the murky depths dislodging from his eyes and floating in front of him.

Bubbles escaped his mouth from an aborted gasp he couldn’t take under the water, his natural human response superseded by amphibian instinct. He didn’t need to breathe underwater. His skin breathed for him now.

But his heart still hammered. It was the only part of him untouched by the evil queen’s magic—the organ that harbored all his fear and resentment and anger.

Phantom echoes of pain reverberated through his elongated limbs as the familiar nightmare faded. He dragged his hand from where it was buried in the reeds and let it float in front of his face.

Four fingers instead of five. Green and mottled skin instead of pink flesh. The pads of his fingers wide and sticky.

Bulbous. Disfigured. Slippery.

A monster’s hand.

Something he didn’t recognize, even after eight long winters.

A small, pointed face appeared between the webbing, patches of rusty orange splattering its feet. Bulbous red eyes regarded him with trust and hands, an exact replica of his in all but color, wrapped around the end of his finger, pads creating small pressure points.

Farwin.

It hurt now to even think of the name he had given his small spadefoot friend a few winters ago. The echo of his dream pierced his heart like a blade, bringing fresh grief to the surface. It was a sharp reminder of what he was still striving toward, however.

With the last of the air in its throat sac, Farwin let out a high croak that rippled through the water.

Someone is here.

Alwin gathered the frog into the cup of his fingers and pushed through the water.

The paths along the bottom of the glen were all too familiar now, fed from the river they had long since carved deep into the area.

His presence and the arrival of frogs and toads and all manner of slimy creatures had only deepened those grooves and pools, creating a network between them that couldn’t be seen from the surface.

It was guarded by moss and lily pads and floating debris, walled in by the wreckage of an ancient castle that had been forgotten in time.

He used it to his advantage now, peering through the murky depths to see who had stepped into his lair.

A stumbling, frantic figure cupping their hand over their ear came into sight near where an outer wall used to be, the whites of their eyes bright in the darkness.

They tripped into a shallow puddle, mud splattering up their arms to join the blood that seemed to be pouring from the area where an ear used to be nestled.

Alwin searched the area behind them for the culprit as they scrambled back to their feet, continuing deeper.

Nothing could be seen giving chase.

Though that did not mean there was nothing there.

Or explain why they may have been following.

Alwin tracked the man toward where a canopy of willow leaves blocked the splintered shell of a room from the castle, acting as a wall.

The stranger pushed through them and climbed inside, shivering and terrified, and Alwin let go of his frog friend to raise himself from the water on the other side of the willow curtain.

“Only fools enter someone else’s house uninvited,” he said.

A scream of fright answered him. The man plastered himself to the wall as he turned, searching the darkness until he caught sight of Alwin’s silhouette.

“P-please…have mercy…have mercy,” he rambled.

Alwin cast his gaze over the stranger, able to see him better this close. He was dressed in threadbare clothes, dirty and bloodstained, and there was a stain at the front of his breeches like he had wet himself.

Alwin didn’t think it was because of him.

Which begged the question…

“Who are you running from?”

“Not who,” he whispered, searching the very shadows as if they could overhear him. “What.”

Alwin clenched his jaw.

“What are you running from?”

“A g-geist. It was a geist. Wicked and vengeful and born from shadow.”

He could barely get the words out, and Alwin knew better than to scoff at the superstition as his heart froze.

He’d seen more creatures than he knew the names of in this forest over the years, and his frogs had heard many a tale more.

But Alwin himself had seen the damage a walking shadow could do when wielded.

His eyes cast toward the makeshift graves of his people, before he tightened his jaw.

“A geist,” he repeated serenely, taking a squelching step along. “And you thought it best to lead it here? Not only an uninvited guest, but with his friends in tow. Am I supposed to accommodate you both?”

“No! Please…it killed everyone. It took my ear. I ran before it killed me too,” he explained, spitting and blubbering. “I didn’t know where I was going, I swear it.”

Alwin’s heart continued to hammer as death played behind his eyes. A frog jumped out to land next to the man. He screamed in fright and shrank away again, kicking out at it viciously.

Alwin let out a deep croak of anger that shook the boughs and had the man falling to his backside, whimpering and searching for the source.

“Tell me,” Alwin growled. “Why is a geist after you?”

The man fidgeted with guilt, his eyes darting. “I…”

Alwin read every line of his body. “What could a person have done to garner the ire of a vengeful spirit, I wonder?”

“I…I…”

“I suppose it’s none of my business,” Alwin said airily, continuing on his path past the willows. “Though you failed to consider one thing…”

He appeared from around the side of the curtain slowly, finally stepping out into view.

“That there might be scarier things than geists in these woods.”

The man’s scream echoed through the forest. He stared wide-eyed and terrified at Alwin’s face for a moment, before tripping over himself to get away. He left Alwin behind, clinging to his shadows, bitter bile rising in his throat at the realization that he truly was a living, breathing nightmare.