A Little More Logical: The Frog Prince

Chapter Five: In which Christopher takes care of his Family

Christopher did not sleep much that night. The feeling of the forest and the sense of foreboding made sleeping difficult. When he did sleep, it was not restful and was troubled by strange dreams that he couldn't remember the next morning, except that they had been strange. He did not mention this the next morning when Professor Atherton had cheerfully asked them all how their night had been. Professor Atherton put rather more stock in the sorts of things that were generally dismissed as "hokum" in most academic circles. Things like the importance of dreams. Christopher was interested in learning about the forest. He was not interested in analyzing strange dreams he couldn't remember or in trying to define the looming sense of foreboding that had been bothering him.

You might be interested to know that Christopher, like Arnesse, had some magical ability. But while Arnesse's was of a fairly practical sort, Christopher's talent was the Sight. The Sight is incredibly unreliable and ironically also requires more raw magical power than almost any other type of magic. Consequently, Seers were very rare, and good Seers were virtually nonexistent. Most people with enough Seer blood to manifest itself but not enough to actually be a Seer (even a bad one) were prone to feelings or hunches or had a surprisingly high number of lucky guesses. Christopher, though he didn't know it, was no exception. 

They spent the day wandering through the forest, stopping to take a look at different things Professor Atherton pointed out to them. He showed them how to tell if a rock was a rock or something else that had been turned into a rock. This was a little tricky because most of the clues were visual, and the relative quality of the enchantment tended to have an effect on how well the result turned out. Sometimes the sorcerer or enchantress or whoever had been aiming for a statue but just turned you into a rock instead, because this was essentially the same thing, and if it so happened that you weren't very good at enchantments it still looked like you weren't a failure. You could always tell when this had happened though, Professor Atherton explained, because the statues or rocks either looked not like a statue at all or like they'd been very inexpertly carved by someone who was probably a little impaired by some substance or other. (Of course Professor Atherton hadn't used these exact words because one doesn't talk about alcohol and drug abuse with any young children, princes or not, but this is what he meant as the guards rightly guessed.)

They had spent some time discussing this over an ordinary boulder which was used as a concrete example. As they moved on from the boulder Professor Atherton encouraged them to look at any other rocks and boulders they might see and to try and decide if they were enchanted or not.

"But always remember, my princes, do not touch them until you are certain they won't turn you into a stone. Most of all -- Armand are you listening? Most of all, remember what I told you about statues: if they're very good, stay away from them!" Good statues meant that the enchanter or sorceress had wanted to turn you into a nice statue to serve as a warning. These were never botched jobs and were often good enough that the person inside them was aware of their surroundings, even after becoming stone. This was not a nice spell and it was not used by nice people. 

Armand, it turned out, had not been listening. Or rather, he had, but not very well and not to all of it. So when they discovered about a half an hour later that Armand was missing, the minor sense of foreboding that had been bothering Christopher all day suddenly expanded into a sense of imminent doom. There was a moment of panic followed by some minutes of frantic searching. It was Christopher who found him at the edge of a small and rather unusual clearing. 

The grass was smoother than you would have thought possible and there was no sunshine falling. Christopher knew the sun was shining somewhere above the forest. But it did not fall here. This was not the strangest part. The clearing was full of statues. Perfect marble statues of men, women, gnomes, dwarves, centaurs. Every creature had an expression of fear and surprise. Armand was stepping up to the nearest statue, a dwarf with a very large battle axe, with his hand stretched out, ready to poke.