A Little More Logical: The Frog Prince

Chapter Seven: In which Patrick runs out of Chapter Titles

Author's Note: I want to know what you think of the story. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think should happen next. Who knows, maybe I'll take someone's advice, maybe not. Whatever you do, enjoy the story! ~Patrick

Arnesse began taking the big, thick, old books on magic out of the castle library and down to the quiet corner of the garden so she could spend more time with Pickles, who she was having a bit of trouble remembering to call Chris. It did help that Pickles was a truly ridiculous name and had never felt right, and Chris felt right almost immediately. But she still had to conquer a years-long habit. He had conceded further that his full name was Christopher, and Arnesse called him that sometimes. But she called him Chris for the same reasons that he called her Ness. They were not simply friends, but close friends. Friends who would not be the same without each other.

Christopher had a very thoughtful way of looking at things and remembered absolutely everything. Arnesse didn't. She didn't exactly forget things easily, it was more that she remembered the gist of something. Specific details sometimes stuck in her mind, but she could never remember where they had come from. Christopher did. It made research go much faster. If Arnesse wanted to go back and check something, Christopher knew exactly where she needed to look. Previously she had spent another day going through where she thought she'd found whatever it was she wanted to check before she actually found it.

Unfortunately this didn't make the library any more organized, nor did it help them find what it was they were looking for. They didn't even really know what it was they were looking for, Arnesse had pointed out one day in exasperation. A lot of the books they looked at were extremely interesting and very old, but did not even mention pelydryns. But you still had to read almost the entire book to find out because pelydryns were a relatively small, insignificant magic and never got even a whole chapter to themselves.

It was on one of these days, when Arnesse and Christopher were sitting under the willow tree poring over a particularly old, dry and complicated journal, that they stumbled onto something rather interesting. Arnesse had been reading aloud, which she found made the text much easier to understand. It was also easier for Christopher who, adept though he was at making his limbs do things that a frog's limbs traditionally didn't do, still had trouble with the pages of some of the larger books. He could read excellently though, and was actually better at translating the various cryptic and incomprehensible handwriting found in some of the journals, which meant that Arnesse made sure to always read the journals with him.

"Onne magickal transformations, this deepe magic of moste strange and dangerous ilk, there is little that a wise or goode magician or enchanterre would be praktising, fore it is of a moste unwise and darke nature,the good magician and enchanter will busy himselffe with onely the undoings of suche awefull workes," Arnesse stopped for the third time in ten minutes to try to figure out what the author had written. This was both ridiculous language and impossible handwriting, and she was not feeling at all patient that day. "Oh heavens! I don't know who he is but this man is impossible. I don't think I can read another word." She slammed the book shut. She was so frustrated that it took her a moment to notice that Christopher had gone absolutely still, as if frozen. She'd seen him do it once or twice before when there had been a heron nearby, but there were no herons in the castle gardens. She looked at him for a moment or two in confusion, and then almost smacked herself for being so stupid. She'd never known for sure because he'd stoically refused to tell her but she'd always suspected that Christopher was one of the cases of a person being turned into a frog rather than an actual frog who happened to have known enough enchanted people to pick up a few things.

"Chris," she began a little hesitantly, fumbling for something to say that wouldn't be stupid or rude. "Are you all right? You look like you've seen a heron." She watched him carefully. Christopher blinked and shifted a bit. So much as she could read his face (it is rather difficult to properly read a face so very different from a human's), Arnesse felt that he was composing himself trying to think what to say. Christopher always thought before he spoke.