Only a few days after she married the frog, the princess Talisen went a-Maying with her brothers. They came riding up the hill on their steeds made of wind and willow and hailed her. She had been sleeping late, silver hair puddled all across the frog’s spotted shoulders and his delicate, pale-yellow breast. But she heard their horns and leapt up and would be off.
“Be careful,” said frog prince — he was that warlord Tor who had bested the cottonmouth in single combat and successfully led his people in a battle against the heron folk, but he was gentle as a lass in his own household. “You’ve barely recovered from the wounds the egret gave you. Don’t put yourself in danger. Don’t ride with your brothers today.”
Talis laughed at him. “Am I a doll, for you to keep me home in a box? You sent me to war against the egrets — because you knew only my magic sword could touch their beauty. Two great wounds I took for you. And now you tell me not to ride out under the sun with my brothers to protect me?”
Her oldest brother held out his hand and she took it and swung up onto his horse. Then all the brothers laughed at the poor frog — and they rode away.
At sunset she came in limping and left a trail of bloody footprints across the broad wooden floor the frog had laid just for her (he always had mud floors until he married the princess). She had spent the day dancing on the hillside in the sun. Now both her feet were bleeding. Why? Because the egret, seeing her bright sword and knowing she would kill him, had pierced her once in each foot with his sharp beak, and had cursed her: “You will not run or dance or go to war again without these wounds opening. You will become a liability to your companions and a danger to yourself unless you stay quietly home — with your frog, your bit of breakfast too gristly to swallow!” He laughed at her, and she cut his head off.
Now, in the shadowy hall with the jimsonweed glowing pale at the open door and silver moon just rising over the lake, the frog prince bound her wounds, as he’d done many times before, and he gave her this lecture: “I will say this one time only. You are in my keeping now. When I ask you to take care of yourself, you will obey me — completely and without discussion.”
Talis stuck her tongue out at him. “Just try to make me.”
“Shall I hood and tie you like a falcon, then?”
“Then I would starve myself and escape on the air. You sent me to war, what do you care if I shed a few puny little drops of blood on your petty little floor?”
“When the times call for it, I will shed your blood as readily as I will my own — I’ll pour us both out like a bucket of rainwater, does that make you feel better? But until then, you will take care.”
She said: “This is fukkin bullshit.”
He was silent, looking around at the house he had built for her. Finally he said:
“You still undervalue yourself. What daughter of a fairy king marries a frog? What — who takes a cup from the hand of a poisoner and drinks it off without question?” For the frog was a master of poison, which he made from his own saliva.
Talis said: “I told you, I will take whatever you have to give me — death or life. Do you think I’m somehow tarnished because I married you? That’s a fine way to start.” Now she was angrier than ever, but daren’t get up because she wanted him to finish bandaging her feet.
He continued: “Do you not yet see how you insult me? You insulted me when you married me, though I was too foolish to see it. You are like a child balancing on a ridgepole, daring the wind to blow her off. You would gladly take poison from my hand, but when I ask you to take care of your injury, you flout me. You want me to be a monster out of a fairy tale, put there to give the girl a thrill.
“Well, you have not married the mindless wind. You have not married a monster. You have married one who cherishes you. Who will protect you, whether you will or no. And if this cup seems bitter to you — ” Here his chest and throat swelled with emotion, forming a golden orb. “ — remember you chose it.”
Tears fell from his eyes. Talisen’s anger went right out of her.
“Tor, I do know, I do understand the erotics of strangeness. Of course I do. But that’s not why I first kissed you. It was because you care for the swamp creatures, even the little minnows and the merfolk who ride them. Because you’re good. You care for people who need your care.”
He looking at her and she saw his grief transform into love, saw that it had always been love. They both cried a little.
Tor said: “But you see, princess, you are one of those folk who need my care.”
The fairy princess — who was tall enough to use the frog as a footstool, if she chose — looked at him gravely. “I don’t believe that, but I understand that you believe it.”
He smiled. “Then you must obey without belief, for a little while.”
Looking up and sideways at her, he saw the orb of her eye in profile, clear, catching the sunset, for a moment beautiful and familiar as a frog maiden’s. He felt her muscles coil, froglike, to spring. But where would she go? Out into the May twilight, or inward to the coiled pathways of the heart? A physical leap, or a moral one? Either would take great courage, he thought.