“A frog?” I asked Logoya.

“A juggernaut frog,” she corrected me. “They’re armored and they have strong fangs and claws. Pretty big, too, for frogs. No point in sending a regular frog into a nest of hundreds of casket rats; it wouldn’t last a minute.”

“But why any kind of frog?”

She shrugged. “Frogs are how the magic works. Do you want me to explain Barene magic to you?”

“Well, this part of it, yes, please.”

“That’s a shame. Pull up your trouser leg.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Do you want your leg healed or not?”

“Don’t harry me! I need to think about this.”

“What is there to think about? If you want your leg healed, pull up your trouser leg.”

“And then you’ll turn me into some kind of fighting frog? And I’ll go down into those tunnels–” I could see them there, dark holes underneath the squatting stone crypt. “–and fight some death rats and bring this ring back up to you?” I could spot a casket rat now, scuttling along the carving at the bottom of the crypt. Grey, slimy, and sinewy, with some kind of brambly black growths around its foul ears.

“That’s exactly right.”

“It could take me days to find a ring down in all that.”

“Then you’d better get started.”

I didn’t want to do it. Of course I didn’t. “Isn’t there some magical way you can bring the ring to the surface?” I asked.

“There is, actually. I could cast a spell to turn a soldier into a juggernaut frog, and then–“

“All right, all right. Isn’t there something else I could do for you instead?”

Logoya shrugged. “I told you that you got here at the wrong time. Three swings ago I would have had you digging out raspberry cane. But you’re here now and I want that ring.”

I hadn’t realized until that moment how delightful it would be to dig out raspberry cane. I sighed, and pulled up my trouser leg.

“Thank you,” she said. She took a small bottle and brush out of her cloak, and painted my scar with the contents of the bottle. I remember it smelled metallic. But my leg felt the same.

“It still hurts,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “That wasn’t the part that heals you. This is,” and she began drawing elaborate patterns in light all around me, with a beech twig for a quill. I turned around and around trying to see all of the symbols and images she created on all sides of me, hanging in the air like mist, glowing like embers. I was careful not to touch them. I don’t remember how long it took her to complete her work. Less than an hour, certainly. When she finished, she examined it all carefully, and reached out and touched a part of her light-painting that looked like a star. She said, “Ybel, become a juggernaut frog, and find Aara’s ring.”

**

I don’t remember what happened after that. No, that’s not true; I do remember that my leg stopped hurting. But I don’t remember being a frog. The whole thing was long enough ago that some of the details would have faded anyway, but I never remembered anything that happened underneath that crypt. There was a vagueness, kind of like the Great Nap, that went on for some time. Then, after that time, I realized I was myself again. I sat on the ground surrounded by Logoya’s light-designs, gasping and shuddering, covered with mud and with hundreds of tiny faint bite and claw marks that didn’t quite break my skin. Logoya was smiling over the ring she had just pulled out of my mouth.

“How does your leg feel?” she asked.

I tested it. It felt like a perfectly normal leg that had nothing wrong with it. I spit out some grit and rat fur and said, “It feels wonderful. Thank you.” I stood up. I could put weight on either or both of my legs. I stepped and jumped and ran. It really did feel wonderful. I remember that it did. It still does, when I think about it. I pulled up my trouser leg to see. There was still a scar, but differently shaped and not so angry. “It’s better than I hoped it would be. Why can’t I remember anything from when I was a frog?”

“It’s like that for some people,” Logoya said. “Do you want to remember it?”

There was blood under my fingernails, and little shreds of flesh and fur. “By every drop of piss ever spilled, no,” I said. “Never. I don’t even want to remember this. How long was I underground?”

“Five days and nights,” she told me. “After the first few hours I set a spell to watch for you and went back to my cottage to read poetry.”

“Five days and nights,” I said. “I should be starving to death.”

“Oh, I imagine you had plenty to eat down there,” Logoya said, and I puked all over the entire forest for the next couple of hours.

Her name was Logoya, and she was originally from Barenum. Her fingers poked terribly at my leg scars as I clung to her bench. “Mm,” she said. “Was it a shipwright, a scullion, or a drunken clown who first treated this wound?”

“Ow,” I said.

“I’m not surprised it still hurts. I think the other fellow’s sword is still in here.”

“Really? Like a splinter of it, or–“

“Not really.” She gave my calf a gentle slap, and sat up.

“Can you fix it?”

“Ay, I can. Got your crutch? Come with me.”

I planted my crutch and used my good leg to hoist myself upright. I had gotten better at doing that, but this bench was a different height than I was used to, so I did fall down once. Logoya waited patiently for me.

She led me away from her cottage, back into the woods. We weren’t really on a path; she seemed to be looking for landmarks. There were more rocks and deadfalls and things to step over, and I stumbled more often. Logoya, not wanting me to lose sight of her, paused every time while I recovered my feet.

“Are we going somewhere to gather herbs?” I asked. “Or is there a magical pool somewhere, or a silver deer, or–“

“Nothing so pleasant.”

“Oh.”

And then all of a sudden we were there. I didn’t see it until we were very close to it, but there was a stone crypt, all overgrown with scrub and moss, surrounded by trees. “Here we are,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s an old crypt. That’s not the important part. I could tell you the history of who’s inside and how she got there and why I care about it, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. The part you need to know is, there’s a ring that was lost underneath the crypt. It’s gold and it’s set with two pearls. Do you understand so far?”

“I think so.”

“Underneath the crypt is a giant nest of casket rats. The ring is somewhere in their tunnels. I need you to go in there and get it.”

I had a number of questions.

“Do you have any questions?”

“I do. A number of them.”

“I thought you would,” she said.

“For instance, why don’t you go in there and find the ring?”

“Because it’s horrible! Casket rats are vicious, and I don’t want to have to fight them off and dig through years of their dried shit after a ring!”

“And I do?”

“No… but you do want me to fix your leg.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I conceded. “But how can I do that? I can’t go crawling through rat tunnels.”

“I’m glad you asked. I propose to both mend your leg, and also prepare you for invading rat tunnels, by turning you into a juggernaut frog.”

I remembered.

I remembered limping through the forest. My leg hurt, and my arm was over a crutch that Dobdo had helped me carve out of a tree branch. Dobdo had been one of my comrades in the Wallentorp army. The path was rough, and I had to go slowly, so that I wouldn’t trip and fall. But I did trip and fall a lot.

There was a healer in these woods. Everybody said so. He, or she, was supposed to be a strange sort. A foreigner, but, more importantly, someone who didn’t always want money. Sometimes she, or he, wanted some other service. It could be as normal as chopping wood or catching fish, or as weird as painting a thirty-foot pine tree yellow, or standing on your toe for an hour.

And of course the first thing you had to do was find him. I had asked as many people as I could for good directions to his cottage. The ones who claimed to know something all agreed that he was on this side of the ridge, on the edge of a clearing. I had already trudged through four clearings, and the maddening thing was that I had found three cottages, all ruined and abandoned, with no idea if they were the right one. I had to hope not.

The wound on my leg, my calf, had healed long ago. But it healed poorly. It was closed over, and there had been no infection, but it still hurt, and I couldn’t put weight on it. I had to get it healed.

I know now why I so wanted to get it healed. At the time I wasn’t even thinking about why. I just knew that I did want it. Part of that was the pain, of course; that was no mystery. It was a constant stab. Didn’t really matter what position my leg was in; it still hurt. It hurt less if I soaked my leg in hot water or cold water and it hurt more if someone whacked it with a stick. (Which did happen a couple of times.) But to understand my reasons it’s important to remember just what had happened.

When we all woke up from the Great Nap, I woke up in the Wallentorp army. I was vaguely aware of some of the things I had done during the Nap, but this was the first time I had the chance to pay attention to them, to realize that I was far away from my home, my friends, my family. That was harder than having to live like a soldier, squatting in the mud outside some pisscan castle that nobody ought to want anyway. And I couldn’t leave until the war was over, because the lauran officers hunted deserters for sport. And of course there was now something that I wanted more than friends and family: sauce.

Then when the war did end, I was in no shape to go home or go after the sauce. I could hardly walk. What was I going to do, beg? I was a young man! I could do anything! I could, for the first time in a long time, choose something. And I knew one thing: if I ever got a hold of a spoonful of the sauce, I wanted it to taste right. It didn’t taste right for me the first time, and it wouldn’t now, either, not with my leg like this. I just knew this somehow. I had to get my leg fixed first.

The trek through the woods was so miserable I don’t remember the details very well. I know I had to go back to town once, and I know there was one night I spent sleeping in the woods. And I certainly remember trying one path I had seen before, and thinking, “Oh, wait, this must be the one, I should have come this way before.” And I was right! It took me to a clearing, pretty little place with a brook, and a cozy-looking cottage on the far side of it, surrounded by beehives and herb gardens.

I stumped up to the front gate of the little fence around the cottage, and rang the bell politely.

A dark-skinned woman stepped out of the cottage, drying her hands on a cloth. She looked me over.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re here to have your nose shortened.” I liked her immediately.

“What’s wrong with my nose?”

“Nothing at all. It matches your ears perfectly.”

“If you’re trying to sell me extra surgeries…”

“For only a little extra I’ll reduce your gland of suspicion. It seems to be overactive.”

I leaned on her stone fence. It felt good to have the weight off my leg and armpit. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t keep up this level of wit for much longer. Do you think you can help me with my leg?”

She pulled out a bench for me to stretch myself out on. “Probably. I’ll have to take a look at it to make sure. But your problem is that you got here just in time for the price to be very high. I can help you, but you’re not going to like this at all.”

And then I remembered more…

Beloved Zann,

I didn’t want to think too long. First, the longer I stayed in there, the hungrier I was going to get. Second, nothing would be easier than for me to think and think and think and lose my chance of doing anything. I liked an easy pace, but Srix had literally beaten into me the lesson that the best pace was always the fastest one that I could control.

My main problem was that I had nothing. Not just no money, no weapon, no tools, but also, no reason why anybody should do anything I wanted. No influence, no leverage, no power.

But if I did, what would I do with it?

I didn’t quite have a plan, but I’d never have more of one, and if I hesitated I’d lose my nerve. I got up, squeezed past my fellow prisoners in the dark, stepping on a couple of feet, and slapped my hand on the door twice. “Hoy!” I called.

“Don’t do that!” some man said. “Are you crazy?” said some woman.

I heard muttering outside. One of the Half Sun Squares opened the door, reached in and grabbed me, and held a knife to my throat. “Don’t waste my time,” he said.

I didn’t resist. “Tell Ladal that I’m not talking to him,” I said. “I know why he’s locking me up, and I don’t care how long he keeps me in here. I’m not telling him anything.”

“What the piss are you talking about?” There were a couple of other Half Sun Squares there watching. Too many to start a fight with.

“Just tell him,” I said, broke his hold, and stepped back into the shadows of the kegroom.

The door closed, and I spent the next couple of hours telling myself that I was an idiot and that this couldn’t possibly work.

Turned out I was right and wrong about that.

Love,

Ybel

Most beloved Zann,

My problem was I didn’t know where Wande would go if she had to flee to somewhere. Her parents were dead. Her sister lived far to the east and they didn’t get along anyway. She’d never go to Jhus’s father. She did have friends here in Crideon but the closest ones were Ostavon’s wife Geme, who was already missing anyway, and a couple of people from the scentmakers, who I had no idea how to find.

I went back to our roost. The city was strange. There were fewer people around than usual, and the ones I could see were skulking and afraid. Some of the shops and taverns were open and some were not. I saw some more corpses among the grey mist of the late afternoon.

By the time I had climbed the steps to the roost, I was weary. Still weak from the oubliette. I opened the door and heard something.

I stopped.

There was no sound.

I sparked one of the wall lights and he was there. A man I had seen before, somewhere, and he struck at me with some huge weapon. I fell down backwards, out the door. I tried to shut the door and he swung again, knocking it open. I rolled down the stairs, scrambling to my feet.

“Lauran-loving pissard,” he said above me. “Your time’s over now.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I answered, skittering downstairs as fast as I could.

“I want to,” he said, and pounced downwards at me.

Looking back on it, I have a hard time believing it, but I did the exact right thing. I dropped flat. It hurt when he landed on me, but it was a lot better than being knocked downstairs. I stood up as soon as I could, sending him farther down the stairs. I turned and kicked out at him, not very effectively.

He was getting up. I came closer and put a foot in his ribs. We continued like this until I had kicked him all the way to the front door. One more hoof and he spilled out onto the street, and I followed.

There was a squad of somebody’s soldiers. When they saw us, they raised their weapons. My attacker grabbed for a knife at his belt, and they shot him dead. Then they grabbed me and threw me in a cart.

Love,

Ybel

Beloved Zann,

I went down to Kayar’s to see if there was anyone there who might know where Wande was. Or, really, to see if Kayar’s was still there. I had to duck into an alley to let a patrol go by, but they took no notice of me.

Kayar’s was still there, although the front wall had scorch marks all over it. I went in. People were in here, eating and drinking, but not in a relaxed or celebratory way. They were all frightened. A couple of families sat in the back corner, their children sleeping on their laps, bags at their feet.

Oror was behind the bar. I greeted him. He said nothing.

“I’m looking for Wande,” I told him. “Have you seen her in here recently?”

He still didn’t say anything.

“Oror? I really need–“

“I haven’t seen anybody,” he said.

So he wasn’t going to tell me anything. Probably had a good reason for it. I let it go, and looked around again. None of Quoon, Ostavon, or Fafafa was here either. But I was hungry. I still hadn’t had a full meal since waking up, although there had been several small ones.

“Sorry,” I said. “Could I just get a cheese-fry? I–“

“We’re out of food,” he said, as he collected a tray of food from the kitchen and brought it out to some other people. “Try somewheres else.”

I couldn’t tell what I had done wrong, but I felt guilty for it all the same. I gave the families at the back a couple of silver cups each and left Kayar’s.

Next I tried Ostavon’s roost. But I could see that the building had been burned out, probably some days ago. From there I went to Quoon’s. Quoon’s building was still there, but when I went up to his roost, the door was standing open and the place was empty.

I didn’t have the heart to try Fafafa’s roost.

But I wasn’t sure what to do next.

Love,

Ybel

Beloved Zann,

Srix wasn’t around.

I had told Candur that I would think about his problem, but I didn’t. I worried about Wande and Jhus. And I worried about them harder everytime I saw a new thing. The longcoach back to the city was an hour late, and when it arrived it had broken windows and was lurching on one wheel. Near the coach stop, there was a round burnt patch of grass with some miscellaneous dark objects in it.

All I knew about what was happening in Crideon was what Tharus had told me. And he obviously hadn’t seen it for himself. He’s a giant anteater.

On the way into town we passed a farmhouse I remembered seeing every other time I had made this trip. Except now it had been burned down. I saw a dog slinking behind the charred remnants.

A mile later, we passed a gibbet that definitely hadn’t been there before. There were two laurans hanging on it.

I had my reasons for being a Rosolla Guard, for working at the palace. They weren’t worth Wande’s life. And if it was as simple as trading one for the other, I would know what to do. Maybe she and Jhus would be home when I got there.

The longcoach was almost full. The other passengers were either soldiers, who looked young and confident and stupid, or people, who looked anxious. They had a lot to look anxious about. There were more burned-out houses and buildings. More dead people. We got stopped twice by patrols in the road. One patrol was a group of masked fellows with farmhooks and the other one was soldiers in an unfamiliar uniform. Lord Clear’s men, I guessed.

It was even worse when we got into the city. We could hear explosions in the distance, and the damage was everywhere. Almost everywhere. When we passed through a richer neighbourhood, that part still looked very nice. But everywhere else. The longcoach didn’t go all the way to Blackfloors Square, but let us out in a smaller square some blocks away. I guess Blackfloors Square was too dangerous.

I made my way to our roost. I had my baton with me, that Srix had been teaching me to use. I didn’t plan on cracking anybody’s head with it, but just the sight of it might make me a little safer.

When I got to our building, it seemed intact. That was one of my worries put to rest. But I climbed the stairs to our floor, and saw a note tacked on the door. It was a message to Wande that I was waking up. So she hadn’t even seen the message? Where was she?

I went in. They had gone.

I knew right away that they had gone. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. The air seemed warm and unbreathed in just that way. I checked the sleeping rooms, and some of their things, that they would use every day, weren’t there. So they had gone on their own.

There was a place in the kitchen where Wande would leave notes for me, a gap under the cold bin. It wasn’t an obvious place to hide something. I checked there. No note.

Where were they?

Love,

Ybel

Dearest Zann,

Ambe’s dim chambers underneath the temple were covered with twisted roots, but not as damp as they should have been. On a shelf near where I was lying, a small statue of a frog wearing a jaunty cap breathed out warm dry air, while the rum bottle it was holding slowly filled with water.

I said to Candur, “Why would we have to do what Lord Clear says? He can give us all the orders he wants. We’ll just ignore him.”

He shook his head. “The oath we swore as Rosolla Guards is magically binding. If he commands us we may be compelled to obey.”

I thought about it. “What have you and Ambe already tried?”

He counted them off on his fingers. “Deafness; doesn’t work for written orders. Plus we really do need to be able to hear things. Not understanding the language; couldn’t do without that either. Changing the name of the Guard to something else. We thought about just leaving. Nobody liked that one. Magical shields. Charms. Things like that.”

That covered the obvious things. I pulled the slabs of moss off my body and sat up. I rubbed my face and head. “Does the oath force us to obey you, while you obey Lord Clear, or does it force all of us to obey Lord Clear?”

“The second one.”

I nodded slowly. I had imagined Candur giving up his spot as Captain of the Guard to me, because I had never taken the oath. But if they all had to obey Clear anyway, it wouldn’t make any difference. “All right,” I said. “I’ll give it some thought. But I have to find Wande and her daughter. They need to know that I’m well and I need to know that they are. Where’s Srix?”

“Probably in the main guardroom. Go and change your clothes,” he said, nodding at the nightshirt I was wearing, “you’ll see him there. The uniform you were wearing in that pit was unsalvageable, and your sword had somehow been transformed into some kind of baton.”

“Ay. That happens to me a lot.” I stood up and felt… not strong, but strong enough. “Do you want to go to sleep in this bed? Nobody will look for you here, and it might be a good idea if you were hard to find.”

Candur yawned. “I’ve heard worse ideas. Good luck finding your woman.”

Love,

Ybel