King Carlyle and Jacob the Frog swam down the river. They swam near the bottom of the river bed, and the Water Sprite, Lydia, swam beside them. “Our Queen was last seen heading this way,” she said. “I do hope she’s okay.”
“Don’t you worry,” said King Carlyle. “We will do everything we can to find her.”
“We will try our best,” said Jacob the frog. “But I should warn you that we have no skill in finding people.”
“Jacob! A little confidence please. I’m only trying to cheer up the young lady.”
“She is a Water Sprite, your majesty, not a lady. And as we discussed yesterday, we have no experience of finding anyone in this river. Now, if Midor were here…”
“As I told you, yesterday,” said King Carlyle, “I do not want to hear the name Midor.”
“Very well, your majesty.”
Every creature they met, be it fish, or frog, or crawfish, or any other aquatic creature, King Carlyle asked them when they had last seen the Water Sprite Queen. Invariably, they had all seen the Queen of the Water Sprites. She was obviously a very popular and visible part of the river. But very few of them were able to offer any useful information about where she might have disappeared to.
The only information that they did get was very vague. A turtle mumbled something about how she had been captured by a very dark magic. And a minnow said something similar.
“A dark magic,” said King Carlyle slowly to himself. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“If your majesty pleases, I had assumed all along it was some sort of dark magic,” said Jacob the Frog. “That’s the only thing that could make a queen of the Water Sprites disappear. But the question is, what kind of dark magic is it? And that, I fear, will be very difficult to find out.”
“It will be very difficult to defeat,” said King Carlyle. “But it should not be very difficult to find. I have some experience of magic. It runs in my family, you know. And my experience is that magic never stays hidden for very long.”
Jacob the Frog was not entirely sure that this was the lesson that King Carlyle’s family history would indicate. But he decided to keep his mouth shut.
And so they kept journeying down the river.
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