Everyone raced to the well, but it was too deep and dark to see anything. The sounds of splashing echoed off the stones.

"Alfonso!" Maud cried. "Are you all right?"

"Don't worry, he should be okay in the water," I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. Would he be as efficient a swimmer as a real frog?

"Alfonso?" Daphne asked in a shaking voice.

Suddenly, the splashing stopped.

"Alfonso?" Maud shrieked. "ALFONSO?!"

After a long, tense moment in which I thought I would witness my trainer cry, the frog appeared with the spade in his mouth, his tiny purple arms shaking from climbing up the well. When he dropped the tool at Daphne's feet, she stared at him, struck dumb by the heroic act.

"Alfonso, you scared me senseless!" Maud cried, scooping him up in her hands.

The princess burst into tears again. "Oh, Alfonso, it must be you!" she sobbed. "No one understood my love for gardening the way you did."

It was unclear how much of this confession the frog heard, because he had collapsed into a dead faint.

"He's exhausted. Muffet, could you take him to our room?" Maud asked. "Meanwhile, I'll get the solutions ready to try out immediately."

"Put him on my back," Muffet offered, looking happier now that he had unloaded the burden of his past. "Just shake him off a bit first. He's still dripping."

Maud wiped Alfonso gingerly with her sleeve before placing him on the cat.

Daphne wiped her eyes. "All right. I believe you, Maud. I'll do it. I'll kiss the . . . the frog."

The fairy godmother beamed. "If you'll be kind enough to show Muffet to our rooms, Noelle and I will go get the solutions from the carriage."

On the way to the stables, Maud told me about what had gone into the mixtures. "All of them have the pepperwood and boarhound powder you got me, some sprigs of cairn berry plant, and wax for texture, but in different doses. I'm experimenting," she added with a twinkle in her eye. "All we need is linwood bark and we're set."

But when we got to our carriage and Maud reached into the hidden drawer under her seat, she frowned. "That's strange. My case isn't here."

"Looking for something, ma'am?" asked a stablehand nearby.

"Just a case I left in the carriage. I didn't think the footman would look so thoroughly."

"Ah, I think I know what happened," the man said. "That carriage is not the one you came in."

I examined the wheels, which were much rustier than the ones on our carriage. "You're right! But where did this one come from?"

"A young woman dropped it off and took yours just now, when you were with the princess," he explained. "She said she was C.A.F.E. personnel and wanted to make sure you had a functional carriage."

"Why would she give us a rustier one, then?" I demanded.

Maud shook her head. "Someone drove a second carriage all the way from headquarters just to take our perfectly good one away? Something about that doesn't make sense."

"Nothing about that makes sense." An image flashed into my mind: Jessaline sneering, as she vowed to do whatever it took to win Sloane the House seat. "Did the woman have red hair, by any chance?"

Maud glanced quickly at me, but the stablehand shook his head. "She had dark curly hair. But she certainly carried herself like a fairy godmother. Very nose-in-the-air, very uppity . . ." He caught Maud's eye. "No offense, ma'am."

"Of course she would wear a wig," I muttered. "It looked like a wig, didn't it?"

He pondered this. "I guess so, but I'm not the right one to ask, am I, miss?" He stroked his own shiny bald head.

Another image appeared in my mind: Sloane sitting in the recordkeeping room, whispering to Jessaline. "It's them. I just know it," I said. "I knew Jessaline being in Viridian couldn't have been a coincidence."

"Noelle, you have no proof," Maud pointed out.

"They've been out to sabotage us since the beginning!" I cried. "They must have found out about your solutions and wanted us to fail this mission. Do you remember if anyone was nearby when you were putting your case in the carriage?"

"Of course people were nearby. I was in the courtyard!" My trainer ran a hand through her hair. "And anyone at C.A.F.E. might have overheard me talking about the solutions in the reading room. It wasn't a secret!"

I opened my mouth to protest, but she shook her head.

"What's done is done. We'll just have to make new solutions. It'll take longer, but we'll do it. And now we have access to linwood bark, so we can just throw everything together." She looked a bit more cheerful. "I'll teach you. It'll be fun."

We walked back to the front of the castle, each deep in thought.

I knew it was never good to throw around accusations without solid proof, but deep in my gut, I knew that Sloane and Jessaline had had something to do with the whole situation. If I was right . . . . if my theory were true . . . then they were apparently following us around on our client visits.

But then they wouldn't have time for their own clients, I thought.

I thought back to King Frederick's dinner, when Jessaline and her client had been sitting alone, eating food that was obviously drugged. Where had Sloane been? Why had she not been there to help them? Had she assigned Jessaline to tail us while she took care of their other clients?

Even so, sabotage was no way to win a seat in the House of Godmothers. But knocking one contender out of the running would certainly make the other one look good. Was that what they were trying to do to Maud?

We ran into Daphne in the great hall. She was smearing a white waxy substance onto her chapped lips, though it didn't seem to be improving matters one bit. "I put the cat and the . . . and Alfonso in their own room adjoining yours."

"How's the . . ." Maud waved her hand in front of her own mouth.

"As bad as ever." The princess closed the jar of lip balm with a sigh. "You'd think that a witch could come up with a better curse than permanently dry lips."

"It's a curse?" I said incredulously.

"Father's got this thing about people making a profit off of stuff that belongs to him," she said. "He wouldn't let this old crone peel bark off a tree, or something, so she cursed him. And me, because I happened to be there."

"What, the lady with the crazy eyes? Janice?" I asked.

"She's not an old crone anymore, she's reformed," Maud said. She held her hand out for Daphne's lip balm and examined it. "Who makes this?"

"The apothecary. Why?"

Maud handed me the lip balm, which I sniffed. It had a scent like earth and dried leaves. "What is it made from, trees?" I joked.

"Linwood trees," Daphne said offhandedly.

The fairy godmother's eyebrows shot sky-high. "Wait a second, Daphne. This is linwood balm? Give that here." She took it back from me with renewed interest. "Does the apothecary make it from the bark?"

Daphne looked annoyed. "I don't know what the help does in their spare time."

"Oh, this is wonderful. This saves us so many steps!" Maud said, chortling. "We've already got the basics right here. All you and I need to do, Noelle, is add our own ingredients!" She glanced at Daphne. "You don't mind if we take this, do you?"

The princess rolled her eyes. "Go ahead. It doesn't do anything for me anyway."

When Maud and I went up to our room, she hurried inside with Daphne's lip balm while I checked on Muffet and Alfonso next door. The frog was still in a swoon, sprawled like a huge ugly raisin on one of the beds. Muffet reclined on the other, cleaning his damp fur with a self-righteous air.

"Poor guy. Romancing is tough work for a frog," I said sympathetically, looking at the unconscious Alfonso.

"Indeed. I haven't the faintest idea what he likes so much about that young woman, but good for him, I suppose," the cat replied, yawning as he settled in for a nap.

Back in our room, Maud had gathered a mortar, pestle, and five little dishes on the windowsill. She spooned Daphne's lip balm into each dish in thick, goopy white chunks, fairly buzzing with anticipation. "We'll add different amounts of our ingredients to each. Five samples should do it, don't you think?"

She had me measure out different amounts of boarhound powder with my magic wand.

"It's more precise if you use your wand. Plus, it's good practice!"

While I did that, she set about crushing several tiny pink berries in the mortar. I watched as she snapped little twigs and added them in.

"We're going to burn this down and mix it with wax." Maud pointed her own magic wand at the mixture, which promptly set on fire, leaving behind pinkish ashes. "Stir in the boarhound powder, would you?"

A few more sprigs of this, a few more pinches of that, and soon she declared the mixture ready to be added to Daphne's lip balm. Maud sprinkled different amounts of the ashes into each dish, and I stirred until everything was smooth.

"Now, we let the ingredients blend together on their own, preferably in sunlight."

"How will we know when they've blended enough?" I asked.

"When they turn violet, which I'm guessing they'll do at different rates," Maud explained. "It's because of the different amounts of boarhound powder."

The first dish, the one with the highest amount of boarhound powder, turned violet within the hour. I woke Muffet and Alfonso, who had recovered, and we followed Maud downstairs into a large music room. Daphne sat at a piano, picking at her flaky lips.

"Here's the first mixture!" Maud announced. "Noelle, our handsome prince, please."

I plucked the frog from my shoulder and offered him to the princess, who held out her hand with some reluctance.

"He's not as slimy as he looks," I assured her, dropping him into her palm. "See?"

"He's . . . heavy," Daphne said, surprised, waving him around to test his weight. If I had done that, I would have gotten another dirty frog look, but he merely gazed at her.

I felt nervous, watching Maud give the dish one final stir. After all, it wasn't every day I helped a fairy godmother turn a frog into a prince.

"Put this on your lips. And then kiss the frog," she instructed the princess.

Daphne hesitated before gingerly dipping a finger into the purple goop. The finger went up to her nose first, and must not have smelled bad because she shrugged and smeared it on her lips. When she was finished, she looked like she had fallen lip-first into a vat of purple dye.

I avoided Muffet's eyes, knowing I would probably laugh and ruin the moment.

"Now kiss him," Maud urged her.

"I know, I know." Daphne took a deep breath, then lowered her lips to his head.

A few seconds went by, then a full minute, as we all waited breathlessly.

Nothing happened.

"Why isn't it working?" Daphne asked in a shaky voice.

Maud held the frog up to the window to better examine him. "I guess this mixture wasn't the right one. But don't lose hope, we have four more."

Over the next few days, she hovered over the dishes like a mother hen watching her eggs. It took another week before the second mixture turned violet, then two weeks for the third. Neither of them did a thing to Alfonso, though Daphne's chapped lips appeared to be improving.

There were only two dishes left, and I could tell Maud was getting more anxious with each passing day. She paced our room from morning 'til night, refusing to leave even for meals. The housekeeper brought up trays for her and took them away half-eaten.

"Maud, you have to eat," I told her firmly. "You need to keep up your strength."

"I'm okay, Noelle." Her eyes stayed glued to the windowsill. "You and Muffet go have dinner. I'll call you as soon as these turn purple."

And so Muffet and I would go down to the kitchen and eat with the servants. Unlike King Frederick's open-table generosity, Daphne's parents had strict rules about who could dine with the royal family. Maud hadn't said it in so many words, but I guessed that fairy godmothers were part of "the help" here. I didn't care very much, but Muffet, however, was a different story.

He was already cranky about the fact that there was no yogurt to be found in Heliotropia, but having to eat in the kitchen wore down his patience even more. His tail gave a menacing swish every now and then as he ate plain broth. If it had been a razor, it would have sliced the butler in the next chair to shreds.

"Stop pouting," I told him on a chilly October evening, when we were walking back to our rooms after dinner. "I didn't know you had gotten so used to the good life."

"I just don't like being thought of as a servant," he said plaintively. "I wasn't brought up by Valentine to skulk away in the kitchens."

"They don't think you're the servant. They think I'm the servant and you're just my pet."

"Thanks. That's very comforting."

"It's nothing to do with us. Some people just like to think they're better than everyone else." And that didn't always apply to royalty. I thought of Jessaline prancing around as though she ruled a kingdom. And of course, thinking of her made me think of Sloane, plotting Maud's demise in the House of Godmothers.

"What are you thinking about?" the cat asked. "You looked like a goblin for a moment."

"Thanks a lot. I was just thinking about how to destroy Sloane so she can stop sabotaging Maud."

As if saying her name summoned her, my trainer exploded from our room just as we reached it. "Eureka!" she shrieked. "The last two mixtures have turned purple within seconds of each other! Get Alfonso and let's go find Daphne."

"But she's eating dinner with her parents . . ."

"I don't care! We are doing this now." Maud's spiky hair was no longer neat and orderly, like the back of a strawberry porcupine, but flat and haphazard.

Muffet and I hurried to obey, never having seen her so frazzled.

I poked my head into Alfonso's room. "Frog boy. The mixtures are ready." He jumped into my hand without a ribbit of protest.

"Let's roll," Maud commanded, and led the way downstairs.