The Princess and the Bear (11 page)

B
EFORE THEY LEFT
the market, Richon saw a woman who sat behind a table on which many carvings were displayed. Most of them were mundane likenesses of children or grown men and women, some of animals. One showed a man kneeling beside a hound that he seemed to love, another a girl on a horse, her hair flowing behind her in the wind, an expression of joy on her face.

After Richon had stared at the carvings for some time, the woman looked around, then reached below the table and took out a new set of carvings. These were entirely different from the first. The animals and humans were entwined.

One was a bear’s head on a man’s body. Another was a woman on her hands and knees with a hound’s tail.

Another was a hound with a woman’s head.

The merchant woman touched a figure of a woman with the claws and eyes of a cat, and the same feral expression on her face.

It was not just any woman, either. There were distinct similarities between the wooden figure and the merchant woman herself.

Richon had no idea why she was revealing herself to him. She might not know that he was the king, but could she not tell, as Halee had, that he had no animal magic? Apparently not.

Last of all, the woman pointed out a figure of a woman connected to a hound, as twins are sometimes connected at birth. The woman did not have a left arm, and the hound was missing limbs entirely on its right side.

Neither could stand alone.

Richon felt guilty at the sight and turned away, thinking of how much of her hound self Chala had already given up.

But Chala leaned forward and touched the figure. “Sometimes two halves are more than one whole,” she said.

The woman in the stall nodded. “She understands,” she said to Richon. “Perhaps better than you.”

Richon pulled Chala a discreet distance away.

“Do you not sometimes wish you were a bear, even now?” she asked him.

“Of course,” he said immediately.

“Why?”

“Because a bear can do things a man cannot,” said Richon.

“And a woman can do things a hound cannot,” said Chala.

“Then you are saying—” Richon began. She could not be saying that she wanted only to be a woman now, could she?

“I am hound and woman,” said Chala. “Just as you are bear and man.”

“And king,” Richon muttered to himself.

“Perhaps the woman there has a triple figure,” said Chala. “Shall we ask her?”

Richon was surprised to see the gleam of humor in her eyes. He had seen humor in the hound many times, though it was rarer in the woman Chala.

But her eyes were bright indeed, and when he smiled at her she let her lips spread widely over her teeth.

“Another day we will come back here,” Richon suggested. Until this moment, he had not allowed himself to think beyond getting his kingdom back. But now he realized that his kingdom was not enough. He needed Chala, as well, to feel whole.

“Another day?” said Chala blankly. “What need for another day when we have this one?” she asked.

He smiled at her. In a way, he supposed, she was still very much a hound.

And he was glad of it.

They had walked nearly to the end of the marketplace when Richon saw a wagon full of books.

His heart began to skip and he hurried closer. He knew those books. They were from his father’s library.

The one on the far left was the book on training horses that his father had tried so hard to get him to read. Not that he had offered him bribes for it. His father would never do that. He felt that reading and the knowledge that came from it must be its own reward. He would only show the book to Richon and mention that he had read it when he was a boy, that he had enjoyed it very much.

Then his father might cautiously mention that he had noticed how interested Richon was in horses. He would ask if Richon knew how it was that a young horse was taught to answer to a particular command, or if he knew why a horse should never be allowed to drink its fill after a hard ride.

Richon had been interested in horses as he had been in no other animals. Other animals reminded him of animal magic that he did not have, but when he looked at a horse he thought only of the way it ate up the ground, the feel of air rushing through his hair, and the undeniable excitement of riding up so high.

But to learn about caring for a horse—he thought that was a duty for others.

His father had never forced the matter and Richon had never opened the book. He had not thought about it once in his three years as king. But now he itched for it.
He felt that his horses had deserved more from him, but only now was he able to give it. If he had the book.

Underneath the first one, a little to the left, there was also his father’s favorite novel, though King Seltar had not liked to admit that he read such things. In fact, the king had hidden this volume under his own pillow. Richon had found it there and stolen it away, to see if it could be as deliciously sinful as his father seemed to think. He had read more than a hundred pages into it before giving up.

It was only now, looking at the book, that Richon wondered if his father had planted the book under his pillow on purpose to tempt Richon. It had been a young boy’s book, of impossible adventures in other lands, and new friends met along the way. But perhaps it was also his father’s favorite book from when he was a boy.

Richon saw book after book that he remembered from his father’s library. For a moment he felt dizzy, swaying, and imagined the library around him once more as it had been on that last day he had seen it, after his father’s death.

His father had labored all his life to collect them in one place, and Richon had cared for nothing but his own feeling of inadequacy at the sight of them.

They were his books no longer.

Richon turned and recognized the man he had sold the books to at the palace. This man had paid in good faith. Richon had no right to demand them back, even as
king. He would have to leave them here, and hope that the books went to those who would love them.

But suddenly the man’s eyes widened in terror, and he put his hands to his head, falling to the ground in prostration.

“Forgive me, forgive me, Your Majesty,” he begged.

Somehow, despite his disguise of filth and a growing beard, the man had recognized the king. And perhaps he remembered that Richon was known for his temper and his whims.

But the man then said, “Do not hurt me with your magic!”

And that surprised Richon.

The man must have heard some garbled version of the story of King Richon being turned into a bear. Otherwise there was no reason for any of his subjects to think that Richon had the least acquaintance with magic.

Richon knelt beside the man. “Stand up,” he said.

The man stood slowly, trembling.

“King Richon,” he got out at last. “Do you wish to have a particular book back? Or—more than one?” He waved at them. “Take as many as you wish, Your Majesty.”

The fear in the man’s eyes made Richon see himself again as the selfish, spiteful boy king that his people had always feared.

Well, that must change.

Suddenly the man’s name came into Richon’s head.

“I want nothing, good Jonner,” said Richon. “But thank you for your kind offer.”

Jonner stared at him, as if waiting for the truth to come out.

Then Richon had an idea. “If you wish to give me something, there is another thing I would value more than the books.”

The man seemed terrified, but he simply nodded. “Whatever the king commands,” he said.

“Information,” said Richon. “What news have you heard in the last few days?”

“They said—there was a battle. A week ago. Magic,” the man stammered out. “And then—you turned yourself into a bear and fled the palace.”

Richon looked about for Chala and found that she had drawn herself away from him, watching. He motioned for her to come closer, and felt better when he could smell her breath next to his.

“Anything else?” he asked the man, who looked back and forth between the king and Chala and said nothing.

The man shook his head. Then he bit at his lip and added, “There is something about the southern border.”

Richon went rigid. “What about the southern border?” He had always had difficulty with the kingdom in the north, threatening war. But not the south.

“They say that what remained of the army has gone to the border in the south.”

“Why?” asked Richon, his head and heart suddenly pounding.

“Because there is another army there, from Nolira, ready to invade. It is said they have been gathering for months now, a new surge with each sign of your weakness, begging Your Majesty’s pardon. Now they have begun to attack what little of our army remains after the fight with the magical animals.”

Richon felt a terrible weight on his chest. He had known none of this, had never been informed of the gathering army. And had never insisted on being told.

Chala came closer to him and put a hand on his arm, but he could only think of what he had done to his people, to his kingdom.

Jonner spoke again. “Perhaps this is all a ploy. You meant to lure your enemies into battle so that you could defeat them in their pride.”

There was a long silence, and then the pressure on his arm from Chala increased until Richon realized he must respond. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

“The money that you have taken to yourself, selling so many of the palace artifacts from your father these last few years—it must all have been spent on secret supplies of weapons and armor. Ah, what a great surprise the king of Nolira has in store for him,” Jonner said excitedly.

“Indeed,” said Richon, though it was not true. He wished he had been so wise as to plan to protect his kingdom, but he had not.

Why had the wild man sent him here if his kingdom was to be conquered by another? What purpose for a king that was no king?

Well, Richon would not give up easily. And if false hope was all he had to offer, he would not stint of it.

“I will not speak of seeing you unless you wish it,” said Jonner. “So as to make sure the surprise is all the greater for the enemies of our kingdom.”

“Thank you,” said Richon, relieved. He sent the man on his way.

Then he and Chala made their way to the edge of town. It warmed him to see the familiar parts of his kingdom stretching out before him, the waving fields of grain and orchards of ripe, fragrant fruit trees. But he also knew they were several days from the palace.

“We must hurry,” said Chala.

“If we are not too late already,” said Richon.

Any other woman would have given him reassurance, but Chala gave him the truth.

“If not that,” she said.

F
OR THE NEXT
two days, Richon allowed less and less time for rest. They slept only a few hours at night and hardly stopped for more than a drink from a stream during the day. They ate what they could take from passing fields on the way, and Richon thought nothing of it.

He spoke to Chala only infrequently and with a distant expression on his face. She understood his need for focus. It was animal-like, and she thought it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.

Nonetheless, she was surprised at how painful she found it to spend hour after hour in silence, crossing through a country that was both familiar and unfamiliar at once. She had gone on journeys like this with Marit and had thought the princess spoke far too much, even if it was only a few words here and there.

Now she longed for a few words of companionship. In
the morning she waited for Richon’s simple “Good morning” and to be able to speak back to him before his face went blank. She longed to hear his curt “Good night” before they rolled into their clothes and slept near a tree or a large boulder that had been warmed by the spring sun.

She and Richon shared food, and she made sure that she touched his hand when they passed the food between them. She knew that was selfish, but it felt good and she could not resist. She was becoming weak, she thought. Weak and human. Only at night was she a hound, in her dreams.

She thought it must be the magic of this time pressing on her, but the dreams were very strange and vivid. One night she dreamt she left Richon where he lay and went into a forest so thick with trees that there was not even a hint of the stars and moon overhead, and she had to travel by sound and scent.

She wore her hound body again and she could not remember feeling this deeply animal ever in her life. There had been humans everywhere in her world, humans who hunted in the forest, humans close by with their homes and their scents. But here there was no touch of humanity and a peacefulness that held her still.

Then she heard them.

The pack of wild hounds.

There were at least twenty of them, and at first she only meant to listen to them, to keep her distance, and
to observe, as she had done once when her daughter was young.

They would not take her presence as a challenge unless she was close enough to be scented, and she knew exactly how far back to stay to avoid that.

But how she enjoyed the conversation among them.

“I saw it first!”

“No, I did!”

“It was my stroke that brought it down.”

“But I was the one who tired it.”

They argued over a recent kill presumably, but Chala could not smell the blood of it, so the carcass must have been left wherever it had been taken.

“Your greediness was unfair. I deserved more than that.”

“If you deserved more, you would have taken it. I am stronger than you, therefore the largest portion of the kill was mine by right. Come and let me show you why, if you wish to argue further.”

And then the sound of tussling in the dark, of growling, and nips, of whining when a wound was taken, and then licking and dragging away.

“Any others?”

But it was only a formality. There was only ever one challenge to the lead male of a pack at a time. Unless it was the final attack, and the challenger had already taken charge. Then it would be merely the finishing up of old business, the chance for all of the pack to take a bite
of their old leader. As if that would give them some of his strength, some of his memories of the past.

The wild hounds roared out their approval for their leader by howling to the skies, and although Chala could not see him, she knew he would be strutting among them, his head held high, his mate at his side.

She stayed even when the moment was over and the wild hounds were quiet once more, and she hardly heard the flutter of wings overhead announcing the arrival of a full-grown falcon. But when the falcon spoke, she could understand it. It was not the wild man’s universal language, but a language of squawks and screeches that she somehow heard as clearly as the language of the hounds.

That astonished her almost as much as what the falcon said.

And then she remembered it was only a dream.

“There is a place of death in the east. Come, all of you. Come and help battle it,” the falcon cried out.

Chala’s heart grew chill.

The falcon flew away and the wild hounds did not hesitate a moment. They immediately rose up and followed after him.

Chala could hear the falcon continue to give out the same cry as it went along through the forest. And somehow all other animals understood. She smelled squirrels and mice and deer and bears and wolves and wild hounds and all kinds of birds. Frogs and toads and snakes leaped and slithered along. Possums,
hedgehogs, porcupines, raccoons, voles, hares, and on and on. There was no fighting among them.

It was astonishing. Animals who came together did so for a battle of survival, and for nothing else. The animals here had set aside their natural tendencies—all of them at once.

It was easy for Chala to go along now that there were so many animals. No one noticed she was not with a pack of wild hounds. They were not focused on the other animals at all, only on the falcon that led them forward.

Chala was surprised again when she realized that she could hear the conversation of any of the animals around her. So it was not only the falcon that was different here. She was changed, too, in this dream. What in reality was reserved for some humans—understanding the speech of animals—became possible in her dream for animals themselves. In some way it felt right to her. It went along with this ancient time and place that had so much magic in it.

“Another place of death so soon? That’s twice in a year. It’s too much. What is the world coming to?” said one of the beavers, older and with a gruffer voice.

Another spot of unmagic? It seemed even more terrible than it had in the other time, for here the air was thick with magic and life.

Surely it must have a different source. The cat man could not have lived so long, Chala thought. This must be something else entirely.

“We always bring them back to life. With all of us together we have power enough,” said one of the younger beavers.

“But if there is more and more of this, there will eventually come a time when we cannot fight it. There will be one dead spot that we cannot fight, and then it will spread like the humans spread, taking far more than is their rightful place.”

“That will not happen for many, many years. You worry too much. Think only of the now.”

Chala’s throat closed up.

Even if this was a dream, those words were true. She knew what it would be like in many years, when the unmagic grew in power. She knew the diminishing sense of wholeness in nature itself.

“There it is!” the falcon called out.

The falcon circled and the animals converged.

Chala was far in the back, but she pushed her way forward and no one tried to stop her. There was no sense of hierarchy here. The animals did not jostle for position, nor give up their place because they knew another was stronger. There was a perfect equality here that Chala had never seen, among animals or humans.

When she reached the front of the line of animals, she saw the cold death at last, and she felt relief. The spot was only as large as her own body, and while it was the same unmagic she had felt in her own forest, it was on a much smaller scale.

Nothing grew around it. She could feel the nothingness that had pulled out all life and brought not even the comfort and familiarity of death. The coldness made her want to whine.

But the animals drew themselves up in a circle around it and Chala felt their magic pulse and stream around them.

Animals with magic.

And she gave magic, too, somehow.

Every moment the spot seemed to grow smaller. It was not so much destroyed as replaced, death with life, but at such a cost!

No wonder the animals in her own time had had no way to combat the unmagic. Or the humans, either.

No wonder the wild man had sent Richon and her back in time.

Chala saw now what had been lost, and it made her want to howl to the skies and never stop. How could the wild man stand it, watching this happen all around him? No wonder he had retreated to his mountain. It must make him ache to see the loss of magic to unmagic as it grew year by year. And he had been watching the change for a thousand years or more.

When the forest’s spot of unmagic had been completely replaced with magic, the animals, their work done, began to dissipate.

Chala, too, walked away from the middle of the forest out to where she could see the moon once more. She
looked down at herself and realized she was not a hound, after all, at least not anymore. Now she was a human woman.

She had never experienced a dream like this before.

As a hound, she had relived experiences she had had in the past. But this dream was different. It combined bits and pieces of new and old to make completely new stories. Did other humans dream this way?

She woke feeling drained, as if she had bled from a wound. But she did not speak to Richon of it.