The Princess and the Bear (14 page)

R
ICHON’S HEAD ACHED
with the weight of his weaknesses. He desperately wanted oblivion, and he wanted to be alone. He was not proud of himself for it, but drink had always given him both of those things in quantity.

At the next town that looked as if it were large enough to have an alehouse, he put down the sack of swords and told Chala he planned to go in. He half expected her to chide him. He had been so insistent they needed to hurry toward the army.

But she simply nodded and said that she would wait and look after the swords. She also made a face that reminded him of the time when, as bear and hound, they had come across some rotting grapes. His nose had been pricked by the reminder of the scent of wine, and he had licked at the grapes. She had turned her nose up, saying she knew where better food was to be found.

All he wanted was to not think about his own lack of magic for an hour or two. He went inside the alehouse.

The two men inside stared at him. One wore a patch over one eye and had a beard that looked as though it might be crawling with lice. The other was so drunk that he could hardly hold his head straight.

“Good morning,” Richon said after a long hesitation.

“More like good afternoon,” said the patch-eyed man.

Richon nodded agreeably and turned away, thinking that would be the end of it.

But he had miscalculated.

“What’s a man like you doing here?” The patch-eyed man waved at Richon’s finely made clothes, improved by his recent bath. “Spying for the king?” He laughed.

Richon felt his heart skip a beat, then pasted a sickly smile on his own face. Surely this man had never seen the king before. It was only a joke.

The drunken man mumbled a few words, then said more clearly, “Always pretending he had no magic, though we all know it’s not true.”

The owner of the alehouse noticed Richon and came over to him. “What will it be, then?” he asked.

“Ale,” said Richon, remembering how he had always had that when he was already well and truly drunk.

He turned back to the patch-eyed man. “You think the king has magic?” His throat was so tight he could hardly get the words out.

The patch-eyed man shrugged. “We all of us have magic, every one. It is only a matter of how much or how little.”

“Surely there are exceptions,” said Richon, drawn into the conversation despite himself.

The patch-eyed man shook his head. “If they live and breathe, they have magic, big or small. Those who think otherwise haven’t looked deep enough.”

Richon was annoyed. Was this man saying that anyone who had no magic just had not tried hard enough to find it? He was a man who had lived two hundred years and more. He knew what he had—and what he did not.

“Some say it’s those who have the strongest magic who hold it back the most,” said the patch-eyed man.

“They’re afraid of it, see,” the drunken man broke in, his words slow but clear. “Afraid of how much bigger it is than they are. And how it will change them.”

Well, that might be true of others, but it wasn’t true for Richon. He felt sure of that.

“Knew a woman like that once,” the drunken man said.

The patch-eyed man said, “He’s known plenty of women, but not recently, eh?” He smiled and made a rude gesture.

But Richon was impatient. “What happened to her? The woman you knew?”

“She died,” said the drunken man. “But she had at last found her magic. Took her sixty-eight years of life, but
when she found it, oh, how strong it was!”

“Why did she die, then?” asked Richon.

“When she realized her magic, she saw how all her life she had done nothing for the animals around her. As a recompense, she joined with the wild man.”

“She was the hawk who did as the wild man bid, against the king,” said the drunken man. “She died of an arrow wound in the final battle. Killed by her own people, trying to save them from the king who hated magic.”

The hawk, thought Richon. He had a flash of memory of that hawk. The dark eyes, the flapping wings, the intense glare.

But he had not noticed the hawk dead of an arrow wound on the battlefield.

The truth was, he had not noticed any of the animals who had died. They had been no more than animals to him then.

Richon took another sip of his sharply flavored drink, very different from the ale from the palace. But he realized he was no longer here for oblivion. He was here to learn of magic, and found himself hoping as he had always refused to hope before.

“Tell me how you use your magic,” he said to the patch-eyed man.

He shrugged. “To call to the birds to get away from my field so as to have more food to harvest come fall. To walk through the forest and call out to the wolves to leave me be. To give the mice one loaf of bread to eat through a
month’s time instead of watching them take bites of each loaf as it’s fresh from the oven.”

He turned to Richon, suspicious once more. “You don’t use your magic for such as that?”

Richon shook his head.

The patch-eyed man stood up. “You think you’re better than we are and won’t use your magic on ordinary things?”

“No, no,” Richon said.

But the patch-eyed man put up his fists and threw one at Richon’s face.

Richon flew several feet across the room and fell, crumpling a chair behind him.

He groaned.

The alehouse owner ran toward him, clucking his tongue. “Sir, let me help you up. Shall I find you a room? Do you need a physician?”

Richon was bleeding from a cut on the face.

He was stunned.

He did not know whether to think of it as a prize or an insult that at last he had been treated as a man rather than a king.

The patch-eyed man stood, finished the rest of his drink, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Let’s leave this wretched place,” he said to the drunken man.

“Yes, go, go,” said the alehouse owner, bending over Richon once more.

Richon struggled to his feet. He wanted to call the
other two men back. There was so much more they could tell him.

But then the drunken man took a step toward Richon.

“The great magics come latest,” he said. “And are most hidden. But they will out.” He nodded to Richon, then stumbled out.

Suddenly Richon found himself thinking of the royal steward, who had seemed to have no ear for music. He hated the sound of it, and was always complaining about the noise. He had not the power to ban it, but he often chose to absent himself from occasions where music would be playing unavoidably—dances, plays, tales sung by bards.

Yet Richon remembered a woman who had once played the harp at the palace. She had called to the royal steward and played a special song for him. It had not sounded particularly beautiful to Richon, but the royal steward was moved beyond words. It brought tears to his eyes and made him tremble so that he could not even sit on a chair.

“What happened?” Richon had asked, staring at the woman and at his steward.

“He has a sensitive ear for music,” said the woman.

“He hates music,” Richon insisted.

“No,” said the woman. “I have seen his like before. He only hates music that is not perfect. Absolutely perfect. And even of those who play music well, so few can play it perfectly. He has simply never had a chance to
hear perfect music before. But now he has.”

Richon watched as the royal steward struggled to regain control of himself. Eventually he had made his way to his own chambers, though Richon had heard nothing from him for the rest of the night and much of the following day.

The woman with her harp had gone the next morning.

At last, when the royal steward had emerged, Richon asked if he should have kept the woman there, to offer more of her unique sounds.

But the royal steward had shaken his head, speaking as if to himself—for he had never been so open with Richon before. “Never again. It unmanned me very nearly,” he said quietly. He motioned to the place where the woman had sat, playing the harp. “She seemed to think it a gift in me that I could feel it so deeply and so rarely. But to me it seems more of a curse.”

Richon had thought he understood then. The royal steward had gone on as he always had, avoiding music whenever he could.

As for the woman with the harp, she had come to the palace some months later and offered to play again.

Richon went privately to the royal steward, but his answer then was the same as it had been the day the woman had left.

“I am not myself with that music playing,” said the royal steward, his teeth tightly clenched.

Richon had sent the woman on her way and given her
a fine purse in return for her offer to play. But he also asked her never to come to the palace again.

“Ah, he is afraid of it,” the woman had said, nodding sadly. “I can see that. Those who are used to denying it can sometimes never learn to appreciate it fully. Well, I pity him.”

Richon had never understood why she might do so, until now.

A
FTER
R
ICHON HAD
disappeared into the alehouse, Chala found herself drawn toward a horse and hound tied together at a post on the other side of the street. It seemed a strange pairing.

She walked closer, then bent down to put a hand out to the hound, and the hound licked her hand dutifully, but did not so much as bark at her, though she was a stranger.

Was it simply well trained?

There was something very restrained in all its motions. Chala had never seen a hound, even a tame one, that looked around so little or seemed to have so little sense of play.

She found a stick on the ground and threw it.

The hound did not even follow the falling stick with its eyes.

She drew closer and sniffed the hound. It was not—right. There was a very flowery human perfume lingering on the hound’s fur, the residue of a recent bath, but she was not sure that was all.

She let a hand run across the hound’s back.

It was dark brown with white on its belly, as were many of the hounds in the forests to the south even in her own time.

She looked around herself to make sure there were no humans nearby, then barked an inquiry in the language of the hounds. “Meat?” she asked, thinking that any hound would perk up at that word.

But this hound turned to her with a blank expression and then turned back.

So, it was a tame hound, one that had given up its own language for the language of humans.

She put out her hand again, let it be licked, and said, “Good boy,” in the language of humans.

But the hound had no more response to this than it had to her speaking in the language of the wild hounds. Nor could it be deaf, because it had looked toward her on her first approach.

What was wrong with it, then?

She gave it a piece of the journey cake that Richon had bought several villages past.

The hound licked the cake from her hand and then hung its head once more.

Chala turned to look at the horse.

There was something in its stance that reminded her of the hound.

Horses were animals that did not give up their own language, even once they were tamed by humans. She had never tried to speak in the language of horses before, but she trusted her new magic and tried it. She stroked the horse’s dappled gray and white neck while saying—she hoped—“Cool weather, good rest.”

She looked up at the horse afterward to see its reaction. Would it think she was a complete fool for speaking so haltingly?

But the horse did not look at her at all. It was as if she had said nothing.

Chala tried it again.

And then she tried other words. She offered the horse a piece of the journey cake, but the horse did nothing until she held the cake out in her hands and toward its nose. Then it turned toward the food and nibbled at it.

The perfumed scent from the hound had spread to the horse, or perhaps they had been washed together. But there was another scent. Chala was sure of that. She put one hand on the horse and one on the hound and concentrated.

As soon as she realized the truth, she leaped away from both of them, cold fear twisting around her spine.

The unmagic.

It had infected them both, though it was not as virulent as the variety in the forest, and left both animals
living—after a fashion. They were more than domesticated, as humans had been doing with animals for centuries. These animals had been stripped of any sense of their own lives. They had no will of their own. They were not even animals anymore, but lumps of clay that moved when told to by a human.

It made her sick.

At that moment a man came out of one of the houses and nodded to her. He stood on legs that bowed, as if he spent most of his life on horses, and he had a well-trimmed beard and mustache.

He nodded to the horse, smiling widely. “The gentlest horse you ever saw, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Very gentle,” Chala admitted.

“And the best-trained hound to be found anywhere.” He clapped his hands and the hound lay down obediently, all four legs tucked under him, head bowed as if before a king.

“Do you have need for one or the other—perhaps both? My lady, I assure you that you have come to the best animal tamer in the kingdom.” His smile never wavered.

Chala stared openmouthed at him. He thought what he was doing was taming? Did he not see the difference himself? He had the unmagic in him, and he used it and called it taming. What a fool he was.

But a dangerous fool!

“Or perhaps you have a horse of your own that is too much for you? Won’t come when it’s called or bites your
men and other horses in the stables? Ruins equipment and has a nasty temper? I have dealt with all of those and they are no problem for me.”

Chala stayed where she was, listening for any information the man could give her about what he did and where he had learned it—or from whom. With every word, she became more sickened. The man was proud of how he had transformed these animals into stones that moved. He thought humans would want animals this way, and Chala realized he must be right. He would not still be in business if there were not some humans who wanted this.

Did they not taste the unmagic? Or did they not care?

The man patted the dappled horse’s back. “You would not recognize this horse from the one that I bought two months ago from a merchant going north. He tried to ride him and was ready to shoot the beast, but I came along and offered a few copper pieces. He was glad to take them and warned me I’d be wasting my feed if I kept her alive. But it worked well enough for both of us, didn’t it, Sweet?”

Why could humans not accept that there would always be some animals that could not be tamed, because they would not accept the exchange of one language for another or give up the forest for a human pasture?

“Could you explain what you do?” asked Chala, pretending interest. “It seems such a wonder for you to
change a horse so radically in just a few months. A horse whose character has already been determined in a young life. Is it your strength alone?”

The man lifted a gloved hand to Chala. “It’s in this,” he said.

“What?”

He took off the black leather glove and Chala held it to her nose.

There it was—the smell of the unmagic. The smell that was underneath the perfume on the hound and the horse. The smell that she’d had too much of in the first moment she’d noticed it. And this man smiled at it!

“Where did you get this?” Chala asked carefully.

The man seemed eager enough to talk. “It came to me when I was a young boy. Lucky thing, too, for my parents were poor farmers and I would have had to live on their farm for the rest of my days, growing plants and hunting in the forest for meat. They did not even have animals to raise until I began to take them from the forest with me.”

Chala shivered, but forced herself to go on with the charade. She spoke casually. “I met a man who was like you once, from the south. He had the same ability to gentle animals. He had a certain striping around his nose.”

“Oh?” said the man, his smile faltering.

Was it possible the cat man was in this time, as well? If so, Chala did not know how to find him.

“So, shall I sell this animal to you? One gold coin?”
the man asked, his smile pasted on once more.

“No,” said Chala, shaking her head. She had magic but did not know if she could help a horse changed like this. It was not at all the same as helping Crown. What would be left of this horse if the unmagic were stripped from it?

“A silver coin, then,” said the man, interpreting Chala’s reluctance as an invitation to bargain. When she did not answer immediately, he nodded to the hound. “I will give you this hound as well. It’s as fine and gentle as the horse, I assure you. Fetches and follows commands without a word, and it won’t even whine when you eat and it goes hungry.”

Chala’s heart ached at this description, and she had to turn her head and walk away.

Still, the man called after her.

“Five copper pieces, then. Or you can come with me and I’ll show you some others. I have plenty to choose from. I only brought these because a man here wished to see them, though now he says he has already bought others.”

It was all Chala could do to walk away. She vowed that this man and the unmagic here would be dealt with later, after the battle.