The Princess and the Bear (17 page)

T
HE HOUND HAD
never been the sort to stand by and watch a battle in progress, even if it had been no business of hers to begin with.

She remembered a time when she had come across a battle between a bear and a hound from another pack. She had had no obligation to the hound. It was simply that she knew that she might do something in the battle, and she itched to do it.

She had thrown herself at the bear’s back, and sunk her teeth into its shoulder. The other hound had fled, but Chala had gone on for hours, fighting the bear until they were both senseless and exhausted. She had enjoyed it for the sheer beauty of the battle.

Richon was staring at the battle, twitching with each death, but not yet ready to throw himself in.

She did not wait. With a bark of regret, she leaped
over the rocks above the battle and down into the midst of it.

If it had ever been organized, it was so no longer. There were no lines of men standing together to hold back the enemy. Pockets of the enemy had penetrated nearly to the place where the hound landed. It was one man against another.

The hound snarled a warning—the kind of fair notice that animals and humans have in common. And then she opened her mouth, bared her teeth, and let them sink into the side of one of the Nolirans who held a sword in his hand.

He groaned, swatted at her, and then fell like a stone.

He must have been already weakened by battle and loss of blood. His face was very pale—for a moment.

Then the man he had been about to run through with his sword stood over him and took a battle-ax to his face.

The pale skin was spattered with blood.

The smell of it made the hound feel as though she were home again. But the human in her kept her from licking at it.

She turned away from the dead Noliran and saw three men directly ahead of her, two against one—and the one was Richon’s man.

She was about to launch herself at one of the enemy’s
chest when she heard a sound like rushing wind overhead. And a sound like a battle cry, but guttural, like an animal’s.

It was Richon—in his bear form.

Like her, he must have decided that he could fight more fiercely as an animal.

She felt an intense pride—like what she had felt at the first sight of her daughter’s birth—when she saw Richon’s claws slash open first one man’s chest and then another’s face.

In two blows he had killed both men.

Or as good as killed them.

The man who had fought against them took a spear to the two chests to make sure they were dead, then moved on.

He seemed to see nothing amiss in the aid of a bear in his battle, nor did he show any fear that he might become the bear’s next victim.

He had magic, thought the hound.

The bear turned to the hound, raising a paw as if in salute. They were together as animals now. She watched as the bear moved to the east, to try to shore up the defenses of the men there, who were letting far too many of the enemy through, deep into the soft underbelly of the Eloliran army. The hound noticed the enemy were still nowhere near the man who shouted orders from this side, the man whose voice had seemed to jolt Richon at the first screeching sound of it.

The hound leaped into the space between two men fighting and pressed hard into the legs of an enemy soldier so that he lost his balance. His arms flew up as he tried to catch himself.

It was enough.

He was dead.

She tried the same tactic a second time, but this time the enemy had seen her from a distance away and was not surprised. Instead he kicked at her, then stabbed Richon’s man dead and turned his sword to her.

The hound stood her ground, daring him to try it.

He moved the sword quickly in a circle around her head.

As if that would make her afraid of him.

The hound wanted to laugh. She had seen these tricks from the very youngest of King Helm’s soldiers. And the king had sworn at them and threatened them that they would not see another day with a sword, for he would kill them himself.

King Helm had had no patience with tricks. He had told his soldiers that if they wished to fight at his side, they had to give the best of themselves, for he was giving the best of himself. And if they died, they died in glory.

It had been one of the first times that the hound had understood a human point of view.

The sword circled again.

The hound simply ran from it, and turned to try herself at another pair.

As she ran, she heard the bear roaring at his own men to get out of the way, but few of them understood him. It was not because they had no magic, but because they were focused on another task—fighting for their lives.

Nonetheless, the hound and the bear moved from the back to the front of the line.

She cut open faces, gouged out eyes, and chewed at hands that held swords.

He cut heads open, tore off arms and shoulders, and crushed whole bodies.

At last, when it was nearly dark, the enemy army retreated, and so did the bear and the hound, scrambling back to the place above the battle where they had begun.

There they rested as dark fell, returning to human form.

Chala was exhausted as she had never been before and knew that only a human could push a body this far. A hound would simply have let the fight go, or let herself die. But she had fought on until she could hardly see.

“I should have saved more of them,” said Richon as he looked out over the battlefield, which was at this point nearly invisible in the dark.

“Not just my own men, but those who fought them as well,” Richon went on. “They were not evil. They were simply here to do what they had been sent to do. My father would have found a way to speak to them, to convince them to turn back. Somehow he would have used
his magic to save lives. I have only made sure that the lives lost were someone else’s.”

Chala was surprised that she, too, felt a sense of loss at the deaths of her enemies. She had never felt such a thing as a hound.

T
HE SOUNDS ON
the battlefield grew more muted. Richon leaned against Chala and wished he could lie down and close his eyes, and sleep until morning. But the work of the battlefield was not finished at night. Young boys pulled the dead to the sides and women and girls stripped them of uniforms and weapons, and whatever else they could find that was of use to the army. How many of the dead were their own relatives or friends?

With sudden determination to see the royal steward who had taken control of his army up close, Richon went back to the forest to retrieve the swords. He slung them back over his shoulder, except for one that he tucked into his tunic, for his own use.

Chala changed back into her hound form and followed him, but from a distance.

Richon kept his head down as he walked toward the
Eloliran army. He could hear shouts of pain from the tents of the physicians who worked to take off mangled limbs, sew entrails back into stomach cavities, and cauterize wounds oozing with infection.

“You there!” someone called to him.

Richon shuffled over.

“What are you doing here? Come to join the army?” It was a dark joke. Indeed, who would come to join this army, when it was losing so badly and the signs of death were everywhere?

“No,” said Richon. He knew immediately that this was a man who had spent time with the royal steward. He held out the swords. “Came to bring these to the royal steward.”

“Ah, good. We can always use more of those. I hope they’re well made.”

“Well enough made,” said Richon. For the brute killing that was this war.

The man gestured to a tent.

It was lit from within and the strong scent of incense rose from it.

Richon kept his head low and moved toward the tent. Another guard stood in front, and Richon explained his errand a second time.

The guard offered to take the swords, but Richon shook his head.

“I’ve got to make sure they get to him. No offense. But it’s my head,” he said, gesturing upward. He tried to use
the accent of the country rather than the more staid tones of the court, and to speak indistinctly.

The guard smiled and said, “Your head, eh? That it is.” He laughed, and Richon pretended to laugh with him.

After a moment, the guard opened the flap to the tent and called within.

Then the royal steward stepped out.

The man seemed so much smaller than Richon remembered, and his face was twisted with anger.

Would the royal steward recognize him, ragged and covered in battle muck as he was?

But he hardly looked at Richon at all. “Yes?” he asked in an annoyed tone.

Richon held the swords out. “For you,” he said roughly. “From the blacksmith in the village.”

“Ah, yes. He works very hard for me. Now.” The royal steward let out a tinkling laugh.

Once, Richon would have laughed along with him. Only a few weeks ago, as time flowed here. But Richon had changed.

“Well, you can go now. Hurry back to your safety, unless you want to stay here and show yourself a hero.”

As a young king, Richon knew he had been blind and foolish. But the royal steward had no such excuse.

“I will stay,” said Richon.

The royal steward snorted. “A hero, are you? Then stay you shall. Who am I to deny you your glory?” He nodded to the guard. “Take him to the food tent. And
make sure he has a uniform. Must look right and proper for tomorrow.” Sotto voce, he added, “When he dies.”

Richon stiffened with anger.

It would take only one swipe of his bear’s claws to tear the royal steward into pieces. But Richon did not want the man to die that way. He had caused such misery to so many, Richon must wait until the battle was over and there was order once more. Then he could make his judgment of the royal steward public, so all would see that the king did not support such behavior any longer.

The guard led Richon to a row of fires over which large racks of lamb were being roasted.

The tantalizing smell of the roasted meat in the food tent blocked out the other terrible smells in the camp. But few of the men seemed to be eating heartily.

Richon saw husbands and fathers, brothers and sons. These were his people, whom he had never bothered to see before.

After a few minutes, the guard tugged Richon away. “Then come get your uniform, if you’re not hungry,” he said.

He walked Richon to a clearing very close to the pile of the dead.

Richon cringed, not just at the multitude of death, but at the lack of respect shown the bodies of men who had given their lives for the kingdom. He wished he could do something for them.

Ahead, a man poked his head out of a tent. He was
balding, with a white mustache.

“A new uniform,” said the guard.

“What? I’ve got no new uniforms.” The man called out loudly. He was nearly deaf, it seemed.

“It will be new for him,” said the guard, smiling grimly.

He left Richon there to be outfitted in a uniform with a slice through the chest and a terrible bloodstain that ran down the tunic and the trousers.

Richon shivered at the sight.

“He don’t mind, you can be assured of that,” said the balding man.

Richon nodded to him and dressed, but wondered if he would use the sword issued to him. He had never been much of a swordsman.

At last, he stepped out of the tent and stared back out over the dead. He had marked the faces of all the animals who had died in the forest for his sake. He could do no less for his own men.

He stretched for the words his father had given in the funerals he had presided over at court. They had always seemed the same, at least to a bored child dressed in stuffy, formal clothes, who did not care who had died, but wished to get on with his games.

He was no longer that child.

And he no longer felt bored at these deaths.

He ached with the weight of them.

Through that dark night, he bent over each of the
dead from that day, not yet piled up with the others. He touched a hand or brushed a cheek. He could not know their names or see their faces, but he could at least count them, as he had done with the animals who had died for him and given him what remained of their magic.

There were 2,668 dead.

The number was higher than he had ever counted before in his life. Yet he had done it carefully and slowly, so he had no doubt.

Richon felt the hound at his side and had a vivid flash of memory. His mother, walking beside his father, for once her constant smile gone. They had been at a funeral, and the tears they had shed had been real, though the dead were peasants in a faraway village who died in a rockslide.

Here was the hound—Chala—walking with him as his mother had once done, as a queen among her dead.

When Richon was done, the new day was dawning bright and beautiful, as if to insist that it was not a day for death.

A trumpet made the call to arms.

All around him Richon felt men rush forward into battle.

He wanted to go with them, and yet the more he tried to move, the more he felt frozen in place, as if a great weight were pressing on his chest, so he could hardly breathe.

He cried out, and even that sound was muted.

He tried to wave his arms, but they would not move.

The hound came closer and sniffed at him. She whined and put a paw on his chest.

With that, Richon began to search inside himself.

He heard animals, some cawing, some scratching, some growling, in a tumult, and he could not distinguish one voice clearly from another. Where had they come from? Why were they inside him?

Then he remembered the forest, and the magic he had taken into himself. It was there still, and the animals to whom it had belonged had somehow lodged in him as well.

The animals were clamoring for something, but it was not until Richon turned toward the pile of the dead that the sound became a roar.

And the animals inside him somehow began to tug him forward.

When he was standing close to the center of them all, he felt a warmth inside himself, and a sudden quiet.

His chest throbbed, as if his whole body were being stretched.

Then he felt an animal leap out of him. It was a great gray wolf. When Richon closed his eyes, he could see the green light of the wolf’s magic, saved from the unmagic, in the midst of the dead.

Eyes open again, Richon could see one of the dead soldiers moving a foot.

For one moment Richon thought that the man had been set in the pile of the dead while yet living, and that he had struggled there for all these days, calling out, trying to show that he was not dead, and no one had seen him.

Richon felt horror at the thought.

And then he realized the truth.

The man had died.

But he was alive again. Because of the wolf.

The magic that gave life to all called the dead man back to his body and, combined with the strength of the animal’s magic, had healed his wounds.

The hound barked wildly.

And the rest happened all in a rush, too quickly for Richon to tell the difference between one animal leaving him and one man rising out of the ranks of the dead.

The animals went to those men they had an affinity for, as far as Richon could tell. At least they did so where it was possible. A man who had always taken the form of a wolf would be stirred by a wolf; the same with a man who was an elk, or a mouse, or a fox in his animal form.

As Richon felt the magic pouring out of himself and into the dead, he felt that for the first time in his life he had done something right. Something only he could do. Something marvelous and magical.

This was what the wild man had set in motion from
the first, to make all of this possible. He could not help but weep, not at his own power, but at the chance he had been given to reclaim something of his life, to help others, animal and human both.

He watched in amazement as the world shifted around him.

As the sun rose, so did the dead, some of them naked because their uniforms had been stripped from them and given to another. Others were fully clothed, though bloody, and even still armed. Their faces came back to the color of life and they cried out in the language of animals and men combined as they ran forward into the battle. If their own comrades in arms were afraid of them, this was nothing compared to the reaction of the opposing army.

Magic was something both armies shared, to a degree. But to bring back the dead, with animal spirits to give them strength—that had never been seen before. It had never even been spoken of before.

There were not many brave enough to hold their ground, and even those who did so were soon overwhelmed. The battle that had seemed a slaughter to Richon yesterday was now a rout, on the opposite side.

It was not until Richon thought about the royal steward that he realized there was no sign of the man, either at the front of the battle, with the men who were now fighting and winning, or at the back.

The royal steward’s personal guards were in disarray,
some still standing where they had been the day before, the others joining in the fray. They were easy to spot—well-fed men with clean uniforms, terrified of those with magic.

The royal steward must have slipped away sometime during the battle, which he had meant to be a failure. To get his justice, Richon would have to go after him.

But for now there was the army of the King of Nolira before him. And then he saw the lord chamberlain on his horse, struggling to get clear of the battlefield.

Richon could not see his face, but slowly the small movements of the man in a panic removed all doubt. This was the lord chamberlain, who had seemed so kind, so gentle when he had come with the news of the deaths of the king and queen. He had made sure that Richon had time to himself, and was given sweets and hot drinks, anything that he asked for. Young Richon had not had to deal with the funerals at all. The lord chamberlain and the royal steward had done everything difficult for him.

And yet the two had hated each other. Richon had known that from the first, and now and again it had amused him to set them against each other. They would argue hotly until he sent them away. They only agreed on things that were to the advantage of both of them.

Each fought on a different side of this battle, but in the end they both must have wanted the same thing: the
power of Richon’s kingdom.

Richon shook with anger as he looked at the lord chamberlain across the field of battle.

Richon had lost the royal steward. But he would not lose the lord chamberlain as well.