The Princess and the Bear (2 page)

T
HE HOUND’S PRESENCE
bothered the bear in small, petty ways, though he knew it should not. She slept noisily, and sometimes her legs moved in the night as if she were running. She ate constantly and moved so quickly that it made his head ache.

He wished that she would simply sit beside him at the stream. Or nuzzle next to him in the cave at night until they both fell asleep together.

He had not thought it possible to feel even lonelier than he had before Prince George had worked his magic to make the hound a hound again, and the princess a woman. But he did.

It was worse still when he and the hound were called for the wedding a few weeks later, and they saw the joy in the eyes of Princess Marit and Prince George. The way that each seemed to see only the other, the whispers they shared with each other, the gentle laughter and
instinctively coordinated steps.

Why could the bear not have the love that the prince had?

He had never been one to settle for second best. Over the last two hundred years, more than one she-bear had signaled with a rooting call and a turn of her flank that she had need of a mate and he would be a fine choice.

Had he been tempted? Perhaps a little. Having a warm body next to his, if nothing else, would have kept the cold of the winter nights away. Still, he had known it would have been a second best for both of them. A she-bear would be disappointed that he could not even speak as a bear and he wanted more than a warm body.

But the hound was not just a warm body. She was life and exuberance, freedom and grace. She was as fine a companion as he could have imagined having in the forest.

And yet…he could not say he loved her. There was something missing between them, something that George and Marit had. Something that the bear had never known but had always longed for.

One night, as the hound slept and he could see the spill of moonlight against her black form, the bear thought of the women whom he had believed he loved, when he was a king, and a man, and very young.

Lady Finick.

She had had the most beautiful blond hair. Her mouth
had been wide and very red, and when she was not smiling, she was laughing. And touching him. Leaning over him with her ample breasts, letting him smell the flowers in her hair, letting him feel her body against his.

Lady Trinner. She had been so petite that on first sight she had seemed a child. Then he had seen her bright eyes and the teasing flounce of her long black hair and gowns designed to make her tiny waist seem tinier still. She had been easy to dance with. One could hardly make a mistake as her partner.

Richon had been unable to choose between them. And why should he? He was king, was he not? Compromises and sacrifices were for others to make, not for him.

Then, one day, the royal steward had come to him with letters to prove Lady Finick was in a conspiracy with another man to steal from the royal treasury. When he confronted her, she did not try to deny it. She told him it was his own fault, for not marrying her soon enough, for not giving her access to the treasury himself.

Did she expect him to apologize for that? To offer to marry her then?

He listened to her screech at him, felt her spittle land on his cheeks, and told himself that he still had Lady Trinner.

But by then Lady Trinner had engaged herself to a duke from another kingdom, a man she had never met.

Fine, let her go, he thought. He did not care. He would
find another, better, brighter, prettier than she.

He said good-bye to Lady Trinner with cold formality, the lord chamberlain and royal steward at his side, looking on with approval at his restraint.

Hours later, he had given up his pride and leaped onto his fastest horse to chase after her. He caught her at the border of his country and begged her to stay with him.

She had looked him in the eyes and said, “But I could never love you. You are too shallow and selfish. You are a boy still, and I will not marry a boy.”

Then she had climbed back into her carriage and gone on her way.

When he returned to his palace alone, Richon had tried frantically to prove to himself that she was wrong. He called for sad songs from minstrels and listened to the deep philosophers of the kingdom. He even gave offerings to a few beggars outside the palace, where before he had set the royal hounds on them to chase them out.

But he soon tired of such pursuits and sought an easier way to blot out Lady Trinner’s memory: more ale and a series of days that ran into other days, indistinct and unending.

He began to believe he simply had no heart to give, and when the wild man had come with his army, he had thought that he would be given relief in death.

But the wild man had not taken his life. He had given him more life instead, an enchanted life as a bear that went on and on.

Now he understood poverty, hunger, desperation. He knew how selfish and thoughtlessly cruel he had been.

But love?

He had still not learned that.

S
OMETIMES SHE HAD
nightmares that she was human again.

She dreamed of the moment more than a year ago when Dr. Gharn had snarled at the princess, his face too close, his voice too loud.

She had growled at him, and then she had no longer been at the princess’s side. She had had no idea where the princess was at all, but Dr. Gharn was in her face.

He smiled at her. She tried to leap at him but fell over. He laughed.

She could not get up. There was something wrong. Everything was wrong.

She made a strange yelping noise. And then there had been a hound next to her. A familiar hound, one she could smell and recognize. But the hound did not lick her. It stared at her and made its own sound of distress.

She had spent days in the princess’s bedchamber,
alone, cowering under blankets whenever a maid entered with a tray of food that she could not bear to eat.

The hound prodded her to look at herself in a glass, see her human form. Together, using sign language, they had worked out the magic that Dr. Gharn had wreaked on them. She had accepted that it might never be undone, that she might remain in the body of a princess the rest of her life.

Prince George had saved her from that.

Now she was a hound once more—in body. But in mind?

If she still dreamed of being human, was there some part of her that had not returned to being a hound?

She dreamed of songs.

Stories.

Letters.

Even words carved into the stone of the palace.

And when she woke, there was silence with the bear.

The bear could not learn the sign language she had perfected with the princess. He was too old, perhaps. Or too used to living alone.

When winter came, she gave up trying to teach him. It frustrated them both, so they began to avoid each other. But they always returned to the cave at night.

The hound thought of some things that she missed about being human.

Music.

Lights.

The feel of thrice-carded wool against her nose.

And she was disgusted with herself. Those were soft things. She did not need them. She was a hound.

She did not need the bear, either. And she meant to prove it to herself.

The winter was long and killing cold. There was little to eat, and both the bear and hound grew thin.

The first night of spring, the hound went deep into the forest, to paths she remembered from her days with her own pack. She felt as if she had gone back in time to be that other hound. As if all her time with humans was washed from her.

It was a marvelous, free feeling.

She chased and chased, the heat of the run as glorious as the taste of fresh meat in her mouth.

When night struck, she crouched near a log and closed her eyes, ready to sleep. It was what she would have done before she met the princess, when she had been sent away from her pack and roamed the forest alone.

But she was not content.

She thought of the bear in the cave and how warm it was to sleep with him, how safe she felt with the sound of his breathing in her ears.

She dozed in fits and starts until the middle of the night, when she could sleep no more. She had to go back to the bear, to the cave. Home.

But it hurt to move. She ached all over from sore muscles.

It had been too long since she had spent so much time in a chase. And, she admitted to herself, she was getting older. She was no longer a young bitch hound, able to run all day without feeling ill effects.

In human years she was not old. She remembered eight full years of seasons.

But as a hound, she would at her age have had only one place remaining in a pack: to care for the pups of the lead mates. And even then, she would be given very little food indeed, for there were always more aging hounds than there was food to offer them.

To the bear, however, age and time were different than they were for any other creature, human or man. The bear had lived more than two hundred years, many times the lifetime of either a normal bear or a man. To him her age meant nothing.

Perhaps she did not need the bear, but that did not mean she did not miss him.

In the dark she struggled to make her way back through the forest. A few steps at a time, then resting as her sore paws found soft leaves. She was not lost, but she was glad when she found the familiar scent of the stream that ran near the cave. She was still some distance away, but now all she had to do was put her head down and follow the stream.

The cool water on her paws felt good, and even better when she let herself lie back on her haunches and cool the swollen muscles in her hind legs.

It was almost dawn when she caught sight of the cave. She stopped a long moment, then saw the bear at the mouth of the cave, standing upright and trembling.

She stepped back at the sight of him.

Was he angry?

She moved closer and he fell onto all fours and drew his face very close to hers.

She could feel his breath, and it might have been comforting but for the look of fierceness on his face.

She was sorry.

It was a strangely human thing to feel.

T
HE BEAR HAD
only a moment to feel relief at the sight of the hound. Then he saw the danger.

Just beyond the hound were three bears, two smaller and one very large. A mother and cubs? If so, the cubs were nearly grown now, and they were just as dangerous as their mother.

The bears were tense, ready for action. At any moment they would attack the hound.

Yet she did not sense them.

He waved at her.

At last she turned and let out a deep growl in the base of her throat.

One of the bear cubs moved closer to threaten her.

It paid no attention to the hound’s bear, seeing no reason to imagine an alliance between hound and bear.

They were natural enemies. The hound’s bear had once been attacked by a pack of hounds at the end of
winter, desperate for a meal and unaware of what it meant that a bear was not in hibernation.

Now it was spring and these bears had become the hunters, hungry for their first meal.

The mother bear was circling to the side.

Then the smaller of the two cubs slashed his claws at the hound’s left hind leg.

She did not even cry out.

The hound’s bear saw the blood streaming down her leg and into the dirt, and for one stunned moment he did not move. Then he flung himself forward, but she was ahead of him, closing in on the mother bear.

Was she trying to get herself killed?

Before he could intervene, the mother bear lunged at the hound and threw her across the stream. After the hound landed, she did not move.

The sight of her lifeless body, half in, half out of the stream, was more painful to the bear than he had imagined it could be.

“No!”

He wanted to shout, but all that came from his mouth was an inarticulate cry.

He charged again.

The other bears bellowed.

He struck the mother bear first, taking them both to the ground. The cubs leaped forward and sank their teeth into his skin, but he felt no pain.

His eyes were on the hound, who was still as death.

It had been a long time since he was so angry.

Not since he was a man and a king.

He threw the two cubs away from him so that they hit the ground hard and did not stand again for quite some time.

The mother bear rose and circled warily.

And then the hound moved. She did not stand, but she dragged herself from the stream.

She was alive!

The rush of violence faded.

After two deep breaths he turned back to the three bears, challenging them with his eyes to come after him.

They did not move.

So he put his back to the hound and retreated with her.

All three bears stood up on their hind legs as one last challenge, then fell and wandered away.

The hound dragged herself, refusing his help, back to the cave.

The bear brought leaves from the edge of the stream that he remembered from when he was a man and ill. The king’s physician had made him eat a tea brewed from those leaves so that his fever would break. The hound would need them, too.

She turned her head away from the taste.

But the bear pushed them at her again, pressing them into her mouth.

She chewed the bitter leaves a few times, then spit them out.

The bear went back to the stream to get more.

At last she managed to swallow a few of them.

She slept, and when she woke the bear had brought her a possum, dripping with blood.

All those years he had not killed another creature, and now he did it without thinking. He told himself it was the way of the forest and watched as she bolted the carcass down.

Then he came closer and licked her wounds.