The Princess and the Bear (3 page)

R
ECOVERING FROM THE
wound with the bear so close to her, every moment of the day, was pleasant at first. She felt safe with him despite the pain. But when the pain turned to itching, the hound found herself more irritable. She nipped at him more than once and stopped thinking of him as the bear who had saved her. He was her tormenter, and she could do nothing but what he said she could.

At last, after several days of confinement, the bear let her go on her own past his line of sight. She had proven she was well enough to catch a fish in the stream while he was watching. Her hind leg was cleanly healed and she moved without any hesitation, even when leaping forward into the water.

The hound was not interested in looking back. She was free again, and it was as wonderful as it had been when the magic had released her.

She leaped and yelped and stood very still, holding her breath so that she could see the other creatures move around her. There was a butterfly dusting by in the faint breeze, as beautiful and delicate as life itself.

But by the end of an hour’s play she was exhausted. She was not ready to return to the cave, so she wandered into the forest.

That was when she came across the strange trail. The first scent of it brought her up straight and unmoving, ready for attack. Then, slowly, as she realized there was no immediate danger, she divided the scent into the familiar and the unfamiliar.

The familiar was the trace of wild cat. She had not come across wild cats in this forest before, but farther north in the mountains that began at the end of the kingdom of Sarrey there were wild cats in plenty. They were mostly solitary creatures, not living in family groups or even clowders except when a mother had young children. This was a male wild cat, the hound was certain, but it was also something else.

The unfamiliar smell was far more troubling. It made her feel cold to the very bone. Her instincts screamed at her to leave, but she ignored them.

She looked around, determined to at least understand what was wrong here before she fled. This was her forest, and she would not be frightened from it.

There was a waterfall nearby, where a stream fell from one side of a crevice to the gully beneath. She
found a rock wall to hide behind, and there she waited.

In time her nose lifted at the scent of the wild cat.

Then she looked and saw—it was a man.

At least, it wore a man’s body.

Had it been enchanted, as she had been?

She held back and watched the cat man further.

He wore no shirt at all to cover his chest and shoulders. The hound herself was not cold in this weather, but she thought that a human must be. Yet she saw no sign of discomfort, no rubbing of hands or jumping in place to keep warm. Nor a fire, either.

Barefoot, the cat man’s feet trailed some blood but were mostly hardened and callused as if he had gone a long while without shoes. He wore tattered trousers, but with his crouched stance, his furtive wanderings, his scent, he seemed even less human than she was.

The cat man drank at the stream a little farther down from the waterfall. He bent over and drank with his face fully in the water, then lifted it up and shook his head, exactly as a wild cat would do.

The hound could see then that there was a strange coloring around his face. He was very tanned, but in addition to this, she could see, were the faint marks of a golden striping around his nose.

The cat man lay flat on his stomach with his hands dangling in the water. It was fresh snowmelt, so the water was very cold, but the cat man kept his hands in for quite a while. Then, with an animal’s swiftness and
precision, he caught a fish and threw it into the air.

The hound would have expected that he would lift his head up and let the fish fall straight into his open mouth, as a wild cat would.

But it did not happen that way.

Instead the cat man grabbed the fish out of the air with one hand and smacked it against a rock near the stream. Not quite enough to kill it, but enough to render it paralyzed.

Helpless but still sensible, the hound thought.

The cat man then stooped over it and stared at it for a long while.

It wasn’t until the hound was shivering that she realized he was doing more than just watching the motionless fish.

He was slowly draining it of whatever it was that made it alive. And smiling as he did so.

When he was finished, the color of the fish’s scales had changed to a dead gray. But the damage extended beyond the fish. From as far away as the hound was, she could feel the difference in the forest itself. As if something had been ripped from not just the fish, but every living thing within a certain radius.

This was what she had smelled from the first, in addition to the smell of the wild cat.

It was all the hound could do not to gag at the feeling of terrible magic in the air. She thought she had seen the worst magic there was in Dr. Gharn’s abominable use of it; she now knew that she was wrong.

The hound trembled, desperate to be away, to be out in full sunshine. She tried to keep very quiet. She was used to being a hunter and to stalking her prey. She should have been able to keep still.

But the cold that seeped into her bones was too much for her.

She made the smallest sound, like a moan, and the cat man’s eyes turned toward her.

There was a wide smile on his face as his eyes seemed to catch her.

But the cat man was distracted by a deer that crossed between him and the hound. The deer froze as the hound had, and it was in that moment that the hound fled.

She heard the sound of a weight falling but no cry.

She ran and did not stop until she was at the cave once more, drenched in sweat and shaking so she could not stand.

The bear came close and touched her hind leg, in search of a reopened cut or a fever, but she ignored him.

Where had the cat man come from? She had never sensed anything like that cold death before, so the cat man had to be recently come to this part of the world. Where had it been before? What had it done?

She imagined the same cold death spread everywhere. She could not stop her mind from seeing a barren land stretching out before her. Was that why the cat man had come here? Had it destroyed all it could where it had been and now would do the same here?

Did it even know what it did?

She thought again of the cat man’s face, the pleasure it showed in the fish’s death.

It knew.

She looked up at the bear at last.

He made a motion with his paws, as if to offer to get a kill for her.

She shook her head and began to scratch in the dirt, making an elaborate map of the forest, beginning with the stream beside the cave and marking other places in the forest she and the bear both knew well. The place of the transformation, near the castle, the hills at the north, the streams that emptied into a river at the south.

Never before had she been so frustrated by the need for human words.

She tried to draw the cold death with dark, angry lines close together, but the bear only stared at them, uncomprehending.

How to describe the choking feeling, the terror?

She knew she would have to take him to the place and let him experience for himself what the cat man had left behind.

But not now. Not yet.

When the bear settled into his place near the opening, she was glad of it.

After a sleepless night, she led the bear back to the waterfall.

She had to stop now and then to let the bear catch up
with her, though normally they were much of the same pace. Her heart was beating so fast she felt it might fly away, and she slowed her pace only when she noticed an unnatural sting in the air.

The cold death had spread and encompassed more area now. She looked down to her paws to see that the ground itself seemed changed, even where the cold had not fully taken hold. The plants were not as green as they had been. They were tinged with brown and wilting, though there had been plenty of rain this spring.

It was worse closer to the stream, where the plants looked as if they had simply withered up and been blown away by wind. There was a gentle blanket of gray chaff everywhere, and all sign of life was gone.

The hound pointed to the stream and pantomimed the cat man reaching for the fish and knocking it against the rock. But that did not truly explain what she had seen. Frustrated, she tried once more to think.

But the bear did not wait for her. He moved a hind leg into the line of gray that marked the cold, then tottered and fell into it.

T
HE BEAR COULD
feel the cold seeping into his body, making his nose go numb at the tip as if there were snow falling outside and a wind howling deepest winter. But in a true change of seasons, he could still feel his heart beating, and the warmth at the core of his body. This unnatural cold made him disconnected from himself, as if his mind were no longer part of his bear’s body but rising above it and watching with no feeling at all as it lay down and began to die.

The hound tugged at him from her place outside the line of full gray, but his body was a useless weight. At last she went into the stream and pulled at his bulk from there.

Immediately the water warmed him, chill as it was.

There was a deeper warmth, of nature, that the water drew from other parts of the forest.

He and the hound rode the stream past all hint of
gray on the forest floor. About half the distance back to the cave, they fell on a bank and lay there, side by side, panting.

It was some time before the bear noticed the quiet. The animals were afraid of the cold death. But fear alone would not protect them if the cold death spread farther into the forest.

And he had no idea how it could be fought.

Perhaps there was one who did, but the thought of the wild man made the bear’s jaw clench. He would not seek out that one willingly a second time.

Slowly he and the hound made their way back to the cave. He thought of how the death of that one section of the forest would affect it all. What of the insects that fed on the plants? The birds that fed on the insects? And those creatures that ate the birds?

It was almost too much to hold in his mind. He wished he weren’t the least bit human, that he could not imagine how much worse things might become. But then he saw how the hound walked, slumped to one side, with no hope in her. She seemed to feel it exactly as he did.

So perhaps it had nothing to do with being human, after all.

They reached the crossover to the cave, and the bear stopped short. It was the scent of cold death that stopped him first, and then he realized there was something else. A figure standing in front of the cave.

A man, but not a man.

The bear remembered how the hound had tried to describe a man and a cat to him, and her shivering.

She tensed now and the bear could feel her ready to spring, to attack.

He roared and went forward himself, the hound close on his heels.

But the man-creature ran with a wild cat’s speed and grace, leaping from stone to tree, and then from tree to tree without stopping.

The bear lost track long before he gave up the chase. The dark had aided the cat man, and the bear could see no farther than a paw in front of his eyes.

The hound whined at him, but he pushed her back toward the cave, toward home. Until they both felt the cold again.

Where the cat man had walked from the cave to the stream there was another barrier of gray and cold.

The cat man must have followed the hound’s trail from the day before, but it was too dark to do anything now. They would have to wait until morning, near home but not in it. Perhaps never in it again.

He felt the hound quiver and moved closer to her. There was only the shelter of a small, budding tree nearby.

It was the longest night in the bear’s memory, longer even than the first night he had spent as a bear.

He counted each heartbeat.

He had always thought he had found courage as
a bear. He had not realized that it was in part that he had had nothing to lose.

Suddenly he was struck with a flash of memory from when he was very young, when he ran too early into his parents’ bedroom one morning, before his nursemaid could catch him.

He had caught them asleep, one of his father’s arms wrapped around his mother’s chest. His mother with one arm held up to catch his father’s arm, as if to pull it closer to herself. Their legs entwined, the blankets thrown off, as if they did not need any warmth but what they shared with each other.

He had run away, out into the castle gardens. He had pouted there for most of the morning, missing breakfast. Then he had been dragged back to his bedroom for a nap that he was determined not to take.

He could only think about his parents and how they had been complete. Without him.

The first light of dawn stretched like fingers through the trees of the forest.

The hound woke and pulled away from him, then stood on all fours and watched as the sun reached the cave and its surroundings. What the cat man had done was starkly visible.

Just above the stream was the shelf of rock where the bear often came out during the spring or fall to let the gentle evening light fall on him as he dozed and thought of the past and what might have been. It had once had
tiny fronds of fern growing up through cracks. These were gone, as if they had never been.

The bear swallowed hard before turning his gaze to the cave itself.

The cave was destroyed, the rocks collapsed, as if some living part deep inside had been torn away.

The bear felt his own legs fall out from under him. As he fell, he cut his face on a prickle bush by the stream, a bush he had always hated.

But now he wanted to sing to it, to praise it.

The prickle bush was still alive. It was green. It might yet survive. If so, it was the only thing that remained of his home that was as it had been for two hundred years.

He felt as wounded as if he had been cut through by a sword, and worse, for a physical wound could be healed. This—never.