The Princess and the Bear (4 page)

T
HE HOUND THOUGHT
that they must go to Prince George. If there was any hope of fighting the cat man and his cold death, it would have to be with the prince. Yet he had used his great magic only once. Could he learn to control it? How much of the forest would be destroyed by that time?

She and the bear went to the edge of the forest near the castle. It had been months since their transformation, but still the hound was stung at the thought of how easily Marit had gone to a new life without her. Only at the wedding had she been acknowledged, and then with a tiny bow from Marit. Since then neither George nor Marit had come to visit in the forest.

The hound waited for some sign of a friendly face. She could not simply walk up to the castle door and scratch on it, howling for attention. She would be sent away.

At last she caught sight of a group of humans moving
toward the forest. The hound recognized George and Marit, along with a handful of others, most young and dressed as little more than peasants.

The hound noticed with some satisfaction that Marit wore practical trousers and a short jacket rather than the floating, gauzy thing she had worn at the wedding. But her face looked troubled.

From her bearing, the hound could see that Marit was bound to her prince and to those around him. These were her pack now.

The bear began to move toward the humans. The hound had to run to catch up with him.

The humans stopped at the edge of the forest, though the hound did not know why. There was no hint of the cold death here. Yet.

Then Prince George saw the bear. He started, then stretched out a hand.

“Bear, it has been too long,” he said, and waved at the bear to come closer.

The other humans were wide-eyed at the sight of a huge bear approaching them, with the exception of one boy, who had very blond hair and a pinched face. He was utterly blank when he looked at the bear, as if he had never felt fear. Or had felt it too much and could feel it no longer.

“Where is—” said Marit suddenly.

And then the hound moved so that she could be seen.

Marit threw her arms up and raced toward the
hound, throwing herself to her knees and giving her a fierce embrace.

The hound stared at Marit, so tall and thin. Her red hair, once worn in the long style that her father and his kingdom expected of a noblewoman, was now cut very short. It stuck up all around her ears, but somehow it suited her. It made her look younger, and it fit the freckles that still dominated her face.

“We could not come. The danger of those who hate the animal magic is still so strong—we feared for you if we were seen to seek you,” said Marit in a jumble of words. “We only dare to come into the forest here, at the very edge, and always we are careful to speak to different animals, so there is no pattern that can be seen by our enemies. Even so—” She stopped and turned to Prince George.

Gravely he said, “There has been more than one of those innocents we spoke to who have died. The burned body of one was left at the castle gate, as a clear warning to us. This has been the first chance we have had to come out into the forest in safety.”

“Mar—” Marit started to say to the hound, then checked herself. “I don’t know what to call you now.”

The hound stared blankly. It had been the princess who had insisted on giving her a name. And after George loved her as a hound, she had taken that name for her own. It was confusing, if one cared about names. The hound did not.

Marit sighed. “‘Hound’ will have to do for now, I suppose. But how good it is to see you, truly. You look well.”

The hound supposed it was true. She had more fresh meat now than she had had with the princess. And living in the forest gave her plenty of exercise.

“Ah, Bear,” said Marit, stepping back. “It is good to see you, too.” She put out a hand and touched the bear’s back, then turned back to the hound.

“I must admit, being with you here makes me feel at home in a way that nothing else has.” She took a breath and smiled ruefully. “Not even my own pillow, which George rode all the way to Sarrey to get for me when I mentioned to him once that I missed the smell of it. Three days he was gone, and used up two horses on the way. Just to get me a pillow. Can you imagine?” She shook her head and there was a hint of blush in her cheeks.

The hound remembered the possum the bear had brought to her when she was wounded and unable to move away from the cave herself. For her, too, it was a strange thing to be taken care of.

“Well, let’s introduce them, shall we, George?” she said.

George bowed to her. He looked older and more self-assured, as much a man as a boy. As much a king as a prince, if only of this small part of his kingdom. His shirt was ragged and stained on the cuffs, and he seemed completely unaware of it. He had also put on some pounds
around his chest and stomach—not all of it muscle.

“Sometimes I still do not believe my memories of that day, and my magic,” said George. “It is good to see the truth before my face again.”

The bear made a strange low sound.

Prince George moved gingerly closer to him. The bear’s mouth gaped open, showing his huge, sharp teeth. George stared straight at them, then put his arms around the bear’s shoulders and let his head rest there. Suddenly he seemed young again, hardly more than a boy.

He took a deep breath and pulled himself away.

“This is the bear and the hound I have told you about,” he said, turning back to the others in the group.

Turning to the bear, George waved at the humans. “This is the school of magic.”

The hound remembered George’s enthusiasm for the school. But there were only a handful here. Was that all the success he had had?

Along with the blond-haired boy, there was a man with the tattoos on his face of a murderer from the southern kingdom of Thurat. One of the women was missing an eye and a hand, and her face had been burned terribly.

The hound wished she believed more in Marit’s new pack’s strength and loyalty. They did not hold close to her as they should, if the danger Marit and George spoke of was so constant.

“Well,” said George awkwardly.

But the hound had no time to make him comfortable again. George might think his place threatened, but there was much worse to come, as he would know when she told him of the cold death.

“Our home is destroyed,” she began, speaking in the language of the hounds.

“What?” said George, starting.

How many of the others understood her? Not the princess, nor from the looks of them the others. And the blond-haired boy seemed utterly uninterested. His whole body was turned away.

“The bear’s cave, where we have lived since—since the transformation,” she continued.

“But how was it done?” asked George. “There have been no earth rumblings, no lightning strikes. Other animals?”

Of a sort, thought the hound.

She looked toward the bear. She wished that he could tell his part of the story. The bear was far more experienced in magic than she was, and had more of the prince’s trust. But the communication was left to her.

“It is a cat man,” said the hound. She waited a moment to see how the prince would react.

“Cat man,” he echoed.

The hound thought she saw a bit of movement from one of the other humans, but she was focused on the prince. “I think it is a cat, but it has been changed into a man. It brings a cold death with it that spreads through the
forest,” she said. It was the best she could do to explain.

“A cat man? I believe I have read an old, old tale of such a creature in this area. But it could not possibly be the same one after all this time, and so long away…” The prince trailed off.

“I do not know about your tale, but I know that this cat man takes life with pleasure. Soon the forest will be consumed.”

George nodded. “I will do what I can with my magic. You have but to show me the way.”

He turned back to Marit and the others. “You should go back to the castle. All of you. There is danger in this.”

Marit grinned, a grin of defiance, of challenge. A hound’s toothy grin, learned from her days in another form. “Is it to do with animal magic?” she asked.

“Yes,” said George.

“Then we should go with you. What are we here for if not to learn about magic, dangerous or not?”

George shook his head. “No,” he said, looking at her belly. “Not now.”

And then the hound stared at Marit again. Her balance was different. And her smell. She should have noticed from the first. The princess was with child. Early still, not enough to show on her tall, thin frame, but it was there.

Yes, the prince would want to protect her.

But the princess would have none of it. “We are a school. If you protect us, we learn nothing.”

The hound thought how a male hound would have reacted to his mate who refused to obey him. A cuff to the ear or a slash at the belly. More, if necessary.

But George was human, and so was the princess.

Far easier to be a hound
, she thought.
Unless one is not a hound.

George nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly. “You will come, then.” He turned back to the hound and spoke to her quietly, under his breath. “The cat man—it is gone now, is it not? You only mean to show us what it left behind with its magic, yes?”

He was asking for the sake of the princess and the unborn child, not for himself.

“I think it has done its work here already,” said the hound.

“Then take us,” said the prince roughly.

The hound turned and led them, the bear following behind.

C
OMING THIS WAY
through the forest, they found further evidence of the harm done by the cat man. The bear could hear the voices of sick and dying animals calling out to him. He did not need to understand their languages to hear their pain and bewilderment.

But he watched Prince George and saw his pain. Each cry was like an arrow to his side. Princess Marit moved closer and then put an arm around him.

They reached the cave, and George tried to step past the stream into the area of cold death. Over and over again, George tried to force himself forward until he was retching on his hands and knees, his face pale and his breathing shallow and fast.

“Is there more?” he asked hoarsely.

The hound led George on to the place where the gray edge was seeping outward.

The humans moved slowly. The bear could hear their feet dragging through the dirt, and he and the hound had to stop many times to let the humans rest.

There seemed to be a taste of death in the air even some distance away, and the bear could see fallen animals scattered ahead, touched by enough of the cold to succumb to it, though the plants were not fully gray here.

The bear’s breath came shallow and quick. This was his home. He had no kingdom anymore but this one, no castle but his cave. And for so long he had watched over this place, in his own way.

Now it was all disintegrating. Soon the remaining animals would be fleeing this forest and it would be deserted. The humans would encroach yet further here, and it would be as if this place, his place, never was.

“Oh,” Prince George groaned, before they had even come within eyesight of the stream where the hound had seen the cat man, where the bear had first tasted the cold death, and where it was now fully black as ashes.

Princess Marit touched the prince’s arm. “No need to go farther,” she warned him.

George shook his head. Sweat streamed down his face. He struggled away from her and, bent over, moved forward.

The bear realized now that Marit might have known better than anyone why she would be needed here, though she had no magic of her own.

“Please!” she called after the prince. “Come back!”

George nearly tripped over a carcass.

Then, in horror, the bear saw it melting into the ground. Before his eyes, he could see the disintegration of one tiny squirrel’s body as it became indistinguishable from the other bodies around it, falling into the gray deadness all around.

Surprised by the sudden change under his feet, George fell, landing flat on his face, his mouth touching the cold death.

“George!” cried Marit. She put out her arms and tried to press herself forward, into the worst of the cold death.

The bear pushed her out of the way and threw himself toward George.

Once he was there, however, he did not know how to get them both out. In the end, George stirred enough beneath him that the bear’s contact with the ground was interrupted. The bear had just enough strength then to push George forward. Then George leaned back and tugged the bear out as well.

Once free, the bear felt numbness in his forelegs and-paws, and a point on his stomach that had had too much contact with the dead ground. George’s lips were discolored, and one of his ears looked deflated.

Marit had to lead him in the right direction, away from the cold death, for he did not walk steadily now.

The hound walked at the bear’s side.

When they had gone nearly to the other end of the forest, George stopped and called for food.

The blond-haired boy and one of the others brought out bread and dried fruit. George had it shared around equally, and offered some to the bear and the hound as well.

The bear ate a little, then turned to see that the hound, for all she had always turned her nose up at such meals before, also took a bit of the bread and chewed on it slowly. He thought she must be terribly hungry and afraid.

“I do not know how to battle this,” said Prince George. “This pulls from me all that I am, all that I feel.”

Was the prince giving up? The bear did not think him a coward, but had hoped for more.

“You are saying we must retreat and leave our dead behind?” asked Marit. The bear remembered her father was a warrior as well as a king. She would not be used to defeat.

“I am saying that it is one thing to cut a new channel for water that is already flowing. That changes only the course of the water, as I have done with you and the hound,” said George. “But it is another thing again to fill a stream that has gone dry with water one must call from the sky to fall just so.”

“And who could do this?” asked Marit.

“One who knows more of magic than I,” said George. “One who breathes it in like a fish breathes water. One who has been part of magic from the first.”

The bear felt a chill run through him, leaving a numbness in his paws. Who was the coward now?

“Let me tell you a story,” said George. “It is a story about the wild man.”

It was the last thing the bear wanted to hear. Had he not suffered enough at the hands of the wild man?

Yet for the sake of the forest animals and their magic, the bear was willing to listen even to this.

“It is a story of a challenge between the two greatest warriors: a man and a wolf. I had to read it through to the end before I understood how it had to do with the wild man.

“His name was Tors and he was a giant of a man,” George said. “His legs were as thickly muscled as tree trunks and he could run as fast as a deer. He knew how to use a sword so well that no man dared stand against him, and he knew the minds of other men so well that he had never been surprised in battle.

“Tors had heard of the wolf known as the Bear-killer, who had killed a bear on his own when he was only two seasons old and then became leader of his pack. In the years following, the Bear-killer gathered more and more wolves to his pack until there were hundreds of them, a terrifying sight to see. So Tors went in search of the Bear-killer and found him with his pack.

“Using the language of the wolves, Tors challenged the Bear-killer to a race across the great globe itself, over mountains, rivers, deserts, snow, and oceans. This race would test endurance and determination as well as physical prowess and sheer ingenuity. It might take more than
a year to finish, but the first of the two to return to the very place in the forest on which he now stood would be declared the winner. The other would lie down and give up his life for the first.

“The Bear-killer accepted the challenge. What else could he do? The human warrior had cried out to him in the hearing of his mate, his pups, and all the other wolves in his pack. And truly he wanted to fight the human. He was tired of the way in which humans saw the whole world as theirs. They cut trees and took over forests that belonged to the animals, and killed those who tried to fight for their homes. Humans were arrogant and had to be shown their true place, which was no higher than that of any other creature.

“‘Then let it begin,’ said Tors.

“‘But wait!’ called out the Bear-killer, for he was as cunning as the human warrior. ‘Because you have set all the other conditions of this quest, I add this one: that those of our own kind who are able to help us shall be allowed to. Thus shall this test be more than for one man and one wolf, but for all men and all wolves.’

“Tors could not see that this would make any difference to the outcome of the race. The Bear-killer still had to run every mile of the race himself, as would he. So he agreed to this change, and the race began.

“Tors began to run toward the mountains in the east. The Bear-killer did the same. But a wolf runs faster than a man, so he was miles ahead before night fell. Then, in the
dark, as Tors rested, the Bear-killer found another pack of wolves close by and spoke to them about the human warrior who believed himself superior to all wolves. The wolf pack was so incensed that they needed no suggestion from the Bear-killer as to what to do next. They attacked immediately, dozens of them coming in the dark against one man.

“Tors defended himself and killed them all. He cried out his triumph into the dark night so that the Bear-killer could hear that he had not beat the human warrior so easily. But Tors was wounded with many wolf bites and had to tend to himself through the night. In the morning he had not eaten well or slept, and when he began his journey again he was much weakened.

“He asked for help from other humans in villages that he passed through, telling them about his great quest to prove that a man is better than a wolf. They agreed that his quest was a good one, but they would not give him food unless he labored for it. So Tors was forced to stop for several days and was further delayed behind the Bear-killer. He told himself that the wolf, though moving well here in the mountains, would soon falter in the deserts.

“But there were desert wolves as well. And in each terrain that they passed through, the wolf never fell behind. Worse still, the human warrior became more battered as time went on, hungrier and thirstier and further in need of aid from the human villages he passed by. And yet they would give him nothing at all, or very little. They had
excuses, for they said the harvest had gone badly, or the winter had been too cold. Tors drank from streams and ate raw meat, and made coverings for himself from leaves and grasses.

“But the wolf, the Bear-killer, was always treated kindly by other wolves, and they helped him in whatever way they could. They thought of any victory he would have against the human as their own victory, whereas the humans were too selfish to think this way. Tors was a man from another village, another kingdom, far away. If he won his contest, they would never know or care. So why should they share their resources with him?

“Tors began to see how selfish humans were compared to the wolves. It made him angry, and yet he wondered if he would have been any different if a stranger had passed through his village asking for help in a contest against an animal. For all his cunning and skill, Tors had never understood the world this way before. And he began to fear that he could lose this race.

“At last the two warriors reached the ocean. Staring out into it, seeing the human vessels that bobbed up and down in the waves, Tors felt he had found hope again. He turned to the Bear-killer and said, ‘Are you ready to give up? If you tell me you are finished now, I will make your death easy.’

“The wolf spat at Tors and then leaped atop him and began to attack him in earnest, as he had never done before. It was a great battle, but it ended too soon, for a
tidal wave washed over them and dragged them out to sea. Neither wolf nor man could survive alone in the terrible current. It was only in this intense moment of desperation that they reached for each other to survive. And in that moment when a man and a wolf tried to help each other instead of battle each other, they found the magic that binds humans to animals.

“And the two began to change into one.

“The man first grew the head of a wolf, and then the tail to keep him steady in the water. The wolf grew a man’s long fingers for paddling. They pushed against the water to reach the surface. They kicked and swam as their lungs screamed. But it was not until they thrashed so violently that the two forms could no longer remain separate in one space. The two became one, and they were able to find air and breathe in life once more.

“A man and a wolf had gone into the water, but it was one creature that came out of it. This creature had wild eyes and a beard that was the grayish white of a wolf’s skin. He no longer had the stature of a giant, but had something between the height of a man and a wolf. At times he could make himself into a wolf. At other times he took on only a few of the aspects of the wolf: the teeth, the claws, the tail. Often he looked simply like a very wild man, which he was indeed. A man who had become one with an animal and was happy with the change, and did not seek to return to the two separate creatures he had been.”

The bear felt only a twinge of sympathy for the wild man. He, at least, had kept some of his human side. The bear had no such comfort.

George held up a hand. “There is more,” he said. “The story I read insisted that the magic that bound the wild man into one form also bound him to life. When he is not found among those with the magic, he is to be found in the north, on the very highest peak of the sheerest mountains, where he watches over the magic still. Yet he is no servant of animal or man, but of magic itself, and he aids it always in the battle against unmagic,” said George.

Unmagic
. It was the perfect name for the cold death in the forest. Magic was a way of connecting with other lives. This—unmagic—was a way of severing all those connections.