The Princess and the Bear (7 page)

T
HE BEAR HATED
the wild man’s mountains. He hated the small rocks that tore at the soft spots on his paws and the large rocks that cut at his skin when he squeezed by them. He hated the way that the rocks shifted as he stepped on them, then heaved him forward to knock him down, breathless and bruised.

He hated the thin air that made it so that he had to take in two breaths for every step he took and still feel as though his lungs were constricted. He hated the cold that the wind whipped at him when he was sharp and awake, but he hated it just as much when he was trying to rest, and the cold, persistent and prickling, kept at him.

Most of all, though, he hated the pressure of the magic on every part of him, overwhelming and unrelenting.

How to describe it?

A fine meal at court, when he had been king and dish after dish had been brought before him, each more
delicious than the last. His stomach was full early on, but he could not stop taking just one more bite, and another bite.

It had nothing to do with not offending his cook. He was king. He could do what he pleased, and the cook had no say in it.

It was only that he wanted more.

This magic was like that. Some part of him wanted it, though another part of him was overwhelmed by it.

He felt overcome by the sweet scent of the brush here. He felt even the tiny thorns in his paws from the little creeping vine that seemed to find a place to grow even in the deepest crevices of the rock. For it was as if the vine spoke to him and the brush sang to him. They knew themselves and they knew him.

He had no doubt that this was where the wild man must be. Who else could survive here?

His dread rose as it began to snow. Soon he could no longer feel his extremities. And at every step he was afraid.

He remembered a story he had heard once, of a man who had decided one day to change himself into a snake because it was the least like himself of all the animals. A snake had no legs, had scales, and was not a warm-blooded creature. So becoming a snake would prove that he had more animal magic than any pretenders.

But when the man became a snake, he was so interested in his new body, in turning this way and that, in discovering how quickly he could move and how food
would taste when swallowed whole, he lost all sense of his human self.

He died when he tried to attack a human—one of his own friends, in fact, who had come in search of him. But the friend had reacted automatically to the danger of poison from the snake and used a hunting knife to pin the snake to the floor of the forest, then his feet to stomp the life out of it.

As the friend held the dead snake in his hands, he realized his mistake at last. But he did not weep.

“It is better thus,” he said. “For a man who forgets himself is better dead.”

The bear fought to not forget himself amid this great magic.

He had been King Richon.

He had been turned into a bear by the wild man.

He had left the hound behind, had hurt her when she did not deserve it. But he would have done it all over again if he had to, to save her from this magic that battered him even now—and would get worse.

He pulled himself up to another shelf, using a boulder to his right for leverage. As he tottered, the boulder slipped from his grasp and fell off the cliff. Its fall took several long seconds. The bear did not look down.

He thought how dangerous this journey would have been with the hound.

He took a rest for two breaths, then heard a sound behind him, a scraping.

He turned and craned his head to look down, but he could see nothing. The snow was falling more heavily now, and it made everything indistinct.

Perhaps the wind had blown a small rock, and that was what he had heard.

He was no longer sure of himself. His limbs felt heavy and swollen. He was so tired that he spent much of the time moving forward with his eyes closed, as if half in sleep.

He went on for several more hours, hearing nothing.

The journey was excruciatingly slow. The climb was so sheer that he had taken only a few steps before there was another sheer cliff before him that he had to scale. He forced himself to go onward. If he stopped now, in this snowstorm, he could freeze to death.

But he felt so much warmer when he stopped.

He awoke, startled, and did not know how much time had passed. He could see nothing. Was it night or had the snowstorm become blinding?

His eyelashes had frozen shut. He rubbed at his eyes. Then opened them again.

There was a little light now.

But he still did not know how long he had slept.

And then he heard another sound.

It came from below him, but when he slid closer to the edge to look over, he swayed and nearly fell over.

He crawled back and listened again.

It was not the wind. It was too persistent a sound, too patterned.

Silence, scraping, scraping, silence, scraping, scraping again.

The same sounds the bear himself would have been making if he had been climbing.

Was any predator so desperate as to chase the bear up these cliffs?

He listened again.

There was breathing as well, heavy, gasping breaths, as if from a creature in pain.

It took a long moment before the bear realized that he recognized the register of those breaths.

It was a hound.

His hound.

“No!” The bear bellowed, a mournful cry that stopped the sound of scraping below him. But not for long.

When it began again, he could only think that he must get to the top first, enter the wild man’s lair and finish his business before the hound reached him.

He could not fight her here. It would be her death. His, too, most likely, but it was her life he had wanted to preserve. He had been willing to do anything for that, even make her hate him.

And now it seemed she had been more stubborn even than he had imagined.

He forced himself to climb again, to match his
movements with hers, and then to exceed them. He gave himself no respite. This was a competition of speed and dexterity rather than sheer strength. The bear did not know if he would win.

At last he could see no cliff directly in front of him. He stumbled forward, hands outstretched to feel for the edge in case the snow had obscured it.

But this was level ground.

And the snow had lightened up enough that he could see.

There was a long stone shelf here and below him he could see the mountains in a circle, as if this peak were the jewel set in a crown, and extending out from that first circle was another circle, and another.

He could only see the faintest glimpse of the lowlands that he had come from and the forest beyond that.

The wind had quieted.

And still the bear could not hear the sound of the hound climbing behind him.

Was it only a matter of minutes before she arrived?

Or had she fallen?

He could not tolerate that thought.

Perhaps she was resting for a moment.

He had to get to the wild man now. The bear tried to call out and was infuriated by his limitations as never before!

He saw a pine tree ahead and moved toward it.

The closer he got, the more he realized that this
was no ordinary tree. It had been trained to grow tight around the edges, with the branches making walls, and one opening left so that there was a glimpse of the openness inside.

He stepped to the opening in the tree and bent down to enter, but the tree rose up to accommodate his height. The whole thing moved, as if it were alive.

The bear swallowed hard and concentrated on the scrapes and cuts on his body. It took away a bit of the fear of seeing the wild man again.

This was what he had come for, but it was like becoming the boy king again, with so little experience, too much pride, and no magic at all.

Then he heard movement behind him and turned to see—

The hound.

She was covered in snow and blood and dirt, hardly recognizable from the graceful creature she had once been.

She stared at him, as if waiting to see if he would attack her again.

But it was too late now. She was here. There was no protecting her from the magic of the wild man or anything else.

He thought for a moment about what the journey might have been like if they had been together, helping each other, comforting each other. It was a painful thought, and he pushed it away.

The hound barked once roughly, and the bear could hear her pain in it.

He opened his mouth and let out a sound in return, one that expressed his grief and his sudden, overwhelming happiness at seeing her alive.

He had always tried not to speak in front of the hound before, because it was embarrassing to him to make sounds that had no meaning. Now his pride was stripped away.

He stared at her wounds. He could still see the streaks of red where he had cut into her belly, a wound that might have been healed by now if she had not come after him.

He could see the way she limped on her left hind leg. He could tell by the way she shifted her weight that there were bruises beneath her dark skin.

All his fault.

T
HE HOUND SAW
the wild man standing behind the bear and gaped.

He was wild indeed, with hair down to his chest in front, dark in spots but gray in others, and a grizzled beard. He wore nothing at all, as a wolf would, but somehow he wore it with a human confidence. He was not large, certainly not when compared to the bear. He was a little taller than the princess, but wiry thin. There were many old scars on his body.

She had heard of the wild man in the human stories of the bear’s transformation.

She thought she would fear him, but she felt for him much as she did for the strange tree he stood beside, which seemed to open its branches to invite them in.

Such a tree could not have grown without magic, and the magic seemed to add to it rather than make it less than it was. So it was with the wild man.

He gestured for them to move into the shelter of the tree. It was not warm inside, but it was not cold, either.

“Well come,” said the wild man, holding out his hand. He spoke to the hound first, and she trembled a little at the way his voice penetrated directly to her mind rather than through her ears.

He turned to the bear. “And you, well come. It has been some years, has it not?”

The bear was careful to step inside the tree and move to the side, all without touching the wild man.

The hound, however, held out her front right paw and shook the wild man’s hand. She had not done it with another human before because she had felt it would make her less of a hound. But with the wild man that didn’t seem possible.

He spoke in a language that was pure magic, not hound and not bear and not human.

“You must eat with me,” said the wild man, and he gestured to a short table with flat pillows around it, perfectly situated for a hound or another creature who came to eat with the wild man. Or a human.

The bear lumbered forward and sniffed at the bread he was offered. He seemed to eat it only reluctantly—as if afraid of what the wild man might have put in it.

As for the hound, she ate the bread without hesitation, but was surprised to discover that it tasted exactly like the best killing she had ever made. It was fresh and salty, and she felt as though somehow the bread were dripping
blood down the back of her throat.

After they had filled their starving bellies, the hound looked up at the wild man and spoke to him in the bear’s place, for she knew he could only speak in groans and growls.

“We come to ask about a creature we have seen, a cat man,” she said, intending to speak in the language of the hounds, though when it came out it sounded different than before, and she could see from the bear’s attitude that he could understand her.

The wild man’s magic must have made it possible, just as it made it possible for him to be understood by all.

The wild man nodded, as if not truly surprised. He would know the tale of the cat man, of course. “And what does it do, this cat man that you have seen?” he asked cautiously.

“It destroys life. It sucks it from the earth and leaves nothing behind. It is not even like death,” said the hound, struggling with the limitations of a hound’s language even here. “It is a coldness that the forest has never seen before, for death there always brings forth another life. And this brings nothing.”

The wild man nodded. “Unmagic,” he said.

“Yes,” said the hound softly. She prepared herself to receive some terrible magic once more, to help the forest.

But the wild man sighed. “There are many stories of the beginning of magic, but not so many of its end. Some say that the beginning is the birth of the first twin and the
ending the birth of a second. All that happens between the two is the agony of a mother waiting for relief.

“Others tell that time itself is a lover’s chase that seems long to those who are running but to others is but a moment that is drawn out until the anticipation is over and the lovers united. When the lovers, who are magic and unmagic, fully embrace, they will cause a conflagration that will destroy each other and all other living things.

“It has been my task to hold off this final destruction. It is an eternal battle, without hope for peace. For the end of magic cannot be bargained with or bribed. It presses forward, relentless and unendingly powerful. But still I fight it.

“Because while I cannot stop it entirely, I can delay it. With each victory I hold back the power of the unmagic to allow magic for another year, or another century, or two centuries to allow more children to find the happiness that only comes from the play of magic in the forest, more animals to see humans not as enemy but as kin.

“Yet I find myself growing weak.”

The hound could not believe it. The wild man held more strength than she had ever felt. She thought of what he might have been before now and had a glimpse of why the bear had feared him so.

But if he could not help them, then this journey had been useless.

“It is not time for the magic to end,” the wild man
continued. “So while I no longer have the strength to leave this place and go to do the work of magic out there”—the wild man waved behind them, down the mountain—“I can still bring those who are necessary to me and use them to help me gain another decade—or more.” He stared hard at the hound.

The hound was frozen, but the bear moved between her and the wild man. She was grateful for his attempt at protection, though she doubted he could stop the wild man from doing what he wished to her.

The wild man’s voice spun out like steam under the boughs of an oak. “I once worked within the fabric of time, moving forward, always forward, as it does. But I do so no longer. To save magic, I shift between times. I tinker here and there, then step back and see what else must be done. Always to save the magic.

“So it was that when I came to you, King Richon—”

The bear stiffened at the mention of his old name, as if touched by old wounds.

The wild man took a breath. “To stave off the power of the unmagic, I had to make you live another life. You had to cease being a king and become instead one of the creatures that suffered by your mistreatment. You had to feel the need for the magic that holds humans and animals together, and that took many years.

“Yet your kingdom needs you to return, so I held time open for you to go back and be king once more. If you so choose.”

The hound’s head ached.

So the bear was to return to his kingdom in the past, to find the unmagic and stop it there. But what of her?

The bear moved to her side, but it seemed she needed no protection from the wild man’s magic, after all.

“I can send you back in the form of the man you were,” said the wild man. “Once there, you must choose again to aid the magic. If you fail, I will be forced to find others who may mend the damage, but I cannot force you to do what you do not wish to.”

The bear twitched, and the hound thought of all he had lost. The wild man was asking him to go back to that, to care again for it. After two hundred years, it seemed an impossible request. But the wild man was all that was impossible.

The hound began to fear for herself then. She had worried that she would have no role. But the wild man offered no part without pain.

The wild man continued, his voice soft and smooth. “Has the magic done badly for you before this? I think if you look back, you will see it has not. Trust that the magic will teach you the lessons you would wish to know. Trust that if you suffer pain through the magic, it is pain you will look back on and be glad of. Trust that you will be glad to be part of extending the reign of magic from your time long into the future.”

The wild man shone brighter and brighter as he spoke, as if he were the sun and there was no need for
any other, at least not on this part of the mountain.

Yet the bear held back, a rumble in his throat.

And the hound could feel tiny shivers in her legs that were no reaction to cold.

The wild man put his hands together with a clap. He held them there tightly. His eyes showed concentration. He began to sweat.

The hound could not see what he was doing.

Suddenly the wild man ripped his hands apart, and the hound could feel the sound of it, like an earthquake or a tornado as it tore trees from the ground and tossed them in the wind.

Between the wild man’s hands, there was an image of this same place, but at a different time. There was less snow there, and the mountain itself seemed different. The stone shelf was smaller, less distinct, the plants on it higher and more vigorous. Below, the mountains seemed younger.

“There is the past. A time of abundant magic compared to now. A time of less magic than before. A time that is yours as no other time has been.”