“Tell the hounds that they will be free if they help us with this. They will not have to return here to the kennels after we are finished and they will be able to find a place in the forest where they can hunt to their hearts’ content,” said Red, his eyes distant. He seemed to have accepted that she would be the one to communicate with the hounds for him.
“You will free them?” asked Fierce. “What of Lord Ahran? Are they not his hounds?”
Red’s face flushed. “He does not deserve them,” he said grimly. “If I must return to him later, I will make recompense to him in some other way. If he insists upon it.”
Fierce turned to the hounds and told them that they would never return to the kennels. All three seemed happy at the news, but the female golden hound asked, “Will we be returned home, then? To our own packs?”
Fierce considered this a moment. How long had it been since they were gone? How human had they become? What would their packs have done in the meantime? “No,” said Fierce. “There is no going back now.”
She had seen how quickly the pack had recovered when her mother had gone. Likely her own pack had done the same with her absence. There were always wild hounds eager to have a place in a pack, and new pups born who would grow into an empty place. The pack moved on.
The female golden hound nodded sadly and Fierce watched her and her brother comfort each other with licks and murmurs.
The wolf-hound stood apart and said in a low voice, “I do not care where I live, here or there. It makes no difference.”
Fierce wondered if she was like him now, unable to return to her pack, but unable to live properly with humans, either.
Red was turning around, as if looking for anything to take for himself. There was nothing in the kennels that was personally his, Fierce realized. Perhaps nothing anywhere.
“This is your home,” said Fierce.
Red pressed his lips together, then said, “I thought it was, but it seems I was wrong.”
And they left together, without looking back.
Chapter Eight:
Once away from Lord Ahran’s estate, the wolf-hound began to go ahead of the group. Red tried to call him back, but the wolf-hound barked at him in his own language, saying that he would not follow a human who could not say a word properly.
Fierce leaped ahead of Red and snarled at the wolf-hound. She put a hand on the spot on his side where she had nipped at him, as a reminder.
He immediately put his head down again.
“You will follow me, then?” asked Fierce.
“You are a female,” said the wolf-hound. “I do not know much about a pack, but I know that females do not lead the males within it.”
“I lead this pack,” said Fierce, her eyes staring unwavering into the wolf-hound’s. “And I lead you. Try me, if you dare.” She said the familiar words of a challenge that she had heard issued from the leader to other males in the pack, not the words of a female to another female.
The wolf-hound had teeth bared, but slowly lowered its head.
“I will listen to you,” said the wolf-hound softly, apparently unwilling to engage in a full physical battle with her. “But I will do what I please. I am a male.” He looked away from her.
Fierce could not allow him to escape so easily. “Then I will take you back to the kennels where you can be chained and wait for Lord Ahran to remember to feed you,” Fierce threatened.
The wolf-hound hesitated a moment. Then he slowed his pace. “You would accomplish nothing without me. I am the only true male here,” he said.
He would be useful, but he was not necessary, Fierce thought. “You obey me, male or not,” she insisted.
“What is he saying?” asked Red. “We need him. We need them all.”
Yes, but on her own terms. “Let me handle the hounds,” she said to Red. She turned back to the hound and waited as his tail moved more and more slowly.
“I will come,” said the wolf-hound.
It was not enough. Fierce waited again.
“I will obey you, then,” he said, tail falling.
Fierce nodded and put out a hand and the wolf-hound slid under her hand. She was a human, who was now in a pack of hounds. It was very strange. But not all bad, she thought.
At the first taste of late afternoon sun and grass, the hounds began to run and Red and Fierce had to chase after them at full speed. For the first time, Fierce discovered that there was a kind of pleasure in the movement of the human body. With the yellow gown knotted up so that it did not fall past her knees, her legs could pump up and down and her toes could grip the dirt. It was not the same as when she had claws, and she did not think she could ever prefer it. She followed the scent of Sanna.
She was not far behind the hounds when they reached the woman at the edge of Lord Ahran’s property, by the stream Fierce had cupped water for him from the day before. Red had arranged for her to wait here for them.
Still, Sanna was startled by the sudden sound and sight of the hounds. She threw her hands in the air and looked behind them. “Lord Ahran,” she murmured. “You convinced him to come.”
“No,” said Red as Sanna’s face fell. “No. It is just us. Feersha and I want to help you. And we brought hounds.”
“But these are Lord Ahran’s hounds. He will call us all thieves,” said Sanna.
“And do you care what he says about you?” asked Fierce. After the way he had treated her already, what could he do worse? There was no pack for her there, she had to understand that.
And slowly, she did. Sanna shook her head and a smile spread across her face. “You give me hope for the first time since the wild magic. Thank you.”
Red and Fierce shook her hand.
But her expression grew quickly grim. “You both are hardly older than my daughter. Too young to die. Too young to chase after a woman who might do anything to you.”
“She might do it to you, as well,” said Red.
“But I—I have reasons to not care.”
“We have reasons, as well,” said Fierce.
Sanna seemed about to protest.
“This is about more than your husband and daughter. It is about the whole kingdom,” asked Red, interrupting her. “This woman cannot be allowed to use her wild magic wherever she will, on anyone she comes across.”
Sanna nodded after a moment.
“Then let us help the kingdom. It is our kingdom as well as yours, isn’t it?” said Red, looking to Fierce.
She nodded.
Fierce thought for a long time afterward about what Red had said. A kingdom was not the same as a pack, not even a very large pack. It included more than humans in it. It was humans, certainly, but also the land itself, and the animals within it. It was a new way of thinking to Fierce, that she had responsibility not only for her own kind, but for others. Lord Ahran should have done this, but Red had taken his place and was thinking of the whole kingdom. Fierce would try to expand her own thinking, as well.
Moving through the hilly fields toward the forest, all of them looked for signs of the princess’s passing. It was not difficult to find, for her entourage was so large and so unusual that the grass was disturbed in large swaths and the greenery around any watering places was trampled. Once they had found the scent of the princess, it was easy for the wolf-hound and the two long-haired hounds to follow that.
She had headed south, but she had brought the wounded black horse with her. Fierce could see that in the three-hoofed tracks and the shortened steps. The horse made the princess and all of her animals more vulnerable. Fierce knew there would be many predators in the forest who would see that the horse was easy prey.
How far was the princess planning to take the wounded horse? She had said home, and it seemed home was south. A long way south, thought Fierce, for no one had ever heard of such great wild magic anywhere nearby.
“Here. It was here,” said Sanna, pointing to a clearing where the sun shone bright and there was a taste of wind and clouds moving above. “This
was where I last saw my husband and my daughter as human.”
The grass here was more trampled than elsewhere. There was a mound of ants that had tracks around it. Most animals tended to avoid ants, for fear of their bites, but as Fierce drew closer, she could see that something had pressed into the hole at the top of the hill. A long nose?
The wolf-hound perked up at the scent he caught from human footprints nearby and began to bark loudly, his tail shivering. It was the first sign of fear that Fierce had ever seen in him.
The two long-haired hounds held their ears very high. “What is it? What is that smell?” they asked.
“Magic,” said Fierce. “Wild magic.”
“There is something wrong with it,” said the female hound with her nose to the ground. She began to whine and to back away from a spot where the ground had been split open deeply.
Fierce went to look at it.
“Be careful,” said Red, and he stepped closer to her, so that he was at her side when she leaned over and saw the fissure.
It was as if the grassy plain had been torn apart with great strength, as an animal’s rib cage might be torn apart by the hands of a larger predator. And within the fissure was an unnatural scent that made Fierce wrinkle her nose. It was sweet and rotten and reminded her of autumn when there were many fruits on the forest to be harvested by those animals who ate such things. Like leaves left in water to mulch.
It was Xaon, Fierce knew. She did not know how she knew it, except that she did.
Fierce peered in to the fissure which was several times her own body length, though not so wide that she could not leap across it.
“What is this? I don’t like it at all,” said Red. He had not made the connection with the Xaon of his tales.
But he had never experienced the darkness of it in his dreams, thought Fierce.
Out of the crack in the earth there were tiny worms spilling out, white and shining, no bigger than the tip of Fierce’s littlest human finger.
But as she watched, one ate another, and so on, the larger devouring the smaller. There seemed no shortage of new worms crawling out of the depths, but Fierce saw one of the larger worms that had eaten many of the others crawl away from the hole. When it touched a bit of a mouse nest, it stretched and pulled itself into the shape of a mouse.
It was still white and shining and Fierce had never seen anything that frightened her more. It was not a mouse. It did not smell like a mouse. It smelled like a worm, sweet and rotten. It did not move like a mouse, either, but slithered on the ground like a worm and dragged its small legs along beside it.
“Did you see that?” asked Red. “How is it possible?”
“I don’t know.” She did not want to know.
Chapter Nine:
Red went on his hands and knees and crawled closer to the fissure. Fierce thought it a very bad idea.
The long-haired hounds were breathing harshly with fear. The wolf-hound was very quiet, and looked away from the fissure.
“It’s her fault,” said Sanna. “Whatever has happened, I’m sure it must be her doing. Her and her wild magic.”
Red picked up one of the worms and held it on his hand. It was one of the smaller ones.
“Does it hurt?” asked Sanna.
“A little. Like the burn of an ant’s bite or the touch of stinging nettle.”
He did not flinch as it moved up his arm, but Fierce yanked the worm away from Red and held it out to stare at. It was no longer a worm.
Or not fully a worm.
It had a finger on it, a finger that looked very much like Red’s callused ones. And the beginnings of a hand bulb.
“Drop it!” Red shouted.
Fierce had to shake it off to get it to detach from her wrist. By then, it had grown an eye. One that looked like the black eyes Fierce had often seen in her mother’s face.
Red stomped on the creature, whatever it was, until it stopped moving.
“We should go from here,” said Sanna. “And find her.”
Fierce nodded. She did not want to see what the worms did next. But because of Red, she could also not stop herself from thinking about the larger consequences of their presence here, for the forest, for the kingdom, for the world.
If birds ate them, what would happen to the birds?
And what would happen to the snakes that ate birds, and the hounds, and the foxes and bears?
What if the worms could grow into whole creatures and began to take the resources of the forest to themselves?
Had the princess done this somehow, with her wild magic? Had she somehow found the Xaon and brought it into the Naon?
Why would she do it? Had she done it before? How many fissures like this were there? Is this why Fierce had dreamed of the Xaon so strongly when she was with the princess?
“The hounds!” cried Red, turning around to realize that all three were gone.
They had gone south as the princess had, fleeing as fast as they could from the fissure and its creatures, and the darkness of the forest that began there must have seemed to offer retreat.
Fierce’s old forest. Her home.
“Can you track them?” Red asked.
Fierce sniffed the air. Her human nose was close to useless, but she had other skills now. She could use her eyes, which could see color clearly, and her mind. “I can do it, but should we leave here? When we do not know what the worms will do?”
Red looked stricken. “But we do not know what to do against the worms or the fissure. We must learn more. Find the princess and ask her what she knows.”
Fierce nodded and led the way.
It was difficult to stay at a pace that Sanna could keep up with in the forest. Fierce found herself going over certain obstacles on all fours, simply because it was easier to do what she had always done before, as a hound.
She knew everything here so well. Not only the trees and bushes, but each flower, each stone in the path that she had leaped over.
There was the place where she had killed her first animal on her own, when she had been hardly larger than the porcupine herself.
Here she had seen her mother the last time.
And there, by the forked tree, she had seen the princess for the first time.
Fierce did not allow herself to stop and mourn her old life, however. She pressed on, until there was a sound in the distance, a high-pitched cry.
“It is him!” said Sanna. “My husband. I know it! That is the sound he made when he first was changed and looked at me.”
“But the hounds—?” said Red.
“We will find them later,” said Sanna. She did not wait for Red or Fierce to agree with her, but began crashing through the forest on her own.
Fierce and Red went after her and saw in a small clearing the princess and her animals. Sanna had thrown her arms around a long-nosed pig with a small face and delicate, pointed ears.
The princess gave neither Sanna nor the pig any attention. She knelt on the ground before the black horse, trying to coax it into taking a bit of river root from her hand. The horse tossed its head and refused to take it.
“I will turn you into a dog if you don’t take it,” she threatened. “I will turn you into a goose. Or a stink bug. Then I will pick you and squash you between my fingers. I will do it! I will!”
The threats were horrible, but Fierce did not believe for a moment that the princess would carry through on them. She loved the horse. She had looked for it for too long to simply destroy it. And the way that she held her head close to the animal, and reached her hands out to touch its broken foreleg, said more than her human words ever could.
Sanna began to weep, and the long-nosed pig sniffed at her tears and licked them away with a thin pink tongue. Then a hive of bees swarmed around the two of them. Their daughter, Fierce realized, transformed and angry. The bees stung both pig and woman, but though Sanna jerked in pain, she did not slap at them.
To become a whole hive of bees rather than one single creature would make it
difficult to control one’s feelings. Fierce looked at her own human body with less distaste now, when she realized there were more disturbing alternatives.
Fierce felt Red’s hand brush against hers and she turned to see his eyes looking at her directly, as a hound looks at another hound trusted implicitly, part of the pack.
“Someday you will tell me your story,” said Red with quiet certainty. “I know there is one, but you must be trust me fully before you share it.”
If he knew she was a hound, would he run from her? Or treat her as a pet, with no thoughts of her own? Fierce could not take that chance.
Red put a hand on hers. It felt very good, and though Fierce told herself that she should, she did not pull away.
Until the princess stood back from her horse, rigid and tall and turned toward Sanna. “You. I told you to leave.” She waved a hand with regal impatience. “You do not belong here.”
Sanna’s jaw clenched. “I won’t leave without the two who belong to me.”
“I can change you into anything I choose. Is that what you want? To join them in service to me?”
“I will never serve you!” Sanna declared.
“Oh, no?” The princess began to step forward, away from the horse.
Red stepped in front of Sanna to shield her from whatever the princess might do.
The princess raised her hand.
Fierce leaped in front of both of them.
But the horse neighed loudly and the princess went still.
Fierce did not understand the language of horses well. She had come across one herd of wild horses in the forest, but that had been years ago. They were too big for her to kill on her own, and so she had simply watched them for a time. She had seen how they stood up, utterly still, for hours on end. And how they ate and ate when they were awake. She had seen how one horse was ignored by the others, and chased from the water. And how another horse was followed without a hint of fierceness.
The herd was not like a pack at all. The horses did not vie for dominance by snipping and howling. They waited. And the few fights between horses she had seen seemed more play than real. Fierce had gone back for several days in a row to see the wild horses. But then she had had to hunt. When she went back to see them again, the herd was gone and she regretted it. She had kept in her head a list of horse words, a handful she had learned but could not say as a hound. They remained in her mind now.
The Princess and the Horse (The Princess and the Hound) Page 6