It would be so easy to go into it. She would forget all her pain. She would no longer have to think of things as human or hound. She would not have to think or feel at all.
“Fierce,” said a voice.
It was Red.
He had pulled himself free of Hunter’s watch over him and come to stand by her. “If you go in, I will come in, as well,” he said softly, seriously. “We may not come out this time.”
Fierce shivered and nodded. If she did not care about herself enough to tune out the temptations of the Xaon, she cared about Red.
The princess, at her side, said, “If my horse were here, I would care about living. But with him gone, I do not.”
Fierce felt a lurch in her stomach. If the princess fell in now—there would be many problems. Her wild magic drew the white creatures. Until they were sure there were no more, the princess must remain with them. No matter how distressed she was at the loss of her horse.
“There is another fissure,” Red reminded her.
“Yes. One more,” said the princess with a sigh.
“There may be others,” added Fierce.
The princess looked at her sharply. “Others?”
“Are you certain you did not open the Xaon at other points along your journey?”
“I am certain,” said the princess. “I had no need for it then. My wild magic was very strong.”
“There may be others doing the same,” said Fierce. Others who were dead or gone, and their fissures might be left open. How could ever be sure that the world was safe from the Xaon?
The princess was silent for a moment. “And so, there will never be an end according to you. I will be forever a slave to helping save the wild magic.”
“You have made others slaves for their natural lives and longer,” Fierce said tartly. She included herself in this count. If she were a hound, she would not have been convinced to give up herself for the world. She was not sure if she wished for that other life back or not. It had not had the urgency, but it had had other compensations.
The princess’s eyes seemed to dull, and her hands worked more mechanically, picking up the worms and throwing them back in. At last, she could see no more of them wiggling. Before Fierce could tell her to do so, the princess leaned forward and pressed her whole body against the fissure.
“I must—” she said out loud, and moaned.
Fierce and Red each took hold of a foot to make sure it did not fall in completely.
The princess breathed through her teeth, as if in terrible pain.
“What is she doing?” Fierce asked Red.
Red looked to be in some pain himself, though perhaps it was only the memory. “She is using her own energy to give back to the balance. To seal the gap into the Xaon,” he said.
“Is that what you did?”
“It is like it. Though I had no magic, I still had my life to give.”
Fierce thought that the princess would give only her wild magic, but when she stood up again out of the fissure, it was clear that she had done more than that. Perhaps she was as empty of wild magic now as Red had always been.
She had aged fifty years, from a young and beautiful woman to a white-haired crone, with lines deeply cut into her face under her eyes. Her mouth sagged to one side and she had age spots on her cheeks. She seemed to have shrunk, as well, as if unable to hold the full weight of her body up.
Fierce gasped at the sight of her, and the princess looked down. She wore a gown that covered her legs, but she saw her own hands, wrinkled, hairy, and splotchy. Her bones could be clearly seen through the thin skin.
But the princess did not scream in horror. She only rubbed at one hand with the other as if to rid herself of a small ache in the hand.
“It must have happened to her before, and she used the wild magic to cure it. But this time, she isn’t using it, because it would mean making another fissure,” whispered Red to Fierce.
Fierce only hoped that the change in the princess was not merely a physical one. Sometimes older hounds grew wiser with age, and sometimes they did not. She suspected it was the same with humans.
The princess stood back from the fissure and examined it. “Is it closed?” she asked. “It feels closed to me, but I cannot be sure.”
Red took a step forward, hand outstretched, but Fierce hurried forward and beat him to the fissure. She touched gingerly along the edge at first, and then into the center. The fissure appeared to be covered with dirt, and though it was looser than the forest floor nearby, there was no sign of worms emerging and she could not sense the Xaon calling her in.
“It seems closed to me,” said Fierce. She looked up to Red.
He nodded. “It is gone now, as far as I can sense it.”
“On to the next fissure, then,” said the princess tiredly.
As she led the other animals forward, Fierce watched as she bent to Sanna’s long-nosed pig, who had once been her human husband. She scratched his ears and patted him gently. It was not the same as acknowledging what she had done to him and asking forgiveness, but it was something.
“When shall we ask her to change them?” asked Fierce. “If she loses all her wild magic, she will not be able to do that. And surely she should. If the wild magic is to make things right again.”
Fierce was sure that Loyal and Unbroken and Hunter were not meant to be humans. The balance of the magic could not be right if they remained as they were. And Sanna’s daughter and husband. But what about herself? What about the other animals around the princess? They had been with her for so long they might not remember what it was to have their old forms.
“We must think of the fissures first,” said Red. “Let the princess keep her strength for that.”
“I thought you said that it would not create more fissures for her to heal them,” said Fierce. “That it would add to the balance.”
Red looked away. “I could be wrong. And if the princess ages to her true natural age, what then? I think we must keep her living until we are sure the Xaon is gone. The greater balance matters more than the lesser ones.”
Chapter Eighteen:
The princess tried to press forward, but the rest of her entourage was too exhausted to move quickly. The animals stumbled until the princess called a halt a little distance from the second fissure. There was a stream from which Red and Fierce and the three former hounds helped catch and cook fish, for those who wished them cooked.
The princess would eat nothing.
“You must keep up your strength,” Fierce coaxed her.
Eventually, the princess drank some water, but that was all.
Fierce thought that she looked a little younger by the end of the day, as her wild magic recovered. But perhaps she was only hoping. A stronger princess meant a greater chance for all of them to be returned to their proper shapes.
When it turned dark again, Red nudged Fierce. She thought he might wish to settle himself against her for the night, as he had before, but instead he gestured to the princess.
“Go talk with her,” he said.
“What should I say?” asked Fierce. She had never been good at making friends. Her history in her pack was proof of that.
“I don’t know. I would go myself, but I think there are times when a woman wishes only another woman to speak to her.”
Another woman, Fierce thought. She was not that at all. She could tell the princess to take a cold dunk in the water, to wrestle with another hound, or to follow a fresh scent of blood. Those were the things that would make a female hound feel better after a defeat. But a woman? Fierce only knew enough now to know that a woman would want something entirely different.
But perhaps one of those things was the smell of another woman who had not come to challenge her.
Fierce went slowly, ready to stop if the princess shouted her away.
But the princess was weeping. She made no sound, but her shoulders shook. Her eyes and face were dry and Fierce held herself up very straight, thinking how like a houn
d this was.
Fierce backed herself closer to the princess, until her leg was touching the princess’s leg. “You are sad,” she said. Was that what Red meant her to do? She looked for him now, but he had turned away, as if to give them privacy.
“What do you care?” asked the princess bitterly. She looked older than she had when Fierce first met her, but not much older.
Perhaps this was her true face, what she should have looked like, if she had not used the wild magic improperly. She looked like a human mother might look, who was ready for life to begin to be easier. She looked like Fierce’s mother might look now, if Fierce knew where she was.
Fierce thought a moment how to respond. “You are pack,” she said slowly.
The princess let out a long, barking laugh. Then she sobered. “You honor me,” she said.
“Tell me what it is that saddens you,” said Fierce. “We can share the burden of it together.”
“When I first saw you, I thought that you hated being a hound. I saw your loneliness and told myself that you would thank me for transforming you. As a human, you would find it easier to be alone. And perhaps you would find better companions.”
“I will not thank you,” said Fierce. What the princess had done had not been for Fierce’s sake. It had been for her own. At least let there be no pretense between them about that.
“No.” The princess rubbed at her face. “I have lied to myself many times, to make my actions look better. I have been very selfish.”
Fierce did not contradict her.
The princess took a deep breath. “I told myself that all the creatures I transformed wanted the magic to be used on them. Even the horse.”
Fierce held herself very still. She had suspected, but she had never known for certain. The horse was not a true horse. It had been something else first.
No wonder the horse tried to escape from the princess so.
But it was not yet clear why she had chased after it, when there must have been other animals she had transformed from one shape to another who had left her, giving up hope that they would ever go back to what they had been.
“All these years, I told myself that he had been taken from me, and that he must be lost or he would have come back to me. But now he is gone again, and of his own free will.”
“You think he is angry with you? For changing him?” asked Fierce. The princess could not be so stupid that she did not understand that.
She nodded. “He hates me. I could see it in his eyes. More than any of the others. The one I care about most despises me most.” Her voice seemed dry and despairing.
Fierce patted the princess gently. “What was the horse? Before? Perhaps you can change him back.”
The princess did not answer, but shook her head. “I will never see him again. He will never come back. I will never see him again. I will never be able to tell him—”
“What?” Fierce had to struggle not to become impatient. The princess was lamenting something that could not be changed. She might howl over it at night, to the moon, but there was still hunting to be done during the day. Could she not see that?
“That I am sorry,” said the princess. “That I would do it differently, if I could do it again.”
“You could change the rest of us back,” said Fierce. Was now a bad time to ask for that?
“You truly want to be a hound again? To leave your human and go back to the forest alone?” She waved at Red.
Fierce’s answer caught in her throat.
“Is he above you, is that what you think? There should be no above or beneath, not for those who truly love.”
Love? That was a word that Fierce could not think of easily. A human word, though there was a hound equivalent. She had not used the hound word for a long time, and the human one never.
“He is a human. I am a hound,” said Fierce bitterly. “That is as it is meant to be.” Red had an affection for hounds. But there could be no more than that.
The princess shook her head. “It is just as well, since I dare not use the wild magic again. It might make another fissure.”
This was sensible. “But you would if you could be sure it was safe?” asked Fierce. Somehow it seemed important that the princess offer this much.
She hesitated a long moment. “Yes. I would,” she said, as if surprised herself by the words and their truth.
“The horse cared about you,” said Fierce. “When you were near death. And later, too. I saw that.”
“No,” said the princess. “I have used up all his caring for me by now. And now he is free from me at last.”
As free as he could be, without having his own shape back, Fierce thought. Whatever that was.
“I thought of him as mine. I thought that if I held tight to him, then he could not get away. I did not realize that he could never be mine unless he gave himself to me. That would have been true love.”
That word again. It was used among hounds to describe relationships within the pack. But Fierce had not fit into the pack since her mother left it, not truly.
It had only been since meeting Red that Fierce had begun to feel as if she might have found a place for herself again at last.
“A hound feels affection, even a desire to mate. But not love,” said the princess. “Perhaps you are still truly a hound. I think I may envy you that. It is easier not to love, for the hurt is not as deep when it is not love breaking the heart.”
“Do not tell me what I feel and do not feel,” growled Fierce. The princess, of all humans, to be giving a lecture to her on what was love and what was not!
“But you would never have met him if not for me,” said the princess softly. “So you should thank me for that much.”
“There can be nothing between us, so I have nothing to thank you for in that.” Though Fierce felt pain at it, she could not quite bring herself to say that she wished it had never happened, that she had never become human, and had never met Red. Had never experienced any of this.
Was this what the princess meant when she spoke of a breaking heart?
“Sometimes it is impossible to go back,” said the princess flalty. “And just as impossible to go forward.”
Nonetheless, the next day they moved south, deeper into the forest toward the largest fissure where the princess had tried to use wild magic against the white buck. It was not difficult to find, for there were signs of the white creatures wherever they chose to look for them. Animals were lying in a daze here and there, apparently touched by the white creatures who had stolen their form and left them burned and stunned. Red and Fierce went ahead of the others, for the princess in her newly aged state moved slowly and the other animals had little motivation to go faster.
The three humans who had been hounds were well able to move quickly, but were easily distracted by one sound or another, and dashed off in this direction or that. Fierce was sure they would come back eventually, but she did not call for them. In fact, she envied them their ability to remain hounds in their actions. She wished that she could forget she was human, as well.
One of the animals was a mole, and Red bent over it, curious. “There is nothing much wrong with it,” he said, after a few minutes. “There are a few burns, but no more than that.” He picked it up and examined it.
“It should tremble in your hands or try to bite you and get away,” said Fierce. “It is not frightened by any larger animal.” Moles had been one of the sources of her early meals as a pup and she knew their ways.
She leaned closer to it and smelled the sweetness of the worms, but not death.
“I wish I knew its language,” said Red. “I cannot even guess what to say to it.”
Fierce remembered a single word she had heard moles say. She thought it was the word for “hound.” She tried to whisper it to the mole. Its vacant eyes focused on her and its body seemed to become firmer.
“Say it again,” said Red.
Fierce did so.
The mole’s whiskers twitched.
“I think it likes you.” Red held out his hands and offered the creature to Fierce. He did not give her a chance to say no.
Suddenly, she was holding the mole in her arms as if it were a pup, her own pup, its stomach to the sky, vulnerable.
She should cut into it and eat it. That was what her hound instincts would have told her. But she was a human now, and she could only think that the mole had been touched by the white creatures. She felt pity for it and wanted to help it, though she did not know how.
“It likes you better than me,” said Red, next to her. “Maybe because you’re female and that is less threatening.”
Fierce thought it was because the mole recognized that she was a hound, in some way, and that was familiar, at the least. Or perhaps it was hoping she would kill it.
“Stroke it,” Red suggested. “Soothe it.”
“But—” protested Fierce. It seemed awkward.
Red grabbed her hand and put it on the mole’s underbelly. “Up and down,” he said. “Gently.”
Fierce did as he said, and the soft feeling of the mole’s fur surprised her. She had killed dozens of moles, but never once had felt one still moving, alive, and unopened.
“We have to know if they can be brought back,” said Red. “There may be others—”
Fierce bowed her head and whispered the same word over and over to the mole, a song of sorts, the best she could manage in her human voice.
The mole wiggled and squirmed in her arms, and then its claws dug into her bare arm and she hissed in pain. She yanked it away and held it above her head, ready to punish it.
“There,” said Red. “Put it down now and see what happens.”
She put it down.
The mole skittered away from her, nosing its way past the broken grass of the white creatures, to another end of the forest.
“You did it,” said Red, smiling proudly. “You gave it the will to live again. You reminded it of what it was.”
Fierce shook her head. “I spoke one word. It was nothing.”
The Princess and the Horse (The Princess and the Hound) Page 12