Loyal and Unbroken threw in the last of the worms and then there was a massive sound of moving earth. Dust billowed into the air and rocks shifted underneath Fierce’s feet. She stood at the princess’s side, not sure if either of them would survive this.
But then the ground settled again and the air began to clear.
The humans let out a cheer.
But in a few moments, it became clear that the fissure had only been partially closed. There was still more than half of it open.
All the work that the princess had done had to be done again. All the danger faced a second time.
Fierce looked at the princess, whose face was streaked white with dirt. She looked like her own white and black striped creature. Her hands shook and she had to lean on Fierce to take a step toward Red.
She had used up her wild magic entirely, Fierce thought. Whatever still had to be done would have to be done by another. Whatever creatures remained in the forest, Fierce did not know. But the bear had been worse than she could have imagined.
She looked to Red.
He faced Lord Ahran and the archer. He shook a finger. “Leave,” he said. “Now.”
“You need us,” said Lord Ahran, his voice nearly a child’s whine.
“None of us need such as you.” Red turned to look at the other humans. “If any of you would stay, stay only on terms of your own honor. If you harm the princess or any of her creatures, I swear to you that I will make you regret it. If I live, I will make it my work to take revenge for her. Do you understand?”
Many of the humans turned away from Red and began to disappear into the forest. He did not try to stop them.
Lord Ahran himself shrugged. Then he said, “If you think you can do it without us, then go ahead and try. We will come back when you are dead and finish with the Xaon then.” He motioned his men to follow him.
Some did.
The archer, however, shook his head. He turned back to Red. “I’ll stay. If you’ll take me.”
Red stared him down.
Fierce could see that the man had changed his allegiance. It was as simple as reading a hound’s tail. He had accepted Red as his new leader, and Fierce knew he deserved it, though it put him above her yet again.
Chapter Twenty-three:
A handful of Lord Ahran’s humans remained with the princess. Twice in the night they were all woken to the sound of something in the distance. Fierce shivered and put her arms around her knees. She stood after a while and walked to where she found Red standing.
“It is something terrible,” he said. “But I can’t go to get it. I have to stay by the princess. And wait for it to come here, to the fissure.”
Fierce nodded.
It was dark in a way she had never felt darkness before. It pressed on her like a mist, rising into her lungs with every breath.
“I don’t remember my parents,” said Red. “Not a single glimpse. I was too young. I used to make up stories about them, and I would imagine this face or that one that I had seen, instead of theirs. I used to imagine that I had brothers and sisters all around me, squabbling, pinching, laughing, running. But whenever I was with people, I felt uncomfortable. They weren’t mine. They didn’t see me as one of them. I was just the orphan boy from the kennels.”
There was another rumbling sound in the distance. The ground shook so that Fierce fell forward. Red moved to help her up, then stepped back.
“My mother was human,” said Fierce. He was trying to tell her about his secret, and though she did not understand, she meant to offer him something of herself in return.
“I don’t understand,” said Red. “How could she be human?”
“She left me. She left the pack. She turned her back on us and she went away with a human woman.”
“As her hound,” said Red, still confused.
“No,” said Fierce. “She became human by some trick of magic. She came back to the woods and I saw her. She left me with a great distrust of all things human. And of magic between humans and animals.” And now here she was, even so.
“I am not like her,” Fierce insisted. “I always swore to myself that I would never be led away by human things as she was. I swore that I would remain a hound in my heart, no matter what happened to me.”
“I understand,” said Red, withdrawing from her physically, his voice cold. “You wish to be alone.”
“No. That is not what I meant,” said Fierce. She reached out and touched his stump. She lifted it to her mouth and kissed it.
Red’s eyes flashed in the darkness. They were brighter than stars.
“Humans think always of the future. The present is never enough for them.”
Red reached for her and kissed her. His maimed arm wound around her neck. “It is enough for me,” he said.
They kissed and Fierce did not know for how long. She fell asleep at some point and dreamed of hunting. She could feel that she was a hound once more, and she knew that there was a hound at her side, but she could not turn her head to see who it was.
She woke to the sound of a long whinnying.
“The horse,” murmured Red. “The princess’s horse.”
She sat up and looked at Red in the dim light. His eyes were still bright. She wanted to kiss him again, but there was no time for that now. She must do what must be done. That was a hound’s way.
She stood up and moved at Red’s side. They followed the sound of the horse, but it was the same as following the sound of the rumbling. The trees were thick here and they rose up around rocks that seemed to have been deposited from a crumbling hillside. Fierce and Red had to pick their way through.
There was something wrong with the stream here. Its flow had been diverted nearby by some kind of dam up ahead, and the ground around it was muddy as a result.
“Are you afraid?” asked Red, pulling her back to stare into her face.
“Are you?” asked Fierce.
“My heart is loud in my ears. But I do not want to turn away,” said Red.
“This is the hunt,” said Fierce.
They moved forward, through wildflowers that made a pleasant scent when they stepped on them. It was fresh and sweet and a little musky.
Not unlike the scent of Red, when he was very close.
Fierce thought that she would come back here, when all was finished and Red was gone. She said that animals only thought of the present, but she would think of the past. She had been that changed.
Suddenly, the princess’s great, black horse came galloping toward them. He dipped his head to turn back to Fierce and Red. He waited a moment for them, and then began to move back to the princess.
“He could not leave her,” said Fierce in a whisper.
“No. Of course not.” There was a look in Red’s eyes as he turned to Fierce that made her turn away.
The horse was badly wounded, despite the speed with which he moved. His face had been cut across so that the eye bled and a mouth that had been torn. The wounds on his flanks looked to be punctures, with blood and pus oozing out of them. The skin had broken across once leg where the bone showed through underneath, white and gray.
“He is already dead,” said Fierce.
“No,” said Red. “He does not accept that.”
“I do not understand,” said Fierce. “There is no way for him to recover from this. Yet he fights on.”
“And what does that tell you of him?” said Red, who was squinting at the horse as if looking for some clue on him.
“It tells me that he has spent too much time with the princess. With all humans, perhaps,” she said.
“He is human,” said Red. “And he always was.”
Fierce stared at the horse. It seemed so obvious now. The princess had already admitted that he had not been born a horse. She should have guessed that meant he had been human.
“She has been searching for him for hundreds of years,” said Fierce.
“She made him a horse and he escaped from her. But I think she must have loved h
im once, long ago.”
“She used wild magic on the man she loved?” Fierce could not understand this. “But why?”
“Perhaps she did not believe that he loved her,” said Red. “And so she did this to punish him, for she loved him and it hurt her that he did not show her that love in return.”
But for her to chase after him for so many hundreds of years, and still to keep him as a horse? She must still be uncertain of his love for her. And yet she must love him terribly.
“And now they love each other as animals love the hunt, with fear and heat and anticipation,” Red added.
Fierce stared at him and felt as if her eyes were burning from the full light of the sun.
“We must help him,” said Red, ending the moment.
Fierce agreed with him by throwing her head back and howling. It was not the same howl she would have been able to make as a hound, but it brought her courage back and she ran forward without fear.
She caught only a glimpse of the white creature the horse was fighting at first. It was like a tree that could move. A thick tree with a smooth trunk. It swayed to and fro, and then there was a flicker of movement and she saw its head—and its fangs. It caught the horse once more on the hind quarters and there was a faint hissing sound as whatever poison in its fangs burned into the horse’s flesh.
Then the horse flung it off and reared back, kicking at the base of the creature’s body. There were bits of white worm that fell off of it, but not enough to make the creature falter.
The horse whinnied and Fierce tried for a moment to understand what he was saying. But then she realized it was not the language of horses. “Jaleel!” he was calling out, as well as he could in his changed form, with his changed tongue. “Jaleel, my love!”
The princess had not lost him, even after all of this. He was true to her, human or not.
The horse trotted and the white creature followed. The trees here were older, and one had fallen. There was a little more space and a hint of the first sunlight of the day streaming through from above. The creature moved forward so that Fierce caught her first glimpse of it.
It was a huge, sinuous creature with slick skin and flippers like those of a sea lion. Its head was small in comparison to its height, which was as tall as the tallest trees. It shook the ground as it walked, so great was its weight. It had no grace, no sense of surety of movement, as did the land creatures that Fierce had known all her life. Though it seemed to lumber along clumsily and ungainly, it could also move swiftly, and there were fangs dripping what smelled like poison in its mouth.
Where it had come from, Fierce could only guess. There were many rivers nearby, and lakes, as well. One of them must be deep enough to house a creature like this, for the worms had to have found a true version of this in order to imitate it. The sea-beast, as Fierce thought of it, was horrible and powerful at once. It also seemed to have a canny sense of self-preservation, for it noticed every movement and watched the humans ahead of it with careful attention. It had been hunted by humans before, evidently, and it knew how to fight them. And the white version of it had all the knowledge that the original had.
The horse began to slow at last, showing a limp on the side the white sea beast had bit most deeply. Fierce ran at the sea beast and began to pound at its flippers with her fists. It did nothing. She looked around and found a stick. She used it to stab into the sea beast torso as many times as she could, where she could reach it. There was a rain of white worms on her face and hands. They fell onto the forest floor around her, but did not seem to affect the large sea beast. It was too big for a few missing pieces to make a difference in its movement.
Still, Fierce wanted to get the sea beast’s attention away from the horse, and she had done so. Now it was staring down at her, its head above the treetops, but easily able to move its long, thick and flattened tail back and forth to lash at her. Or alternately, to tuck its head down to strike at her with its poisonous fangs.
She could not survive this battle, and a hound would wait to die with dignity. But she did not do it. Instead, she used the stick to pivot a leap away from the attacking head of the sea beast. She could hear Red’s voice behind her. She turned back and saw him arrive in the place she had left at just the wrong moment. The sea beast struck at him instead of at her. The fangs slid into the place between Red’s shoulder blades.
Fierce could see his face the moment the pain struck him. It became very still, and then he bit down hard on his lip.
Howl, thought Fierce. Scream and cry out in pain. Yell and shout and kick and flail.
But Red took it with the calm of a hound. He slid down after the sea beast withdrew.
The sea beast seemed not to realize that there had been two humans. With the one down, it went on its way, after the horse. Fierce had given the horse a very short respite, but it was all she could offer him.
She rushed back to Red.
His eyes were very dark. His mouth was moving, but there were no words coming out of it.
She put her head over his and she could not think what difference it made now whether he was a human or a hound, a horse or a butterfly. She loved him and she was sure that he loved her.
She picked him up in her arms.
He gave a little moan.
She whispered into his ear in the language of the hounds, “My love.”
He coughed.
Then she looked down and saw that he was looking back at her. He seemed better than she expected.
“I thought you were dying,” she said.
“Does that mean that you don’t love me anymore?” said Red, grinning.
She let go of him.
He blinked hard as he hit the ground. “Ouch,” he said. “Maybe I would prefer it if you didn’t love me so much.”
“Maybe the horse loved the princess too much and she was trying to get him to stop,” said Fierce.
Red put up his hands in surrender. “Help me up?” he asked. “I think we have a small battle to win before we can argue about love.”
Fierce offered him a hand. She and Red stumbled off in pursuit of the sea beast and the horse, who had left a long trail of trampled plants in their way. But they were heading back to the great fissure in any case, and they knew the way there. The princess would be there, and the humans, and the animals. This was their last battle, and who knew if they would win it. It might be the end of the world, of the Naon.
And Fierce cared more about the fact that Red was smiling at her. She felt very young again, and it did not matter that she was in a human form. She felt like a hound, ready to run and chase and nip and howl—and win.
Chapter Twenty-four:
The sea beast had the archer in its mouth. It had sunk its venomous fangs into the archer’s chest and then lifted him up off the ground and lifted him into the air. Now it pounded him up and down against a tree trunk, front and back side both battered and bloodied.
At the sight, Fierce’s smile faded and became a grimace. She did not have to look or speak to Red. They acted in concert, Red going around to the left and Fierce to the right. She found a huge stone, so large it was difficult for her to lift. Then she clambered on top of a fallen tree trunk and flung the stone with as much force as she could muster at the white sea beast’s terrible, red eyes.
Her throw fell short and hit it lower on the neck, almost crushing the archer. But the sea beast let go of the archer and he tumbled to the ground. The stone had passed through the sea beast entirely, pressing out a section of white worms that flopped onto the ground. The sea beast’s head flopped forward, and its long, grayish pink tongue stuck out. It looked dead for a moment and the humans who had come with Lord Ahran to the forest cheered.
Those who had been with the princess for other attacks were not so swift to declare victory. They were silent and watched with trepidation for signs of the sea beast’s recovery. It came only a few minutes later, as the body began to twitch and then reconnected the head to itself, though it took a few moments
for the shape to smooth out to what it had been.
Then the head turned to stare at Fierce and darted at her.
There was screaming now, and many of the humans ran rather than face the sea beast. Fierce did not blame them. It was a sensible thing to do, for humans or animals. If she had believed that it would help, she would have done the same.
Fierce stood still as the sea beast fell at her. She watched as its head grew larger and larger. She could smell the strange nothingness that was the sea beast. It was not even as if it had been cleaned in water, or had sloughed off the smell of the forest. It simply did not have a scent because it was not alive in the sense that other things were living.
She felt the burning of the poison as its surged forward and its fangs pierced her skin.
Then she smelled burning.
The sea beast shrieked. It was a high-pitched sound like a bird might make, and it should not have come out of the mouth of this creature. But it did. The sea beast pulled away from Fierce. She gasped as the wound on her thigh began to bleed. It would hurt more later, she thought. But for now, she did not have time to pay attention to that.
Red had set the sea beast on fire.
It was another use of the sticks in the forest that Fierce had not thought of. More proof that Red was truly human, while she was not. Fire was something that animals ran from, because they had no control over it. But humans used fire as a pet, as a bear in a cage. It did sometimes turn on them, but they did not seem to learn to avoid it from this. Instead, they learned to keep better chains on it.
Red must have rubbed the sticks together, for he held two sticks in his hands, and was stinging the sea beast alternately with one or the other. They were thick torches, but the sea beast darted this way and that, hissing and groaning. Red leaped with the ability of a fish in water himself.
Fierce had a moment to look out and see the horse. And the princess.
They were together not far from the sea beast, a little away from the other animals who waited for their deaths. The princess had her arm around the horse’s neck and was pressing her lips into his ear. There were tears streaming down her face.
The Princess and the Horse (The Princess and the Hound) Page 16