The Princess and the Bear

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Chala came closer to him and put a hand on his arm, but he could only think of what he had done to his people, to his kingdom.

  Jonner spoke again. “Perhaps this is all a ploy. You meant to lure your enemies into battle so that you could defeat them in their pride.”

  There was a long silence, and then the pressure on his arm from Chala increased until Richon realized he must respond. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  “The money that you have taken to yourself, selling so many of the palace artifacts from your father these last few years—it must all have been spent on secret supplies of weapons and armor. Ah, what a great surprise the king of Nolira has in store for him,” Jonner said excitedly.

  “Indeed,” said Richon, though it was not true. He wished he had been so wise as to plan to protect his kingdom, but he had not.

  Why had the wild man sent him here if his kingdom was to be conquered by another? What purpose for a king that was no king?

  Well, Richon would not give up easily. And if false hope was all he had to offer, he would not stint of it.

  “I will not speak of seeing you unless you wish it,” said Jonner. “So as to make sure the surprise is all the greater for the enemies of our kingdom.”

  “Thank you,” said Richon, relieved. He sent the man on his way.

  Then he and Chala made their way to the edge of town. It warmed him to see the familiar parts of his kingdom stretching out before him, the waving fields of grain and orchards of ripe, fragrant fruit trees. But he also knew they were several days from the palace.

  “We must hurry,” said Chala.

  “If we are not too late already,” said Richon.

  Any other woman would have given him reassurance, but Chala gave him the truth.

  “If not that,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Chala

  FOR THE NEXT two days, Richon allowed less and less time for rest. They slept only a few hours at night and hardly stopped for more than a drink from a stream during the day. They ate what they could take from passing fields on the way, and Richon thought nothing of it.

  He spoke to Chala only infrequently and with a distant expression on his face. She understood his need for focus. It was animal-like, and she thought it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.

  Nonetheless, she was surprised at how painful she found it to spend hour after hour in silence, crossing through a country that was both familiar and unfamiliar at once. She had gone on journeys like this with Marit and had thought the princess spoke far too much, even if it was only a few words here and there.

  Now she longed for a few words of companionship. In the morning she waited for Richon’s simple “Good morning” and to be able to speak back to him before his face went blank. She longed to hear his curt “Good night” before they rolled into their clothes and slept near a tree or a large boulder that had been warmed by the spring sun.

  She and Richon shared food, and she made sure that she touched his hand when they passed the food between them. She knew that was selfish, but it felt good and she could not resist. She was becoming weak, she thought. Weak and human. Only at night was she a hound, in her dreams.

  She thought it must be the magic of this time pressing on her, but the dreams were very strange and vivid. One night she dreamt she left Richon where he lay and went into a forest so thick with trees that there was not even a hint of the stars and moon overhead, and she had to travel by sound and scent.

  She wore her hound body again and she could not remember feeling this deeply animal ever in her life. There had been humans everywhere in her world, humans who hunted in the forest, humans close by with their homes and their scents. But here there was no touch of humanity and a peacefulness that held her still.

  Then she heard them.

  The pack of wild hounds.

  There were at least twenty of them, and at first she only meant to listen to them, to keep her distance, and to observe, as she had done once when her daughter was young.

  They would not take her presence as a challenge unless she was close enough to be scented, and she knew exactly how far back to stay to avoid that.

  But how she enjoyed the conversation among them.

  “I saw it first!”

  “No, I did!”

  “It was my stroke that brought it down.”

  “But I was the one who tired it.”

  They argued over a recent kill presumably, but Chala could not smell the blood of it, so the carcass must have been left wherever it had been taken.

  “Your greediness was unfair. I deserved more than that.”

  “If you deserved more, you would have taken it. I am stronger than you, therefore the largest portion of the kill was mine by right. Come and let me show you why, if you wish to argue further.”

  And then the sound of tussling in the dark, of growling, and nips, of whining when a wound was taken, and then licking and dragging away.

  “Any others?”

  But it was only a formality. There was only ever one challenge to the lead male of a pack at a time. Unless it was the final attack, and the challenger had already taken charge. Then it would be merely the finishing up of old business, the chance for all of the pack to take a bite of their old leader. As if that would give them some of his strength, some of his memories of the past.

  The wild hounds roared out their approval for their leader by howling to the skies, and although Chala could not see him, she knew he would be strutting among them, his head held high, his mate at his side.

  She stayed even when the moment was over and the wild hounds were quiet once more, and she hardly heard the flutter of wings overhead announcing the arrival of a full-grown falcon. But when the falcon spoke, she could understand it. It was not the wild man’s universal language, but a language of squawks and screeches that she somehow heard as clearly as the language of the hounds.

  That astonished her almost as much as what the falcon said.

  And then she remembered it was only a dream.

  “There is a place of death in the east. Come, all of you. Come and help battle it,” the falcon cried out.

  Chala’s heart grew chill.

  The falcon flew away and the wild hounds did not hesitate a moment. They immediately rose up and followed after him.

  Chala could hear the falcon continue to give out the same cry as it went along through the forest. And somehow all other animals understood. She smelled squirrels and mice and deer and bears and wolves and wild hounds and all kinds of birds. Frogs and toads and snakes leaped and slithered along. Possums, hedgehogs, porcupines, raccoons, voles, hares, and on and on. There was no fighting among them.

  It was astonishing. Animals who came together did so for a battle of survival, and for nothing else. The animals here had set aside their natural tendencies—all of them at once.

  It was easy for Chala to go along now that there were so many animals. No one noticed she was not with a pack of wild hounds. They were not focused on the other animals at all, only on the falcon that led them forward.

  Chala was surprised again when she realized that she could hear the conversation of any of the animals around her. So it was not only the falcon that was different here. She was changed, too, in this dream. What in reality was reserved for some humans—understanding the speech of animals—became possible in her dream for animals themselves. In some way it felt right to her. It went along with this ancient time and place that had so much magic in it.

  “Another place of death so soon? That’s twice in a year. It’s too much. What is the world coming to?” said one of the beavers, older and with a gruffer voice.

  Another spot of unmagic? It seemed even more terrible than it had in the other time, for here the air was thick with magic and life.

  Surely it must have a different source. The cat man could not have lived so long, Chala thought. This must be something else entirely.

  “We always bring them back to life. Wi
th all of us together we have power enough,” said one of the younger beavers.

  “But if there is more and more of this, there will eventually come a time when we cannot fight it. There will be one dead spot that we cannot fight, and then it will spread like the humans spread, taking far more than is their rightful place.”

  “That will not happen for many, many years. You worry too much. Think only of the now.”

  Chala’s throat closed up.

  Even if this was a dream, those words were true. She knew what it would be like in many years, when the unmagic grew in power. She knew the diminishing sense of wholeness in nature itself.

  “There it is!” the falcon called out.

  The falcon circled and the animals converged.

  Chala was far in the back, but she pushed her way forward and no one tried to stop her. There was no sense of hierarchy here. The animals did not jostle for position, nor give up their place because they knew another was stronger. There was a perfect equality here that Chala had never seen, among animals or humans.

  When she reached the front of the line of animals, she saw the cold death at last, and she felt relief. The spot was only as large as her own body, and while it was the same unmagic she had felt in her own forest, it was on a much smaller scale.

  Nothing grew around it. She could feel the nothingness that had pulled out all life and brought not even the comfort and familiarity of death. The coldness made her want to whine.

  But the animals drew themselves up in a circle around it and Chala felt their magic pulse and stream around them.

  Animals with magic.

  And she gave magic, too, somehow.

  Every moment the spot seemed to grow smaller. It was not so much destroyed as replaced, death with life, but at such a cost!

  No wonder the animals in her own time had had no way to combat the unmagic. Or the humans, either.

  No wonder the wild man had sent Richon and her back in time.

  Chala saw now what had been lost, and it made her want to howl to the skies and never stop. How could the wild man stand it, watching this happen all around him? No wonder he had retreated to his mountain. It must make him ache to see the loss of magic to unmagic as it grew year by year. And he had been watching the change for a thousand years or more.

  When the forest’s spot of unmagic had been completely replaced with magic, the animals, their work done, began to dissipate.

  Chala, too, walked away from the middle of the forest out to where she could see the moon once more. She looked down at herself and realized she was not a hound, after all, at least not anymore. Now she was a human woman.

  She had never experienced a dream like this before.

  As a hound, she had relived experiences she had had in the past. But this dream was different. It combined bits and pieces of new and old to make completely new stories. Did other humans dream this way?

  She woke feeling drained, as if she had bled from a wound. But she did not speak to Richon of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Richon

  AFTER NINE DAYS of traveling, they were nearly at the palace. There was only one more village to go through, and then over the hill and down into the valley. But Richon saw immediately that this village was very different from the towns they had passed through in the north.

  The village streets were nearly empty, and those figures they did see were haggard, missing limbs or eyes, starving, ragged, and hopeless. As for the buildings, they were crumbling, roofs unpatched, door hinges broken, with untouched grime everywhere. He saw no animals and very few humans.

  Richon wanted to ask someone what had happened, but who to ask? He stared at a man who was walking by, his face down, his shoulders sloped. He moved slowly, as if each step were painful.

  Richon reached out a hand to touch him, then let the hand fall.

  “Excuse me, sir?” he asked.

  The man looked up, blinking. His eyes were red. “Are you mocking me?” he asked.

  “No, no,” said Richon.

  “No sirs here in this town. Not for a long while, and we don’t want them coming back, either,” he said fiercely.

  At this point Richon’s clothes looked more like cast-offs taken from a dung heap than anything else. He was glad he did not look like a “sir” much at this point, either.

  “Have things gone badly here, then?” Richon gestured at the buildings.

  The man snorted. “Badly? That’s one way of putting it,” he said.

  “Will you tell me why?” Richon’s mouth felt parched. He swallowed hard and forced himself to continue. “Is it because of the king?”

  “King?” The man spat and then stomped on the wet spot that came from his spit. “We don’t give him that name around here.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do,” said Richon sympathetically. “Can you tell me what he’s done to you, then?”

  “Gladly. It’s all we ever think about here. That and what we’d do to him if we could put our hands on him,” he said.

  Richon went rigid at this, but he did not try to escape the punishment of hearing the truth.

  He only wished that Chala were not there to hear it. She looked away, but he knew she understood all quite clearly.

  At least, he told himself, he did not give excuses.

  “It was three years ago the king first outlawed magic,” the man continued. “Those who were found to use it in the normal acts of living—in planting and protecting crops, in hunting and bringing home to a family meat to eat—they were punished by the loss of a hand on the first offense, and an arm on the second. Here, because it was closest to the palace, the laws were most strictly enforced, in case the king ever happened by.”

  Richon had signed the laws against animal magic, but he had not written them himself. He was not even sure if he had read them. His advisers, the lord chamberlain and the royal steward, had been eager to help him when he expressed his hatred of the magic. He had not been interested in the details, only in the outcome, which was less talk about magic and less use of it where he could be made to feel inadequate.

  Yet he could not blame others for the consequences. He had used his power to take from his people with no thought of their welfare. And if he had read the laws, Richon knew, it would have made no difference. He would have thought the punishments perfectly just. What did he know of townspeople who would lose their livings without a hand or an arm?

  “My son was found speaking to an antelope,” the man said. “He was coaxing her toward his knife, for it was close to winter and she was near death. She had no children left to care for. He would have given her a pleasant death and no need to face the cold.

  “But the servants of the king caught him with his hand on her neck, and they proclaimed him guilty without a chance of defense.

  “They cut off his hand on one side, and then his arm on the other. This, they said, because they were certain he had had more than one offense to his name. Or else how could he have spoken to the antelope so well?

  “And then my son found himself without any way to help his family live. He would take no food, though I put it in his mouth myself. He spat it out and said that it was not right for him to take what he could not earn.

  “His wounds were not bandaged well. They were not cut cleanly. And soon they began to fester. His eyes went bright with fever, and he no longer spoke the language of humans at all. He raved in the words of all the animals he had ever known, and always he begged for the same thing: his death.

  “I tried to keep him close to me, but in the end he broke free. He was still strong then, with the muscles of youth that had not yet wasted away. He ran to the animals he had always loved. I do not know what became of him, but he never returned.

  “The king who made these laws killed him as surely as he signed that law.”

  I am a murderer, Richon thought. What must Chala think of him now?

  But telling the people his identity and allowing himself to be punished would not bring
back this man’s son. All he could do now was to ensure more men’s sons did not die, either because of their magic or because of the war at the border. And he could work to become a king this town deserved.

  He stared at Chala and tried to read her expression. He would not try to keep her with him if she wished to go. He could not see what she was feeling. It was so strange, since when she had been a hound she had showed every fleeting emotion clearly on her face. Now that she was human, she hid it all.

  But it was the kingdom he would focus on now, and not let himself be distracted by selfish needs.

  A young man came down the street as the man finished speaking. The first man waved him over, and said, “He wants to hear your story, too, no doubt. Tell him about your father. What the king’s laws did to him.”

  The young man looked at Richon, eyebrows raised, as if to be sure Richon wanted to hear it, after all.

  Richon nodded. Hearing it was the least he could do.

  “Please tell me,” he said.

  And the young man did.

  “My father survived the first year of the new laws without being caught. He learned to be cautious. He only showed his magic when there were no strangers about in the village. He did not use it beyond the borders of the village, either, because there were too often soldiers there, protecting the king’s own animals for his hunt. All animals belonged to the king, it seemed. As all people belonged to him. And all magic.

  “But then the rewards were announced. A dozen gold coins for each man who was betrayed to the king’s men. They came through each year. The first year no one in the village betrayed another. But the second year it had been a bad harvest. Too many of us had been afraid of the king’s law against magic. We had not asked the beetles and worms to irrigate the ground for us. We had not called to the birds to keep from our fields.

  “And so we were starving, all of us, when the news of the rewards came. My father, as well as many others, was betrayed that year. Those who betrayed them were equally betrayed, for they received no payment at all in return for their loss of honor.