The Princess and the Bear, Page 2

  When he returned to his palace alone, Richon had tried frantically to prove to himself that she was wrong. He called for sad songs from minstrels and listened to the deep philosophers of the kingdom. He even gave offerings to a few beggars outside the palace, where before he had set the royal hounds on them to chase them out.

  But he soon tired of such pursuits and sought an easier way to blot out Lady Trinner’s memory: more ale and a series of days that ran into other days, indistinct and unending.

  He began to believe he simply had no heart to give, and when the wild man had come with his army, he had thought that he would be given relief in death.

  But the wild man had not taken his life. He had given him more life instead, an enchanted life as a bear that went on and on.

  Now he understood poverty, hunger, desperation. He knew how selfish and thoughtlessly cruel he had been.

  But love?

  He had still not learned that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Hound

  SOMETIMES SHE HAD nightmares that she was human again.

  She dreamed of the moment more than a year ago when Dr. Gharn had snarled at the princess, his face too close, his voice too loud.

  She had growled at him, and then she had no longer been at the princess’s side. She had had no idea where the princess was at all, but Dr. Gharn was in her face.

  He smiled at her. She tried to leap at him but fell over. He laughed.

  She could not get up. There was something wrong. Everything was wrong.

  She made a strange yelping noise. And then there had been a hound next to her. A familiar hound, one she could smell and recognize. But the hound did not lick her. It stared at her and made its own sound of distress.

  She had spent days in the princess’s bedchamber, alone, cowering under blankets whenever a maid entered with a tray of food that she could not bear to eat.

  The hound prodded her to look at herself in a glass, see her human form. Together, using sign language, they had worked out the magic that Dr. Gharn had wreaked on them. She had accepted that it might never be undone, that she might remain in the body of a princess the rest of her life.

  Prince George had saved her from that.

  Now she was a hound once more—in body. But in mind?

  If she still dreamed of being human, was there some part of her that had not returned to being a hound?

  She dreamed of songs.

  Stories.

  Letters.

  Even words carved into the stone of the palace.

  And when she woke, there was silence with the bear.

  The bear could not learn the sign language she had perfected with the princess. He was too old, perhaps. Or too used to living alone.

  When winter came, she gave up trying to teach him. It frustrated them both, so they began to avoid each other. But they always returned to the cave at night.

  The hound thought of some things that she missed about being human.

  Music.

  Lights.

  The feel of thrice-carded wool against her nose.

  And she was disgusted with herself. Those were soft things. She did not need them. She was a hound.

  She did not need the bear, either. And she meant to prove it to herself.

  The winter was long and killing cold. There was little to eat, and both the bear and hound grew thin.

  The first night of spring, the hound went deep into the forest, to paths she remembered from her days with her own pack. She felt as if she had gone back in time to be that other hound. As if all her time with humans was washed from her.

  It was a marvelous, free feeling.

  She chased and chased, the heat of the run as glorious as the taste of fresh meat in her mouth.

  When night struck, she crouched near a log and closed her eyes, ready to sleep. It was what she would have done before she met the princess, when she had been sent away from her pack and roamed the forest alone.

  But she was not content.

  She thought of the bear in the cave and how warm it was to sleep with him, how safe she felt with the sound of his breathing in her ears.

  She dozed in fits and starts until the middle of the night, when she could sleep no more. She had to go back to the bear, to the cave. Home.

  But it hurt to move. She ached all over from sore muscles.

  It had been too long since she had spent so much time in a chase. And, she admitted to herself, she was getting older. She was no longer a young bitch hound, able to run all day without feeling ill effects.

  In human years she was not old. She remembered eight full years of seasons.

  But as a hound, she would at her age have had only one place remaining in a pack: to care for the pups of the lead mates. And even then, she would be given very little food indeed, for there were always more aging hounds than there was food to offer them.

  To the bear, however, age and time were different than they were for any other creature, human or man. The bear had lived more than two hundred years, many times the lifetime of either a normal bear or a man. To him her age meant nothing.

  Perhaps she did not need the bear, but that did not mean she did not miss him.

  In the dark she struggled to make her way back through the forest. A few steps at a time, then resting as her sore paws found soft leaves. She was not lost, but she was glad when she found the familiar scent of the stream that ran near the cave. She was still some distance away, but now all she had to do was put her head down and follow the stream.

  The cool water on her paws felt good, and even better when she let herself lie back on her haunches and cool the swollen muscles in her hind legs.

  It was almost dawn when she caught sight of the cave. She stopped a long moment, then saw the bear at the mouth of the cave, standing upright and trembling.

  She stepped back at the sight of him.

  Was he angry?

  She moved closer and he fell onto all fours and drew his face very close to hers.

  She could feel his breath, and it might have been comforting but for the look of fierceness on his face.

  She was sorry.

  It was a strangely human thing to feel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Bear

  THE BEAR HAD only a moment to feel relief at the sight of the hound. Then he saw the danger.

  Just beyond the hound were three bears, two smaller and one very large. A mother and cubs? If so, the cubs were nearly grown now, and they were just as dangerous as their mother.

  The bears were tense, ready for action. At any moment they would attack the hound.

  Yet she did not sense them.

  He waved at her.

  At last she turned and let out a deep growl in the base of her throat.

  One of the bear cubs moved closer to threaten her.

  It paid no attention to the hound’s bear, seeing no reason to imagine an alliance between hound and bear.

  They were natural enemies. The hound’s bear had once been attacked by a pack of hounds at the end of winter, desperate for a meal and unaware of what it meant that a bear was not in hibernation.

  Now it was spring and these bears had become the hunters, hungry for their first meal.

  The mother bear was circling to the side.

  Then the smaller of the two cubs slashed his claws at the hound’s left hind leg.

  She did not even cry out.

  The hound’s bear saw the blood streaming down her leg and into the dirt, and for one stunned moment he did not move. Then he flung himself forward, but she was ahead of him, closing in on the mother bear.

  Was she trying to get herself killed?

  Before he could intervene, the mother bear lunged at the hound and threw her across the stream. After the hound landed, she did not move.

  The sight of her lifeless body, half in, half out of the stream, was more painful to the bear than he had imagined it could be.

  “No!”

  He wanted to shout, but all that c
ame from his mouth was an inarticulate cry.

  He charged again.

  The other bears bellowed.

  He struck the mother bear first, taking them both to the ground. The cubs leaped forward and sank their teeth into his skin, but he felt no pain.

  His eyes were on the hound, who was still as death.

  It had been a long time since he was so angry.

  Not since he was a man and a king.

  He threw the two cubs away from him so that they hit the ground hard and did not stand again for quite some time.

  The mother bear rose and circled warily.

  And then the hound moved. She did not stand, but she dragged herself from the stream.

  She was alive!

  The rush of violence faded.

  After two deep breaths he turned back to the three bears, challenging them with his eyes to come after him.

  They did not move.

  So he put his back to the hound and retreated with her.

  All three bears stood up on their hind legs as one last challenge, then fell and wandered away.

  The hound dragged herself, refusing his help, back to the cave.

  The bear brought leaves from the edge of the stream that he remembered from when he was a man and ill. The king’s physician had made him eat a tea brewed from those leaves so that his fever would break. The hound would need them, too.

  She turned her head away from the taste.

  But the bear pushed them at her again, pressing them into her mouth.

  She chewed the bitter leaves a few times, then spit them out.

  The bear went back to the stream to get more.

  At last she managed to swallow a few of them.

  She slept, and when she woke the bear had brought her a possum, dripping with blood.

  All those years he had not killed another creature, and now he did it without thinking. He told himself it was the way of the forest and watched as she bolted the carcass down.

  Then he came closer and licked her wounds.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Hound

  RECOVERING FROM THE wound with the bear so close to her, every moment of the day, was pleasant at first. She felt safe with him despite the pain. But when the pain turned to itching, the hound found herself more irritable. She nipped at him more than once and stopped thinking of him as the bear who had saved her. He was her tormenter, and she could do nothing but what he said she could.

  At last, after several days of confinement, the bear let her go on her own past his line of sight. She had proven she was well enough to catch a fish in the stream while he was watching. Her hind leg was cleanly healed and she moved without any hesitation, even when leaping forward into the water.

  The hound was not interested in looking back. She was free again, and it was as wonderful as it had been when the magic had released her.

  She leaped and yelped and stood very still, holding her breath so that she could see the other creatures move around her. There was a butterfly dusting by in the faint breeze, as beautiful and delicate as life itself.

  But by the end of an hour’s play she was exhausted. She was not ready to return to the cave, so she wandered into the forest.

  That was when she came across the strange trail. The first scent of it brought her up straight and unmoving, ready for attack. Then, slowly, as she realized there was no immediate danger, she divided the scent into the familiar and the unfamiliar.

  The familiar was the trace of wild cat. She had not come across wild cats in this forest before, but farther north in the mountains that began at the end of the kingdom of Sarrey there were wild cats in plenty. They were mostly solitary creatures, not living in family groups or even clowders except when a mother had young children. This was a male wild cat, the hound was certain, but it was also something else.

  The unfamiliar smell was far more troubling. It made her feel cold to the very bone. Her instincts screamed at her to leave, but she ignored them.

  She looked around, determined to at least understand what was wrong here before she fled. This was her forest, and she would not be frightened from it.

  There was a waterfall nearby, where a stream fell from one side of a crevice to the gully beneath. She found a rock wall to hide behind, and there she waited.

  In time her nose lifted at the scent of the wild cat.

  Then she looked and saw—it was a man.

  At least, it wore a man’s body.

  Had it been enchanted, as she had been?

  She held back and watched the cat man further.

  He wore no shirt at all to cover his chest and shoulders. The hound herself was not cold in this weather, but she thought that a human must be. Yet she saw no sign of discomfort, no rubbing of hands or jumping in place to keep warm. Nor a fire, either.

  Barefoot, the cat man’s feet trailed some blood but were mostly hardened and callused as if he had gone a long while without shoes. He wore tattered trousers, but with his crouched stance, his furtive wanderings, his scent, he seemed even less human than she was.

  The cat man drank at the stream a little farther down from the waterfall. He bent over and drank with his face fully in the water, then lifted it up and shook his head, exactly as a wild cat would do.

  The hound could see then that there was a strange coloring around his face. He was very tanned, but in addition to this, she could see, were the faint marks of a golden striping around his nose.

  The cat man lay flat on his stomach with his hands dangling in the water. It was fresh snowmelt, so the water was very cold, but the cat man kept his hands in for quite a while. Then, with an animal’s swiftness and precision, he caught a fish and threw it into the air.

  The hound would have expected that he would lift his head up and let the fish fall straight into his open mouth, as a wild cat would.

  But it did not happen that way.

  Instead the cat man grabbed the fish out of the air with one hand and smacked it against a rock near the stream. Not quite enough to kill it, but enough to render it paralyzed.

  Helpless but still sensible, the hound thought.

  The cat man then stooped over it and stared at it for a long while.

  It wasn’t until the hound was shivering that she realized he was doing more than just watching the motionless fish.

  He was slowly draining it of whatever it was that made it alive. And smiling as he did so.

  When he was finished, the color of the fish’s scales had changed to a dead gray. But the damage extended beyond the fish. From as far away as the hound was, she could feel the difference in the forest itself. As if something had been ripped from not just the fish, but every living thing within a certain radius.

  This was what she had smelled from the first, in addition to the smell of the wild cat.

  It was all the hound could do not to gag at the feeling of terrible magic in the air. She thought she had seen the worst magic there was in Dr. Gharn’s abominable use of it; she now knew that she was wrong.

  The hound trembled, desperate to be away, to be out in full sunshine. She tried to keep very quiet. She was used to being a hunter and to stalking her prey. She should have been able to keep still.

  But the cold that seeped into her bones was too much for her.

  She made the smallest sound, like a moan, and the cat man’s eyes turned toward her.

  There was a wide smile on his face as his eyes seemed to catch her.

  But the cat man was distracted by a deer that crossed between him and the hound. The deer froze as the hound had, and it was in that moment that the hound fled.

  She heard the sound of a weight falling but no cry.

  She ran and did not stop until she was at the cave once more, drenched in sweat and shaking so she could not stand.

  The bear came close and touched her hind leg, in search of a reopened cut or a fever, but she ignored him.

  Where had the cat man come from? She had never sensed anything like that cold death before, so t
he cat man had to be recently come to this part of the world. Where had it been before? What had it done?

  She imagined the same cold death spread everywhere. She could not stop her mind from seeing a barren land stretching out before her. Was that why the cat man had come here? Had it destroyed all it could where it had been and now would do the same here?

  Did it even know what it did?

  She thought again of the cat man’s face, the pleasure it showed in the fish’s death.

  It knew.

  She looked up at the bear at last.

  He made a motion with his paws, as if to offer to get a kill for her.

  She shook her head and began to scratch in the dirt, making an elaborate map of the forest, beginning with the stream beside the cave and marking other places in the forest she and the bear both knew well. The place of the transformation, near the castle, the hills at the north, the streams that emptied into a river at the south.

  Never before had she been so frustrated by the need for human words.

  She tried to draw the cold death with dark, angry lines close together, but the bear only stared at them, uncomprehending.

  How to describe the choking feeling, the terror?

  She knew she would have to take him to the place and let him experience for himself what the cat man had left behind.

  But not now. Not yet.

  When the bear settled into his place near the opening, she was glad of it.

  After a sleepless night, she led the bear back to the waterfall.

  She had to stop now and then to let the bear catch up with her, though normally they were much of the same pace. Her heart was beating so fast she felt it might fly away, and she slowed her pace only when she noticed an unnatural sting in the air.

  The cold death had spread and encompassed more area now. She looked down to her paws to see that the ground itself seemed changed, even where the cold had not fully taken hold. The plants were not as green as they had been. They were tinged with brown and wilting, though there had been plenty of rain this spring.

  It was worse closer to the stream, where the plants looked as if they had simply withered up and been blown away by wind. There was a gentle blanket of gray chaff everywhere, and all sign of life was gone.