The Princess and the Hound (21 page)

Was Dr. Gharn lying about the black-green leaf?
Was there a cure after all? George did not believe it, for if the man had intended to lie, surely he would have said that King Davit could be cured. That would make him far more valuable, would give George a reason to keep him alive.

But the man did not care. Now that his dove was gone, he had no reason left to lie. Or to take his revenge.

George looked at Dr. Gharn and saw a different man. He was sure of it, as sure as his father must have been when he saw four-fingered Jack and offered him all that he had. He had to believe in Dr. Gharn, for that was the only way that he could also believe in himself.

“I wish you to help him all you can,” said George.

“I will then,” said Dr. Gharn, “for my dove’s sake.”

After a long moment Dr. Gharn spoke once more. “The scholar in the east,” he said, “the man of the animal magic, he told me many stories. One of them was very like our tale of King Richon and the wild man, except that it promises a different ending, one that is not told either in Sarrey or in Kendel.”

George listened breathlessly for the rest.

“It promises the magic will be broken when there is a woman to love an animal and an animal to love a man.”

There was a rushing in George’s ears, and when he next opened his eyes, he found he was on the ground, with Dr. Gharn’s head above his.

“It would take great magic,” said Dr. Gharn. “Great magic indeed. But they say that the greatest magic often hides as long as it can. Hides and waits.”

G
EORGE SLEPT THAT
night in fits and starts, dreaming of Marit and Beatrice and of the bear. They were not the true shared dreams he had before, just repetitions of what he had already seen. When morning came, his eyes were red, his ears rang, and his body ached with the slightest movement. He felt old already and too worn out for more. But there was no way out of it. He had to see his father, and soon. He was king yet, and a report must be made in person.

George thought of stopping to see Beatrice first but told himself he had no time. The truth was perhaps more cowardly than he cared to admit.

Climbing the stairs to his father’s chamber, he realized the enormity of his having come here. This was not just coming to see the king. This was coming to see his father, knowing everything had changed between them.

He did not know what to do or what to say. He felt as though he were meeting a stranger for the first time.
As if he himself were walking up to the judgment seat to face his punishment.

And yet nothing was truly different. He was still the prince of Kendel, betrothed to the princess of Sarrey for the good of his kingdom. And his father was still dying.

George took a moment to catch his breath at the door to his father’s bedchamber, where four-fingered Jack waited, as always.

“Jack,” said George at last with a nod.

“He is asleep,” said Jack.

“Then I shall sit by his side,” said George.

Jack made no complaint.

George stared first at his father’s wasting gray form, then out the window at the distant woods. Was it any wonder King Davit had not known what to do about his son’s animal magic? It was nothing he’d had any experience with. It took George into dangers his father could not protect him from, dangers of which he knew nothing. Of course he had wanted to deny it existed or at least to ignore it as much as possible.

And now? The full story of Dr. Gharn, of Beatrice and Marit, was so complicated and so disheartening. Did his father truly need to know it?

Suddenly the king spoke. “In a fit of anger I once asked your mother a terrible question.” His eyes were only partly open. He seemed almost to be speaking in his sleep. To touch him would wake him further, and that might do him more harm than good. So George
stayed back and held himself as still as before.

“I asked her”—the king went on—“if she would choose her woods and her animals over me.” He paused, breathing heavily. “She told me…only if I forced her to the choice.” A longer pause then. So long that George began to wonder if that was all.

“And then she said that there was a part of her I could never understand, just as there was a part of her no animal could ever understand. She was two women, she said, in one body.”

George’s throat tightened.

“George, that is what you have always been, I think. Two boys, two men in one body.”

Was it true? It was what Dr. Gharn had said of Beatrice. And Marit.

George had always felt as though one side of himself had been suppressed, made to hide away. He was both the prince who lived in the castle and the boy who wandered in the woods. Was he any different from the princess and the hound?

It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps he had begun to love her—them—because he had sensed that division and known it matched his own.

“I think I was jealous of you, that there was always something in you I could never be part of. Just as I was jealous of the magic your mother had. It took her away from me, and it bound you two closer together in a way that I could never understand.”

Jealous? King Davit? Though George might not have felt close to his father, it was not because he thought that his father was wrong.

Now—

“It’s hardly something to be jealous of,” George said. “If you knew what it was like…”

With great effort, his father took hold of George’s wrist, leaning in so that their eyes were very close. “Tell me what it is like,” he said.

George opened his mouth and only one word came out: the word
hop
, in the rabbit tongue. George realized that it was not something he could explain, any more than he could explain what the color red looked like to someone who was blind.

“I knew it,” the king whispered, despondently. “Even when your mother died, I knew that she had lived more than I ever could. It is not so hard to give it up now as I thought then. I am so tired of seeing myself wanting. It is time for a better to take my place.”

“No,” said George. “I cannot lose you too. Not yet.”

His father smiled on only one side of his mouth, as if he were too tired to move the other. “We do not decide whom we lose, or when. That at least is the same for both of us.”

It isn’t fair,
thought George. He knew he would sound like a child if he said it aloud.

“Dr. Gharn said—” George said at last.

“Ah, Dr. Gharn? The lord general came to beg of me permission to see him hang.”

“But you did not give it,” said George.

“No.”

“Father, he has lost so much. I do not believe he will try to hurt you again.”

His father sighed. “I suppose it makes very little difference if he does. I have no hope to live long after this. I might as well give him one more chance. Why shouldn’t he have that too?”

George did not answer.

“George, listen to me.” This time his father spoke as the king. His voice was soft, but it was commanding. “I will not let you have regrets when I am gone. We must say what we have to say to each other before then.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.” George did not want to know.

His father’s mouth worked furiously, but then he spoke instead of something new. “I have never told you of the way your mother died in my arms.”

“In your arms?” George had always assumed that his mother had been brought back from the woods dead. He had never thought there might have been a chance to see her one last time….

“Yes. My jealousy again, you see. I wanted to have her to myself at the last. I pretended to agree with those who told me that a boy your age should not see his mother covered in so much blood, that it would be better for you to see her clean when she was gone, to say good-bye to her then.”

George had not known that talking of his mother
could be still so painful.

“But of course I knew in my heart that you would want to be with her, as I did, in the last moments of her life.”

A long, ragged breath.

George held himself very still. Was this what it would have been like if he had been allowed to see his mother dying? Would it have hurt so much? Would it have made him wish to be sent away?

At last his father went on. “The truth is, I did not want you with me. I hardly knew you. My own son, but I had spent so little time with you I felt you would have been a stranger there. And I was afraid.”

“Afraid?” asked George. “Of what?” Surely his father did not mean he was afraid of himself as a young boy.

King Davit gave a small, silent laugh. “Afraid of failing you. And being afraid, I did fail you. Over and over and over again.”

Yes, George thought. He had.

“After your mother died, you changed. I saw it before my eyes. You became less than what she would have made of you. But I did not know how to stop it. I could not take her place. I could only try to banish her from your thoughts, to make you think more of me. You learned duty from me then. You learned to be a king. At least that is what I told myself.”

“You were right,” said George, desperate to give his father some small peace.

“No,” his father said. His arm jerked across his
chest, and the motion exhausted him. He had to breathe quietly for several minutes afterward.

“No,” he said at last. “I taught you to be me. There are many kinds of kings, but I only knew how to be myself. I thought if I showed you that, you would be safe and secure. You would forget about her, about your animal magic, about that whole part of yourself.”

If only I could have,
George thought. He would have done exactly as his father said. But the animal magic could not be set aside so easily as that.

“Then came the night of the fire, after my failed judgment of the man with the animal magic. How you must have hated me that night, yet it was no more than I hated myself.

“Did I change then? A little, I think.”

George would never have allowed himself to judge his father as harshly as King Davit judged himself. In a way it was cathartic. It let the anger out without destroying him. He could remind himself that there was still love between them.

His father had given him this one last gift. It did not make up for what George had lost, but it was wonderful in its own way.

“Tell me about her,” said George. He felt free now. He had never talked to his father so openly before. “When she was dying. I want to know.”

King Davit nodded. His face relaxed, and he thought for a long while. “She did not know where she was. She thought she was still back in the woods. She spoke as if
in a dream. I tried to get her to recognize me, to talk to me. I wanted to tell her I loved her one last time, but she would not see me. She would not see any of us.

“That was another reason I told myself it was just as well that you did not see her. Because I thought she would not have known you. Or maybe—maybe I did not want to see that you were the only one she would know.” He gave a small shrug.

George put his hand out to his father’s shoulder and held it there. It felt good to be offering his father strength for once in his life, instead of the other way around.

“She spoke as if I were the bear. I think that was it, although it made no sense at all to me at the time. She spoke sometimes in another language and sometimes in ours. When I understood her, she told me I should not worry, that my time was coming. That the pain would be gone soon. That wearing a skin had taught me much. She said—the last thing she ever spoke—she said that even a beast could be loved for who he was.”

George’s heart nearly stopped as he heard this. It sounded so much like what Dr. Gharn had said about the end of the tale of King Richon and the wild man. Could that be what she had meant? But why would she have said it in her last moments?

“Was I right? Was she speaking to the bear that had killed her? Or did she mean—was it you she was speaking to all along and I never understood it?”

“No,” said George. “No, I do not think it was me she meant.”

“But if I had brought you to her then, you would have known. You would have understood her.”

“Would I?” George was not so sure. His mother’s story of the owl that had lost his family was only now starting to make sense to him. It had taken all these years before he knew what they had meant and whom they had been spoken to. It might well have been the same with his mother’s last words.

“She was speaking to a bear,” George said.

“The bear that killed her?” asked King Davit.

“No,” said George. “I don’t think so. A bear she had been searching for, one that might have looked like that bear. But not at all the same.”

“Ah. And this bear, it is special?”

George nodded.

“Is it possible—do you think you might find it? And tell it what she meant to say? If it still lives?”

“Yes. I will,” George replied.

His father seemed to sink then, and George was terrified that he had stopped breathing altogether. But when he put his head to the sunken chest, there was still a faint rise and fall.

Wiping his own face, George kept his hand on his father’s shoulder. He knew what the story of the owl meant at last.

G
EORGE STAYED WITH
his father the rest of the day and into the night. The next morning Dr. Gharn came in to relieve him. Sir Stephen had gone back to let him go freely from the dungeon, and the lord general had not stopped him.

No one else in the castle had been informed about what Dr. Gharn had done to the king. It was a good thing, perhaps, for George did not doubt that if four-fingered Jack had known the truth, Dr. Gharn would not have escaped from his sight with less than several broken limbs. And there were others who would have taken the rest, if given the chance.

George himself did not leave as Dr. Gharn examined the drowsy, weary king. He did not trust Dr. Gharn that far after all.

“How is he?” George demanded as the physician stepped back from the bed.

Dr. Gharn put a finger to his lips and motioned to George. He closed the curtain to give the king some quiet, then answered: “Not well, but not as bad as I feared.”

“No?” George felt a desperate hope rise in him.

“The poison has not yet dug deep inside him, or he would not be breathing so easily.”

“Then you can flush it out.”

Dr. Gharn looked up at George, “Your Highness, I told you already I cannot do that.”

It was hard for George to remind himself that this was not a new betrayal. This was what was expected. “Then what?” he asked, trembling so he had to reach for the wall to lean against.

“He will die, but not as soon as I thought,” was all Dr. Gharn said, in his blunt way. Then he went to work with the herbs he had brought. A new elixir was soon ready, this time green and yellow-flecked, but pleasant smelling.

Dr. Gharn offered it to George to taste, and George felt it his duty to do so.

Then he watched as Dr. Gharn showed himself willing to do the same. “You see? It is no poison this time.”

George nodded. He checked Dr. Gharn’s supplies and saw nothing there but what he had put into this new elixir. If he was going to let the man try, he must leave him to do his work. He decided he must be satisfied.

George too had work to do that he had been putting
off. As he climbed down the stairs and outside, he thought once more about his mother and her animal magic. Small magic or great?

Outside the castle he stood by the moat and remembered all those times when he had wished he had never been born with the animal magic. Why hadn’t he seen that it was something to be cherished, not hidden? He felt rain fall on his head and welcomed it.

And then he reached deep inside himself, where the animal magic was.

Yes, there.

A great magic indeed.

It was so enormous that George had always been afraid to see it. And yet it was so clear.

He looked, and this time he saw with his magic.

There in the kitchen was Fat Tom, licking his paws and waiting for a bit of fat from the spit. A chicken in a cage, waiting to be served for dinner. And beyond the kitchen, the family of mice he had tried to save. Not young any longer and scattered throughout the castle, but George saw them as individuals, brilliant lives of color and joy.

When he looked outside the castle, his ability to sense the animals around him increased. And became overwhelming.

Birds overhead. So many of them, calling to one another. Calling to the sky itself. Calling to him.

Fish in the moat. Diving, turning, twisting, sliding, with a language all their own, not sounds at all, but
scents. George had never thought to wonder how fish spoke, and now it was so obvious.

It hurt to be so aware of everything at once, yet George could not push it back now that he had started. He was not with his body now. He was with the creatures around him.

Ants dancing everywhere, in red and gold. Worms beneath the dirt. Beetles and moths and crickets and slugs. And on and on.

Even if his mother had known this part, she could never have taught it to him as a child.

Now, where was Beatrice?

There. Not in the castle at all, but wandering about the stables. How to call to her?

George was vaguely aware that his body was soaked with cool rainwater and the ground around him had turned to mud. He had to speak to Beatrice, had to reach her somehow, without words.

Ah, that was it. He had to stop thinking of her as a woman. She was a hound.

“Beatrice, come to me!” he said.

In his mind, he could see her image start, her head lift like a hound that has heard a distant call. In a moment she was coming toward him. The hound at her side came as well. In his mind, it was not a hound at all, however. It was a human woman.

George stared at the shape for a long time. This was his first chance to see the girl from his dreams, the girl who had become the woman Princess Beatrice and then
the hound Marit. He had always known there were things about her that were not houndlike. Just as Beatrice had never been comfortable in her woman’s body.

Now, though, George could see that both of them fit the images in his mind perfectly. There was a wonderful peace in that moment, but it did not last long.

When the two arrived, Marit stared at him with a hint of distrust.

“Did you call for us?” She seemed unsurprised.

“There is something in the woods I wish to show you,” said George. “Will you come?” Now it was he who was not telling all that he knew. He did not want to get their hopes up for no reason.

“I will come,” said Beatrice. She looked at Marit.

Marit said nothing, but Beatrice interpreted. “She will come as well.”

“Thank you,” said George. Despite all, there was still that much trust between them. He hoped he did not kill it after this.

“One more moment please,” said George. “There is another I must call.”

“As you wish,” said Beatrice.

Marit looked as though she were straining to hear him with her own closed eyes.

Without knowing why, George was certain she would not hear him. Even another hound would not have heard his specific call to Beatrice. If he called all
the wild hounds in the kingdom, they all would come to him expecting to be the only one. That was part of the magic in that place deep inside him, that crystal-clear place that had been there all along, waiting for him to wake to it.

Now he reached out to call to the bear his mother had meant to speak to as she lay dying. The bear he had tried to help as a boy, that had lived all these years. The bear he had saved from King Helm. The bear Beatrice and Marit had already come to know, impossibly gentle. A bear that was not a bear.

Inside his magic, George stretched and stretched but could not find any sign of the bear. There were several bears in the forest near the castle, but none of them was the right size. He looked farther abroad, seeing bears now and again but not the right one. He went all the way to the woods in Sarrey where he had last seen the bear, but still no sign. And then south, as far as he could go.

So, north again? George felt at a loss. The world was very large indeed, and he was not sure how far this sense of creatures went. There were limits to it, though. He thought that it did not work far from his own kingdom of Kendel.

“What is wrong?” asked Beatrice.

Her voice jerked George out of his trancelike state. He stared at her and did not know what to say.

“Wrong,” he echoed. Suddenly he knew what it was.

He held up his hand to stave off Beatrice, then
closed his eyes again. Into the forest by his own castle he went once more. This time he searched not for a bear but for a man. A wounded man, very old.

Yes. There he was. Hunched over close to the ground, moving slowly, lumbering along.

“Meet me at the edge of the woods,” George said to him.

The man looked up at once, as if searching for the source of the voice.

“I will do at last what you wanted me to do so long ago,” George told him.

And then the man, the bear that had been a man, began to move quickly without any regard to whatever injuries remained from the day of King Helm’s hunt. He would reach the edge of the forest before George and Beatrice and Marit did no doubt.

“It is time,” George said, and began to run.

Beatrice pushed herself behind him, but Marit was right at his side.

A woman to love an animal and an animal to love a man
. That was what Dr. Gharn had told him.

George himself was presumably the man who could love an animal. Could King Richon love a woman who was also a hound? What of Beatrice? Could a hound that had been a woman also love a bear that had been a man? He did not know how to ask her such a thing. Or if there was anything to ask at all.

George was running so hard that he had difficulty
thinking more than one thought in a dozen strides. The rain had made the ground wet, but not until they came close to the edge of the forest was the grass high enough to make George and Marit slow down. Beatrice came up swiftly behind them, never complaining of their pace or her own inability to keep up with it.

George stopped.

Was that the bear he could see pacing to and fro like a man behind the first trees? The smaller animals had fled, for George could hear no sign of them. And when he blinked, he was also aware that he could not see them with his other vision either.

“What is this?” Beatrice asked.

And he had to tell her something. “Could you love a man?” he asked bluntly.

“A man? What man?”

George shook his head. “Could you?” he insisted.

Beatrice’s face tilted to the side, a very houndlike expression. “I do not think that I can love as a human loves,” she said.

George’s heart sank.

Then she added, “But perhaps I have learned to be a little more human since I have worn this body. I don’t know, it might be possible. I did not think truly that I could ever give myself again as a mate to any hound, after what was done to me before and the loss of my daughter. Still, if it were not a hound at all but a man, then it would be different.”

George thought of the bear he had seen in his shared dreams. His gentleness. His struggle to be human in some way, despite the bearskin he wore. He thought of the man he had watched, the king who ruled long ago, unsure of himself, cruel and hasty.

He thought of Beatrice, with her temper and her pride. Her refusal to be hurt.

Perhaps there was a match to be made there. He could only try.

At last he turned to Marit. This was the hardest part. He saw her with his own eyes as a hound. She smelled like a hound, breathed like a hound. She could not speak to him with a human’s voice or in the language of the hounds. They were as separate as ever two beings could be.

But he had to do this. He knelt on one knee. He closed his eyes and blocked out all his other senses so he could see her as she truly was. The resourceful, self-sufficient girl from his dreams, who had become a woman undamaged by her father’s mistreatment. And then a hound, warm and giving as a hound could be.

He loved her. As much as his mother had ever loved his father, he was sure. And more perhaps. For he shared more with her than his father and mother had.

It was not only that he trusted her or that he understood her and she him. It was not only that he thought her beautiful and courageous and strong. She was unique, but that too was only part of it. There was no one thing that he could point to and say, “This is it.” But
all of them together, yes.

“I love you,” he said. There, was that so hard to say out loud? It felt as though something had been wrenched out of his heart. He knew men who had had teeth pulled out, but those teeth were usually partly loose and rotting away. Perhaps this pain was something like that one, magnified a hundred times.

“Can you love me?” he asked. That was the one that should have been harder, but strangely it was not. He thought a moment and realized why. He could withstand it if she hurt him. He did not want to be hurt, but he was willing to take the chance of it. After all, he had withstood it before and survived. They both had survived.

With his magic’s eye George could see Marit move toward him. Marit, the woman, in her true, beautiful human shape. Her red hair, her square jaw, so much like her father’s, her eyes flashing defiance, her lips showing vulnerability. All he had seen in his dreams. And more.

Yet she did not touch him. Her mouth opened. Her lips moved. “Yes,” was all he read. But that was enough.

He sagged, relieved. Really, this was only the beginning of the magic, if it was a beginning at all. But it felt to him as if nothing else could matter more. He put out his arms to embrace her.

She fell toward him.

Their faces touched, and he felt her warm, wet cheek against his. It was a hound’s fur that touched his skin,
but he did not notice it. To him, it was a woman who touched him. His magic told him it was true, and he found that he trusted his magic at last.

George breathed deeply and felt as though something inside him had been filled, something he had never realized was lacking before.