The Princess and the Bear (16 page)

T
HE FOREST WAS
darker than any Richon had ever been in, and older. The trees were enormous, their canopies high overhead, and their leaves were so thick that little light trickled below. This forest was near the edge of Elolira. The greenery here was more like that of the southern kingdom of Nolira, so he knew he was close to the battlefield. He heard no sounds, however—no calling of birds overhead, no chittering of possums under the tree boughs, no hopping of rabbits underfoot. It was unearthly still.

Yet there was something calling to him, almost a physical force pulling him forward, tugging at his chest so that the swords moved uncomfortably against his shoulder bones.

He turned to look at the hound and saw that she was unsettled, too.

They went deeper into the forest and slowly smelled
the stench of the cat man’s unmagic ahead, worse than ever before.

With each step Richon was sure that he could go no farther, that this had to be the worst of it. But always he could feel more of the unmagic ahead, and so he went on and on. They came at last to the center of it.

It was at the top of a small hill, in a clearing about the size of Richon’s own palace courtyard. There was no green here at all, and when Richon looked inside of himself to see with his other eyes, he could see no light, no color—nothing.

But it was not empty of form, though it was empty of magic.

There were animals here, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, all lying together, stretched out, dead, their bodies blackened as if burned. They had not sunk into the earth as the animals had in the future, when the unmagic had spread into the forest and the bear had only just had time to save the fawn. Somehow the bodies were untouched by the unmagic all around them. And Richon could touch the ground around them without being sucked into the unmagic himself. In their death they had left behind protection.

Though the bodies did not stink, Richon was sure they had been dead for some time. There was no vegetation around them, no insects crawling over them, no flies overhead, no buzzards coming toward the smell of death—because there was no smell. Except for the
smell of the unmagic itself.

Richon bent down, then fell to his knees, unable to stay upright, unable to stop his weeping.

All of these creatures, dead.

Just as in the future, he had failed to save them from the unmagic.

Richon rose. He took deep, gasping breaths and forced himself to walk through the clearing. He looked at each carcass, hoping to find some clue as to what had happened to them and how the unmagic had not completely dissolved their forms.

They were with their own kind. The shrews with shrews, the foxes with foxes, the bears with other bears. The crows had all fallen together, and next to them were other birds: eagles, hawks, sparrows, finches, robins, and jays.

Richon moved back out to stand at the edge of the clearing. Chala stood by him, as silent as the ancient forest itself.

Richon closed his eyes, as if to use his magic to help him, but he could sense nothing. Whatever life the animals had once had, it was gone now, erased as if it had never been. Yet all had been together, called for a united purpose.

Richon groaned as the truth struck him.

It had only been weeks since the wild man had called to the animals in Richon’s kingdom to fight against him.
Richon had never thought what might have happened to those animals once the battle was over and he had been turned into a bear.

It seemed they were here, many of them.

They had been caught together by one who wielded unmagic and turned the strength of their combined magic against them.

And this, too, was Richon’s fault.

The only question that remained in his mind was why their bodies had not yet decayed. Richon could feel no magic around them, but he could not see why the unmagic would not have turned them to gray dust.

He looked for Chala, and then saw her as a hound, walking through the ranks of the fallen wild hounds. She stopped in front of each carcass and gave out a howl of mourning.

Richon had never known a human woman who could have faced something like this. And she did not stop with the hounds. She moved to the other animals, body by body, and howled for them as well. She seemed to go through them in order of those most like the hounds. Wolves, then porcupines, sables, wolverines, and stoats, and, last of all, the birds. Richon followed after her, looking at each animal, fixing the image of their forms in his mind, holding them there with magic and giving them names in his mind. Not their own names, perhaps, but names nonetheless.

Here was a family of caribou, the father buck with a great rack on his head at the front, the mother behind him, and the child standing behind them all. All dead in the same moment, with no chance for one to protect another, but a family nonetheless.

H
ER THROAT HAD
never felt so rough. She had torn it with howl after howl, not giving herself a moment’s rest. It had been the one way she could think of to make things better for these animals who had been killed by unmagic.

“We should go now, I think,” said Richon as the morning light grew hot. There was no cool breeze here, as if the wind itself were afraid to come through the trees of this forest.

The hound hung her head, taking in great gulps of air.

She wondered if she would ever feel whole again. She felt the deaths of these animals as if they were her pack, and the pain of their loss tore at her more because a part of her was human and did not see death as natural and inevitable.

In any case, these deaths had not been natural, any of them.

Suddenly there was a streak of sunlight from overhead, and the hound felt the descent of something heavy from above.

Rain?

She looked up and saw nothing, but felt the same sense of weight approaching.

Richon saw it, too, and reached for her.

The weight—whatever it was—was falling slowly. And it was warm.

Then the hound gasped as she realized what it was.

Magic!

And it belonged to the animals. She could sense it as it descended toward them.

This was why their bodies had not disintegrated.

The unmagic had caught them unawares. They had not had time to flee. But they could have fought back. They could have thrown their combined power against him, but they had chosen not to.

For if they had, their magic would have been swallowed up. And it was wrong for that magic to be gone from the world.

Though none of these animals had any hope of giving their magic to a son or a daughter, to a mate or a cousin, or even to any of their own species, the hound realized, they had wanted to keep it safe. And so they had sent it up into the air above them, still attached to their forms but away from the greedy unmagic, waiting
for magic to call to magic.

The magic of a thousand animals or more—it was hot and heavy, and very sweet.

The hound did not think it was for her.

She turned to Richon, who held out a hand, as if reaching for the magic. Then he pulled back and looked at her.

“I am the last man who should take it. The very last. I am the cause of their death, and they hated me. They must have, to fight against me as they did.”

He stared at the hound, his eyes wide and red, his hands clenched into fists.

The stance of a man ready to do battle, thought the hound. It reminded her of King Helm.

“There are humans who died because of you and yet you still think yourself able to be their king. How is this different from that?” she asked simply. Perhaps it was a hound’s argument, but it was true for humans as well.

“Because I was born to be a king of humans. Not of animals,” protested Richon.

“Both,” the hound barked at him. It was never as easy to speak as an animal. The words were simply not as complex. But the hound felt it would be wrong to change back into a human now, and Richon could understand her in either tongue.

Richon took in a choking sob. “I have another battle to fight first.” He looked out to the southern edge of the
forest, beyond which his army was supposed to be, battling other humans who threatened his kingdom.

“There is only one battle,” the hound barked. “And one magic.”

At last Richon lifted his head to the magic, as if welcoming it. He spread out his arms. And then he opened himself.

The hound could feel the block he had been using to press against the magic simply disappear, and the magic flowed into him naturally. Then she saw him sag, and put a hand to his mouth, as if to stop himself from vomiting the magic back up.

He took a tottering step. Then steeled himself and took another.

“They trust me,” he said, half in wonder, half in despair. “I may do whatever I wish with their magic. They give me free rein.”

The hound was not surprised. She, too, trusted Richon to the end of her life and beyond.

But she turned back to the animals one more time and saw that the bodies, held lifeless but untouched by death, had changed. They had begun to melt into the ground, overcome by the unmagic now that their magic had been taken up by Richon.

In a few hours’ time there would be nothing left to mark this spot except a vast field of cold death. The animals would be erased entirely, as the cat man must have intended from the beginning.

R
ICHON COULD HEAR
the sounds of the battle at the border of Elolira and Nolira as soon as he stepped out of the ancient forest and the hound changed into human form at his side. It had been more than two weeks since he had passed back through the gap into his own time, and he had been preparing for this all that time. Even so, it seemed to take him by surprise.

The clanging of swords, the cries of death, the rearing of horses as they trampled foot soldiers. And the call of generals who were far back from the actual fighting. It was familiar and yet Richon had never been so afraid. He had never cared so much about the outcome.

“You should stay back,” he said to Chala. “Here, where it is safe.” He nodded to the edge of the forest.

“Safe?” said Chala. “When I have faced the unmagic time and time again already?”

“But this is different,” said Richon. “You will not be fighting with magic here.”

“No, I will not. Give me a sword,” said Chala, nodding to the sack he carried. “I will fight with that.”

“You?” said Richon.

She stared him down. “Do you forget that I was a princess once, and that the princess had a father who was a warrior first and foremost?”

“But surely he did not train you,” said Richon.

“No,” said Chala. “He did not. But that does not mean I did not train. It was in secret, but it was one of the few things that I liked about having a human body even then. A hound has no way to manipulate a weapon—and no need to do it, either.

“But I liked the strength that I felt when I swung a sword. It was the one way that I could be in a hunt without having to make an excuse to leave for the forest.”

Richon was tempted to give her a sword just to satisfy his desire to see her holding it, fire in her eyes, her breath coming swift and deep in her chest. A human woman with a hound’s heart.

“Did King Helm ever allow you to battle on the field—with men?” asked Richon.

“No,” admitted Chala.

Richon nodded. “Because a woman would not be allowed in any army.”

“Why not?” asked Chala. “If she is good enough, would they not welcome another warrior on their side?
It would be foolish not to.”

Richon thought of all the reasons that he might give for this. The rules he had learned from boyhood. That a woman, no matter how strong, is not as strong as a man. That the male warriors would be distracted at the sight of a woman. That a woman in an army would cause the men to compete among themselves for her attention. That a woman simply did not belong on the battlefield—that her place was inside the walls of a palace, wearing fine clothes and drinking good wine while the men outside decided what flag she would swear allegiance to.

“Think of the last time you left me behind,” said Chala. “And if you would do that again.”

Richon burned at the memory. Chala had let him wound her very badly, and then had done what she wished to do anyway.

If he tried to do the same here, he did not doubt it would have the same outcome.

“If you do not wish me to be a woman in battle gear, I will be a hound. A bitch hound who hunts at the side of her mate,” said Chala bluntly.

“You are not a bitch hound,” said Richon. And he thought of her standing in his throne room. It was a revelation to him. Hound or human, she was the only queen he could imagine at his side.

Why had it taken him until now to realize that he loved her? That he had always loved her?

He had only been afraid of that love, and how deeply
he felt it. As afraid as he had been of his own magic. He had thought of how it would make him vulnerable, because he had felt the pain of loss before and knew how vulnerable he had been.

But love also made him strong. It made him strong enough to dare to take chances for himself, and for her.

“Come, then,” he said at last. “However you wish to be.”

“For this battle, then, a hound.”

Then she bounded ahead of him, toward the clash of armies. He thought of the boy king he had been, and knew suddenly that even if he had known about his magic, even if he had been less selfish, he could not have faced this threat.

The wild man had had to let him learn, beyond what humans could learn in the few short years of life they had to them, in order to bring him here to counter this. He still did not know what he would do, but he knew now that he was capable. Two hundred years of life had brought him at last to the battle that his kingdom needed him to fight.

Coming around the hill, Richon recognized a voice calling out behind the soldiers, cursing them for their weakness, taunting them with insults to their wives and children.

It was the royal steward. Richon would have known that high-pitched scream anywhere.

Richon motioned for the hound to wait. He set the swords down, then went back to find a vantage point
from which he could see the fighting well, and make a plan.

How many were in the invading army? Richon wished that he knew tactics better, but that had never been part of his training. His father had believed that diplomacy was the way to fight battles. And perhaps it usually was.

Not in this case, however.

Once again, Richon could see how his life as a bear had prepared him for this moment. It was not the same, of course, in tactics or strategy. But the mind-set was useful, the fierceness and the need for survival.

Richon made his way to the rocky outcropping above the battle. He crawled the last few feet toward the edge to keep his cover.

Then he stopped short and gasped.

This was no battle.

This was a slaughter.

Perhaps his men on the battlefield could not see it, but Richon could. They were hemmed in on all sides. There was no hope for victory. His men had little on them but dirty uniforms, some even in bare feet, but they fought against men in armor and boots.

Richon could see the royal steward watching it all, not calling retreat. The royal steward, who had insisted on the men having swords, but did not seem to care about any of the other rudiments of a fair battle between two armies.

Perhaps he had not had time to find such things. But
if that were the case, then his army should at least be falling back to better ground, to a better chance to fight again. But the royal steward was letting them die. Was he as incompetent as Richon was at battle? Or was there more going on here?

Richon watched more men die with each second, knowing that his hesitation had killed them. And yet his ignorance could kill even more.

He had to keep calm.

The hound was very quiet at his side. He did not doubt that she understood as much about this battle as he did, if not more.

He looked out over the field to the enemy troops. There were perhaps three thousand of them. Not an overwhelming number, though Richon could see only a thousand of his own men still standing. There were half that many dead on the field. And who knew how many days this battle had gone on?

Then Richon looked over at the horses standing behind the enemy lines. There was a very large man shifting frequently on one of those horses, standing back as the royal steward was standing back and with the same expression of watchful excitement on his face.

The lord chamberlain, the other man who had claimed to be his friend and adviser after his parents’ death. Richon was sure it was him.

So, he sat on one side, and the royal steward on the other.

Were they truly on opposite sides or were they working together to make Elolira fall?

It did not matter.

One way or the other, his people were being sacrificed.

Richon could not allow it to continue.