And that was more than contentment.
For what do hounds need with the past or the future, when there is the now?
If you enjoyed this book, you might consider other books by the same author:
The Princess and the Wolf
http://www.amazon.com/The-Princess-Wolf-Hound-ebook/dp/B00B9FXEDA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1372714604&sr=8-4&keywords=mette+ivie+harrison
Prolog: The Tale of the Stolen Princess
She was born Ina Dagmar, Princess of Sarrey and Kendel, daughter of King George and Queen Marit. In the first week of her life, she traveled more miles than most adults in either kingdom traveled in their entire lives. She was carted from the southern edges of the kingdom near the dark forests to the mountains in the north by the icy sea. She wore gowns that had been sewn for her by the most reputable seamstresses in either kingdom, each one more elaborate than the one before. At last, she and her exhausted parents returned to their home, the castle of Kendel, and she was taken by her nurse to her own room so that if she woke in the night, she would not disturb her parents.
That night, as Queen Marit undressed, she heard a wolf howling in the distance. She went very still and listened carefully.
“Do you recognize him?” asked King George.
Queen Marit shook her head. “What is he saying?” she asked.
King George pressed his lips together.
“It is a call for battle, for blood, isn’t it?” said Marit.
“A wolf is not a hound,” said George, putting a hand to her neck to help with the burden of the thick gold necklace with white stones she had been given as a gift from her father on her daughter’s birth. What he would have sent her if she had given birth to a son was not something either of them spoke of. Ina was Princess of Sarrey, but she had no right yet to inherit it as queen or to rule there when her grandfather had died. King Helm had grown old and he had changed for the better toward his daughter, but he had not changed so far as to wish to see a queen upon his own throne. Or George, the king of a country he still considered an enemy.
“It has been so long since I have seen her. I worry for her.”
“She is a hound. She must have her own life in the woods.”
“Yes. I know what happened to her when I kept her to the castle to suit my own needs. It was not right. But I miss her.”
George kissed her hand gently. “She will return. You cannot doubt that. She will always return to you, when she can.”
“And the wolf?” asked Marit. “What does it want? What does it mean?”
“The wolf is outside the walls of the castle, where it is meant to be.”
The moon rose, and the forest was very quiet. If there was a battle for blood amongst the wolves, it had not lasted long.
Then in the darkest part of the night, when clouds had been drawn in by a fierce wind and covered the moon, there was a dark shape at the edge of the forest, a human in a hooded cloak, staring at the castle and at the tiny room at the top of the eastern tower where the princess woke for a moment and burst out in a fit of wailing for no reason her nurse could decipher, before suddenly falling back asleep.
A dream, the nurse told herself. But she shivered as she thought it.
She pulled the blanket around her shoulders and sat upright by the princess, intending to remain awake.
But she fell asleep soon afterward, dreaming her own dreams.
The farmers near the castle woke early in the morning to find fences torn through, gates broken off at the hinges, and animals missing.
The hooded human stood with arms outstretched as farm animals gathered around him: pigs, dogs, goats, cats, horses and cattle. They made noises that they had not made for most of their lives, the animal grunting sounds that had nothing to do with human language. They milled about anxiously, knocking into trunks of trees, digging at the ground with tusks and hooves, turning up stones and chewing on them.
With a sound like a howling wolf, the human lifted a hand and drove the animals forward, to the castle. They sounded and acted like wild animals, never tamed by humans. More than one of the animals died and was left behind by the mass, unnoticed and unmourned.
Two guards stood at the castle gate and tried to hold back the horde of animals. They were trampled over, their flesh picked over by each passing maw. The next set of guards, on the moat, died the same way.
The human in the cloak turned the animals to the side, and led them into the castle kitchens near the garden. The cook was only just starting to build up the fire in the hearth for morning bread baking. She had hoped to go back to sleep for a little while, for she was getting old, and this business of a new princess had worn her very thin.
The animals attacked her viciously, but so swiftly that she made no sound before she was dead.
Then the animals went inside the castle itself, maneuvered through the halls and stairs until they came to the nursery tower. They pressed up, knocked open the door, and woke the terrified nurse.
She, of all the humans who saw the rampaging animals, was close enough to touch them, to see their eyes and smell their breath and to hear their wild sounds. She reported all she knew to the king and queen when they arrived, too late, to find out what had caused the commotion.
But in days following, her story was believed less and less. Surely it was more logical to believe that she was confused, that it was only some terrifying enemy of the king who had come to take his daughter. The poor woman left the castle soon afterward, and was not heard from again.
There were those who argued that the nurse leaving the castle was proof of her complicity. She had been planted, paid off, and depended upon to tell a wild story of animal magic, when it was a purely political move. King George had many enemies, and the loudest of them were those who hated the way that he had made animal magic safe to use openly once more. And there were other enemies, from the kingdoms around Kendel, who hated King George for his lax taxation, which made their own people more restless and unhappy.
By full daylight, King George and Queen Marit had searched the castle twice over again for their daughter and found no sign of her. The queen was said to have wept a single tear, and then no more, for she wished to show herself strong for her people.
Whether the queen was cold or stoic was a matter for bards to argue as they told their differing stories of the night’s events. The one most commonly told is as follows:
Queen Marit was the first into the baby’s chambers. She ran up the steps as fast as if she had still had the form of a hound that was once so comfortable to her. She threw open the window and looked out at the forest, but there was no sign of any passage, human or animal. No trampled grass, no footprints, no marks. The animals in the farms were missing, and so was the princess.
But there was no blood on the bedsheets or on the stone. Though the nurse was white and trembling, she had not been harmed. The guards and the cook were not as fortunate.
King George saw to their bodies, and made sure they were buried in the castle cemetery and that their families received appropriate compensation for their fearless courage in defending the castle and kingdom. There was never a hint from him that the men had not done their jobs well enough.
It was King George who seemed to be the one in mourning in the days following. He did not go to the village for his weekly meetings with his people, to ask them for suggestions or advice, to listen to their words of wisdom. He had begun this tradition after his father’s death, in lieu of his father’s judgment days, when the people came to the king to ask for his opinion. George felt that he needed more wisdom from his people than they needed from him.
Rumors from the castle were that George did not sleep at night, that he roamed the castle with a candle in hand, and that he would not have animals near him of any kind. He was not seen riding, nor in the stables, nor going to the forest. Those who knew the legends of animal magic watched for signs of the fever in him, and he grew gradually more frail and thin.
It was left to Que
en Marit to rule the kingdom on a daily basis. She was stern and did not speak a word beyond what was required of her. No one accused her of being unfair, but she was not seen as a warm ruler and she was not beloved. A mother who could live through the death of a daughter so easily—she was not natural.
It was three months later that the queen insisted that the king come in the carriage with her to the castle village. His eyes were ringed with dark exhaustion, but he stepped out into the sunlight and raised a hand. A ragged cheer rang out.
The queen led him through the village. She ensured that he stopped at each house, hut, or hovel. She nodded to him to encourage him to hold out his hand in greeting, to say a kind word, to nod to those who were too fearful to come closer to the king.
And at last they came to the farthest hut in the village, well-kept inside and out, small though it and the land surrounding were. There were wildflowers near the steps in the same shade of blue as the summer sun that had broken through the clouds of spring for the first time only the week before. Small stones that shimmered with quartz and silver threads were organized in a beautifully abstract design. Someone within had an eye for beauty.
There was the sound of a baby’s cry.
The queen stopped, head bowed, and one of the peasant women behind her moved forward to stop the painful reminder. For anyone who had believed the queen felt nothing could see clearly now the pain written on her face in splotches of red and in the set of her shoulders, straight but forlorn.
But the king held up a hand and went into the hut himself.
When he came out, it was with the peasant’s babe in his arms. She was wrapped in a soiled cloth and her face was shining with happiness at the king’s song. She was blowing a bubble of saliva with her rounded lips. But the king, though his song was merry, looked closer to death than ever.
“What is it?” asked Marit.
He shook his head, and held more tightly to the baby than ever. He took a step toward the carriage.
Marit put a hand to his arm. “It is tempting, but you cannot take her away from them. No matter how poor the conditions are here, they love her. And she is theirs.”
King George murmured a negative.
“George,” said Marit in a more personal tone, lowering her voice so that only he could hear her. “She is not ours. She is not Ina.”
“There is no one else for her. She is meant to be mine,” said George.
Queen Marit raised a hand and sent a servant into the house. The man came out with an expression of despair on his face.
Then the queen went in herself.
She saw a dead man and a woman, dressed in peasants’ clothes, covered in filth, their hands reaching out to touch each other’s fingers, and between them, the tiny cradle of their daughter, who had lived.
She went back out again.
“There was a plague,” said one of the villagers. “Many were struck dead.”
This baby’s parents were obviously among them. And if the king and queen had not chosen that day to visit the village, there was no knowing what would have become of her, for her cries had not been loud enough to reach to the next hut.
Queen Marit wrapped her arms around herself. “We will take her back to the castle,” she said to the king. “And search for other relatives. She may have grandparents or an aunt or an uncle who wish to take her.”
“She is ours now,” the king said defiantly. “Dagmar.” He would not hear her called anything else, and he would not speak of the other daughter he had lost. There was only this one, Dagmar.
So she was raised in the castle’s own nursery, and became Princess Dagmar, the peasant girl who was raised in the palace as the king’s own child.
What happened to the true princess was never discovered, though the king had sent hounds out to search for her and offered a reward of nearly half the kingdom for her safe return. Gradually, the kingdom ceased to speak of it, for it caused the king only pain. And the new princess was a beautiful, bright thing who seemed to only lack her father’s animal magic. But there were plenty in Kendel who thought this a good thing.
The Princess and the Horse (The Princess and the Hound) Page 19
