“Oh, yes, several. Of course, a lady such as yourself is used to a selection. Come, I will show you the others. There are some variations in color, and perhaps you would prefer an animal that is less—active.”
Chala wondered why any human would wish for an animal that had given up its wildness. But then she remembered the many domesticated animals she had seen that had no more of their own language remaining. Cows, goats, dogs, pigs—all had lost half their wildness and half themselves, in her opinion. But at least they had given it up willingly, in exchange for the ease of life with humans.
These monkeys were not the same. They had had no choice in this matter at all, and were given no recompense. She would not have it!
She gripped Richon tightly, and he made a small hiss of pain. Another hound would have nipped her in return, but Richon walked on.
The animal trainer led the way into a stall that stank of animal feces. It was dark and hot inside, and the monkeys in the cages were so weak and without hope that they did not even look up when Richon and Chala walked in. Chala could see old bruises on them and dried blood from wounds that had never been treated, but it was the blank stares that told her how often they had been beaten.
These animals thought there was nothing left in life but that, and they waited for the end. It made her sick to see them.
“This one is young and female,” the animal trainer said, pointing to a white-skinned monkey with a crown of white fur on the top of her head.
The monkey did not even look at Chala.
Chala leaned toward it. “Yes, yes, I see,” she murmured.
“And this one is a beautiful black male,” the animal trainer said, pointing to the one that looked as if it had been beaten worst of all.
“Black, yes,” said Chala, pretending interest in something other than the cage and its lock.
The animal trainer seemed to catch no hint of the undertone of anger in her voice. “Perhaps you would like to hold one,” he offered.
Chala gave out a long breath, as if she had been holding it for some time. “That would be best, I think. Don’t you?” She turned to Richon and let him see the anger in her eyes.
She wanted to kill the animal trainer, to feel his blood in her mouth, to feel his last kicking breath flow out of him.
But that was a hound’s desire, and it was not one she could indulge here.
When she had first been forced into the body of the princess, Chala remembered, she had attacked one of the coal boys who had come into her room at night to stoke her fire. She had not been used to being a human and had been angry at the change and at the magic that had been used against her. She had stayed in the castle before, but it had never felt as confining as it did then. Her every breath was a reminder of the prison she was in.
She’d told herself that she would get through this terrible time by thinking of the princess’s room as her own den, as she had had in her days with a pack. But the coal boy had violated her territory, had come in without warning, without permission. He had seen her sleeping on the rug near the fire, with the hound at her side, and in his surprise had fallen over her.
The pain had reminded her of other pain, and suddenly it had all come shooting out of her. She leaped on the coal boy and tore into his face with her fingernails, far less effective than claws but enough to draw blood. The coal boy had screamed for help, and it was the princess—in the body of the hound—who had come to his aid. She leaped on the hound and tore her off.
The coal boy ran away and left the castle. Afterward, orders were given for coal to be left outside the princess’s room for her to serve herself when she wished it. Slowly the hound had learned to restrain her violent impulses. It seemed this man had never done the same, though he thought of himself as far above animals.
The trainer got out his keys and whistled tunelessly as he approached one of the cages.
A monkey spit on him as he crossed its path, not out of anger, but because it was ill and wasting away.
The animal trainer threw the cage to the floor and cursed the creature, yanking on its tail.
Chala had had enough. She moved forward, kicked the man’s stomach, and snatched the keys out of his hands.
The sound of his howling filled the room, and the animals stared at him, and then at Chala.
She focused on the moment, something easy for a hound to do. She put aside fear and anger, and thought only of what must be done next, so her hands did not shake nor her eyes waver. After trying six keys, she found the right one to open the first cage.
Then she helped the white monkey with the crown of fur out and it scampered away. She moved next to the black-skinned monkey.
Richon stepped between her and the animal trainer.
The animal trainer kicked Richon in the stomach.
Chala heard Richon’s gasp, stifled.
It seemed wrong to her that he would have to hide pain even in these circumstances, but she could not spare thoughts for him. She moved to the next cage, opened it, and set the monkey on the ground. But this time the monkey did not move.
“Go, go!” Chala encouraged it in humans words that could have no meaning for the monkey. If only she had some of Prince George’s magic, she could speak to the monkey in its own tongue. She had never wished such a human thing for herself before, but she wished it now, for the monkey’s sake.
Richon and the animal trainer continued to fight. The animal trainer put his hands around Richon’s throat, and Chala heard Richon’s choking sounds, his feet and hands scrabbling at the floor.
She went to help, lunging at the animal trainer’s back and kicking at the backs of his knees. He turned, surprised.
But the animal trainer’s human reluctance to hurt a female doomed him. He did not throw her off fast enough, nor with enough force. And by the time that Chala was on the ground again, Richon was pounding the animal trainer’s body and pushing him back, and back again.
Chala took a moment to catch her breath and turned back to the cages. She tried to coax the unmoving monkey to leave once more, but it was no use. A human might have kept at such a fruitless task, but she did not. She could not spend all her time on one animal. There were others who needed her. She felt no guilt. An animal has a right to choose to live or die.
The third monkey that Chala freed wandered away, if not quickly, at least without question. Then she moved down the row of cages.
Richon and the animal trainer fell behind her in a heap.
She told herself that she should let Richon battle alone. No hound would thank her for interference with another hound. But she had to look to him, to make sure that he would survive even if she went on without him.
He was breathing heavily, had a streaming cut above one eye, and would likely have some terrible bruises in the morning, but he was winning. And he was smiling, not at her, but in his own joy at his fight.
Did he know how much that look was like a hound’s?
She hurried to the last monkey, picked it out of its cage, then shooed it back toward the forest beyond the town.
Then she waited for Richon to finish.
He seemed to take a long time about it, but she supposed that as a king he had not been taught how to fight.
When the animal trainer lay on his back, eyes closed, blood streaming out of his mouth, Richon brushed himself off and came to her side.
“I think I have never looked less like a king,” said Richon, his mouth twisting as he stared down at his clothes.
“And I think you have never looked more like one,” said Chala.
Richon’s cheeks reddened. “My princess,” he said to her, smiling.
Chala knew he meant it as a compliment, but she was not sure if she wanted to be thought of as a princess.
She turned back to look at the man’s chest, rising and falling. “Is it wise to leave an enemy alive?” she asked, genuinely wondering if humans had different rules for this than animals. A hound would never leave a threat alive.
“He i
s one of my people,” said Richon. “If I make an enemy of him, whose fault is it, his or mine?”
Chala thought there was a simple answer to that question, but Richon apparently did not agree.
“He lives,” he said, with finality in his voice.
They left the animal trainer where he was and moved to other stalls, near the edge of the forest.
Richon stared out into the trees. “Will other animals hurt the monkeys?” he asked Chala. “Out there, I mean. The monkeys are from the south and not used to the animals here. Perhaps we should go after them and make sure they are safe.”
Chala was confused. “Go after them and make sure they are safe? You mean cage them again and make them into pets for humans?”
“No, no,” said Richon.
“They will die in the forest when it is winter again,” explained Chala. She had known this when she had unlocked the cages and coaxed them to go. She thought the monkeys must know it, too.
“But then…why?” asked Richon.
“Because any animal would rather die free than live in a cage,” she said.
Richon breathed out slowly. “And any human,” he added.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Richon
BEFORE THEY LEFT the market, Richon saw a woman who sat behind a table on which many carvings were displayed. Most of them were mundane likenesses of children or grown men and women, some of animals. One showed a man kneeling beside a hound that he seemed to love, another a girl on a horse, her hair flowing behind her in the wind, an expression of joy on her face.
After Richon had stared at the carvings for some time, the woman looked around, then reached below the table and took out a new set of carvings. These were entirely different from the first. The animals and humans were entwined.
One was a bear’s head on a man’s body. Another was a woman on her hands and knees with a hound’s tail.
Another was a hound with a woman’s head.
The merchant woman touched a figure of a woman with the claws and eyes of a cat, and the same feral expression on her face.
It was not just any woman, either. There were distinct similarities between the wooden figure and the merchant woman herself.
Richon had no idea why she was revealing herself to him. She might not know that he was the king, but could she not tell, as Halee had, that he had no animal magic? Apparently not.
Last of all, the woman pointed out a figure of a woman connected to a hound, as twins are sometimes connected at birth. The woman did not have a left arm, and the hound was missing limbs entirely on its right side.
Neither could stand alone.
Richon felt guilty at the sight and turned away, thinking of how much of her hound self Chala had already given up.
But Chala leaned forward and touched the figure. “Sometimes two halves are more than one whole,” she said.
The woman in the stall nodded. “She understands,” she said to Richon. “Perhaps better than you.”
Richon pulled Chala a discreet distance away.
“Do you not sometimes wish you were a bear, even now?” she asked him.
“Of course,” he said immediately.
“Why?”
“Because a bear can do things a man cannot,” said Richon.
“And a woman can do things a hound cannot,” said Chala.
“Then you are saying—” Richon began. She could not be saying that she wanted only to be a woman now, could she?
“I am hound and woman,” said Chala. “Just as you are bear and man.”
“And king,” Richon muttered to himself.
“Perhaps the woman there has a triple figure,” said Chala. “Shall we ask her?”
Richon was surprised to see the gleam of humor in her eyes. He had seen humor in the hound many times, though it was rarer in the woman Chala.
But her eyes were bright indeed, and when he smiled at her she let her lips spread widely over her teeth.
“Another day we will come back here,” Richon suggested. Until this moment, he had not allowed himself to think beyond getting his kingdom back. But now he realized that his kingdom was not enough. He needed Chala, as well, to feel whole.
“Another day?” said Chala blankly. “What need for another day when we have this one?” she asked.
He smiled at her. In a way, he supposed, she was still very much a hound.
And he was glad of it.
They had walked nearly to the end of the marketplace when Richon saw a wagon full of books.
His heart began to skip and he hurried closer. He knew those books. They were from his father’s library.
The one on the far left was the book on training horses that his father had tried so hard to get him to read. Not that he had offered him bribes for it. His father would never do that. He felt that reading and the knowledge that came from it must be its own reward. He would only show the book to Richon and mention that he had read it when he was a boy, that he had enjoyed it very much.
Then his father might cautiously mention that he had noticed how interested Richon was in horses. He would ask if Richon knew how it was that a young horse was taught to answer to a particular command, or if he knew why a horse should never be allowed to drink its fill after a hard ride.
Richon had been interested in horses as he had been in no other animals. Other animals reminded him of animal magic that he did not have, but when he looked at a horse he thought only of the way it ate up the ground, the feel of air rushing through his hair, and the undeniable excitement of riding up so high.
But to learn about caring for a horse—he thought that was a duty for others.
His father had never forced the matter and Richon had never opened the book. He had not thought about it once in his three years as king. But now he itched for it. He felt that his horses had deserved more from him, but only now was he able to give it. If he had the book.
Underneath the first one, a little to the left, there was also his father’s favorite novel, though King Seltar had not liked to admit that he read such things. In fact, the king had hidden this volume under his own pillow. Richon had found it there and stolen it away, to see if it could be as deliciously sinful as his father seemed to think. He had read more than a hundred pages into it before giving up.
It was only now, looking at the book, that Richon wondered if his father had planted the book under his pillow on purpose to tempt Richon. It had been a young boy’s book, of impossible adventures in other lands, and new friends met along the way. But perhaps it was also his father’s favorite book from when he was a boy.
Richon saw book after book that he remembered from his father’s library. For a moment he felt dizzy, swaying, and imagined the library around him once more as it had been on that last day he had seen it, after his father’s death.
His father had labored all his life to collect them in one place, and Richon had cared for nothing but his own feeling of inadequacy at the sight of them.
They were his books no longer.
Richon turned and recognized the man he had sold the books to at the palace. This man had paid in good faith. Richon had no right to demand them back, even as king. He would have to leave them here, and hope that the books went to those who would love them.
But suddenly the man’s eyes widened in terror, and he put his hands to his head, falling to the ground in prostration.
“Forgive me, forgive me, Your Majesty,” he begged.
Somehow, despite his disguise of filth and a growing beard, the man had recognized the king. And perhaps he remembered that Richon was known for his temper and his whims.
But the man then said, “Do not hurt me with your magic!”
And that surprised Richon.
The man must have heard some garbled version of the story of King Richon being turned into a bear. Otherwise there was no reason for any of his subjects to think that Richon had the least acquaintance with magic.
Richon knelt beside the man. “Stand up,” he said.
The man stood slowly, trembling.
“King Richon,” he got out at last. “Do you wish to have a particular book back? Or—more than one?” He waved at them. “Take as many as you wish, Your Majesty.”
The fear in the man’s eyes made Richon see himself again as the selfish, spiteful boy king that his people had always feared.
Well, that must change.
Suddenly the man’s name came into Richon’s head.
“I want nothing, good Jonner,” said Richon. “But thank you for your kind offer.”
Jonner stared at him, as if waiting for the truth to come out.
Then Richon had an idea. “If you wish to give me something, there is another thing I would value more than the books.”
The man seemed terrified, but he simply nodded. “Whatever the king commands,” he said.
“Information,” said Richon. “What news have you heard in the last few days?”
“They said—there was a battle. A week ago. Magic,” the man stammered out. “And then—you turned yourself into a bear and fled the palace.”
Richon looked about for Chala and found that she had drawn herself away from him, watching. He motioned for her to come closer, and felt better when he could smell her breath next to his.
“Anything else?” he asked the man, who looked back and forth between the king and Chala and said nothing.
The man shook his head. Then he bit at his lip and added, “There is something about the southern border.”
Richon went rigid. “What about the southern border?” He had always had difficulty with the kingdom in the north, threatening war. But not the south.
“They say that what remained of the army has gone to the border in the south.”
“Why?” asked Richon, his head and heart suddenly pounding.
“Because there is another army there, from Nolira, ready to invade. It is said they have been gathering for months now, a new surge with each sign of your weakness, begging Your Majesty’s pardon. Now they have begun to attack what little of our army remains after the fight with the magical animals.”
Richon felt a terrible weight on his chest. He had known none of this, had never been informed of the gathering army. And had never insisted on being told.
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