“When the day of the executions came, they were forced to speak their accusations aloud before all in the village, and to watch as the sentence was carried out against those to whom they had meant no harm.
“We all watched as they died, and perhaps the king expected that there would be yet more deaths, that we would turn against those in our village who had turned against us. But we saw the true enemy, and it was not those who had spoken out in their need. It was the king.”
Richon clenched his fists and told himself he was not yet done. There was more pain here for him to share.
Finally a girl came, no more than eight years old. She spoke with a lisp, and her voice was so childlike that Richon was chilled to hear it speak with such anger. She said:
“My mother had no magic. My father left us long ago, and it was his magic I inherited. I used it in fits and spurts because I had no one to teach me. My mother tried to tell me that it was wrong, but it was as if she told me to stop eating a sweet. I held it in my hands—how could I let it be wasted?”
She ought to have all the sweets she wished for, Richon thought. Now, when it was too late for her to be the child she should have been.
“She died because of the magic I used,” the girl said. “I made a locust dance on my hand. A man saw me and sent to the king for his reward. When the king’s men came, my mother insisted that it was her magic that had made the locust dance.
“And so she died in my place. Her last words to me were that she loved me and to remember that I was only a child. But at that moment I grew up. There are no children when a king like that rules over us.”
Richon suspected there were many more stories, just as bad.
In time, if all went well, he would invite these villagers to the palace to tell him the rest. And he would make what compensation he could to those who remained.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Chala
CHALA AND RICHON reached the palace on the tenth day after they stepped through the gap in time. The dust-colored stone towers were plainly visible against the acres of cleared land. There was no moat, but the gates were twice as tall as any human, with pointed spears on top to prevent incursions. There was a tower on either side of the gates, but the lookouts that should have been filled with guards were empty.
There was no one to be seen, however.
And when Richon pushed against the gates, they creaked open.
Was it possible that Richon had been king here only days ago? It looked as if the palace had been abandoned for months.
Why should humans wait to make a new leader when a pack of wild hounds would not?
“Perhaps you should wait here,” said Richon.
Chala growled low in her throat and did nothing of the sort.
Richon walked carefully on the overgrown stones and then through the gates. Chala followed behind, conscious for the first time of how little she looked like the companion to a king. Her hair was matted with sweat. Her skin was scratched and dirty. Her gown looked more gray than red.
Yet she kept her head high and walked onward.
The cobblestone path led to a courtyard faced on three sides by the palace itself. Inside the courtyard, Chala began to walk more easily, her breath steady in her throat, her feet light. Somehow the stained-glass windows and cut stone around them made Chala feel almost as if she were back in the forest, giving her a sense of peace and tranquillity.
When Chala looked more carefully, she could see that there were abstract figures of animals embedded in the center of each window. One had a deer, another a wolf, a third a bear.
Had Richon ever noticed them before? Had he seen how the palace was homage to the animals of the forest, and an attempt to re-create it here in a human way? Chala had never spoken to Richon about his ancestors, but this seemed to her clear evidence of the animal magic in those who had built the palace. There was love of animals and knowledge of their way of life in every stone here.
Richon walked more and more slowly through the courtyard, and then he ducked his head under an arch. Under the light was a garden, or the remains of one.
“This was my mother’s place,” said Richon. “My father cut it out for her and she came here nearly every day. Sometimes she brought me with her, and I sat and watched her dig in the dirt with her hands—she would not wear gloves.
“After she died, I kept this. So many reminders of my parents I destroyed or sold, but this I could not touch. I did not come to see it, but the cook made sure that the herbs were cared for, and she watered the bushes.”
His shoulders shook and tears streamed down his face; he knelt on the ground, his hands touching the dirt, his nose turned to the dead bushes.
When humans wept, what did other humans do? In King Helm’s court Chala had seen them laugh or make snide remarks. Or, if the cause of the weeping was an attack by another, it seemed to invite a second attack, or a third. Especially among women of the court.
Only once had Chala seen a man touch the shoulder of another man gently. But the weeping man had thrown the other off with a vehemence that Chala had been surprised to see in any human. The rejected man’s jaw had grown taut, and his eyes glassy, staring nowhere at all. Then he had moved away from the weeping man.
A wild hound snarled or bit when in pain. A wild hound used claws as weapons, sometimes on its own flesh. But once a hound began to whimper in pain, it was either near death or wild no longer.
She had never been uncertain before. She hated the feeling of it, like a loose cloak over her skin that rubbed against her neck with every step.
At last Richon got to his feet and walked, head bowed, away from the small garden. He began to move through the palace itself, room by room. The kitchen smelled of dusty spices and was full of broken tools. In the servants’ quarters Richon seemed unsure of himself, and he turned back and back again before returning to the courtyard.
“My own palace, and I don’t know its secrets,” he muttered. He led her through the main hall and through the larger, obviously royal rooms. The fine tapestries had been taken from the walls and left pale shapes behind, marking where they had been. Finally Richon stopped at a door, his hand to his heart.
“It has been so long,” he said. Some part of him seemed to grow smaller as he walked through.
It was a large room, empty but for a child-sized chair that had been smashed and lay on its side. Richon bent over the chair and ran a hand smoothly over it.
For a long moment he stared into the cold, empty fireplace.
Chala wanted to shout at him, to demand he tell her what he felt. As a hound she had been able to read emotions in other hounds just by the way they stood. Even with the bear she had been able to see what he felt in his stance, and smell it in his breath. But with this man she was at a loss.
At last Richon said, “The royal steward and the lord chamberlain came here to tell me my parents were dead. I did not believe them at first. I kicked and screamed. And when I was finished at last, they told me that it was time for me to give up my childish habits, for I was to be king.
“After that day I never came back to this room. I was trying so hard to be a grown man that I dared not remember how much I had loved being a child. I do not even know what they did with the playthings I had here—if they waited for me all those years or if they were taken away from the first.”
He paused for a long moment and then sighed.
“I should like to have had one to give to a child of my own.”
Chala stiffened.
She thought of him married, sharing this palace with another woman, giving her his child. She could not think of a human woman she thought would deserve Richon. A human woman would surely drill the wildness out of him.
Yet the most she could hope for was to stay and watch, hoping that Richon did not send her back to the forest to live without him. He knew all too well that she might look like a human, but she was a hound.
Richon moved on, and Chala matched his strides without thinkin
g. They passed through the throne room, which was empty and stank of urine—and worse. Someone had taken the trouble to truly foul the place before leaving.
Then the ballroom and the dining hall. Richon looked each of them over, surveying the damage stonily.
Then they went to the stables.
Richon walked by each stall.
He stopped for a few seconds longer at one that had the name Crown burned into the door.
And then, near the far end of the stable, there was a noise.
“Who’s there?” called Richon.
The reply came in a snort and a whinny.
Richon’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Crown?” he said.
The whinny came again, and this time Chala could hear a note of desperation.
“Crown, I’m coming,” said Richon. He moved cautiously through the other end of the stable, looking in each stall.
He found Crown lying down, one eye nearly shut with crusted pus. One leg was broken, and there was a terrible slash that must have been done deliberately with a sword down his belly. That he had not been killed was a miracle, but not a kind one.
He should be put down, thought Chala. No animal would wish to live through this. Nor any human, either.
But she did not know if Richon had the strength to do it, not after what he had been through this day.
Richon helped Crown to stand on three legs, and the horse seemed happy, but only for a moment.
As soon as it was standing, Richon had a look at the bleeding sores on the horse’s side. Its body, which must once have been the pride of the king’s stables, was now withered. It was clear that the horse had gone without water for far too long. It would die within the day, in terrible misery.
Richon put his head close to Crown’s. There were no more tears flowing down his face, as there had been in the garden. He did not look devastated as he had in the child’s bedchamber. He looked determined. And Chala knew then that he could bear the horse’s pain no better than she could.
He went back through the stalls, his voice calling back to gentle the horse in his absence.
While he was gone, Chala moved closer to the animal. He was too far gone to care if she was a familiar hound or not.
She only meant to comfort the horse while Richon was gone. She put a hand out to touch the horse’s belly, near the infected sword wound. And with that one touch, she suddenly felt all of the horse’s pain and deprivation. It was as strong to her as if she were close to dying herself.
She pulled back, trembling.
What had happened?
She had become the horse, in a way. But that was only possible through magic.
Impossible.
And yet she had had magic in the dream. If it was a dream.
Chala put out her hand once more. The pain of the horse flowed into her, and then she let her strength flow out.
Chala did not remember anything of herself for a long time after that.
But she remembered what the horse remembered. She saw the man standing above her, the one called Lord Kaylar, holding the sword, the vicious look in his eyes, her horse legs tied to posts so she could not turn away. She remembered the sound of terror that had come from her horse’s mouth and then the man’s laughter, mocking her agony.
And then, in and out of pain, in sleep and waking, the fever that had come and then finally passed, leaving her weak and trembling, waiting for death.
And the king, at last, who came to help her.
Chala felt it all through Crown.
And when she woke, Richon was standing over her, holding a short, rusty knife.
Dropping the knife, he fell to her side. “What happened?” he asked, his eyes dark with concern.
Chala lifted her head—a human head again now—so she could see the horse. It was nearly healed. There was a scar on its belly, but the sores on its side were gone and it stood on all four legs now, no sign of a break on any of them.
“Magic,” said Richon, staring at her with awe on his face. And not a little pain.
Chala understood immediately, for in seeing Crown healed by her, Richon was faced once again with the fact that he did not have the magic. He had not been the one to heal the horse he cared for.
There was a long silence, and then Richon offered her his arm. They walked out of the stables together, Crown behind them.
Chala stared at the horse and thought of how much faster Richon could go if he rode it, alone, to the border where the army waited.
But Richon patted his horse and said, “You’ve served long enough here. It’s time for you to be free of this palace and all that has happened to you here.”
Letting Crown go was the kind thing to do for the horse. And now Richon could hold to his memories of how the horse had once been with him.
In the silence that followed, Chala and Richon turned and walked to the south side of the palace. He did not look back, only forward—to the battle that lay days ahead. And this time Chala knew her purpose. She had magic after all, and she would use it to defeat Richon’s enemies.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Richon
FOR THE NEXT two days, Richon and Chala traveled together silently. Richon felt that seeing the palace empty had cleansed him in some way from the ghosts of the past. He did not understand how Chala had healed Crown or how she had found a magic that he had thought was always reserved for a select group of humans, but his pain faded when he decided that it must be a gift from the wild man, like the coins he had found in his purse. To be used when necessary, but once used, gone.
They soon came to another village, not as devastated as was the last one, and Richon sighed with relief at the sight of the women and children working in the fields, and in the shops along the market streets. Chala watched them intently.
There was a bakery with heavy dark bread for sale.
Richon bought one loaf and paid for it with a copper piece, but Chala insisted on buying two more loaves and paying a full silver for hers, though that was three times the price posted.
The woman who worked the shop stared at the coins, as if afraid, until Chala said, “For your children’s sake.”
The woman nodded but said nothing. Her eyes watched Chala suspiciously until she and Richon left the shop.
“Why did you give her so much?” asked Richon.
She waved an arm. “All of the men in town are gone. Only the women and children remain.”
“Oh,” said Richon, ashamed he had not noticed. His mind had not been trained to think of details like this about his own people. He had always thought of them as a group, not as having lives of their own.
Chala was better able to understand his people than he was!
They passed a blacksmith shop, and then Richon turned back as he realized there was a man inside. The only full-grown man in the village.
The blacksmith was hard at work pounding out a sword. But when the blacksmith turned to him, Richon saw the man was missing an arm.
“I haven’t finished yet,” the blacksmith said roughly.
“Finished what?” asked Richon.
The blacksmith paused a moment. “You are not a messenger from the royal steward?” he asked.
Richon shook his head. The royal steward? His mind whirled. Was that who was in charge of his armies at the border?
Once Richon had thought the royal steward his loyal adviser, but in his years as a bear he had realized that the man had simply been interested in taking power for himself through a weak king.
“Ah, well. I have no time to spare to make orders for anyone else,” said the blacksmith. “The royal steward has paid for all the weapons I can make for the next month, and more than that besides. So even if you’ve broken a plow or have a horse in need of shoeing, I cannot help you.”
His eyes glanced over Chala, but he said nothing of her. Too much work made a man incurious, Richon thought.
“I see.” Richon thought to leave the shop then, but stopped to ask one more question. “The men
of the village?” asked Richon. “Did they all join the army to go with the royal steward?”
“Join the army? I suppose you could put it like that,” said the blacksmith with a trace of bitterness.
Richon noticed how awkwardly he worked with his one arm. The flap of skin that covered his stump was not entirely healed. How recently had he been maimed? And how had it happened?
“How would you put it?” asked Richon.
“Forced to it,” said the blacksmith. “Threatened with the lives of their wives and children.”
Chala made a very human sound of distress as the blacksmith went on.
“Took some of them hostage, sent away to other villages. No one knows where. Most of them were left here, though. With the royal steward’s promise the men would be home by winter.”
Did the royal steward think the war would be over so quickly?
“And you?” asked Richon.
The man held up his stump. “I resisted,” he said. “The royal steward took the sword right from my own shop and cut off my arm with it. Said I was lucky, for he needed blacksmiths at home as much as he needed soldiers. Said I would live so long as I proved that I was useful. And he told me the number of swords I was to produce each month.” He named a figure that made Richon’s eyebrows rise.
“Indeed. I work night and day, and still I do not meet his quotas.”
“And what will happen to you if you do not?” asked Richon.
The blacksmith held up his other arm.
Richon swallowed.
He remembered the royal steward’s cruel sense of humor. It was no stretch to believe that he would do what he had said to the blacksmith and laugh over it. But it sickened Richon to realize that he himself had laughed with the royal steward for so many years, and in no better causes.
“I will take those swords to the royal steward if you like,” said Richon. “I am going to find the army myself, to join with them.”
“Why?” The blacksmith was surprised and looked more closely at him. “You look familiar.”
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