The Princess and the Bear

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Richon stiffened, but could not think how a blacksmith would have met the king.

  “Well, no matter,” said the man flatly. “If you’re going to the battlefield, I won’t be seeing you again. One way or another you’ll be dead, and the rest of us will be taken by Nolira.”

  “Doesn’t it matter to you if our kingdom is taken by another?” Richon asked.

  The blacksmith shrugged. “One king or another—they take our taxes just the same.”

  “Is that the way you truly thought of your king?” Richon asked.

  The blacksmith thought a long moment. “I suppose—I felt sorry for him,” he said at last.

  “Sorry? Why?” This was the last thing he had expected. Anger or jealousy, yes. But pity?

  “He did not see how little he ruled the kingdom, I think. He believed he made the laws and the people listened to him. Perhaps those who lived in more far-reaching places believed that, too. But those of us who were near enough the palace—we saw the truth. He was a boy being pulled by a nose ring, like a pig to the slaughter. And he had not the least idea of it.”

  “He should have known it. He should have been stronger,” said Richon darkly. “That was his duty, as king.”

  The blacksmith sighed. “Yes. We all have our duties and we all fail in them at one time or another. Some fail more than others, I suppose.” He held up his one hand. “And some are given more obstacles to overcome. But I do not blame him. He was used as much as any of us were.”

  Richon walked away from the blacksmith’s shop with a heavy burlap sack containing five well-crafted though hastily made and undecorated swords, all wrapped together. He carried them on his shoulder, and in his mind he carried the blacksmith’s evaluation of himself.

  It was like being told that all his mistakes were, in fact, a great deal smaller than he had thought they were. Because no one had expected more of him.

  After a long moment, he felt Chala’s hand on his shoulder. It was light but warm, and he looked up at her in surprise.

  “I do not know what to do,” she said. “You are a human. You deserve to have a human response, but I do not know what it should be. If you would tell me, then I would do what would comfort you. If that is what you would like.”

  It was a strange speech, but Richon could see it was entirely serious.

  “It is not my place to tell you what you should do,” he said. “Not even a king can order another to give him comfort. If it is commanded, there is no true power in it.”

  “But what if it is offered the wrong way, or if it goes on too long, or if there are others watching—” Chala stumbled over the words.

  “It is your choice,” said Richon. “You must do what you wish to do.”

  “And if it is not what you would wish?” asked Chala.

  Richon wanted to sigh. “I will always appreciate your touch, Chala,” said Richon.

  Her eyes widened. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “I am sure.”

  “Oh. That is not so difficult, then.”

  Richon used her hand to pull her closer to him so that her face was only inches from his. He could smell her breath, and thought how it had smelled when she had been a hound and he was a bear.

  “Do not be afraid of me,” Richon said. That she thought she needed to be more for him! When he could see so clearly that it was he who needed to be more for her. For all of them.

  “I may do the wrong thing. I may embarrass you among your own people,” said Chala.

  “Never,” said Richon fiercely.

  “I am a hound,” she said.

  It was not an apology, simply a statement of fact. And for Richon to deny it would only make Chala think him a liar.

  “You are a hound,” Richon agreed. “But you are more than that.”

  “Am I?”

  “You are.”

  “I am not human. I will never be—fully human,” said Chala.

  Richon swallowed and thought of Chala paying her silver for two loaves of bread they did not need. “You say that, and yet there are times when I think you are more human than I.”

  Chala tilted her head to one side, as a hound might who was listening for a distant sound in the forest. But she did not argue with him.

  He let her hand go, then they walked away from the village together. Once, later that day, as they moved into the southern hills, he thought again of the village children waiting for fathers to come home. He felt Chala’s hand on his stiff back muscles, rubbing at them ineptly but with kindness.

  Long past dark, when he was drenched in sweat and so exhausted that he was stepping over Chala’s feet, as well as his own, he stopped at last and let himself rest.

  He did not think he would sleep, but he did. He woke in the middle of the night, breathing hard from a dream in which he had seen soldiers dressed in his own colors being slaughtered by the hundreds. Chala woke with him, and put a hand on his arm.

  He pulled himself closer to her, then let her go with a curse at himself.

  He had said he believed she was human in many ways, but he still did not know what name to give his feelings for her, and it seemed wrong to offer less than his whole self.

  He did not sleep again, but he woke Chala at dawn with a rough shake to her shoulder.

  Partly because he could no longer stand his own stench and partly because he wanted to punish himself, he took a very cold bath in a stream nearby. Chala waited until he was finished scrubbing himself and his clothes and had gotten out to shiver in the dying sunlight before she did the same.

  In the following week they passed more villages and heard more stories of the royal steward.

  He had insisted that ten women from one village be sent to the army at night, to offer “companionship” to the soldiers. The women who remained to tell the story would not meet Richon’s eyes.

  Another village told of the royal steward’s demand that all their sheep be slaughtered and sent to the army for a night of feasting. Ten of the men from the village had agreed to join the army then, for there was nothing left for them at home, now that their flocks were gone.

  Richon could even imagine the royal steward explaining that it was all for the best, that the villagers would be grateful for their part in the great victory of the kingdom, and would be able to tell tales to the next generation of bravery and fighting at the side of the royal steward himself.

  Richon thought of the wild man and wondered if he had even begun to discover what it was the wild man had sent him here to do. He wanted desperately to save his kingdom, but the wild man had been concerned about the unmagic and Richon had seen nothing of that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Chala

  FOUR DAYS AFTER leaving the palace, they were between two villages, on the edge of a forest, when Chala caught sight of a cage as large as a man standing upright on the ground. It was shaking and she could hear animal sounds coming from it. She thought immediately of the monkeys she had freed before.

  Why did humans think they should be allowed to do such things to the animals they shared the world with? It was one thing to kill animals because of the need for food, and another entirely to imprison them like this.

  Richon tried to hold her back. “You do not know what danger there may be in that cage,” he said.

  But she shook him off and ran toward it. She recognized the language of the wolves, which was very close to her own language of the hounds, and she called out, “Be calm! I come!”

  But it only made the creature in the cage more agitated. The cage swayed from side to side and then turned over. Instead of angry words of demand, Chala now heard calls for vengeance, for death, for blood against all humans.

  She looked back at Richon, who could not understand the words at all, but must have gathered the general meaning from the tone in which they had been spoken. He did not look pleased, but neither did he suggest that they ignore the noises and simply walk past the cage.

  He had been an animal recently himself, treate
d by humans as nothing more than meat to hunt for.

  “I must do something for it,” Chala said to Richon.

  He bit his lower lip, but then nodded.

  Chala approached the shaking cage.

  She kept thinking of the animal held inside as a “creature” rather than as a wolf, although it spoke the language of the wolves quite clearly. Why was that? Because the animal’s voice did not sound like a wolf. It was too high-pitched.

  She knelt down. The cage was filthy and it stank, and she wrinkled her nose and nearly turned away from the terrible smell.

  But then she saw the creature’s eyes, and they were blue.

  A human blue.

  She leaned into the cage. There was little hair on the creature except on its head, and the arms were long, with rough fingers. No claws, either. He stood on all fours like a wolf, and he was matted and filthy so that his color looked dark.

  But it was a human boy, perhaps fourteen years of age, in the middle of that time between childhood and adulthood.

  He showed his teeth to Chala and then tore at her face, which she had placed too close to the bars.

  She drew back.

  He growled and called out in the language of the wolves, “Mine—this one is mine.”

  It was the traditional call at first sight of prey, and it meant that the other wolves, while they could help to corner the fleeing animal and would certainly share in the meat, would also give this wolf the opportunity to make the first killing strike against it.

  Then all would converge and the pack would feed.

  Richon came running up and put an arm around her. He turned her so that she was facing him. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “What happened?”

  She pointed to the boy.

  “It’s—” said Richon, then he paused. “Impossible,” he muttered.

  But it was possible, obviously, since the boy was here.

  “There is something gravely wrong here,” said Chala. How had this boy been made so animal-like, and who had placed him in this cage?

  She turned to Richon, and he moved a little closer.

  “Do you have a name?” Richon asked, pronouncing each word distinctly. He kept his hands and face away from the cage and stared intently at the boy.

  There was no sign of understanding, as far as Chala could tell. Was it possible the boy had never learned the language of humans?

  “The story of the boy raised by wolves,” said Richon, glancing at her.

  Chala nodded. She remembered it as well. But the story had not spoken of how difficult it might have been for the boy to return to humans.

  “You think he was raised by wolves but that humans tried to take him home and found he was too much animal?” She thought of herself and how much she was like this boy.

  “It is all I can think of,” said Richon. “Perhaps he lived too long with the wolves to ever make the change.” He did not look at her. “In any case, they should have sent him back to the forest with the wolves once they discovered that he could not live as a human.”

  “Unless they feared he could not survive,” said Chala.

  She looked around now and saw evidence of bones that had been eaten clean and thrown outside the cage. The boy was being fed at intervals and brought water as well.

  She could not tell how long he had been in the cage, but he would survive here. Animals from the forest could not hurt him, no matter how they might be attracted by his calls. In that sense the cage was for his protection. But it also kept him in one place so that the humans knew where he was and could come to him to keep him alive. The humans cared for him, though their way of expressing it might seem strange to Chala.

  “He is also one of my subjects,” said Richon bitterly. “And I have failed him.”

  “What do you think you should have done to help him, then?” asked Chala.

  Richon thought for a long moment. Then he said, “If I had magic of my own, then I could tame him. Or if you had not already healed Crown with the magic the wild man gave you, perhaps you could do it.”

  Chala stared.

  He thought that she had healed Crown with magic from the wild man?

  She did not have time to explain now. She had to help this boy with her magic if she could.

  Before Richon could stop her, she reached the cage and put her hand through the bars, reaching for the boy.

  He leaped toward her. She felt his teeth dig into the flesh of her arm.

  “Chala, no!” shouted Richon.

  But she was already gone, into the magic, and was far from him.

  She went into herself first, feeling the thread of magic that connected her to the boy, pulling herself along it as if she were on a rope bridge crossing from one side of a river to another.

  She could feel that he was sucking at her blood, and might do worse, but there was no pain as yet.

  With her magic she could see his life growing up with wolves. Then the day that he had been discovered by humans, who had gone into the forest to seek for the source of the magic they felt from far away. They took him away in chains and they tried to teach him, to no avail. And so had come the cage, and their infrequent visits.

  How he hated them!

  How he hated everyone, even himself.

  But only because of his human form.

  His soul was a wolf’s.

  Chala saw clearly that to be saved he must be allowed to become a wolf in truth.

  She could only assume that the animals in the forest did not know how to use their magic for something like this, or that they did not have enough of it. Perhaps she did not have enough, either. But she had to try.

  She pushed her magic toward him.

  She did not know precisely what she was doing, but she had been next to Prince George as he had changed her back into her hound form, and the princess to her woman’s form.

  Hairless skin turned to fur.

  Ears peaked.

  Nose turned to snout.

  Teeth and limbs elongated.

  And then it was done.

  The boy was a wolf.

  Chala fell back, breathing hard, blood streaming down her arm.

  The wolf growled at her, still not sure of what she had done. But he did not seem as crazed as he had before. He was himself again, though with less magic now to draw humans to him. He only needed to be set free, and allowed to return to his pack.

  Chala pulled on the lock to the cage but could not get it to come free. The use of magic was so unfamiliar to her.

  At last Richon, hands trembling, came around her and put his knife in the keyhole. It sprung free and the wolf leaped out.

  Chala watched him go, and felt a terrible wave of envy. He could return to the forest and be at home once more. He could be a wolf again, with a pack and a wolf’s life.

  But with all her magic she did not know if she would ever be a hound again. She did not regret the choice she had made to be a human woman and take on the task of aiding Richon against the unmagic.

  It was the simplicity of life as a hound that she missed. The physicality of it. Eating, the sun on her bare back, even the feel of rocks in her paws. And the sense of belonging, in the forest with other animals, of her kind and not.

  She did not know if she would ever truly fit in with humans. She did not know if she wanted to.

  “Chala,” said Richon.

  She felt him close to her, his touch easing the sting of the wound on her arm. He tucked her head into the crook of his neck, and she knew that here, at least, she belonged. With him.

  With surprise, she noticed there was something rolling down her face, stinging it. She put a hand up to feel it and discovered her face was wet.

  Tears.

  She was weeping, as a human woman would.

  “I thought it was the wild man’s magic that you used with Crown,” said Richon after the tears had stopped and she had pulled away from him once more.

  “No,” said Ch
ala softly.

  “You have it because you are human now?”

  “I think it is because of this time and place. There is magic everywhere here and in adundance. Even the animals have it.”

  Richon slapped his leg and swore darkly. “I am surrounded by magic and have not a drop of it myself, though I am supposed to be king. Truly I think I fit better in Prince George’s time than in my own.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Richon

  RICHON’S HEAD ACHED with the weight of his weaknesses. He desperately wanted oblivion, and he wanted to be alone. He was not proud of himself for it, but drink had always given him both of those things in quantity.

  At the next town that looked as if it were large enough to have an alehouse, he put down the sack of swords and told Chala he planned to go in. He half expected her to chide him. He had been so insistent they needed to hurry toward the army.

  But she simply nodded and said that she would wait and look after the swords. She also made a face that reminded him of the time when, as bear and hound, they had come across some rotting grapes. His nose had been pricked by the reminder of the scent of wine, and he had licked at the grapes. She had turned her nose up, saying she knew where better food was to be found.

  All he wanted was to not think about his own lack of magic for an hour or two. He went inside the alehouse.

  The two men inside stared at him. One wore a patch over one eye and had a beard that looked as though it might be crawling with lice. The other was so drunk that he could hardly hold his head straight.

  “Good morning,” Richon said after a long hesitation.

  “More like good afternoon,” said the patch-eyed man.

  Richon nodded agreeably and turned away, thinking that would be the end of it.

  But he had miscalculated.

  “What’s a man like you doing here?” The patch-eyed man waved at Richon’s finely made clothes, improved by his recent bath. “Spying for the king?” He laughed.

  Richon felt his heart skip a beat, then pasted a sickly smile on his own face. Surely this man had never seen the king before. It was only a joke.