The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [12]
But he watched Prince George and saw his pain. Each cry was like an arrow to his side. Princess Marit moved closer and then put an arm around him.
They reached the cave, and George tried to step past the stream into the area of cold death. Over and over again, George tried to force himself forward until he was retching on his hands and knees, his face pale and his breathing shallow and fast.
“Is there more?” he asked hoarsely.
The hound led George on to the place where the gray edge was seeping outward.
The humans moved slowly. The bear could hear their feet dragging through the dirt, and he and the hound had to stop many times to let the humans rest.
There seemed to be a taste of death in the air even some distance away, and the bear could see fallen animals scattered ahead, touched by enough of the cold to succumb to it, though the plants were not fully gray here.
The bear’s breath came shallow and quick. This was his home. He had no kingdom anymore but this one, no castle but his cave. And for so long he had watched over this place, in his own way.
Now it was all disintegrating. Soon the remaining animals would be fleeing this forest and it would be deserted. The humans would encroach yet further here, and it would be as if this place, his place, never was.
“Oh,” Prince George groaned, before they had even come within eyesight of the stream where the hound had seen the cat man, where the bear had first tasted the cold death, and where it was now fully black as ashes.
Princess Marit touched the prince’s arm. “No need to go farther,” she warned him.
George shook his head. Sweat streamed down his face. He struggled away from her and, bent over, moved forward.
The bear realized now that Marit might have known better than anyone why she would be needed here, though she had no magic of her own.
“Please!” she called after the prince. “Come back!”
George nearly tripped over a carcass.
Then, in horror, the bear saw it melting into the ground. Before his eyes, he could see the disintegration of one tiny squirrel’s body as it became indistinguishable from the other bodies around it, falling into the gray deadness all around.
Surprised by the sudden change under his feet, George fell, landing flat on his face, his mouth touching the cold death.
“George!” cried Marit. She put out her arms and tried to press herself forward, into the worst of the cold death.
The bear pushed her out of the way and threw himself toward George.
Once he was there, however, he did not know how to get them both out. In the end, George stirred enough beneath him that the bear’s contact with the ground was interrupted. The bear had just enough strength then to push George forward. Then George leaned back and tugged the bear out as well.
Once free, the bear felt numbness in his forelegs and-paws, and a point on his stomach that had had too much contact with the dead ground. George’s lips were discolored, and one of his ears looked deflated.
Marit had to lead him in the right direction, away from the cold death, for he did not walk steadily now.
The hound walked at the bear’s side.
When they had gone nearly to the other end of the forest, George stopped and called for food.
The blond-haired boy and one of the others brought out bread and dried fruit. George had it shared around equally, and offered some to the bear and the hound as well.
The bear ate a little, then turned to see that the hound, for all she had always turned her nose up at such meals before, also took a bit of the bread and chewed on it slowly. He thought she must be terribly hungry and afraid.
“I do not know how to battle this,” said Prince George. “This pulls from me all that I am, all that I feel.”
Was the prince giving up? The bear did not think him a coward, but had hoped for more.
“You are saying we must retreat and leave our dead behind?” asked Marit. The bear remembered her father was a warrior as well as a king. She would not be used to defeat.
“I am saying