The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [25]
It was a magic so immense and powerful that it could fill the open space of the mountainous expanse and still throb and pulse at her, as if demanding that it spread yet farther.
Prince George’s magic, when it had transformed her back into a hound, had been a kind magic. It had not been painless, but it had touched her with no intent except to do what she most wished for. It was an obedient magic, meant to be called for and used.
This magic was its own wild thing, as much like the magic she had felt before as was a trained pup to a wild hound.
For a long moment she faltered.
She could go back, she thought.
To the forest at the foot of the first mountains.
Stay there, be safe. Wait for the bear to return.
But she had never been a coward, not as a wild hound and not as a human princess, either.
The bear belonged with her, and she would go to him and face what he would face.
She moved onward, her face against the magic as if against a strong wind.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Bear
THE BEAR HATED the wild man’s mountains. He hated the small rocks that tore at the soft spots on his paws and the large rocks that cut at his skin when he squeezed by them. He hated the way that the rocks shifted as he stepped on them, then heaved him forward to knock him down, breathless and bruised.
He hated the thin air that made it so that he had to take in two breaths for every step he took and still feel as though his lungs were constricted. He hated the cold that the wind whipped at him when he was sharp and awake, but he hated it just as much when he was trying to rest, and the cold, persistent and prickling, kept at him.
Most of all, though, he hated the pressure of the magic on every part of him, overwhelming and unrelenting.
How to describe it?
A fine meal at court, when he had been king and dish after dish had been brought before him, each more delicious than the last. His stomach was full early on, but he could not stop taking just one more bite, and another bite.
It had nothing to do with not offending his cook. He was king. He could do what he pleased, and the cook had no say in it.
It was only that he wanted more.
This magic was like that. Some part of him wanted it, though another part of him was overwhelmed by it.
He felt overcome by the sweet scent of the brush here. He felt even the tiny thorns in his paws from the little creeping vine that seemed to find a place to grow even in the deepest crevices of the rock. For it was as if the vine spoke to him and the brush sang to him. They knew themselves and they knew him.
He had no doubt that this was where the wild man must be. Who else could survive here?
His dread rose as it began to snow. Soon he could no longer feel his extremities. And at every step he was afraid.
He remembered a story he had heard once, of a man who had decided one day to change himself into a snake because it was the least like himself of all the animals. A snake had no legs, had scales, and was not a warm-blooded creature. So becoming a snake would prove that he had more animal magic than any pretenders.
But when the man became a snake, he was so interested in his new body, in turning this way and that, in discovering how quickly he could move and how food would taste when swallowed whole, he lost all sense of his human self.
He died when he tried to attack a human—one of his own friends, in fact, who had come in search of him. But the friend had reacted automatically to the danger of poison from the snake and used a hunting knife to pin the snake to the floor of the forest, then his feet to stomp the life out of it.
As the friend held the dead snake in his hands, he realized his mistake at last. But he did not weep.
“It is better thus,” he said. “For a man who forgets himself is better dead.”
The bear fought to not forget himself amid this great magic.
He had been King Richon.
He had been turned into a bear by the wild man.
He had left the hound behind, had hurt her when she did not deserve it. But he would have done it all over again