The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [31]
She knew them too well, and at their worst. Now she would see how much he was like them.
“And think of this,” she went on. “If you leave me behind, I will go back to the forest where the unmagic is spreading. I will fight there, on my own, for as long as I can. And when I am finished, I will go in search of the cat man myself, and not turn back until I have killed him. Or he has killed me.”
The bear swallowed the bitterness rising in the back of his throat. If he did not wish her to see him as he had been, he would simply have to be better.
“If I go through there, what will I find?” he asked the wild man.
“You will find your own kingdom as it was two hundred years ago. You will enter your kingdom as a man, at the moment that you fled it as a bear. But it is up to you to make yourself king again, for the stories will have already spread about the battle with the animals. The people will know what the wild man has done to you. And they will remember what you have done to them.”
The bear touched a paw to the hound. “We will go, then,” he said gruffly.
Together they stepped toward the gap.
The magic around it did not bother him as much now. He seemed to have become used to it. Or he was no longer fighting it.
“One more choice you must make, Hound,” said the wild man, stopping her. “He goes as a man, and you may go as his hound—or you may go as a human woman at his side.”
The hound let out a short bark in surprise.
The bear wanted to speak, to say that he would never force her to put on a form that was not her own. He had seen how painful it was for her, and he knew how painful it was for himself.
But she was already speaking. “Send me as a woman, for then we will be able to share far more than we do now. And in understanding him, I will be able to help him more.”
The bear felt as though he were drowning. She offered him so much of herself, more than he had to give back to her.
The wild man simply said, “Then go through and the magic will do the rest.”
He opened his arms wider, and the gap enveloped the bear and the hound before they could change their minds.
The bear howled at the roaring pain in his ears and at the numbness in his paws. He could see nothing. Then he felt the sensation of falling, as if from a great height, but it went on and on.
He came back to himself slowly. He glanced up into the sky, but the wild man’s cliff and his moving tree were gone now. He saw only a few clouds and the peak of a mountain that he could sense no magic in.
There was no way back now. The choice had been made, for both of them.
He stretched, and only then did he start at the sight of his arms.
Human arms. Both completely whole and long, but with hair instead of fur and the skin beneath bronze. He stood up on his two feet, and how good it felt to do so! He would gladly walk back to his palace. He tried to think how long it would take.
He had only ever ridden far afield on a horse, and then only two or three days at the most, to observe the edges of his kingdom. On foot and from here in the mountains, it would take at least twice as long, and that was if he pushed himself past all limits.
He turned to look for the hound.
And gasped when he saw her, curled in a ball, gradually coming to herself on the rocks beside him.
She was not the woman she had been before. She did not have Marit’s pale, freckled skin and red hair. She was not as tall as a man and painfully thin.
He should have guessed that.
After all, the wild man’s magic was not like Dr. Gharn’s. It was far more subtle, and far more powerful. And she was not exchanging a body with another creature. She was living in a body that was all her own—only human, and healed of its wounds.
When he thought of it that way, it made sense: the black eyes, the dark, shining hair that fell down her back like sleek skin, and the way she moved, with the grace of a hound.
In addition, she wore a fine gown in a soft red velvet. Her feet were covered