The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [39]
“It was not…chivalrous,” said Richon.
“You need not use those rules with me. I am not a human woman,” said Chala coolly.
“But you are a human woman.” Richon nodded to her body. “Or at least the others will think you are. If I do not treat you well, they will take it as license to treat you badly. And they will not think well of me, either.”
Chala considered this point. She did not wish to be badly treated, as she had been by the courtiers of King Helm, who had thought his daughter of no value to the kingdom.
So she nodded. “I will take the meat, then,” she said reluctantly.
Richon gave her a hunk of it, on a stick that he had crudely fashioned into a fork.
She ate it. It tasted about as she had expected. She grimaced.
“It wasn’t very good, was it?” said Richon, after he stamped down the fire and stared at the spit with the remains of the partridge on it.
“I do not like cooked meat in any case,” said Chala.
“No, of course you would not. But I thought it would taste like it tasted in the palace. I was looking forward to that. And it did not. Not a bit.”
“Which should make you more kind to your cook when next you meet her,” said Chala.
“The cook? Oh.” He wrinkled his brows. “I do not know if I would recognize her.”
“And why is that?”
“I sent my parents’ cook away. With a little coin,” he added, as if that made up for it. “I did not wish anyone to compare me to my father.”
“And the new cook?”
“The lord chamberlain chose her. She cooked well enough, but I never spoke to her myself. I suppose I should have. But at that time I never thought of giving compliments to those I paid to work for me.”
“A hound does not compliment,” said Chala. “The task is done for the pack, not for an individual. So all benefit.”
“Yes. Well, if only my kingdom truly worked like a pack, I could make that excuse,” said Richon. He looked up at the sunlight leaking through the heavy cover of trees.
It was nearly midday already, and they had not begun to move any closer to Elolira.
Chala wondered now if that was part of the reason that Richon had wanted to stop and cook his meal. Had he wanted to delay his approach to his kingdom?
She stared at him and saw the tense line of his mouth, the set firmness of his jaw, and the way that he twitched all over, making the same movement of hand to knee over and over again.
If a hound did this, she would think it had gone mad, and she would have to kill it to protect the pack.
Richon turned an anguished eye to her. “I thought I was ready to return,” he said. “I thought I had learned so much. But now that I am back in this body I feel like I am starting over again.”
“You will do better a second time,” she told him. He was thinking too much of past and future and too little of the present.
“Will I?” asked Richon.
She did not like his mood. She went over to tease him out of it, as she would another hound. She touched him gently on the arm, meaning to call out a challenge to chase her.
Surely a race would return his spirits, and they had never tried it in human form. He would find she had not so much advantage now.
But her hand on his arm made him jump, as if she had touched him with a sword and cut him open.
He pulled back his arm and held it close to his side.
Then he looked at her.
She thought of her mate, so long dead. She did not think of him often now, though in an instant she could recall his scent and the sound of his growl, whether it was playful or angry.
When she had been with child, he had groomed her night after night. It had been pleasant, but she had felt nothing more than that.
He was part of the pack. He had done his duty to her. He had filled the role he should have filled.
And Richon?
He felt like her pack, but in a deeper way. She knew this was not the way any hound would feel. And yet she felt it anyway, part human, part hound.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Richon
IT WAS LATE afternoon of the sixth day when they had found a dirt road at last, albeit one gouged by wagon wheels and split by torrential rain. Chala was ready