The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [49]
It was astonishing. Animals who came together did so for a battle of survival, and for nothing else. The animals here had set aside their natural tendencies—all of them at once.
It was easy for Chala to go along now that there were so many animals. No one noticed she was not with a pack of wild hounds. They were not focused on the other animals at all, only on the falcon that led them forward.
Chala was surprised again when she realized that she could hear the conversation of any of the animals around her. So it was not only the falcon that was different here. She was changed, too, in this dream. What in reality was reserved for some humans—understanding the speech of animals—became possible in her dream for animals themselves. In some way it felt right to her. It went along with this ancient time and place that had so much magic in it.
“Another place of death so soon? That’s twice in a year. It’s too much. What is the world coming to?” said one of the beavers, older and with a gruffer voice.
Another spot of unmagic? It seemed even more terrible than it had in the other time, for here the air was thick with magic and life.
Surely it must have a different source. The cat man could not have lived so long, Chala thought. This must be something else entirely.
“We always bring them back to life. With all of us together we have power enough,” said one of the younger beavers.
“But if there is more and more of this, there will eventually come a time when we cannot fight it. There will be one dead spot that we cannot fight, and then it will spread like the humans spread, taking far more than is their rightful place.”
“That will not happen for many, many years. You worry too much. Think only of the now.”
Chala’s throat closed up.
Even if this was a dream, those words were true. She knew what it would be like in many years, when the unmagic grew in power. She knew the diminishing sense of wholeness in nature itself.
“There it is!” the falcon called out.
The falcon circled and the animals converged.
Chala was far in the back, but she pushed her way forward and no one tried to stop her. There was no sense of hierarchy here. The animals did not jostle for position, nor give up their place because they knew another was stronger. There was a perfect equality here that Chala had never seen, among animals or humans.
When she reached the front of the line of animals, she saw the cold death at last, and she felt relief. The spot was only as large as her own body, and while it was the same unmagic she had felt in her own forest, it was on a much smaller scale.
Nothing grew around it. She could feel the nothingness that had pulled out all life and brought not even the comfort and familiarity of death. The coldness made her want to whine.
But the animals drew themselves up in a circle around it and Chala felt their magic pulse and stream around them.
Animals with magic.
And she gave magic, too, somehow.
Every moment the spot seemed to grow smaller. It was not so much destroyed as replaced, death with life, but at such a cost!
No wonder the animals in her own time had had no way to combat the unmagic. Or the humans, either.
No wonder the wild man had sent Richon and her back in time.
Chala saw now what had been lost, and it made her want to howl to the skies and never stop. How could the wild man stand it, watching this happen all around him? No wonder he had retreated to his mountain. It must make him ache to see the loss of magic to unmagic as it grew year by year. And he had been watching the change for a thousand years or more.
When the forest’s spot of unmagic had been completely replaced with magic, the animals, their work done, began to dissipate.
Chala, too, walked away from the middle of the forest out to where she could see the moon once more. She looked down at herself and realized she was not a hound, after all, at least not anymore. Now she was a human woman.
She had