The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [57]
“You are a hound,” Richon agreed. “But you are more than that.”
“Am I?”
“You are.”
“I am not human. I will never be—fully human,” said Chala.
Richon swallowed and thought of Chala paying her silver for two loaves of bread they did not need. “You say that, and yet there are times when I think you are more human than I.”
Chala tilted her head to one side, as a hound might who was listening for a distant sound in the forest. But she did not argue with him.
He let her hand go, then they walked away from the village together. Once, later that day, as they moved into the southern hills, he thought again of the village children waiting for fathers to come home. He felt Chala’s hand on his stiff back muscles, rubbing at them ineptly but with kindness.
Long past dark, when he was drenched in sweat and so exhausted that he was stepping over Chala’s feet, as well as his own, he stopped at last and let himself rest.
He did not think he would sleep, but he did. He woke in the middle of the night, breathing hard from a dream in which he had seen soldiers dressed in his own colors being slaughtered by the hundreds. Chala woke with him, and put a hand on his arm.
He pulled himself closer to her, then let her go with a curse at himself.
He had said he believed she was human in many ways, but he still did not know what name to give his feelings for her, and it seemed wrong to offer less than his whole self.
He did not sleep again, but he woke Chala at dawn with a rough shake to her shoulder.
Partly because he could no longer stand his own stench and partly because he wanted to punish himself, he took a very cold bath in a stream nearby. Chala waited until he was finished scrubbing himself and his clothes and had gotten out to shiver in the dying sunlight before she did the same.
In the following week they passed more villages and heard more stories of the royal steward.
He had insisted that ten women from one village be sent to the army at night, to offer “companionship” to the soldiers. The women who remained to tell the story would not meet Richon’s eyes.
Another village told of the royal steward’s demand that all their sheep be slaughtered and sent to the army for a night of feasting. Ten of the men from the village had agreed to join the army then, for there was nothing left for them at home, now that their flocks were gone.
Richon could even imagine the royal steward explaining that it was all for the best, that the villagers would be grateful for their part in the great victory of the kingdom, and would be able to tell tales to the next generation of bravery and fighting at the side of the royal steward himself.
Richon thought of the wild man and wondered if he had even begun to discover what it was the wild man had sent him here to do. He wanted desperately to save his kingdom, but the wild man had been concerned about the unmagic and Richon had seen nothing of that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Chala
FOUR DAYS AFTER leaving the palace, they were between two villages, on the edge of a forest, when Chala caught sight of a cage as large as a man standing upright on the ground. It was shaking and she could hear animal sounds coming from it. She thought immediately of the monkeys she had freed before.
Why did humans think they should be allowed to do such things to the animals they shared the world with? It was one thing to kill animals because of the need for food, and another entirely to imprison them like this.
Richon tried to hold her back. “You do not know what danger there may be in that cage,” he said.
But she shook him off and ran toward it. She recognized the language of the wolves, which was very close to her own language of the hounds, and she called out, “Be calm! I come!”
But it only made the creature in the cage more agitated. The cage swayed from side to side and then turned over. Instead of angry words of demand, Chala now heard calls for vengeance, for death, for blood against all humans.
She looked back at