The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [6]
The bear brought leaves from the edge of the stream that he remembered from when he was a man and ill. The king’s physician had made him eat a tea brewed from those leaves so that his fever would break. The hound would need them, too.
She turned her head away from the taste.
But the bear pushed them at her again, pressing them into her mouth.
She chewed the bitter leaves a few times, then spit them out.
The bear went back to the stream to get more.
At last she managed to swallow a few of them.
She slept, and when she woke the bear had brought her a possum, dripping with blood.
All those years he had not killed another creature, and now he did it without thinking. He told himself it was the way of the forest and watched as she bolted the carcass down.
Then he came closer and licked her wounds.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Hound
RECOVERING FROM THE wound with the bear so close to her, every moment of the day, was pleasant at first. She felt safe with him despite the pain. But when the pain turned to itching, the hound found herself more irritable. She nipped at him more than once and stopped thinking of him as the bear who had saved her. He was her tormenter, and she could do nothing but what he said she could.
At last, after several days of confinement, the bear let her go on her own past his line of sight. She had proven she was well enough to catch a fish in the stream while he was watching. Her hind leg was cleanly healed and she moved without any hesitation, even when leaping forward into the water.
The hound was not interested in looking back. She was free again, and it was as wonderful as it had been when the magic had released her.
She leaped and yelped and stood very still, holding her breath so that she could see the other creatures move around her. There was a butterfly dusting by in the faint breeze, as beautiful and delicate as life itself.
But by the end of an hour’s play she was exhausted. She was not ready to return to the cave, so she wandered into the forest.
That was when she came across the strange trail. The first scent of it brought her up straight and unmoving, ready for attack. Then, slowly, as she realized there was no immediate danger, she divided the scent into the familiar and the unfamiliar.
The familiar was the trace of wild cat. She had not come across wild cats in this forest before, but farther north in the mountains that began at the end of the kingdom of Sarrey there were wild cats in plenty. They were mostly solitary creatures, not living in family groups or even clowders except when a mother had young children. This was a male wild cat, the hound was certain, but it was also something else.
The unfamiliar smell was far more troubling. It made her feel cold to the very bone. Her instincts screamed at her to leave, but she ignored them.
She looked around, determined to at least understand what was wrong here before she fled. This was her forest, and she would not be frightened from it.
There was a waterfall nearby, where a stream fell from one side of a crevice to the gully beneath. She found a rock wall to hide behind, and there she waited.
In time her nose lifted at the scent of the wild cat.
Then she looked and saw—it was a man.
At least, it wore a man’s body.
Had it been enchanted, as she had been?
She held back and watched the cat man further.
He wore no shirt at all to cover his chest and shoulders. The hound herself was not cold in this weather, but she thought that a human must be. Yet she saw no sign of discomfort, no rubbing of hands or jumping in place to keep warm. Nor a fire, either.
Barefoot, the cat man’s feet trailed some blood but were mostly hardened and callused as if he had gone a long while without shoes. He wore tattered trousers, but with his crouched stance, his furtive wanderings, his scent, he seemed even less human than she was.
The cat man drank at the stream a little farther down from the waterfall. He bent over and drank with his face fully in the water, then lifted it up and shook his head, exactly