The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [60]
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Richon
RICHON’S HEAD ACHED with the weight of his weaknesses. He desperately wanted oblivion, and he wanted to be alone. He was not proud of himself for it, but drink had always given him both of those things in quantity.
At the next town that looked as if it were large enough to have an alehouse, he put down the sack of swords and told Chala he planned to go in. He half expected her to chide him. He had been so insistent they needed to hurry toward the army.
But she simply nodded and said that she would wait and look after the swords. She also made a face that reminded him of the time when, as bear and hound, they had come across some rotting grapes. His nose had been pricked by the reminder of the scent of wine, and he had licked at the grapes. She had turned her nose up, saying she knew where better food was to be found.
All he wanted was to not think about his own lack of magic for an hour or two. He went inside the alehouse.
The two men inside stared at him. One wore a patch over one eye and had a beard that looked as though it might be crawling with lice. The other was so drunk that he could hardly hold his head straight.
“Good morning,” Richon said after a long hesitation.
“More like good afternoon,” said the patch-eyed man.
Richon nodded agreeably and turned away, thinking that would be the end of it.
But he had miscalculated.
“What’s a man like you doing here?” The patch-eyed man waved at Richon’s finely made clothes, improved by his recent bath. “Spying for the king?” He laughed.
Richon felt his heart skip a beat, then pasted a sickly smile on his own face. Surely this man had never seen the king before. It was only a joke.
The drunken man mumbled a few words, then said more clearly, “Always pretending he had no magic, though we all know it’s not true.”
The owner of the alehouse noticed Richon and came over to him. “What will it be, then?” he asked.
“Ale,” said Richon, remembering how he had always had that when he was already well and truly drunk.
He turned back to the patch-eyed man. “You think the king has magic?” His throat was so tight he could hardly get the words out.
The patch-eyed man shrugged. “We all of us have magic, every one. It is only a matter of how much or how little.”
“Surely there are exceptions,” said Richon, drawn into the conversation despite himself.
The patch-eyed man shook his head. “If they live and breathe, they have magic, big or small. Those who think otherwise haven’t looked deep enough.”
Richon was annoyed. Was this man saying that anyone who had no magic just had not tried hard enough to find it? He was a man who had lived two hundred years and more. He knew what he had—and what he did not.
“Some say it’s those who have the strongest magic who hold it back the most,” said the patch-eyed man.
“They’re afraid of it, see,” the drunken man broke in, his words slow but clear. “Afraid of how much bigger it is than they are. And how it will change them.”
Well, that might be true of others, but it wasn’t true for Richon. He felt sure of that.
“Knew a woman like that once,” the drunken man said.
The patch-eyed man said, “He’s known plenty of women, but not recently, eh?” He smiled and made a rude gesture.
But Richon was impatient. “What happened to her? The woman you knew?”
“She died,” said the drunken man. “But she had at last found her magic. Took her sixty-eight years of life, but when she found it, oh, how strong it was!”
“Why did she die, then?” asked Richon.
“When she realized her magic, she saw how all her life she had done nothing for the animals around her. As a recompense, she joined with the wild man.”
“She was the hawk who did as the wild man bid, against the king,” said the drunken man. “She died of an arrow wound in the final battle. Killed by her own people, trying to save them from the king who hated magic.”
The hawk, thought Richon. He had a flash of memory of that hawk. The dark eyes, the flapping wings, the intense glare.
But he had not noticed the