The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [62]
Richon went privately to the royal steward, but his answer then was the same as it had been the day the woman had left.
“I am not myself with that music playing,” said the royal steward, his teeth tightly clenched.
Richon had sent the woman on her way and given her a fine purse in return for her offer to play. But he also asked her never to come to the palace again.
“Ah, he is afraid of it,” the woman had said, nodding sadly. “I can see that. Those who are used to denying it can sometimes never learn to appreciate it fully. Well, I pity him.”
Richon had never understood why she might do so, until now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Chala
AFTER RICHON HAD disappeared into the alehouse, Chala found herself drawn toward a horse and hound tied together at a post on the other side of the street. It seemed a strange pairing.
She walked closer, then bent down to put a hand out to the hound, and the hound licked her hand dutifully, but did not so much as bark at her, though she was a stranger.
Was it simply well trained?
There was something very restrained in all its motions. Chala had never seen a hound, even a tame one, that looked around so little or seemed to have so little sense of play.
She found a stick on the ground and threw it.
The hound did not even follow the falling stick with its eyes.
She drew closer and sniffed the hound. It was not—right. There was a very flowery human perfume lingering on the hound’s fur, the residue of a recent bath, but she was not sure that was all.
She let a hand run across the hound’s back.
It was dark brown with white on its belly, as were many of the hounds in the forests to the south even in her own time.
She looked around herself to make sure there were no humans nearby, then barked an inquiry in the language of the hounds. “Meat?” she asked, thinking that any hound would perk up at that word.
But this hound turned to her with a blank expression and then turned back.
So, it was a tame hound, one that had given up its own language for the language of humans.
She put out her hand again, let it be licked, and said, “Good boy,” in the language of humans.
But the hound had no more response to this than it had to her speaking in the language of the wild hounds. Nor could it be deaf, because it had looked toward her on her first approach.
What was wrong with it, then?
She gave it a piece of the journey cake that Richon had bought several villages past.
The hound licked the cake from her hand and then hung its head once more.
Chala turned to look at the horse.
There was something in its stance that reminded her of the hound.
Horses were animals that did not give up their own language, even once they were tamed by humans. She had never tried to speak in the language of horses before, but she trusted her new magic and tried it. She stroked the horse’s dappled gray and white neck while saying—she hoped—“Cool weather, good rest.”
She looked up at the horse afterward to see its reaction. Would it think she was a complete fool for speaking so haltingly?
But the horse did not look at her at all. It was as if she had said nothing.
Chala tried it again.
And then she tried other words. She offered the horse a piece of the journey cake, but the horse did nothing until she held the cake out in her hands and toward its nose. Then it turned toward the food and nibbled at it.
The perfumed scent from the hound had spread to the horse, or perhaps they had been washed together. But there was another scent. Chala was sure of that. She put one hand on the horse and one on the hound and concentrated.
As soon as she realized the truth, she leaped away from both of them, cold fear twisting around her spine.
The unmagic.
It had infected them both, though it was not as virulent as the variety in the forest, and left both animals living—after a fashion. They were more than domesticated, as humans had been doing with animals for centuries. These animals had been stripped of any sense of their own lives. They had