The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [66]
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Chala
THEY SPENT THE night in the forest. In the morning when Chala woke, she was next to the bear.
She reached out a hand and touched him.
He started, growled, and then sat up.
She waved at his bear form.
Richon—the bear—looked at himself and then closed his eyes.
Chala watched then as he slowly transformed himself from bear into man. Slowly, without the ease the wild man might have used, but steadily and without doubt.
“I have often wondered why the wild man did not change me into something smaller and more disgusting, rather than a bear,” said Richon. “If I was to learn what it was like to be an animal, one who was hunted instead of the hunter, he could have made me a hare or a possum or some other creature that could not defend itself easily in a forest full of larger predators.”
“Perhaps he did not want you to die quickly,” said Chala.
Richon looked at Chala. “What if that was not the reason, either?”
Chala did not understand.
“What if it was my own magic, working unknown to me?” asked Richon.
“And you chose to live for two hundred years as a bear?” asked Chala. “You were so miserable, were you not?” For all those years he had been utterly alone.
“Yes, but I had not finished something. I could feel that. I thought it was the wild man, saying that I had not yet learned my lesson. But if it was my magic all along, then it was my sense of incompleteness, not his, that kept me living.”
“Without knowing it,” said Chala.
Richon nodded. “Do you remember,” he added. “When we went to the wild man, he said that I had to choose. He said that it was my choice if I went back as a king. What if he meant that it was my magic that would transform me, as it had at first?”
“And mine?” asked Chala. “He said that it was my choice, that you could not stop me.”
Richon stared at her wonderingly. “Do you think all animals have the magic, then?” he asked. “In this time as well as in the future?”
“I think so, yes,” said Chala. All living things seemed to have it, though as the unmagic grew, it seemed to grow more faint, in both animals and humans.
“But do they know it? Did you know it before you came here?”
“No,” Chala admitted. She thought of the animals in her dream. Had they known they were using the magic?
Certainly animals in her own time did not know they had magic. It was easier now, when the feel of it was all around, rich and sweet, to discover it inside.
“So, the magic is there in us,” said Richon wonderingly, “whether we know of it or not. It is part of us.”
“Or are we part of it?” asked Chala.
“Yes,” said Richon, half smiling. “The closer you are to magic, the more difficult it is to draw the line between what is magic and what is not.”
“But what does this have to do with you being made into a bear?” asked Chala.
“I think when the wild man changed me, he drew from what was already inside of me to make me a bear. That was my natural shape, for some reason. I am at heart a bear.”
Chala thought of the family of shape changers they had met before. All had chosen to be hounds. She had thought at the time that it was purely a matter of safety, for it was less conspicuous to travel as a pack of wild hounds than as five different animals.
Perhaps they had all been hounds because that was simply the way they were.
And the children in the animal race had each had his or her own form and seemed unable to change to another.
She thought of humans she had known when she had been a princess. There had been Lord Sniff. At least that was what she had always called him in her mind. He was always sniffing his nose at things, as if that were the only way to make a judgment. It had been very like a cat, and she had told herself that was part of the reason she had disliked him, for hounds and cats can never live together happily.
And King Helm. She had thought of him with a boar’s head on top of his large, muscled human body. He was as tough as a boar, and she had respected him for that, but he was also as difficult to reason with as a boar, as intent