The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [75]
There were 2,668 dead.
The number was higher than he had ever counted before in his life. Yet he had done it carefully and slowly, so he had no doubt.
Richon felt the hound at his side and had a vivid flash of memory. His mother, walking beside his father, for once her constant smile gone. They had been at a funeral, and the tears they had shed had been real, though the dead were peasants in a faraway village who died in a rockslide.
Here was the hound—Chala—walking with him as his mother had once done, as a queen among her dead.
When Richon was done, the new day was dawning bright and beautiful, as if to insist that it was not a day for death.
A trumpet made the call to arms.
All around him Richon felt men rush forward into battle.
He wanted to go with them, and yet the more he tried to move, the more he felt frozen in place, as if a great weight were pressing on his chest, so he could hardly breathe.
He cried out, and even that sound was muted.
He tried to wave his arms, but they would not move.
The hound came closer and sniffed at him. She whined and put a paw on his chest.
With that, Richon began to search inside himself.
He heard animals, some cawing, some scratching, some growling, in a tumult, and he could not distinguish one voice clearly from another. Where had they come from? Why were they inside him?
Then he remembered the forest, and the magic he had taken into himself. It was there still, and the animals to whom it had belonged had somehow lodged in him as well.
The animals were clamoring for something, but it was not until Richon turned toward the pile of the dead that the sound became a roar.
And the animals inside him somehow began to tug him forward.
When he was standing close to the center of them all, he felt a warmth inside himself, and a sudden quiet.
His chest throbbed, as if his whole body were being stretched.
Then he felt an animal leap out of him. It was a great gray wolf. When Richon closed his eyes, he could see the green light of the wolf’s magic, saved from the unmagic, in the midst of the dead.
Eyes open again, Richon could see one of the dead soldiers moving a foot.
For one moment Richon thought that the man had been set in the pile of the dead while yet living, and that he had struggled there for all these days, calling out, trying to show that he was not dead, and no one had seen him.
Richon felt horror at the thought.
And then he realized the truth.
The man had died.
But he was alive again. Because of the wolf.
The magic that gave life to all called the dead man back to his body and, combined with the strength of the animal’s magic, had healed his wounds.
The hound barked wildly.
And the rest happened all in a rush, too quickly for Richon to tell the difference between one animal leaving him and one man rising out of the ranks of the dead.
The animals went to those men they had an affinity for, as far as Richon could tell. At least they did so where it was possible. A man who had always taken the form of a wolf would be stirred by a wolf; the same with a man who was an elk, or a mouse, or a fox in his animal form.
As Richon felt the magic pouring out of himself and into the dead, he felt that for the first time in his life he had done something right. Something only he could do. Something marvelous and magical.
This was what the wild man had set in motion from the first, to make all of this possible. He could not help but weep, not at his own power, but at the chance he had been given to reclaim something of his life, to help others, animal and human both.
He watched in amazement as the world shifted around him.
As the sun rose, so did the dead, some of them naked because their uniforms had been stripped from them and given to another. Others were fully clothed, though bloody, and even still armed. Their faces came back to the color of life and they cried out in the language of animals and men combined as they ran forward into the battle. If their own comrades in arms were afraid of them, this was nothing compared to the reaction of the opposing