The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [9]
The cat man must have followed the hound’s trail from the day before, but it was too dark to do anything now. They would have to wait until morning, near home but not in it. Perhaps never in it again.
He felt the hound quiver and moved closer to her. There was only the shelter of a small, budding tree nearby.
It was the longest night in the bear’s memory, longer even than the first night he had spent as a bear.
He counted each heartbeat.
He had always thought he had found courage as a bear. He had not realized that it was in part that he had had nothing to lose.
Suddenly he was struck with a flash of memory from when he was very young, when he ran too early into his parents’ bedroom one morning, before his nursemaid could catch him.
He had caught them asleep, one of his father’s arms wrapped around his mother’s chest. His mother with one arm held up to catch his father’s arm, as if to pull it closer to herself. Their legs entwined, the blankets thrown off, as if they did not need any warmth but what they shared with each other.
He had run away, out into the castle gardens. He had pouted there for most of the morning, missing breakfast. Then he had been dragged back to his bedroom for a nap that he was determined not to take.
He could only think about his parents and how they had been complete. Without him.
The first light of dawn stretched like fingers through the trees of the forest.
The hound woke and pulled away from him, then stood on all fours and watched as the sun reached the cave and its surroundings. What the cat man had done was starkly visible.
Just above the stream was the shelf of rock where the bear often came out during the spring or fall to let the gentle evening light fall on him as he dozed and thought of the past and what might have been. It had once had tiny fronds of fern growing up through cracks. These were gone, as if they had never been.
The bear swallowed hard before turning his gaze to the cave itself.
The cave was destroyed, the rocks collapsed, as if some living part deep inside had been torn away.
The bear felt his own legs fall out from under him. As he fell, he cut his face on a prickle bush by the stream, a bush he had always hated.
But now he wanted to sing to it, to praise it.
The prickle bush was still alive. It was green. It might yet survive. If so, it was the only thing that remained of his home that was as it had been for two hundred years.
He felt as wounded as if he had been cut through by a sword, and worse, for a physical wound could be healed. This—never.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Hound
THE HOUND THOUGHT that they must go to Prince George. If there was any hope of fighting the cat man and his cold death, it would have to be with the prince. Yet he had used his great magic only once. Could he learn to control it? How much of the forest would be destroyed by that time?
She and the bear went to the edge of the forest near the castle. It had been months since their transformation, but still the hound was stung at the thought of how easily Marit had gone to a new life without her. Only at the wedding had she been acknowledged, and then with a tiny bow from Marit. Since then neither George nor Marit had come to visit in the forest.
The hound waited for some sign of a friendly face. She could not simply walk up to the castle door and scratch on it, howling for attention. She would be sent away.
At last she caught sight of a group of humans moving toward the forest. The hound recognized George and Marit, along with a handful of others, most young and dressed as little more than peasants.
The hound noticed with some satisfaction that Marit wore practical trousers and a short jacket rather than the floating, gauzy thing she had worn at the wedding. But her face looked troubled.
From her bearing, the hound could see that Marit was bound to her prince and to those around him. These were her pack now.
The bear began to move toward the humans. The hound had to run to catch up with him.
The humans stopped at the edge of