“I WON’T GO!”
The bear had let his growls rise to a shaking pitch, then found that he was able to make words, though what language they were in he was not sure.
He had not thought of how it was possible for him to understand the hound’s language, but now he realized it was the wild man’s magic at work. No doubt he could have spoken earlier if he had wished to. Perhaps he should have been grateful to the wild man for this gift, but it seemed only a reminder of all that the wild man had taken from him.
Did the wild man think he could simply send the bear back in time and all would be well? The bear thought of the young king he had been, for only a few years, and how badly he had done. No!
“You say I have a choice. Then I choose this—to stay here and return to our forest with the hound, both of us untouched by magic,” said the bear.
“Untouched by magic?” said the wild man, his eyes boring into the bear’s.
But the bear did not flinch away. “By more magic,” he added softly.
And the wild man looked away. When he turned back, his face looked ravaged. Suddenly the bear could see hundreds of years of time, of desperation and battling, in that face. Scars, puckered skin around his mouth, sagging black circles around his eyes—this was his own suffering, mirrored back to him and multiplied many times over. For the wild man had lived perhaps since the very beginning of time and magic.
The wild man bowed his head in defeat. “Yes. Yes, you may go. The magic cannot force you back. There would be no purpose in it if you are not a willing warrior for its sake.”
How much longer would the wild man live? The bear had never thought to feel sympathy for the wild man, yet there it was. He had fought the unmagic for so long, and yet he knew he could never win for once and all. He could only lose now or lose later.
The wild man sighed. “Once the unmagic has spread too far, there will be nothing left for me to do. No more twists in time, no more transformations of those who will come to hate me for my work, no lonely, cold winters spent with only my own fears for company. Not long at all.”
The bear was moved. If he could help—in any way that did not involve taking more magic on himself, and risking the hound with magic—he would do it.
“I would—” he began to offer. Perhaps he and the hound could come visit now and again and alleviate the loneliness. Or they could fight the unmagic here and now, by other means. The wild man had only to tell him how.
Of course, the bear knew, looking at the wild man, that he had already tried all else. This was the last possible hope.
And yet why should the bear be the one to save the magic? What had it ever done for him? He had seen only its worst side. He had never been able to wield it himself. Why should he help magic, and all those who had it, when he would benefit not at all?
Because of the unmagic.
The unmagic had destroyed his home. That was his enemy. Was that not one of the lessons he had learned as a bear? He had nothing to fear from those who wielded magic truly, for the good of humans and animals alike. He had already helped Prince George willingly, in aid of magic. He did not like to think that he simply held a grudge against the wild man for what had been done to him.
He knew what he had been and could see little else that would have made him what he was now.
But he did not want to go back. He realized now that what he feared was not to be transformed a second time, but to go back to the foolish, shallow boy king he had been.
He did not want the hound to see him that way.
He opened his mouth and touched her shoulder with his paw.
But she would not turn to him.
She pressed her head around his bulk and stared at the gap in time.
The bear looked at the wild man, who wore a surprised expression, though not an unhappy one. “You must know that she will be given a choice as well,” the wild man said.
But it was he the wild man wanted, to send back in time as a king! How could the hound—
The wild man said only, “See how the magic calls to her.”
Indeed, the hound leaned into the gap in time, her body taut with longing.
“She is a hound,” said the bear, though ashamed of himself for saying it. She was not only a hound. He knew that. But it would be easier if she were.
“She is who she is,” said the wild man.
The bear gave up speaking to the wild man and spoke instead to the hound. “It is not for you to go there,” he said stubbornly.
The hound spoke to him without turning back. “I will go where I wish. You do not own me. I am not a king’s hound, to be bought and sold, or bid to go here and there.”
There was such vitriol in her speech that the bear was taken aback.
“I will go,” she said again.
“But…what place will there be for you there? You are a hound. I will be a man.” Had he already moved to accepting that he would go?
The hound said, with a movement to her shoulders that seemed very much like a human shrug, “Then I will be a hound who is a companion to a man. I have been a hound who is a companion to a woman before, and did well enough.”
The bear shook his head. “They will not see you as I do. They will think of you as an animal.” It was only part of his fear, but it was true enough.
“Let them think whatever they wish. It is not their opinion that matters to me. It is yours. And my own,” said the hound.
“You do not know humans as I do,” said the bear. “You do not know what they can do, how they can cut with their words, with just a look. You have not felt how it is to be excluded from their laughter or their smiles.”
The hound turned from the gap with such a look of scorn on her face that the bear had to step back from her.
“I do not know humans,” she echoed. “But it is I who have lived among humans most recently. Perhaps there are questions you should ask me, about how women take revenge on other women with rumors and lies and cutting words. I think I know humans as well as you.”
She knew them too well, and at their worst. Now she would see how much he was like them.
“And think of this,” she went on. “If you leave me behind, I will go back to the forest where the unmagic is spreading. I will fight there, on my own, for as long as I can. And when I am finished, I will go in search of the cat man myself, and not turn back until I have killed him. Or he has killed me.”
The bear swallowed the bitterness rising in the back of his throat. If he did not wish her to see him as he had been, he would simply have to be better.
“If I go through there, what will I find?” he asked the wild man.
“You will find your own kingdom as it was two hundred years ago. You will enter your kingdom as a man, at the moment that you fled it as a bear. But it is up to you to make yourself king again, for the stories will have already spread about the battle with the animals. The people will know what the wild man has done to you. And they will remember what you have done to them.”
The bear touched a paw to the hound. “We will go, then,” he said gruffly.
Together they stepped toward the gap.
The magic around it did not bother him as much now. He seemed to have become used to it. Or he was no longer fighting it.
“One more choice you must make, Hound,” said the wild man, stopping her. “He goes as a man, and you may go as his hound—or you may go as a human woman at his side.”
The hound let out a short bark in surprise.
The bear wanted to speak, to say that he would never force her to put on a form that was not her own. He had seen how painful it was for her, and he knew how painful it was for himself.
But she was already speaking. “Send me as a woman, for then we will be able to share far more than we do now. And in understanding him, I will be able to help him more.”
The bear felt as though he were drowning. She offered him so much of herself, more than he had to give back to her.
The wild man simply said, “Then go through and the magic will do the rest.”
He opened his arms wider, and the gap enveloped the bear and the hound before they could change their minds.
The bear howled at the roaring pain in his ears and at the numbness in his paws. He could see nothing. Then he felt the sensation of falling, as if from a great height, but it went on and on.
He came back to himself slowly. He glanced up into the sky, but the wild man’s cliff and his moving tree were gone now. He saw only a few clouds and the peak of a mountain that he could sense no magic in.
There was no way back now. The choice had been made, for both of them.
He stretched, and only then did he start at the sight of his arms.
Human arms. Both completely whole and long, but with hair instead of fur and the skin beneath bronze. He stood up on his two feet, and how good it felt to do so! He would gladly walk back to his palace. He tried to think how long it would take.
He had only ever ridden far afield on a horse, and then only two or three days at the most, to observe the edges of his kingdom. On foot and from here in the mountains, it would take at least twice as long, and that was if he pushed himself past all limits.
He turned to look for the hound.
And gasped when he saw her, curled in a ball, gradually coming to herself on the rocks beside him.
She was not the woman she had been before. She did not have Marit’s pale, freckled skin and red hair. She was not as tall as a man and painfully thin.
He should have guessed that.
After all, the wild man’s magic was not like Dr. Gharn’s. It was far more subtle, and far more powerful. And she was not exchanging a body with another creature. She was living in a body that was all her own—only human, and healed of its wounds.
When he thought of it that way, it made sense: the black eyes, the dark, shining hair that fell down her back like sleek skin, and the way she moved, with the grace of a hound.
In addition, she wore a fine gown in a soft red velvet. Her feet were covered in sturdy-looking black boots. She even had a bit of gold around her neck.
Richon looked down at himself then.
He wore the body of the young man he had been, still ungainly and uncertain, but strong. His boots were the ones he had loved once, and the clothes, sweaty and bloodstained, were what he had worn at the end of the battle with the animals. And when he put a hand on the pouch at his side, he could feel the coins that jingled in it.
Had he had coins in his pouch then?
He did not remember. He had not often carried coins with him. He had had servants for such things.
This must be a gift of the wild man.
“Hound,” said Richon in his own human voice, not as deep as he had wanted it to be.
He put out a hand.
The hound—the human woman—met it with hers.
“What shall I call you?” he asked.
“Must I have another name, then?” Now she, too, spoke in the language of humans. Her voice was low, more like a man’s than a woman’s, and not at all smooth. Perhaps it would become smoother as she grew used to it, but the bear did not think she would ever sound like other women.
He would not give her a name. He had imposed on her too much already. But it would be strange indeed if the king referred to the woman at his side as “Hound.”
A small smile played across her face. “Call me Chala, for it means ‘human woman’ in the language of the hounds.”
“Chala,” he said aloud, trying it out. She seemed to think there was irony in the word, but he thought it fit her well.