FOR THE NEXT two days, Richon allowed less and less time for rest. They slept only a few hours at night and hardly stopped for more than a drink from a stream during the day. They ate what they could take from passing fields on the way, and Richon thought nothing of it.
He spoke to Chala only infrequently and with a distant expression on his face. She understood his need for focus. It was animal-like, and she thought it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Nonetheless, she was surprised at how painful she found it to spend hour after hour in silence, crossing through a country that was both familiar and unfamiliar at once. She had gone on journeys like this with Marit and had thought the princess spoke far too much, even if it was only a few words here and there.
Now she longed for a few words of companionship. In the morning she waited for Richon’s simple “Good morning” and to be able to speak back to him before his face went blank. She longed to hear his curt “Good night” before they rolled into their clothes and slept near a tree or a large boulder that had been warmed by the spring sun.
She and Richon shared food, and she made sure that she touched his hand when they passed the food between them. She knew that was selfish, but it felt good and she could not resist. She was becoming weak, she thought. Weak and human. Only at night was she a hound, in her dreams.
She thought it must be the magic of this time pressing on her, but the dreams were very strange and vivid. One night she dreamt she left Richon where he lay and went into a forest so thick with trees that there was not even a hint of the stars and moon overhead, and she had to travel by sound and scent.
She wore her hound body again and she could not remember feeling this deeply animal ever in her life. There had been humans everywhere in her world, humans who hunted in the forest, humans close by with their homes and their scents. But here there was no touch of humanity and a peacefulness that held her still.
Then she heard them.
The pack of wild hounds.
There were at least twenty of them, and at first she only meant to listen to them, to keep her distance, and to observe, as she had done once when her daughter was young.
They would not take her presence as a challenge unless she was close enough to be scented, and she knew exactly how far back to stay to avoid that.
But how she enjoyed the conversation among them.
“I saw it first!”
“No, I did!”
“It was my stroke that brought it down.”
“But I was the one who tired it.”
They argued over a recent kill presumably, but Chala could not smell the blood of it, so the carcass must have been left wherever it had been taken.
“Your greediness was unfair. I deserved more than that.”
“If you deserved more, you would have taken it. I am stronger than you, therefore the largest portion of the kill was mine by right. Come and let me show you why, if you wish to argue further.”
And then the sound of tussling in the dark, of growling, and nips, of whining when a wound was taken, and then licking and dragging away.
“Any others?”
But it was only a formality. There was only ever one challenge to the lead male of a pack at a time. Unless it was the final attack, and the challenger had already taken charge. Then it would be merely the finishing up of old business, the chance for all of the pack to take a bite of their old leader. As if that would give them some of his strength, some of his memories of the past.
The wild hounds roared out their approval for their leader by howling to the skies, and although Chala could not see him, she knew he would be strutting among them, his head held high, his mate at his side.
She stayed even when the moment was over and the wild hounds were quiet once more, and she hardly heard the flutter of wings overhead announcing the arrival of a full-grown falcon. But when the falcon spoke, she could understand it. It was not the wild man’s universal language, but a language of squawks and screeches that she somehow heard as clearly as the language of the hounds.
That astonished her almost as much as what the falcon said.
And then she remembered it was only a dream.
“There is a place of death in the east. Come, all of you. Come and help battle it,” the falcon cried out.
Chala’s heart grew chill.
The falcon flew away and the wild hounds did not hesitate a moment. They immediately rose up and followed after him.
Chala could hear the falcon continue to give out the same cry as it went along through the forest. And somehow all other animals understood. She smelled squirrels and mice and deer and bears and wolves and wild hounds and all kinds of birds. Frogs and toads and snakes leaped and slithered along. Possums, hedgehogs, porcupines, raccoons, voles, hares, and on and on. There was no fighting among them.
It was astonishing. Animals who came together did so for a battle of survival, and for nothing else. The animals here had set aside their natural tendencies—all of them at once.
It was easy for Chala to go along now that there were so many animals. No one noticed she was not with a pack of wild hounds. They were not focused on the other animals at all, only on the falcon that led them forward.
Chala was surprised again when she realized that she could hear the conversation of any of the animals around her. So it was not only the falcon that was different here. She was changed, too, in this dream. What in reality was reserved for some humans—understanding the speech of animals—became possible in her dream for animals themselves. In some way it felt right to her. It went along with this ancient time and place that had so much magic in it.
“Another place of death so soon? That’s twice in a year. It’s too much. What is the world coming to?” said one of the beavers, older and with a gruffer voice.
Another spot of unmagic? It seemed even more terrible than it had in the other time, for here the air was thick with magic and life.
Surely it must have a different source. The cat man could not have lived so long, Chala thought. This must be something else entirely.
“We always bring them back to life. With all of us together we have power enough,” said one of the younger beavers.
“But if there is more and more of this, there will eventually come a time when we cannot fight it. There will be one dead spot that we cannot fight, and then it will spread like the humans spread, taking far more than is their rightful place.”
“That will not happen for many, many years. You worry too much. Think only of the now.”
Chala’s throat closed up.
Even if this was a dream, those words were true. She knew what it would be like in many years, when the unmagic grew in power. She knew the diminishing sense of wholeness in nature itself.
“There it is!” the falcon called out.
The falcon circled and the animals converged.
Chala was far in the back, but she pushed her way forward and no one tried to stop her. There was no sense of hierarchy here. The animals did not jostle for position, nor give up their place because they knew another was stronger. There was a perfect equality here that Chala had never seen, among animals or humans.
When she reached the front of the line of animals, she saw the cold death at last, and she felt relief. The spot was only as large as her own body, and while it was the same unmagic she had felt in her own forest, it was on a much smaller scale.
Nothing grew around it. She could feel the nothingness that had pulled out all life and brought not even the comfort and familiarity of death. The coldness made her want to whine.
But the animals drew themselves up in a circle around it and Chala felt their magic pulse and stream around them.
Animals with magic.
And she gave magic, too, somehow.
Every moment the spot seemed to grow smaller. It was not so much destroyed as replaced, death with life, but at such a cost!
No wonder the animals in her own time had had no way to combat the unmagic. Or the humans, either.
No wonder the wild man had sent Richon and her back in time.
Chala saw now what had been lost, and it made her want to howl to the skies and never stop. How could the wild man stand it, watching this happen all around him? No wonder he had retreated to his mountain. It must make him ache to see the loss of magic to unmagic as it grew year by year. And he had been watching the change for a thousand years or more.
When the forest’s spot of unmagic had been completely replaced with magic, the animals, their work done, began to dissipate.
Chala, too, walked away from the middle of the forest out to where she could see the moon once more. She looked down at herself and realized she was not a hound, after all, at least not anymore. Now she was a human woman.
She had never experienced a dream like this before.
As a hound, she had relived experiences she had had in the past. But this dream was different. It combined bits and pieces of new and old to make completely new stories. Did other humans dream this way?
She woke feeling drained, as if she had bled from a wound. But she did not speak to Richon of it.