AFTER NINE DAYS of traveling, they were nearly at the palace. There was only one more village to go through, and then over the hill and down into the valley. But Richon saw immediately that this village was very different from the towns they had passed through in the north.
The village streets were nearly empty, and those figures they did see were haggard, missing limbs or eyes, starving, ragged, and hopeless. As for the buildings, they were crumbling, roofs unpatched, door hinges broken, with untouched grime everywhere. He saw no animals and very few humans.
Richon wanted to ask someone what had happened, but who to ask? He stared at a man who was walking by, his face down, his shoulders sloped. He moved slowly, as if each step were painful.
Richon reached out a hand to touch him, then let the hand fall.
“Excuse me, sir?” he asked.
The man looked up, blinking. His eyes were red. “Are you mocking me?” he asked.
“No, no,” said Richon.
“No sirs here in this town. Not for a long while, and we don’t want them coming back, either,” he said fiercely.
At this point Richon’s clothes looked more like cast-offs taken from a dung heap than anything else. He was glad he did not look like a “sir” much at this point, either.
“Have things gone badly here, then?” Richon gestured at the buildings.
The man snorted. “Badly? That’s one way of putting it,” he said.
“Will you tell me why?” Richon’s mouth felt parched. He swallowed hard and forced himself to continue. “Is it because of the king?”
“King?” The man spat and then stomped on the wet spot that came from his spit. “We don’t give him that name around here.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do,” said Richon sympathetically. “Can you tell me what he’s done to you, then?”
“Gladly. It’s all we ever think about here. That and what we’d do to him if we could put our hands on him,” he said.
Richon went rigid at this, but he did not try to escape the punishment of hearing the truth.
He only wished that Chala were not there to hear it. She looked away, but he knew she understood all quite clearly.
At least, he told himself, he did not give excuses.
“It was three years ago the king first outlawed magic,” the man continued. “Those who were found to use it in the normal acts of living—in planting and protecting crops, in hunting and bringing home to a family meat to eat—they were punished by the loss of a hand on the first offense, and an arm on the second. Here, because it was closest to the palace, the laws were most strictly enforced, in case the king ever happened by.”
Richon had signed the laws against animal magic, but he had not written them himself. He was not even sure if he had read them. His advisers, the lord chamberlain and the royal steward, had been eager to help him when he expressed his hatred of the magic. He had not been interested in the details, only in the outcome, which was less talk about magic and less use of it where he could be made to feel inadequate.
Yet he could not blame others for the consequences. He had used his power to take from his people with no thought of their welfare. And if he had read the laws, Richon knew, it would have made no difference. He would have thought the punishments perfectly just. What did he know of townspeople who would lose their livings without a hand or an arm?
“My son was found speaking to an antelope,” the man said. “He was coaxing her toward his knife, for it was close to winter and she was near death. She had no children left to care for. He would have given her a pleasant death and no need to face the cold.
“But the servants of the king caught him with his hand on her neck, and they proclaimed him guilty without a chance of defense.
“They cut off his hand on one side, and then his arm on the other. This, they said, because they were certain he had had more than one offense to his name. Or else how could he have spoken to the antelope so well?
“And then my son found himself without any way to help his family live. He would take no food, though I put it in his mouth myself. He spat it out and said that it was not right for him to take what he could not earn.
“His wounds were not bandaged well. They were not cut cleanly. And soon they began to fester. His eyes went bright with fever, and he no longer spoke the language of humans at all. He raved in the words of all the animals he had ever known, and always he begged for the same thing: his death.
“I tried to keep him close to me, but in the end he broke free. He was still strong then, with the muscles of youth that had not yet wasted away. He ran to the animals he had always loved. I do not know what became of him, but he never returned.
“The king who made these laws killed him as surely as he signed that law.”
I am a murderer, Richon thought. What must Chala think of him now?
But telling the people his identity and allowing himself to be punished would not bring back this man’s son. All he could do now was to ensure more men’s sons did not die, either because of their magic or because of the war at the border. And he could work to become a king this town deserved.
He stared at Chala and tried to read her expression. He would not try to keep her with him if she wished to go. He could not see what she was feeling. It was so strange, since when she had been a hound she had showed every fleeting emotion clearly on her face. Now that she was human, she hid it all.
But it was the kingdom he would focus on now, and not let himself be distracted by selfish needs.
A young man came down the street as the man finished speaking. The first man waved him over, and said, “He wants to hear your story, too, no doubt. Tell him about your father. What the king’s laws did to him.”
The young man looked at Richon, eyebrows raised, as if to be sure Richon wanted to hear it, after all.
Richon nodded. Hearing it was the least he could do.
“Please tell me,” he said.
And the young man did.
“My father survived the first year of the new laws without being caught. He learned to be cautious. He only showed his magic when there were no strangers about in the village. He did not use it beyond the borders of the village, either, because there were too often soldiers there, protecting the king’s own animals for his hunt. All animals belonged to the king, it seemed. As all people belonged to him. And all magic.
“But then the rewards were announced. A dozen gold coins for each man who was betrayed to the king’s men. They came through each year. The first year no one in the village betrayed another. But the second year it had been a bad harvest. Too many of us had been afraid of the king’s law against magic. We had not asked the beetles and worms to irrigate the ground for us. We had not called to the birds to keep from our fields.
“And so we were starving, all of us, when the news of the rewards came. My father, as well as many others, was betrayed that year. Those who betrayed them were equally betrayed, for they received no payment at all in return for their loss of honor.
“When the day of the executions came, they were forced to speak their accusations aloud before all in the village, and to watch as the sentence was carried out against those to whom they had meant no harm.
“We all watched as they died, and perhaps the king expected that there would be yet more deaths, that we would turn against those in our village who had turned against us. But we saw the true enemy, and it was not those who had spoken out in their need. It was the king.”
Richon clenched his fists and told himself he was not yet done. There was more pain here for him to share.
Finally a girl came, no more than eight years old. She spoke with a lisp, and her voice was so childlike that Richon was chilled to hear it speak with such anger. She said:
“My mother had no magic. My father left us long ago, and it was his magic I inherited. I used it in fits and spurts because I had no one to teach me. My mother tried to tell me that it was wrong, but it was as if she told me to stop eating a sweet. I held it in my hands—how could I let it be wasted?”
She ought to have all the sweets she wished for, Richon thought. Now, when it was too late for her to be the child she should have been.
“She died because of the magic I used,” the girl said. “I made a locust dance on my hand. A man saw me and sent to the king for his reward. When the king’s men came, my mother insisted that it was her magic that had made the locust dance.
“And so she died in my place. Her last words to me were that she loved me and to remember that I was only a child. But at that moment I grew up. There are no children when a king like that rules over us.”
Richon suspected there were many more stories, just as bad.
In time, if all went well, he would invite these villagers to the palace to tell him the rest. And he would make what compensation he could to those who remained.