FOR THE NEXT two days, Richon and Chala traveled together silently. Richon felt that seeing the palace empty had cleansed him in some way from the ghosts of the past. He did not understand how Chala had healed Crown or how she had found a magic that he had thought was always reserved for a select group of humans, but his pain faded when he decided that it must be a gift from the wild man, like the coins he had found in his purse. To be used when necessary, but once used, gone.
They soon came to another village, not as devastated as was the last one, and Richon sighed with relief at the sight of the women and children working in the fields, and in the shops along the market streets. Chala watched them intently.
There was a bakery with heavy dark bread for sale.
Richon bought one loaf and paid for it with a copper piece, but Chala insisted on buying two more loaves and paying a full silver for hers, though that was three times the price posted.
The woman who worked the shop stared at the coins, as if afraid, until Chala said, “For your children’s sake.”
The woman nodded but said nothing. Her eyes watched Chala suspiciously until she and Richon left the shop.
“Why did you give her so much?” asked Richon.
She waved an arm. “All of the men in town are gone. Only the women and children remain.”
“Oh,” said Richon, ashamed he had not noticed. His mind had not been trained to think of details like this about his own people. He had always thought of them as a group, not as having lives of their own.
Chala was better able to understand his people than he was!
They passed a blacksmith shop, and then Richon turned back as he realized there was a man inside. The only full-grown man in the village.
The blacksmith was hard at work pounding out a sword. But when the blacksmith turned to him, Richon saw the man was missing an arm.
“I haven’t finished yet,” the blacksmith said roughly.
“Finished what?” asked Richon.
The blacksmith paused a moment. “You are not a messenger from the royal steward?” he asked.
Richon shook his head. The royal steward? His mind whirled. Was that who was in charge of his armies at the border?
Once Richon had thought the royal steward his loyal adviser, but in his years as a bear he had realized that the man had simply been interested in taking power for himself through a weak king.
“Ah, well. I have no time to spare to make orders for anyone else,” said the blacksmith. “The royal steward has paid for all the weapons I can make for the next month, and more than that besides. So even if you’ve broken a plow or have a horse in need of shoeing, I cannot help you.”
His eyes glanced over Chala, but he said nothing of her. Too much work made a man incurious, Richon thought.
“I see.” Richon thought to leave the shop then, but stopped to ask one more question. “The men of the village?” asked Richon. “Did they all join the army to go with the royal steward?”
“Join the army? I suppose you could put it like that,” said the blacksmith with a trace of bitterness.
Richon noticed how awkwardly he worked with his one arm. The flap of skin that covered his stump was not entirely healed. How recently had he been maimed? And how had it happened?
“How would you put it?” asked Richon.
“Forced to it,” said the blacksmith. “Threatened with the lives of their wives and children.”
Chala made a very human sound of distress as the blacksmith went on.
“Took some of them hostage, sent away to other villages. No one knows where. Most of them were left here, though. With the royal steward’s promise the men would be home by winter.”
Did the royal steward think the war would be over so quickly?
“And you?” asked Richon.
The man held up his stump. “I resisted,” he said. “The royal steward took the sword right from my own shop and cut off my arm with it. Said I was lucky, for he needed blacksmiths at home as much as he needed soldiers. Said I would live so long as I proved that I was useful. And he told me the number of swords I was to produce each month.” He named a figure that made Richon’s eyebrows rise.
“Indeed. I work night and day, and still I do not meet his quotas.”
“And what will happen to you if you do not?” asked Richon.
The blacksmith held up his other arm.
Richon swallowed.
He remembered the royal steward’s cruel sense of humor. It was no stretch to believe that he would do what he had said to the blacksmith and laugh over it. But it sickened Richon to realize that he himself had laughed with the royal steward for so many years, and in no better causes.
“I will take those swords to the royal steward if you like,” said Richon. “I am going to find the army myself, to join with them.”
“Why?” The blacksmith was surprised and looked more closely at him. “You look familiar.”
Richon stiffened, but could not think how a blacksmith would have met the king.
“Well, no matter,” said the man flatly. “If you’re going to the battlefield, I won’t be seeing you again. One way or another you’ll be dead, and the rest of us will be taken by Nolira.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you if our kingdom is taken by another?” Richon asked.
The blacksmith shrugged. “One king or another—they take our taxes just the same.”
“Is that the way you truly thought of your king?” Richon asked.
The blacksmith thought a long moment. “I suppose—I felt sorry for him,” he said at last.
“Sorry? Why?” This was the last thing he had expected. Anger or jealousy, yes. But pity?
“He did not see how little he ruled the kingdom, I think. He believed he made the laws and the people listened to him. Perhaps those who lived in more far-reaching places believed that, too. But those of us who were near enough the palace—we saw the truth. He was a boy being pulled by a nose ring, like a pig to the slaughter. And he had not the least idea of it.”
“He should have known it. He should have been stronger,” said Richon darkly. “That was his duty, as king.”
The blacksmith sighed. “Yes. We all have our duties and we all fail in them at one time or another. Some fail more than others, I suppose.” He held up his one hand. “And some are given more obstacles to overcome. But I do not blame him. He was used as much as any of us were.”
Richon walked away from the blacksmith’s shop with a heavy burlap sack containing five well-crafted though hastily made and undecorated swords, all wrapped together. He carried them on his shoulder, and in his mind he carried the blacksmith’s evaluation of himself.
It was like being told that all his mistakes were, in fact, a great deal smaller than he had thought they were. Because no one had expected more of him.
After a long moment, he felt Chala’s hand on his shoulder. It was light but warm, and he looked up at her in surprise.
“I do not know what to do,” she said. “You are a human. You deserve to have a human response, but I do not know what it should be. If you would tell me, then I would do what would comfort you. If that is what you would like.”
It was a strange speech, but Richon could see it was entirely serious.
“It is not my place to tell you what you should do,” he said. “Not even a king can order another to give him comfort. If it is commanded, there is no true power in it.”
“But what if it is offered the wrong way, or if it goes on too long, or if there are others watching—” Chala stumbled over the words.
“It is your choice,” said Richon. “You must do what you wish to do.”
“And if it is not what you would wish?” asked Chala.
Richon wanted to sigh. “I will always appreciate your touch, Chala,” said Richon.
Her eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I am sure.”
“Oh. That is not so difficult, then.”
Richon used her hand to pull her closer to him so that her face was only inches from his. He could smell her breath, and thought how it had smelled when she had been a hound and he was a bear.
“Do not be afraid of me,” Richon said. That she thought she needed to be more for him! When he could see so clearly that it was he who needed to be more for her. For all of them.
“I may do the wrong thing. I may embarrass you among your own people,” said Chala.
“Never,” said Richon fiercely.
“I am a hound,” she said.
It was not an apology, simply a statement of fact. And for Richon to deny it would only make Chala think him a liar.
“You are a hound,” Richon agreed. “But you are more than that.”
“Am I?”
“You are.”
“I am not human. I will never be—fully human,” said Chala.
Richon swallowed and thought of Chala paying her silver for two loaves of bread they did not need. “You say that, and yet there are times when I think you are more human than I.”
Chala tilted her head to one side, as a hound might who was listening for a distant sound in the forest. But she did not argue with him.
He let her hand go, then they walked away from the village together. Once, later that day, as they moved into the southern hills, he thought again of the village children waiting for fathers to come home. He felt Chala’s hand on his stiff back muscles, rubbing at them ineptly but with kindness.
Long past dark, when he was drenched in sweat and so exhausted that he was stepping over Chala’s feet, as well as his own, he stopped at last and let himself rest.
He did not think he would sleep, but he did. He woke in the middle of the night, breathing hard from a dream in which he had seen soldiers dressed in his own colors being slaughtered by the hundreds. Chala woke with him, and put a hand on his arm.
He pulled himself closer to her, then let her go with a curse at himself.
He had said he believed she was human in many ways, but he still did not know what name to give his feelings for her, and it seemed wrong to offer less than his whole self.
He did not sleep again, but he woke Chala at dawn with a rough shake to her shoulder.
Partly because he could no longer stand his own stench and partly because he wanted to punish himself, he took a very cold bath in a stream nearby. Chala waited until he was finished scrubbing himself and his clothes and had gotten out to shiver in the dying sunlight before she did the same.
In the following week they passed more villages and heard more stories of the royal steward.
He had insisted that ten women from one village be sent to the army at night, to offer “companionship” to the soldiers. The women who remained to tell the story would not meet Richon’s eyes.
Another village told of the royal steward’s demand that all their sheep be slaughtered and sent to the army for a night of feasting. Ten of the men from the village had agreed to join the army then, for there was nothing left for them at home, now that their flocks were gone.
Richon could even imagine the royal steward explaining that it was all for the best, that the villagers would be grateful for their part in the great victory of the kingdom, and would be able to tell tales to the next generation of bravery and fighting at the side of the royal steward himself.
Richon thought of the wild man and wondered if he had even begun to discover what it was the wild man had sent him here to do. He wanted desperately to save his kingdom, but the wild man had been concerned about the unmagic and Richon had seen nothing of that.