THE HOUND HAD never been the sort to stand by and watch a battle in progress, even if it had been no business of hers to begin with.
She remembered a time when she had come across a battle between a bear and a hound from another pack. She had had no obligation to the hound. It was simply that she knew that she might do something in the battle, and she itched to do it.
She had thrown herself at the bear’s back, and sunk her teeth into its shoulder. The other hound had fled, but Chala had gone on for hours, fighting the bear until they were both senseless and exhausted. She had enjoyed it for the sheer beauty of the battle.
Richon was staring at the battle, twitching with each death, but not yet ready to throw himself in.
She did not wait. With a bark of regret, she leaped over the rocks above the battle and down into the midst of it.
If it had ever been organized, it was so no longer. There were no lines of men standing together to hold back the enemy. Pockets of the enemy had penetrated nearly to the place where the hound landed. It was one man against another.
The hound snarled a warning—the kind of fair notice that animals and humans have in common. And then she opened her mouth, bared her teeth, and let them sink into the side of one of the Nolirans who held a sword in his hand.
He groaned, swatted at her, and then fell like a stone.
He must have been already weakened by battle and loss of blood. His face was very pale—for a moment.
Then the man he had been about to run through with his sword stood over him and took a battle-ax to his face.
The pale skin was spattered with blood.
The smell of it made the hound feel as though she were home again. But the human in her kept her from licking at it.
She turned away from the dead Noliran and saw three men directly ahead of her, two against one—and the one was Richon’s man.
She was about to launch herself at one of the enemy’s chest when she heard a sound like rushing wind overhead. And a sound like a battle cry, but guttural, like an animal’s.
It was Richon—in his bear form.
Like her, he must have decided that he could fight more fiercely as an animal.
She felt an intense pride—like what she had felt at the first sight of her daughter’s birth—when she saw Richon’s claws slash open first one man’s chest and then another’s face.
In two blows he had killed both men.
Or as good as killed them.
The man who had fought against them took a spear to the two chests to make sure they were dead, then moved on.
He seemed to see nothing amiss in the aid of a bear in his battle, nor did he show any fear that he might become the bear’s next victim.
He had magic, thought the hound.
The bear turned to the hound, raising a paw as if in salute. They were together as animals now. She watched as the bear moved to the east, to try to shore up the defenses of the men there, who were letting far too many of the enemy through, deep into the soft underbelly of the Eloliran army. The hound noticed the enemy were still nowhere near the man who shouted orders from this side, the man whose voice had seemed to jolt Richon at the first screeching sound of it.
The hound leaped into the space between two men fighting and pressed hard into the legs of an enemy soldier so that he lost his balance. His arms flew up as he tried to catch himself.
It was enough.
He was dead.
She tried the same tactic a second time, but this time the enemy had seen her from a distance away and was not surprised. Instead he kicked at her, then stabbed Richon’s man dead and turned his sword to her.
The hound stood her ground, daring him to try it.
He moved the sword quickly in a circle around her head.
As if that would make her afraid of him.
The hound wanted to laugh. She had seen these tricks from the very youngest of King Helm’s soldiers. And the king had sworn at them and threatened them that they would not see another day with a sword, for he would kill them himself.
King Helm had had no patience with tricks. He had told his soldiers that if they wished to fight at his side, they had to give the best of themselves, for he was giving the best of himself. And if they died, they died in glory.
It had been one of the first times that the hound had understood a human point of view.
The sword circled again.
The hound simply ran from it, and turned to try herself at another pair.
As she ran, she heard the bear roaring at his own men to get out of the way, but few of them understood him. It was not because they had no magic, but because they were focused on another task—fighting for their lives.
Nonetheless, the hound and the bear moved from the back to the front of the line.
She cut open faces, gouged out eyes, and chewed at hands that held swords.
He cut heads open, tore off arms and shoulders, and crushed whole bodies.
At last, when it was nearly dark, the enemy army retreated, and so did the bear and the hound, scrambling back to the place above the battle where they had begun.
There they rested as dark fell, returning to human form.
Chala was exhausted as she had never been before and knew that only a human could push a body this far. A hound would simply have let the fight go, or let herself die. But she had fought on until she could hardly see.
“I should have saved more of them,” said Richon as he looked out over the battlefield, which was at this point nearly invisible in the dark.
“Not just my own men, but those who fought them as well,” Richon went on. “They were not evil. They were simply here to do what they had been sent to do. My father would have found a way to speak to them, to convince them to turn back. Somehow he would have used his magic to save lives. I have only made sure that the lives lost were someone else’s.”
Chala was surprised that she, too, felt a sense of loss at the deaths of her enemies. She had never felt such a thing as a hound.