AFTER FILLING HER stomach, the hound went back to wait outside the inn. It was one of the most difficult things she had ever done. If only she could have simply leaped through the window and attacked. That was what the hound in her longed to do. No thinking about choices, about chances. Do it, or don’t do it. But don’t stew over it like a human.
Perhaps it would help if she were not so torn between the two sides of herself.
She tried changing herself back to a woman, wondering if that would help her to be more patient. It did not.
So she watched as a hound while the shadows of the royal steward and the cat man sat by the hearth late into the night. And then at last went up to their rooms to sleep.
At dawn her legs were cramped and tight. Her head was hot and heavy. And her magic was itching to be used.
But she could do nothing as spectacular as what Richon had done. She did not have the magic that he had taken from the animals who had died at the hands of the cat man. She had only her own magic, and little experience with that.
Who was she to stand against the cat man? Why did she not flee back to Richon and tell him of the danger, and warn him to keep himself and those he loved as far from the cat man as he could?
Because she could not do it. Hound or woman, she was too strong and too stubborn to back away from a battle. And perhaps because, like the cat man, she was made of two parts, she was meant to stand against him.
Even if she had no hope of defeating him.
It was nearly midday when she saw the royal steward emerge from the stairs and call for breakfast. A serving girl at the inn brought it to him and he ate near the window. His expression seemed bitter.
It was at least another hour before the cat man appeared. Perhaps because of his unmagic, he appeared exactly as he had when the hound had seen him last, two hundred years hence, down to his chilling smile.
She had seen that smile before, when he had destroyed the spot in her own forest, and when he had followed her to the bear’s cave. It was a smile of joyful destruction.
The serving girl was gone when the cat man stopped in the middle of a conversation he was having with the royal steward. He leaned over the royal steward and put a hand on his arm.
And the hound felt the cold of the cat man’s unmagic.
The royal steward’s face froze. Then crumpled. Then began to turn to dust that fell to the floor in a heap that could have been the ashes from a very small fire.
The supposed ally of the cat man was dead, as simple as that. He had caused so much trouble in Richon’s kingdom, but in the end he was nothing.
As if he had never been.
The hound could tell Richon that much at least, if she ever saw him again. He need not fear that the royal steward had escaped, or that he had not suffered enough. An end like this was worse even than a painful death in her mind.
She moved away from the window for a moment to catch her breath, and to save herself from having to look into the face of the cat man any longer. She knew the story, knew how the cat man had been abused by the magic and by a human, but still it seemed to her that his corruption had gone beyond any reasonable revenge.
He had to be stopped, and it was left to her to do it. She had not said a farewell to Richon before she left the battlefield. If she had, he would not have let her go. She had done the right thing, and so had he.
The cat man was standing in the window, staring out at her.
Did he sense her?
He did not smile or try to signal her or speak to her.
Just stared.
The hound kept very still.
Could he use his unmagic on her from there? She had felt it, but it seemed he had to touch her to send it out. That was the way it had worked before, when she had seen him in the forest. And with the royal steward.
She could feel no sympathy for the cat man. She wanted only to see his end.
Despite the shaking in her legs, she stood and turned her face away from him to the sky. Then she howled, as a hound would howl. A call to challenge, to battle, to death.
The cat man answered her call by coming out of the inn to meet her.
They stood face-to-face and the cat man smiled again, and reached for her.
She could have stepped away, but she did not. She moved forward and allowed his hand to touch her back.
How it hurt!
The unmagic was terrible enough when it touched the ground she walked across. But this was inside her, not to be turned away from, never to be escaped. It burned and cut through her vitals. She thought she had no more heart to beat, no more lungs to pump air.
She could hear the cat man’s soft laughter. “You do not fight against me at all. Do you wish for death, then?”
And the hound found it in herself to spit and stiffen and to feel that she still had a body, though she did not know how. It took her another moment to find her magic and to pull it around herself like a cloak. It was not enough.
As she expected, the cat man’s unmagic burned through.
She pulled up her magic once more. This time she did not use it as a defense, but pressed it into the cat man. As she did so, she thought of all the moments that had made her life precious and sharp with joy.
Her first hunt.
Her first coupling with her mate.
The birth of her daughter.
The first sight of the princess.
The smell of the bear in the cave.
The wild man’s gap in time.
Her new body.
Her own magic.
And now this.
Even this pain was life. She savored it, and pressed that feeling against the cat man.
This was her magic, and she poured it into him until he drowned in it. It had been so long since he felt true magic, and even then it had not been magic like this.
As she touched him, she saw also his plans for the future. To go south, to conquer animals and humans there, then to return north when he had enough unmagic to finish the destruction completely. It was not only this kingdom that he had threatened. His plan had been an ambitious one, almost like a man’s.
The hound drained him of all memories, of all hatred, of all he had been.
Then he was a cat again. The creature in her arms gasped and choked, but there was still some life in it.
The hound was nearly drained herself. She knew it would take all of her magic to finish him. When she was done, she would no longer be able to change between forms. She did not think about it but simply let the magic drain out of her.
And as she did so, she changed once more into a human woman, still in her filthy gown. She was only partly surprised that in her deepest self she was now human.
The cat shivered once as the last of Chala’s magic was pressed into him, then sagged against her.
Pulling away from him, damp with human sweat, constricted by the tight bands of fabric around her chest, Chala did not regret her choice.
The wonderful new power she had shared with Richon, to change freely from animal to human, had not lasted long, after all. And now she had given it up, not for him or his kingdom, but for the future world that would have been threatened by the cat man’s continued existence.
To no longer be a hound, that was a loss she would have to come to accept. But to never be human again, to lose Richon, to return to what she had been—she could never have come to accept that.