The Princess and the Bear by Mette Ivie Harrison

Author:Mette Ivie Harrison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, rulers, Animals, Magic, Body, Science Fiction, Royalty, Mind & Spirit, Juvenile Fiction, Love & Romance, Girls & Women, Human-animal communication, Fantasy & Magic, Princesses, Magick Studies, Time travel, queens, General, etc, Fairy tales, Kings, Fairy Tales & Folklore, etc.
ISBN: 9780061553165
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-24T07:18:14+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Chala

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.

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