The Princess and the Horse (The Princess and the Hound) Read online

  THE PRINCESS AND THE HORSE

  by: Mette Ivie Harrison

  Prologue:

  The Tale of the Princess with the Wild Magic

  Princess Jaleel was born with great wild magic, which should have been a boon to her people and her kingdom. But because her mother died at her birth and her father was indulgent and melancholy, she was not taught the discipline she needed to keep her power in balance with the laws of nature. The king insisted that he would teach her soon enough, when she was a little older and when he was a little stronger. But then he died only a few years later, and the princess became ruler of the kingdom of The Three Mountains still untutored.

  In her early years, she transformed whomever she wished into whatever creature would amuse her and she threatened and teased and terrorized all those who remained at the palace. But those around her said that she had a great capacity for love, and that she needed only to grow a little older before she learned the proper bounds of her magic. So many remained with her, in hopes of the future when the kingdom of The Three Mountains would grow strong with her power. She would marry and have children with the wild magic and all would surely be well.

  But at the age of seventeen, the princess fell in love with a man whose station in life was far beneath from her own and not a man who would make a proper king. Her counselors tried to warn her against him gently, but she had never bothered to listen to their advice and did not now. She spent every waking moment with the man that she could, and she lavished him with gifts that were worth more than his life. Her counselors saw the man’s eye for other women, and his selfishness, and his lack of the wild magic, and they said nothing.

  But when the man disappeared just days before the wedding, they were relieved. They hoped that the princess would at last learn self-control, for the wild magic used wrongly could destroy the foundations of all life. Instead, when the man she loved left her, the princess became even more selfish and erratic, more prone to rages. She used her magic in anger, without thought, and her servants and counselors did their best to keep away from her.

  The only creature who willingly spent time with her in this temper was a new black horse she had found wandering in the plains and brought back to the palace just days after her broken betrothal. The horse was as tall as any man at its withers and its hair was a jet black as dark as the princess’s.

  Also like the princess, its mood was often dangerous. It would rear up and bite any groom in the stable that tried to touch it. Only the princess could ride and care for the black horse safely. The hours she spent riding and grooming the horse afterward were a blessing of peace to the rest of the royal household, the only time they did not fear for their lives or for the kingdom itself.

  Yet one day she came home from a ride and left the horse untouched. She stalked out of the stable and went directly to the blacksmith.

  “You will brand my horse today,” she told him sharply.

  The blacksmith looked up at her in surprise and then, when he saw the set of her jaw, fear. “Has it done something to harm you, Princess?” he asked.

  The princess tossed her hair. “I will have the branding done. Will you do it or will you leave your place and let another do as I command?” she demanded.

  The blacksmith had two sons and a daughter to care for, and no wife, for she had died the previous year. He bowed his head. “I will do it,” he said sadly.

  The horse was brought to the smithy and tied with thick ropes to hold it in place. The sound of its breath was heavy and wet as it stood with muscles taut and jaws tightly closed.

  But when the moment came, and the blacksmith brought the red-hot brand out of the furnace, he looked into the large, black eyes of the horse and could not touch it. There was such intelligence there, and such courage. More than that, the blacksmith felt a flash of warning that to kill this one creature would be a blow against all creatures everywhere, against the wild magic itself.

  So the blacksmith set down the brand and faced the princess bravely. “I won’t do it,” he declared.

  “I have commanded it,” insisted the princess.

  The blacksmith shrugged. “If you will have it done, then do it yourself.” He did not believe the princess would do it. She was spoiled and used to her own way, but she rarely did anything but use her magic herself.

  Nonetheless, the princess stepped forward and pulled the horse’s head to her own. She stared into its eyes. “You are mine,” she said fiercely.

  The horse nickered and tossed its head, but it did not buck or try to escape. The princess picked up the brand from the fire.

  The blacksmith opened his mouth to give her a warning to be careful, but it was too late.

  She had already pressed the brand into the left hind quarters of the horse, and in her heedless temper, she burned herself as well.

  “Mine,” said the princess to the horse again, and stalked out.

  The blacksmith shook his head over the poor treatment of such a noble creature. He took the horse back to its stable, then slept fitfully in his own bed.

  When he woke in the morning, he went to the stables to find the princess’s black horse was gone. The stall that it had been held in was smashed to bits of wood suitable for kindling, and the locked stable gate was torn apart as if it were made of butter.

  The blacksmith was sick with horror, for the horse had been his only hope for the princess to learn discipline with her magic.

  That same morning, he admitted to the loss of the horse to the princess herself, then promised he would find the creature.

  “I know what the horse means to you, and I will find it. I swear it.”

  In a menacing whisper, the princess told him what would happen to him if he failed, as if there were no emotion left in her now that her beloved horse was gone.

  In the days following, the blacksmith and many other servants went out from the palace and the outlying villages into the fields. Each night, the princess waited eagerly for news, but the blacksmith had to tell her again and again that he was sorry, for no trace of her unique black horse was ever found.

  A villager in the next week brought the princess a gray colt that his mare had just weaned. The colt had a black muzzle and it looked likely to grow very tall. It had an upright carriage and slender legs, and would one day be a beautiful black horse.

  But the princess would not try to ride it, nor touch its soft, silky hair or smell the sweet scent of hay and oats on its breath. She put a hand to her throat and walked away from it with a bleak look on her face, as if the world had ended for her at the loss of her horse.

  The blacksmith redoubled his efforts to find the black horse, but there was no trace of it. He became frantic, forgoing food and rest for days on end, returning to the palace infrequently and rarely seeing his children. And each time he spoke to the princess, he found her fading before his eyes. Her wild magic would be lost to the kingdom, never having been used properly for its good. And what of his children? What of the legacy he would leave them? What of the kingdom and all the depravations it had suffered?

  The blacksmith pressed himself to search harder and longer, but with no luck. The black horse was gone, it seemed forever.

  At last, months later, a man arrived at the palace and claimed that he had found the princess’s horse. He was well-dressed, with jewels in his hair, and he walked in his bare feet in the princess’s court as if he were used to shoes. He called himself Lord Dashto and demanded that he should speak to the princess directly.

  He was brought to her throne room, where he did not do much as bow to her. “I have found your horse, Princess,�
�� he declared brashly.

  She looked up immediately. “Where is he?” she demanded, as if she expected to see the horse right there.

  The blacksmith was as eager as the princess was to hear of the black horse.

  “I have come to negotiate the terms of his return,” said Lord Dashto slyly.

  “Negotiate? I demand that you return him at once.” The princess snapped her fingers and her guards immediately lifted spears to Lord Dashto’s side, touching but not piercing his skin.

  Lord Dashto showed not the least sign of fear. “Your demands will have no effect on me,” he warned her.

  “I will turn you into a beast and then I will turn you into my pet. You will gradually forget everything that you know and love and then I will make you human again and make you think well of me, until I choose to turn you into a beast again.” She smiled with a coldness that the blacksmith shivered at. “Do you have any doubt that I can do this with my magic?”

  “I do not doubt your great and terrible power, Princess,” said Lord Dashto—if that was his real name, which the blacksmith doubted. “But if you transform me into a dumb beast, then I will never be able to tell you where your horse is. He will die of thirst and all because of you.”

  The princess thought for a moment. “He must be nearby if you have come here. I will send out search parties for him and we will find him in time.”

  Lord Dashto tilted his head to one side and took in the blacksmith and the others who had participated in the grand search. “Will you? Your search parties so far have had little success in finding him. It is reasonable to assume that he is perhaps hidden somewhere, a cave or a hollow. Caged or roped and unable to return to you at the sound of your voice. He would return for you if he heard your voice, would he not?”

  The princess did not answer his question. “You stole him!” she accused. “And for that alone you should die.”

  “But again, if you kill me, you will not get what you want.”

  The princess pouted for a moment. Then she said, “I will give you a great reward if you will tell me where he is.”

  “And will you kill me while I am still counting the coins?”

  The princess took a breath, but whether or not she had considered this, he did not know. “What do you wish, then?” she asked.

  “I wish to be your husband. King of all the land,” said Lord Dashto. “That is the reward I expect for returning your horse to you.”

  “Never!” shouted the princess, and she flung herself out of the throne room with a shrieking wail.

  The blacksmith closed his eyes and rubbed at them, then motioned for Lord Dashto to be escorted out and brought to food and shelter appropriate for guests of the kingdom.

  Lord Dashto returned to the throne room the next day and the next, until at last the princess promised to take him as her husband if only he returned the horse to her.

  The blacksmith felt a strange sense of relief. If the princess were married, surely that would be better for the kingdom, even if her husband were a stranger and without the wild magic. The princess’s counselors should have urged her marriage in the first place, when they had had the chance to do so long ago.

  “We will be married,” said the princess coldly to Lord Dashto. “In ten days’ time.”

  And the man smiled and believed he had won. He took up new rooms in the palace near the princess’s, and he began to indulge himself in meals and entertainment. He spoke often of how he had tamed the princess and would soon have everything he wanted.

  But the blacksmith heard of the spies the princess set on Lord Dashto, and after several days, the man returned to the cave where the horse was held, to check on the creature and to bring it grain and water.

  As soon as he had revealed the horse’s hiding place, he was taken, bound tightly, and brought before the princess.

  With a wave of her hand, she transformed the lord into a hyena and then she set her dogs to chase him out of the court and into the desert.

  The blacksmith reminded himself that at least the princess would have her horse back, and perhaps that would calm her.

  Soon, her servants brought the animal they had found. They bowed low. They looked very pleased with themselves.

  But when the horse was brought in, the blacksmith knew as soon as the princess did that it was not hers.

  This horse was black and tall and there was a little of the sharp look in its eyes of the horse the princess had lost. But it had the wrong shape to its shoulders and its legs were too finely shaped. Its back end was not as strong or as wide and it seemed eager to please the princess as her true horse had never been.

  The disappointed princess put a hand to the horse’s haunches and transformed it into a spider. It skittered away on four legs rather than eight, as the blacksmith stared in horror at this proof of the princess’s abuse of the wild magic.

  Then the princess ordered the servants out, and they stood outside her chambers as she broke every item of value in the throne room through the night.

  In the morning, the princess rose and commanded ten of her best guards to follow her. She had the royal steward gather supplies for a long journey, and coin to purchase more supplies if the journey lasted even longer than that. She proclaimed that she would go out to search for her horse herself, since all her friends had failed her. And she would not return until she had succeeded.

  Her chamberlain tried to stop her, claiming that she had no right to take away the resources of her people if she did not intend to rule them. The blacksmith offered to go in her place, so long as she would remain in the palace where she was meant to be.

  “And will you be as vigilant as I will? Will you refuse to stop searching, even when all reasonable hope is hope? Will you know for certain that my horse is found, by looking into his eyes?” the princess asked him hotly.

  “I will,” said the blacksmith solemnly.

  The princess took a breath and shook her head. “Then you will come with me, As for my kingdom, perhaps it will be better off without me. I have been no proper princess of the wild magic.”

  It was the first time she had admitted to any weakness in herself, and the blacksmith thought it a good thing. So he made arrangements for his children to be cared for in his absence, thinking he would be gone for a few months at most, that he would see them again soon and that his sacrifices would be worth it. He would return home a hero, with a princess who had at last learned discipline in the hardship of such a journey.

  But they went north, and north again, and then west. There was always a hint of a trail before them, the princess insisting that she could sense the trace of the black horse here, and here again. So year after year, they sought the black horse and did not quite find it.

  The blacksmith grew old. He watched the princess’s servants be transformed one after the other into dumb beasts who would follow her without question, but he never spoke a word of protest, for he thought that the princess needed at least one human at her side. When he was close to death, the princess leaned over him and told him that he had been true to her and she would allow him to choose what form she would hold him to, as he continued at her side in a second lifetime.

  But the blacksmith asked only that she let him die as a human. For his service and devotion to her, the princess gave him this one gift. Then she commanded her servants to bury the blacksmith, and went on, seeking her horse.

  Chapter One:

  At her birth, Fierce had been the daughter of the lead male. When her father died not long after, she had still been the daughter of a strong female. Then just after she had grown to full size, her mother had left the pack with a human female at her side, and Fierce had become a young female hound of no importance at all.

  The new lead female of the pack nipped at Fierce constantly, and when she was tired of it, the other females who wished her favor did it in her place. When Fierce was called, she lowered her head, approached with her hindquarters first, and whined. She did not take food unless it had alr
eady been abandoned by others.

  Fierce listened to taunts that her mother had gone to live an easy life, that she did not care what she left behind her, that she would forget everything that had made her a hound. Fierce did not believe any of them. She was convinced that her mother had a reason for leaving, and that she would return as she should, someday.

  Then one day her mother did return, but not as a hound. She wore a human skin, and Fierce could smell that it was both her and not her. It was then that Fierce realized that her dreams of being with her mother again had been foolish, the dreams of a pup who knew nothing of the world and of the pain of living in it.

  She hardened herself then, refused to speak to her mother in any language, and turned her back on those memories, as her mother had. She told herself that she had learned a lesson, that everything to do with humans was ruinous, and that she would not be tricked as her mother had been. She was a hound and she always would be. She belonged in the forest with her pack.

  But there was no solace in her pack. For when her mother in human form was gone, the lead female began her torments of Fierce anew. She chased Fierce away from the stream where the fish were plentiful. She refused her a place inside the cave where the pack slept. She made sure that the others did not call her Fierce in their barking, but mockingly called her Human instead.

  Fierce found she did not care. Seeing her mother again had made her lose a part of herself that hurt. She could bear pain now that would have been impossible before, and she did not think twice about it. She simply did not feel it as she once had. She grew to be a better hunter, enough that the pack appreciated her kills, even if no one would go out hunting with her. They said that she was too dangerous, that she took no care of anything but the thrill of the moment.

  There were times when Fierce forgot she had a pack at all. And other times when she wondered why she bothered to remain with them, since they so obviously disdained her. But where else could she go? No other pack would take in a strange hound. And she certainly had no intention of going to the humans. She would die alone in the forest first, fighting for her pack or fighting for herself, whatever was left to her.