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

  The princess stared at the mess of cooked fish in Fierce’s hands. She took a small portion of the center of it out and put it into her mouth. Instead of tipping her head back and letting the meat fall directly into her throat, she moved it around with her teeth and tongue.

  “Not bad,” she said. “Fresh fish is always good, even if it is not fully cooked. Next time, you might think of spitting the flesh on a stick and turning it over the fire. It would make the fish more evenly cooked. And save your hand.” She pointed to it.

  The more Fierce thought of it, the more it hurt. She gingerly folded up the princess’s tent and then packed it onto the white and black horse.

  “We go north,” said the princess.

  “I—Can I ask a question?” stammered Fierce.

  “Ask,” said the princess.

  “It is—the Xaon,” she said, remembering again the words she had heard before.

  The princess flinched. “I do not know what you mean,” she said. But it was obvious that she did, that the name itself was something that burned her, inside of herself.

  “A man—a human with a sword,” Fierce tried to explain.

  “It is no matter,” said the princess. “The Xaon is not for such as you to worry about. It is from the far past, and perhaps in the far future. But now, we have only to think of finding my horse.”

  “But—” said Fierce.

  “No more!” shouted the princess. Then she ordered Fierce to take down her tent and collect her things to put on the black and white horse. After that, she commanded the entourage follow to the west. She pressed her traveling companions hard. By late afternoon, they were out of the forest and into terrain that Fierce did not know at all.

  There were a few hills here, but they were all covered by the same unending greenish golden grass that was tall enough that Fierce had to lift her feet consciously with every step. She was exhausted, her tender human feet covered with tiny cuts, her legs trembling with such exertion, her arms burned with the sun above.

  “I have been this way before, many years ago,” said the princess. She stared at Fierce. “Lifetimes ago for you, as a hound. But humans live longer, even those who have no wild magic.”

  Fierce thought of living long years with the princess commanding her day after day, and she knew she would rather have died as a hound. She had always known that death might come this day or the next one. That was part of living as a hound, part of the sweetness of it. There might only be this day, this moment, all the more reason to feel every part of life while it lasted.

  The princess sighed. “I have traveled so many thousands of miles. It is difficult to keep them all straight in my head. But I do not need a map to find my horse. The sense of him draws me forward.”

  Fierce did not argue with her.

  But they circled the area for two weeks without a hint of the princess’s black horse. And every night, Fierce dreamed of the dark thing that she began to think of as Xaon.

  Chapter Four:

  One morning, Fierce was startled awake by the sound of the princess calling for help and shouting out curses.

  Fierce’s eyes adjusted in a moment to the dawn light, and she caught sight of the princess chasing after the white and black horse-like creature.

  “Thief! Thief!” cried the princess.

  The white and black horse had stolen something from the princess?

  But after a moment, Fierce saw a human who was pulling on the creature with a rope tied around its neck. The man was several inches smaller than the princess and he looked thin and desperately hungry. He had a heavy beard and wore dirty, torn clothing.

  The princess had an easy grace in running and she quickly reached the thief. She snatched the rope from his hands and pushed him to the ground.

  To Fierce’s surprise, however, as soon as she had the rope, she dropped it and then turned to face the thief. She kicked him in the stomach, then put a foot on his chest and held him down. “Who are you? Where are you from?” she demanded.

  “I am called—Beriv,” the thief stuttered. “Please, great noblewoman, I have lost all I own and thought that the sale of this unusual horse would bring me back the woman I love.”

  “You expect me to believe that?” demanded the princess. “When I can look at you and see that you have never owned anything of quality in your life?” She gestured at his shirt. “A woman love you? Not with a hundred such animals to your name.”

  It seemed cruel to Fierce, but the princess was within her rights to defend her property. Even in the forest that was true. If she had killed an animal, she would not allow anyone else to eat from it until she had finished taking her fill.

  “I beg you, let me go,” said the thief.

  “I think you must learn a lesson first,” said the princess.

  “No—no lesson.” The thief tried to get out from under the princess, but she held him firmly pinned beneath her. “I swear, I will never steal anything again. I know better now,” he wept.

  “I shall turn one arm into a pig’s hoof. That will remind you forever after of the consequences of your actions,” said the princess coldly.

  “Wild magic?” the thief whispered. He began to fight the princess in earnest then, writhing on the ground to get away from her, until the princess kicked at his side. His eyes went dull then, and he became still.

  “Or I could turn you into a pig complete,” said the princess. She raised a hand and with her eyes closed, she let out a long breath of air.

  Fierce had expected to see the reverse of the process which had turned her into a human, but she saw no change in the thief at all. Had it only been a threat?

  “You—you,” got out the princess. She moved her foot and stared at the thief.

  For his part, he began to thank the princess profusely, kneeling before her and telling her that he would name his first daughter after her, if only she would tell him what her beautiful name was.

  “I will tell you nothing,” said the princess. She raised a hand once more. “Pig,” she said loudly, though she had not needed to say a word before.

  Fierce stared carefully at the princess and noticed that she looked exhausted now, with lines under her lower lip and darkness smudged under her eyes. Almost as if she had aged several years in this one moment. But how?

  “I have the wild magic,” said the princess under her breath. It was more to herself than to the thief, but he heard her and seemed to lose his fear of her.

  “Wild magic. Of course,” the thief mumbled. “Very strong, wild magic. Very fearsome.”

  “I do have wild magic,” the princess insisted.

  “If you say so,” said the thief. He backed away from her, bowing several times as he went.

  “What horses have you seen?” the princess called after him. “Where? Is there a large black one?”

  But the thief did not answer her.

  The princess let him go. She picked up an ant and let it crawl on her finger. Twice, she muttered a word to herself and closed her eyes. Each time, she seemed to grow a little older, but the ant did not change in any way that Fierce could tell.

  “It will come back,” the princess said at last. “It knows it is mine. It knows that it is missing what is most important, even as I do.”

  Fierce had no reason to believe that the princess was wrong about the horse. Whatever else Fierce might think about the princess, she was still Fierce’s only chance to be a hound again.

  “And I should have spared the thief in any case, for he told me of horses here. Perhaps one of them is my own horse?” The princess looked up and stared at Fierce.

  “Yes, it might be,” said Fierce. What else could she say to the princess?

  “If there are poor thieves, there might be rich ones, as well. And my horse eats too much to be kept by anything but a rich thief,” pronounced the princess.

  Fierce thought that the princess’s horse was more likely to be in a wild herd to the east than here, with humans. If she herself escaped the princess, Fi
erce thought she would make sure she went far away where she knew she would never meet a human again.

  But the princess was insistent. “I feel him nearby,” she said. She led her entourage south, then west, then north again, and finally back to the beginning. “He is here somewhere. They are hiding him from me. They are holding him. I can sense his anger in the air.”

  Fierce sniffed the air, but she smelled mold and dust and a warren of rabbits she wished she could chase after. The princess had made sure that she had food to eat, but it was usually fruit taken from orchards they had passed by, or fish from the cold stream off the mountains.

  “Princess?” asked Fierce, that evening, when she was cooking food properly over the fire for the princess, on a spit.

  “Yes?”

  “Your wild magic,” said Fierce. “This is what allows you to change creatures from one form into another.”

  “Yes, of course. And it will return to me. I know it will. It is only that I have been so far gone from home.”

  Was that the reason the wild magic had gone from the princess? Fierce did not think so. “Is the wild magic the Xaon?” she asked.

  “The Xaon? No, the wild magic has nothing to do with the Xaon.”

  But the princess would say no more.

  A week passed with no sign of the horse, and then the princess woke one morning and picked up a caterpillar. She changed it in a moment to a butterfly, speeding up the natural process that would have happened in any case.

  “You see?” she announced to Fierce, and to the great cat with a mane, who was watching her. “My wild magic is back.”

  She seemed very pleased about it, but it only made Fierce more tense, as she thought about the Xaon.

  The dreams seemed to grow worse, and Fierce felt as if she woke only just in time to pull herself out of the darkness that was the Xaon. She grew more and more tired, and began to avoid sleep entirely, keeping herself upright and pretending that the princess had asked her to keep guard over the camp. Fierce was exhausted and jumped easily in fear.

  But the princess did not seem to notice the difference in Fierce’s temperament. She did not seem to notice any problems in her menagerie. If one of them were to be lost, she would seek for it because it was hers. But if they died, Fierce thought, she would simply find another to take their place. They were easily replaceable to her. All except the black horse she spoke of.

  Several days later the princess asked Fierce which direction she thought they should go in, and Fierce chose east, toward the rising morning sun, simply because they had not gone that way yet.

  They went slowly, and the princess exclaimed twice that she could smell her horse, but neither time did they find anything.

  So when the princess said, “There! We must hurry! He is just ahead!” Fierce did not really hurry.

  But to Fierce’s surprise, in a few moments she saw that the princess was indeed standing next to a horse, black and tall as many a bear, one leg bent with injury, its head sagging with defeat.

  There was a human sitting on top of it on an elaborate, gold-stitched saddle, beating stripes on it with a whip and commanding it to move around the princess.

  “This horse is mine!” said the princess, reaching for the reins and yanking them from the rider’s hands.

  When Fierce looked up at his face, she recognized him immediately as the human with the sword whom she had defeated, and who had first spoken of the Xaon to her. He looked even more weighed by fear now as he had the year before. And he took out his frustration on the horse, raising his whip and bringing it down ruthlessly, as if making the horse afraid and in pain would make him less afraid and lessen his own pain.

  “Leave him be!” shouted the princess. “That is my horse, I tell you!”

  “Get out of the way, woman. Or I will run you down,” the rider threatened.

  “I am Princess Jaleel of the Kingdom of the Three Mountains,” said the princess. “How dare you speak to me thus?”

  “Oh, a princess,” sneered the rider. “I didn’t know. That changes—nothing. Get out of my way, Princess. Or I will run you down.”

  “I am not defenseless,” said the princess. She waved a hand and the animals in her menagerie moved in to flank her, like soldiers in a human army.

  In response, the rider dug his spurs into the horse and the animal would have run into the princess if it had followed his commands, but instead it jerked to the side, twisted, and fell hard on one leg.

  The rider slid off and landed more lightly. He cursed the horse soundly and got to his feet. Then he stared at the horse. “As good as dead,” he said, and kicked it in the side.

  He was still afraid, thought Fierce. Did he know it?

  “No!” shrieked the princess. She ran to the horse and put her arms around its head.

  The animal twitched in misery. Fierce turned to it long enough to see that it had broken its right foreleg.

  “I have found you!” said the princess, pressing her lips to the horse’s cheek, and then nose. “You do not know how long I have been searching for you, hoping to bring you home with me at last.”

  The horse lifted its head away from her. But for all that, Fierce thought that the princess must be right, that this was her horse. It had saved her life, at the cost of its own leg. And it had not done it out of fear, but out of a conscious decision. Fierce smelled the difference. The horse was as stubborn as the princess herself, it seemed.

  Chapter Five:

  “You must pay me for this ruined horse, Princess,” said the man. “It is your fault he is of no more use to me. And I have much to do today. Important things for my people.”

  The princess paid no attention to him, for she was occupied in stroking the horse, her head close to its own, murmuring soft words of comfort.

  The horse, Fierce was astonished to see, did not thrash against her touch or even try to get back to its feet. It lay quietly, turned away from the princess, its pain in every inch of its stillness. Fierce had never seen a horse like this.

  “Or perhaps if you have no coin,” said the rider, “I will take something of equal value in return.” He looked around the fields, taking in her animals and their packs. But there was nothing much of value. At last, his eye caught on Fierce.

  She would not show him fear, so she stared straight back at him.

  “I’ll take your serving girl,” he said. “A fair trade, I should think, for a good horse. She looks to me to be somewhat untrained and disobedient. But she can help me make my way back to my own estate.”

  Fierce expected the princess to tell the rider that she would give him nothing in return except for his own life. Instead, the princess waved to Fierce. “Take her, then.”

  Fierce was startled, so that she did not resist when the rider leaned on her and pulled her forward, away from the horse.

  “But I—” she stuttered. Had she been so bad at being human as that? Then why had the princess not turned her back into a hound and let her prove herself in that form?

  “She has no use for you now. Come now with me,” the man said roughly.

  Fierce thought for a moment. Perhaps she should go with him. She wanted to find out about the Xaon, and he seemed more likely to tell her than the princess was. But she did not want to lose all track of the princess, either, for how else would she be returned to her true form?

  The rider tugged on Fierce’s shoulder, then yanked her arm forward with him.

  Fierce looked back at the princess, but followed the rider.

  After a time, she dared to ask, “What do you know of the Xaon?”

  The rider shivered at the word. “Do not speak of it,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Fierce. The man had spoken to her of it before. Why would he not now?

  “The name itself may draw it to us,” he said.

  “But how?” asked Fierce.

  “I do not know,” he said in a low tone. “I have studied the Xaon, but the more I read of it, the less I understand it. I think in the end
that it is not meant for understanding. It is only meant to be kept away from.”

  “But what is it?” Fierce insisted. “Is it to do with the wild magic the princess has?”

  The rider shook his head, and he would not say anymore to her about the Xaon. But after they had walked for some time, he said, “Shall I tell you a story about a man with wild magic who lived in this land not so many years ago?”

  “If you wish it,” said Fierce, and listened carefully, though she pretended not to.

  “This man had not so much as that princess, but he had enough to live better than his circumstances. He used the wild magic to transform a pig into a cow, so that he would have more meat to eat. Or to transform a crow into a magnificent peacock, so that he could sell it and earn more money. And the more he used his wild magic, the more he liked it.

  “When a dog got in his way as he was driving a cart, he transformed it into a moth. When a friend told him that he had begun to shout at all around him as if they were dumb beasts, he transformed his friend into one of those dumb beasts. A woman rejected his advances and he changed her into a fly which he put under glass and carried with him wherever he went.

  “He was chased out of his home by a mob of men who had nothing left to be afraid of him taking from them. He killed many of them, then waited from a distance to plan his revenge. Instead he was murdered in his sleep that night by one of his own creatures, given the shape of a human being. The man called this one ‘son,’ and believed that it loved him in return. But even a beast knows what is true and what is not.”

  Fierce stiffened. Was he saying something about Fierce’s questions about the Xaon?

  The man limped forward on Fierce’s arm, needing to rest frequently, and Fierce held him steady so that he need not lift himself off the ground again.

  “My name is Ahran,” he said during one such rest. “Lord Ahran of the Fels. What is your name?”

  “Fierce,” she said, with a hint of the bark that went with it, when she had spoken her name as a hound.

  “What sort of a name is that?” he asked, his face twisted in suspicion.