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

  “But the Olde Wolf here senses somehow when we are coming for him. He has many animals to send against us. And I think that perhaps he has a way of turning the minds of humans to help him. I don’t know how. I only know that he was gone and my brother lay dead and no one had seen anything.”

  Hans grew up and saw that it was as Sieg said: every year, young men left the Order to find the Olde Wolf, and every year, they disappeared without sending word back as to what had happened to them.

  Hans vowed that one day, he would find the Olde Wolf, and he would discover how to defeat him at last.

  Chapter Four: Golda

  If her father found out that she had taken human form, he would be angry with her. She had done it once before, when she was very young, half the size that she was now. She had seen humans before, and her father had told her how misshapen they were, how far from the true ways of animals. But she had wanted to try the shape for herself. She had tried others and he had not minded that. He seemed to like for her to speak with other animals, and to show a mirrored face to them.

  But when she turned into a human, Golda had done it in full view of him.

  “See, Father?” she said. “I can do this one, too.”

  It was as if he changed into a different wolf. His fur stood on end and his jaw dropped to show his teeth clenched together. There was a low sound coming from his throat, not quite a growl, for it said nothing at all. It was pure emotion, and the emotion was black anger.

  “Father, what is wrong?” she asked, turning in a circle, sure that she would see some sign of danger, or perhaps some animal who had been taken by humans and tamed. He was always angry when he saw those, and either worked hard to make them wild again, or killed them in merciful swiftness.

  “Do you not like it?” She looked down at her own form. She saw the two thin legs, hairless, pale, toes without claws, feet that looked like mushrooms, knobby knees, hands grasped at her sides. She could feel the cold of the wind around her.

  “I do not understand why anyone would choose this. It is so weak,” she said. She meant to please her father, who hated humans.

  “Surely they would want to be animals again, the same as you wish for them. You would only have to show them,” she said, speaking as a wolf though she had a human’s voice. She had no chance to say more.

  Her father had leaped toward her, his ruff up around his neck, his teeth bared in threat.

  She reacted instinctively, running from him. It was difficult on her new human feet, but she was too afraid to change her form. She did not even think of it. She only thought of escape, of safety.

  She knew the forest well, but it was different as a human. The trees seemed shorter, rocks and dirt harder, branches sharper. She could see things and colors she had not seen before, and they distracted her.

  Perhaps if she had concentrated, the human form might have served her better. She was young and full of energy, but he had more experience. She did not know exactly how old he was, but it hardly showed in his pelt or in his stride. He seemed to be ageless to her.

  She felt him nip at her side, and she cried out, the high-pitched human voice strange in her ears. Then she saw a tree and jumped as high onto the trunk as she could manage. She could hear her father behind her. He had not leaped as high as she had, and she could hear the sound of his breathing, heavy and low, very close.

  It was that same breath that teased her to sleep at night, that had told her stories of her own birth and her mother’s death, of her childhood without a pack in the woods.

  “Father,” she gasped, using her human tongue again to form the wolf words.

  The wolf—her father—snarled at her.

  She threw herself toward the first branch she could see, yanked herself up, and was on her toes. From this vantage point, she could see the whole forest laid out before her, and even the winking of the lights of the castle in the distance. She could not hear the human voices, but she knew that they were there. She was caught by the sudden reality of the humans her father hated. Here they were, so close. Many humans, all living together, all content to be as they were, without any sense of the way they had gone wrong.

  If they saw her now, they would think there was nothing wrong with her.

  Her father’s claws raked her left foot.

  The moment for contemplation was over. It was time for action.

  Golda jumped higher into the tree, and higher still. She could feel the beat of her own heart in her throat, and in her ears. She took a daring chance and jumped to the nearest tree. She reached for a branch and missed it. Sliding, she fell and let out a yelp for her father. But he was too far away.

  For a long moment, she believed she would die. This would be her last moment, and it would be in human form, which she hated. Her father would see her in a human form and he would want to forget that she was his child. He would turn away from her and never think of her again.

  It was the most terrible end she could think of.

  But then she landed on a fork between branches and her reflexes were quick enough that she was able to pull herself up. Her head rang and her fingers bled, scraped raw, but she was alive.

  She slid down the tree and began to laugh. She ran again, and this time she could not hear her father behind her. She came to the river and rushed into it, heedless of what it would do to the human body.

  She would not be in the human body much longer. As soon as she could, she would change again, and it would not matter that she had worn it for a little while, however disgusting it was.

  Within moments, she was under the water, fighting currents and cold. The human body had no fur to keep her warm, no tail to stabilize itself. Stupid, stupid, she thought. Stupid as a human.

  When she was at last spit out on the bank in an eddy, she used all her remaining strength to change back into a she-wolf, not yet grown. And still, she shivered until her father found her and nuzzled at her.

  “Home?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, teeth chattering.

  He nudged her with his muzzle to her flanks and she found herself on all fours. It did not take much thought to move forward, paw by paw, until she was back home under the stones.

  “I did not like being human,” she said to him, the next day, after a long, restless sleep.

  “I do not wish to speak of it,” said her father.

  Golda wondered if he would have killed her. She had not doubted it in the moment, but now that all was well between them again, she saw her loving father, kind, gentle, always providing for her.

  In a way, it was he who had changed forms, not she.

  But she told herself that she would obey him, that she had no need to be human again. And for four long seasons, she was able to keep her promise. She was tempted to be human when she saw a robin’s nest full of eggs high above her. She loved the taste of eggs, but it was so hard to reach a nest with only a wolf’s claws to guide her up the trunk of a tree. That her father had been able to follow her at all when she had taken human form had been a surprise. That she had bested him in the end was not.

  She had resisted, however, and watched instead as the robin’s eggs hatched and turned into birds. She had come close enough to one that she had been able to bat at it before it flew away, but otherwise the desire for eggs went unfulfilled.

  Another time she saw a human atop a horse. She crept closer, for it was near the edge of the forest, and she did not often leave the protective canopy of the trees without her father’s guidance. But she was curious about both the human and the horse. Her father hated to see humans use animals in this way, though he did say that he thought horses were the least tamed of all the domesticated creatures.

  She could see nothing of resistance in the horse. The rider did not use a saddle or a bridle, which her father had described to her in detail. The horse was not in a cage or on a rope tied to its neck. The rider did not wear boots with spurs or carry a whip to spur the horse on. The two of them seemed at peace with each other an
d with the world. In fact, Golda could not tell for a moment if the human had two legs or if the appendages around the horse’s belly belonged to the animal itself.

  She drew closer and saw the human bend forward, pressing face to face, whispering in the horse’s ear. She could not tell if the human spoke the language of horses, but for some reason she believed it was so. It was in the way the horse responded, as if the two of them were sharing a sly secret. When the human leaned forward, the horse took a step. When the human sat up straight, the horse stopped. When the human stiffened, the horse began to bounce.

  The horse smelled like a human and at the same time, the human smelled like a horse. They breathed in the same rhythm, and Golda never saw the human off of the horse, though the two spent all day in the forest, until the sun set and they were called back to the castle by the all of the night bells.

  By then she had determined that it was a female human and a male horse. They were friends, and Golda envied them. Her father had great power over the animals of the forest and could command them to do anything for him. He commanded them to care for her, to hunt for her when she was small, and he had more than once commanded them to play with her. But when it was commanded, there was no pleasure in it, no individuality. She had rather watch the animals playing with each other than have them misused in that way. So she told her father that she preferred to spend her time with him, and he was pleased with this.

  Now, watching the horse and the human, she wished she could change into a human. She imagined walking out of the forest and toward the castle. Would they let her in, if she appeared human? Could she ask them to borrow a horse? Or could she simply take one without them knowing?

  This was a fantasy that was difficult to dispel. She thought about it so often it became part of her dreams, and she had to be careful when she slept at night to put her head to the ground so that her voice was muffled. She found herself speaking in the language of horses when she was asleep and she did not want her father to hear her and ask why.

  But when she saw another human child alone in the forest while her father was gone, searching for tame animals he could liberate while she guarded the others against humans who might come to the stones. It was a girl, about the same age she had been when she had first changed into a human. She was alone in the forest and was making a terrible wailing sound, with water dripping down her face.

  At first, Golda meant to keep to her promise and only appear as a wolf. But the girl was terrified and ran from her, then fell and bruised herself badly and held her hands in front of her face while Golda tried to sniff at her and then to speak a few common words of wolf that she thought the girl would understand. She did not. She spoke none of the animal languages that Golda knew so well, though her father had told her that most humans could speak animals to either kill or tame them.

  Golda tried the shape of a smaller animal, in hopes the girl would be less fearful. She was a squirrel and then a rabbit. But those, too, frightened her and made her shiver and put her head under her arm to hide it.

  At last, Golda changed into a human. She could not pretend that it was not a change of intent, as it had been before. She did not do it unconsciously. It was done willfully, and it took several minutes, for she was used to keeping her mind from the thought of the human shape.

  Once she had changed, however, Golda felt as if she had stepped out of a cage. She felt as if she had been meant for this form. It was like slipping into her father’s warm embrace. There were so many things that were easier this way. She loved the hands. She loved the way her toes could grip the dirt and let her stand upright with ease or help her to run with purpose and speed.

  She was so caught up in herself that she forgot entirely about the girl.

  “I’m lost,” the girl said. “Are you lost, too?”

  Golda glanced up at her. “No,” she said, the human words coming easily to her.

  “I did not see you before. Do you live here in the woods? Do you have a house?”

  “I live here,” said Golda. She let the girl assume that it was in a house. She did not dare to show her to the stones. That would be taking things too far.

  “I’m hungry,” said the girl.

  Golda was unsympathetic to this. “Do you not hunt?” she asked.

  The girl spread out her hands helplessly. “I don’t know how. I don’t have a knife or a bow.”

  “How did you come here?” asked Golda.

  “With my father and my brother. Only—they did not know I was following them. And they went faster than I could go. I did not call after them because they would have been angry at me if they knew I had come. They would have taken me home.”

  “But why?”

  “Because the forest is dangerous and the animals might eat me,” said the girl.

  For a moment, Golda was struck with how much like her father this sounded, when she was younger and had asked why she could not go to the castle and see the humans.

  “I will help you to go home,” Golda offered.

  The girl offered her a hand and Golda took it. How soft and warm it felt. The girl trusted her implicitly, never thinking that a wolf might suddenly come at her, and tear her to pieces. She was afraid of animals, but not other humans. It was so strange.

  Golda led her to the edge of the forest. “Can you see your home from here?” she asked, pointing at the castle.

  “Oh, I don’t live there,” said the girl. “That’s where the king and queen and the princess live. I live in the village.”

  “Can you find your way from here?”

  “I think so. But why don’t you come with me? I will give you a piece of pie if you come.”

  Golda did not disbelieve her, but she did not think she would like human food and she was happy enough with what was provided in the forest. Also, she wanted to be at the stones when her father got there, so that he had no reason to ask her what she had done that day while he was gone.

  Golda watched the girl for a while, until she had turned at the path that led away from the castle, to the village east of it, toward the rising sun.

  Then she went back into the forest. To be safe, she turned first into a deer, then into a hawk, and into a mink, before she turned into a wolf once more. She dipped herself into the river twice, and then made sure that she came home with a killed duck from the river’s edge, blood on her hands so thick that there could be hardly any other scent detected.

  Her father did not seem to suspect what she had done at all.

  It was months before Golda dared to be human again, but this time, it was by her own choice, without any other humans around. And in the years that followed, she became human more and more often, but only when she knew that her father had no chance to see her.

  It was only when she was full size that she began to think that her father should have so say as to her form, and that the next time she was human, she would let him see her, and try to stop her.

  Chapter Five: Dagmar

  Princess Dagmar and Lord Morlieb danced together every night after their first meeting. She did her duty and danced with other noblemen of the kingdom. She listened to their stories and asked questions that showed that she had paid attention. But there was nothing like dancing with Lord Morlieb.

  The princess expected her father to tell her that she should not dance so much with the same man. Or for her mother to notice that Dagmar was breathless and nearly insensible after every dance with him. She felt she had almost lost herself to the rhythm of the dance. There was a danger in it, but it was a danger that she could not stop herself from going back to.

  The rhythm of the dance, the feel of Lord Morlieb’s heartbeat at one with hers, was something that had become as necessary to Princess Dagmar as water itself. She woke in the middle of the night sometimes and tried to hum a tune to herself, and dance with her eyes closed, as if Lord Morlieb were there with her. But it was nothing like the man himself.

  Her whole life after meeting Lord Morlieb seemed to be waiting.
She waited for the next evening, when Lord Morlieb would be able to dance with her. Then she waited for him to see her first, to ask her. She waited for a dance with another nobleman to be finished, so that she could dance once more with Lord Morlieb.

  If her parents had indeed told her that she could not dance with him again, she would have refused them. She could not have been in the same room with him, heard music, and not danced in his arms. Her greatest fear was the moment that Lord Morlieb declared that he had to leave Kendel and return to his native Tirol.

  As for Lord Morlieb, he seemed as interested in Princess Dagmar as she was with him. He watched while she danced with other noblemen, but he did not ask anyone else to dance. More than one noblewoman was frustrated in her attempt to encourage him to do exactly that.

  Lady Ethel passed him by on several occasions, stopping to fan herself and smile prettily at him.

  On the third such time, Lord Morlieb said, “You look lovely this evening, Lady Ethel.”

  She was only a year older than Princess Dagmar, and had a face suitable for painting. In fact, it had been painted more than once, by professionals and by amateurs who could not resist the temptation.

  Lady Ethel smiled and moved closer to Lord Morlieb, just as Princess Dagmar was returning from a dance to stand at Lord Morlieb’s side. “It is a good gown for dancing. It floats freely and shimmers in the light,” Lady Ethel hinted broadly.

  “Indeed. I must say that I wish that I were dressed suitably to match your glory. I would look a poor stone compared to your sparkling diamond,” said Lord Morlieb. “I see a man there who is very eager for a dance.” He pointed to the second son of Lord Peter, who was without doubt the most handsome man in the ballroom.

  Without waiting for Lady Ethel’s encouragement, Lord Morlieb stepped forward and introduced them. Then he turned back and held out his arm for Princess Dagmar to dance with him once more.

  Later that evening, Princess Dagmar saw her father moving toward Lord Morlieb as she intended to dance with him again. She turned aside and hid behind a pillar so that she could hear what her father had to say.