The Princess and the Hound by Mette Ivie Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

He could only speak to animals, and no more.
    Yet he did not speak to animals in any place where he might be seen. Certainly not in the castle and often not even in the fields around the castle or in the stables or the kennels. He had once mewed at the old cat Cook Elin kept as a mouser and looked up to see Cook Elin staring at him with a look on her face that frightened him. He did not speak to the old cat again, but sometime later he woke up in the middle of the night, before even Cook Elin was in the kitchen, and found the cat dead. He took the body to bury it in the soft dirt by the moat.
    It was Cook Elin who noticed Prince George’s aversion to rare meat and teased him about it, a “great, strapping lad like you,” she said. “Afraid of a little blood?”
    But the meat reminded him of the bear’s meals, animals caught midflight and then dismembered, their messy entrails steaming on the ground. With his oversize knife and fork he felt as clumsy as the bear, and though he knew that these were not wild animals that had been slaughtered, it made little difference to him. His mother had always eaten sparingly of meat, though she had disdained those who claimed not to eat meat at all, saying that the law of the animals was that it was right to kill but only in necessity.
    At last the dreams of both the bear and the man became less frequent. It was a relief, yet George missed his nightly companions. He even missed the temptation of thinking that his magic was something great and important and that only he could do what was meant to be done with it. Because he was great and important too.
    But he was not. He was only Prince George, quiet and obedient and pitied by all who knew him, because of his mother’s death and his father’s neglect. Prince George could hardly be trusted to put his shirt on the right way around, let alone change the world with his magic.
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C HAPTER S IX
    T ALL, STERN S IR Stephen became George’s tutor when he was eight years old. He had the king to advise, as was his official position, but when other tutors complained the prince was too stupid to learn properly, the king appointed Sir Stephen to take over the task.
    It was not that George did not wish to learn or even that he could not. It was only Sir Stephen who seemed to realize that George was best prodded by reminders of his mother. Sir Stephen was the one who would say, “Would your mother be happy if she saw you today?” and so George reluctantly kept at his lessons, for her memory’s sake.
    Sir Stephen might have given the hint to another tutor. Some claimed that he was looking to his future, that he wanted to assure he had the next king’s ear. But George felt real sympathy from Sir Stephen, as if he understood what it was to be a boy of whom too muchwas expected. Also, only Sir Stephen had known his mother well enough that now and again he could surprise George with a new story or two about her life.
    He told of her first state dinner, when she had used the wrong fork and all the other ladies at the table had been forced to use the wrong fork with her. George went red with embarrassment for his mother’s mistake, but Sir Stephen shook his head and laughed.
    “She did it every dinner after, for a year,” he said, “just to tease them.”
    George smiled at this and went right back to work at his letter writing, though he did purposely misspell a word here and there: “I shall always fail my responsibilities” instead of “I shall always fill my responsibilities.”
    He watched as Sir Stephen tried to keep his temper. And waited for him to see how he had only followed his mother’s example from the story.
    Then Sir Stephen shook his finger and threatened George direly, but with a twinkle in his eyes.
    Even with Sir Stephen’s sympathy, George knew how different his life might have been had his mother lived. She would not have insisted on so many lessons. She would not have allowed George to be forced