Robin McKinley

by Deerskin

  She moved her own eyes to look at Lilac, spearing a slab of bread with her thov, and Lilac glanced up at just that moment, meeting her eyes straightforwardly.

  There was nothing in her gaze but herself; no shadows, nor shards of broken stories; nothing she wanted to make Lissar a part of; the smile that went with the look was similarly kind and plain and open. Lissar was Lissar-or rather she was Deerskin-Lilac was willing to wait on the rest. Lissar smiled back.

  The consensus was that while Redthorn could find work for her, at least till Jed was active again, she should present herself to the court first. Everyone agreed that the prince would like Ash.

  "It's, you know, polite," said Lilac. "I went myself, after about a sennight; I was just curious, if nothing else, there's a king and a queen and a prince and a princess a stone's throw away from you-a stone's throw if you don't mind braining a doorkeeper and breaking a few windows-it's a waste not to go look at 'em, you know? So I did. Got a real bad impression of the prince, though-I told you, he looks eight kinds of vegetable slouched down in some chair of state, covered with dog hair, he's always got a few of the dogs themselves with him and they look better than he does. I keep wondering what he must be like at formal banquets and so on; I know they have 'em. Cofta is easy-going but he still remembers he's a king. But that's no mind really. You'll end up liking him-Ossin-too after you've seen him coming in from running the young hounds for the first time, with burrs in his hair.

  Clementina's the practical one-that's the queen-lots of people would rather go to her with their problems than the king because she understands things at once and starts thinking what to do about them. Cofta's dreamier, although his dreams are usually true."

  "There's a saying," broke in Jed, "that Cofta can't see the trees for the forest, and Clem the forest for the trees."

  "Camilla's the beauty," continued Lilac. "It's so unexpected that that family should produce a beauty-the Goldhouses have been squat and dreary-looking for centuries, you can see it in the portraits, and Clem's just another branch of the same family; she and Cofta are some kind of cousins-that they're all struck rather dumb by it. By Camilla: And she's so young that being beautiful absorbs her attention pretty thoroughly. She may grow up to be something; she may not. I don't think anyone knows if she's bright or stupid."

  Breakfast was over by then, and Lilac and Lissar were leaning on a post outside the barn, and Lissar was watching out of the corner of her eye, while listening with most of her attention, the bustle of the morning's work at the king's stable. Jed paused beside them when he needed to rest his ankle. "She's probably not even beautiful, you know," he said. "It's just that she's a stunner next to the rest of them.

  Besides, she's ours, so we like her," and he grinned. He was himself good-looking, and knew it.

  "Except for that Dorl," said Lilac. "Since Camilla got old enough, he's started hanging around."

  Lissar knew that while Redthorn might well find work for her, she did not belong at the stables. She knew little of horses, though this she might learn, and less, she thought, of getting along with other people; that she feared to learn, although she remembered the hope she felt at the idea of finding a place for herself in the yellow city, which was so very full of people. Choices were choices; that did not mean they were simple ones. But she had not liked the eyes around the breakfast-table.

  So she borrowed a brush and comb, and took turns working on her own hair and Ash's. When either of them whined and ducked away too miserably she switched over to the other for a while. Finger-combing was frustrating and time-consuming and she had neglected both of them in the last weeks.

  Cofta's general receiving was this afternoon; the sooner she got it over with the better. It would be another three days to wait if she missed today. There were voices in her head again, and not the quiet voice from the mountaintop. These voices were .

  . . "The king was very handsome and grand, but the queen was the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms." It was a story she had heard somewhere, but she could not remember where; and trying to remember made her feel tired and weak and confused.

  In her mind's eye she was wearing another white dress, not of deerskin, but of silk; and Ash was beside her, but the Ash she was remembering, as her fingers lost themselves in the long cool waves of the skirt, had short fine hair instead of thick curls. Ash? No, she did remember, Ash had grown her heavy coat this last winter, when they had been snowbound for so long. But Ash was not a young dog, a puppy reaching her adulthood and growing her adult coat; she could remember holding the puppy Ash had been in her arms for the first time, and she had been smaller then herself. She remembered the kind look of the man who handed the puppy to her; and she remembered there were a great many other people around....

  Perhaps it was a market day, and she had come to town with Rinnol, to whom she had been apprenticed. She opened her hands, laying the brush down for a moment.

  I give you the gift of time, the Lady said.

  Her winter sickness had robbed her of so much. What did she even remember surely that she once had known how to do? Something to give her some direction to pursue, to seek, a door to open? What did she know how to do? Nothing. This morning she had discovered that while she understood the theory and purpose of stall-mucking, the pitchfork did not feel familiar in her hand, as the leather rein had.

  But neither the familiarity nor the unfamiliarity led to anything more.

  I give you the gift of time, the Lady said.

  Even the memory of the Lady was fading, and Lissar thought perhaps she had been only a fever dream, the dream following the breaking of the fever, her own body telling her she would live. What was the gift of time worth?

  As she stared at her hands she saw the white dress again, and there were bright, flickering lights around her, so many that they made her head swim, and the noise and perfumes of many splendidly dressed people....

  No.

  The thought ended, and all thoughts blanked out. She was sitting, feeling tired and weak and confused, in the small mattressfurnished end of a long attic room with a steeply pitched roof over one end of the king's stables. She had only the memory of a memory of when she had first held Ash in her arms, and the only white dress she remembered wearing was the one she wore now; and Rinnol was only a name, and she was not sure if she had been real.

  A bad fever it was, it had killed ...

  She could not remember what it had killed, nor did she understand why her lack of memory seemed more like a wall than an empty space.

  But she remembered the touch of the Lady's fingers on her cheek, and the sound of her voice, bells and running water. She looked down at her lap, her anxious hands. And there was the deerskin dress. If the Lady had been a dream, then some dreams were true.

  She picked up the hairbrush again. Ash, watching the brush, retired into the shadows of the opposite end of the room and tried to look like dust and old wooden beams.

  NINETEEN

  LILAC WENT WITH HER FAR ENOUGH TO ENSURE THAT SHE

  WOULD not get lost. There was a stream of people, narrow but steady, going the same way they were. Lilac knew the doorkeepers and had a friendly word for each of them, accompanied by the same clear, straightforward look that had rescued Lissar that morning at breakfast-and, she thought, had first weighed and considered her at the water cistern.

  "I'll leave you here," Lilac said at last, at the end of one hall. "You can't miss it from here. Straight through those silly-looking doors"-they were carved as if the open entry were a monster's roaring mouth-"and then look around. There'll be a group of ordinary-looking folk off to one side, and a lot of unordinary folk wandering around trying to look important. You go stand with the first lot." She grinned. "I'd stay with you a little and watch the show, but I've skipped enough work for one day. Redthorn is a good fellow, but you put your hours in or he won't keep you."

  Lissar was finding it hard to see; she blinked, but as soon as her eyes were open, she saw ... two different pictu
res, one superimposed upon the other. She could see the monster-mouth doorway, and the friendly, casual doorkeepers, who seemed not to lose nor fear losing any of their dignity by speaking to all the mixture of people that passed in and out. Through this scene or over it she saw another, taller, plainer doorway, with guards standing by it, dressed in golden uniforms with breastplates bright enough to be mirrors; and a doorkeeper so haughty that he seemed grander than most of the stately, expensively dressed people he permitted to pass through the doors; two flunkies stood at his elbows, tense with watching for his orders.

  "Thank you," she said to Lilac, blinking again. "I'm sure I'll find the way from here."

  "Are you feeling quite well?" Lilac asked abruptly. "You've gone pale." She touched Lissar's arm. "Did you get a touch of heatstroke yesterday? Or maybe Cala's sausages don't agree with you. Gods only know what all she puts into them."

  Lissar shook her head-gingerly, still blinking. "No. I'm just-still not accustomed to so many people."

  Lilac looked at her a moment longer, and dropped her hand. "I still wish you'd let me loan you some shoes. Barefoot before the king and queen!" She shook her head, but she was smiling again.

  Lissar murmured, "I like to know where I'm walking. In shoes I'm always walking on shoes."

  "Well, it identifies you as a stranger, anyway, and strangers are often exotic. But it makes you look like you have no friends. Now remember, come back to the stables tonight, whatever happens. We won't keep you in the boxroom forever."

  Lissar nodded, and Lilac, after looking at her anxiously a moment longer, turned away.

  "Lilac-"

  Lilac, who had moved a few steps away, stopped at once and turned back.

  "What do you call them, the king and queen, I mean? Your-your"-the word fell out of her mouth-"splendor?" It tasted ill, as if the name were an insult, and for a moment she braced herself for anger, but Lilac answered easily enough.

  "You can, but it will brand you worse than your feet. Call them `your greatness.'

  `Splendor' is unfashionable here. Like lap-dogs."

  Lissar nodded again, and made her way down the hall, to the yawning doors. One of the keepers said to her cordially, "Welcome. You are here for the general receiving?"

  Lissar nodded, hoping it was not necessary to speak. Evidently it was not; the doorkeepers were accustomed to ordinary folks' stage fright upon the prospect of being introduced to royalty. "Go straight in; you will see there is a place to wait. You will have your turn; do not worry. The king and queen see everyone who comes. Not only the prince is here today, but the princess, and the Cum of Dorl," he added, as if she would be glad to hear this; she smiled a little at his tone.

  With her smile, he seemed to focus on her at last, to forget his prepared announcement for a moment; and his eyes swept over her, her white hair, black eyes, deerskin dress, bare feet, silver-fawn dog; and something came into his face, something like what she had seen in the faces of Lilac's fellows, and again she did not want to understand, to guess at a name for it. She turned her own eyes away, and went through the door.

  She was aware of a number of things simultaneously, too many things, and this confused her. She was still more accustomed to being among crowds of trees than crowds of people, and she was unaccustomed to the pointless (it seemed to her) movement and gestures, the purposeless chattering of human crowds. She remembered the forest, the mountains, with longing, where one day was much like the next, where the priorities were simple and plain: water, food, warmth, defense.

  Sound had meaning in the wild; as also did smell. She felt suffocated by the smells here, perfume and tobacco and too-rich food.

  There was something else as well; with every breath and step she expected to see and hear ... something other than what she saw and heard; yet her expectation was always a little before or behind her thought, and she could never identify it. It made her feel off-balance, as if she were walking on the swaying limb of a tree instead of on solid earth. Just now, for example, as she stepped through the door, she lifted her eyes to see the portrait at the end of the long room ... and yet this was a square room, and there were no portraits; tapestries of hunting scenes hung on the walls, interspersed with sconces and niches. What portrait? And why was the absence of an imaginary portrait such a relief?

  She did not know, and yet her eyes would not quite focus on what lay around her now, even as her mind could not quite bring into recognition what her eyes looked for.

  She shook her head and moved cautiously to her left. The blaze of colors-the density of perfumes--0n her right told her that this was not where the common supplicants waited. There was quite a little group of the latter, smelling reassuringly human, and so she had some time to look around her before it was her turn to present herself to the king and his family.

  She found them first. The royal family sat on a dais near the center of the room-a little nearer the back wall, where tall doors opened and closed beneath the sconces and between the tapestries, than to the single huge door by which she had entered. A series of tall chairs stood on the dais, but she could identify the king and queen by their attitude as well as by the fact of their chairs being the tallest and most central.

  She identified the prince next, for his location at the king's right hand, and by the long narrow dog-face poking out from behind his chair. Without Lilac's description she might have guessed that the young man at the queen's left must he the prince, for he sat and looked about him in a more princely manner. Between the queen and the young man sat a young girl. Her cushioned chair was backless, and yet she sat straight and still and poised; and there was a golden circlet upon her head, which declared her the princess. The prince was bare-headed.

  The receiving moved briskly. She believed that the king and queen did listen to each of their subjects, however humble both in appearance and in the tale each had to tell; even at this distance she could see the expressiveness of their faces, hear the responsive lone of their voices when they asked questions or made rulings. Mostly, she thought, the rulings were popular; most sets of shoulders on the people leaving the royal presence were square and relieved.

  She wished the rumble of conversation around her would diminish that she might hear what was said around the dais. It was not that the voices of those she wanted to listen to were so far away or so soft; it was that she could not distinguish one voice from the next. She could only listen to all of them at once and therefore understand nothing. This was a knack, she thought, one that she had perhaps had in her old life; it would come back to her. Meanwhile she took in, without wanting to, the tale of the old woman behind her and her sickly only son, and the tale of the old woman with her, whose previous husband had come back from the dead, as she had supposed, and not to wish ill upon the living since it now seemed he was living, but she had liked him better dead, for he was a ne'er-do-well and her second husband suited her much better, and she wished to keep him. These voices fell the nearest upon her ear, and she could not turn her listening away from them.

  Ash had stayed quietly at her side, pressed up against her, her wide brown eyes moving quickly, her fleethound's muscles vibrating faintly at all the tempting or dubious shadows and sudden bursts of motion; but she was no longer a puppy, and not only her own dignity but her person's demanded she stay where she was.

  As the crowd before her thinned, Lissar could see the folk on the dais more clearly. She liked the queen's brightness of eye, the king's ready smile; she Jiked that bath of them were quietly dressed (not all of their court were so modest); she liked that they seemed to speak no more than was necessary. She liked that neither of them was handsome.

  The young man to the queen's left was handsome. His hair was thick and curly, his eyes large and brilliant, his lashes long, his hands slender and graceful: Lissar could see the women, young and old, look at him when they went to address the king and queen; and they looked long and longingly. The young man looked back, smiling, without arrogance, but with a kind of selfconsci
ousness that Lissar did not like. He rarely spoke, and then only if the king or queen spoke to him first.

  The princess was not beautiful in the common way, but she drew the eye and then held it. There was something about her, as if she were always poised on the brink of doing something surprising and wonderful; an air as if she too believed she were about to do something surprising and wonderful. Sitting so close to the beautiful young man neither put her out of her composure, nor put her in the shade of his more predictable beauty. She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.

  The prince spoke as little as possible, and there were long pauses before his answers, if a question was addressed to him. But she noticed that everyone, including the king and queen, paid sharp attention when he did speak, and her impression was that his words on more than one occasion had significant influence on the outcome of the particular situation under discussion. This was, she thought, reassuring, as there was so little at all princely in his demeanor.

  He was probably tall, though it was difficult to be sure, for he hung in his chair as if he rested on the middle of his spine instead of his pelvis; and he sprawled over one arm of the chair as well, his head negligently propped on one fist. His hair, though thick, was inclined to be lank, his eyes were a little too small, his nose a little too square, his chin a little too large-as was his waistline. His hands were big and broad, and either of his boots looked long enough for a yerig to den in. As she was thinking this, he uncrossed one leg from the other and stomped that foot on the floor; she startled, as if he had known what she was thinking, and her involuntary movement, for some reason, among all the gaudy motion of the court, caught his eye.