Robin McKinley

by Deerskin

  The hallways they passed through grew progressively grander. "The oldest part of the house was built by old King Raskel, who thought he was founding a dynasty that would rule the world. His idea of support for his plans was to build everything with ceilings high enough to contain weather beneath them. I used to fancy stormclouds gathering up there and then with a clap of thunder the rain falls and drowns an especially deadly state banquet." He flung open a set of doors. "Or a ball. Not a bad idea, if I knew how one made a thunderstorm. Raskel is the one who first called himself Goldhouse, seventeen generations ago."

  They were in the ballroom. Lissar didn't need to be told. There were servants in livery hanging long ribbons and banners of crimson and gold and blue and green around the walls; the banners bore heraldic animals, dogs and horses, eagles and griffins. Goldhouse's own badge, which hung above the rest, held a rayed sun with a stubby yellow castle, a horse, a deep-chested and narrow-bellied dog, and some queer mythological beast, set around it. Ossin saw her looking at it. "Fleethounds are in the blood, you might say. Or if there wasn't already one there, I'd've put one in, although it would ruin the design. No, I would have taken the elrig out: ugly thing anyway. It's supposed to be an emblem for virtue, virtue commonly being ugly, you know."

  Other servants were taking down plain drab curtains and hanging up other curtains to match the banners. "What do you think?" Ossin said, but it was a rhetorical question, and she only shook her head. He set out across the vast lake of floor, and she followed uneasily, dodging around servants with mops and buckets and polishing cloths; the smell of the floor polish made her eyes water. "They lay the stuff down now so the smell will be gone by the night," he offered over his shoulder.

  "And the doors will be barred when they're finished, so that people like me, who lack the proper attitude, can't tramp through and ruin the gloss." His footsteps echoed; the servants all wore soft shoes, and if they spoke, they spoke in whispers.

  Lissar's bare feet made no noise, but she had the uncomfortable feeling of the floor polish adhering to her feet, so that she would slide, whenever she set her foot down, for some time after, leaving a sparkling trail like a snail's.

  They left by another, smaller door, went up two flights of stairs and down a hall of a more modest size, with a ceiling whose embossed flower pattern was near enough to see in detail. Then Ossin opened another door.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THIS ROOM WAS SMALL AND, WHILE IT WAS OBVIOUSLY

  DUTIFULLY aired at regular intervals, smelled unused. It was dim, the windows closed and curtains drawn over them; light came in only from the hall windows behind them. There were a few paintings hanging on the wall to their left as they walked in; they hung crowded together and uneven, as if they had been put up where there were already nails to hold them, without regard to how they looked.

  The paintings were all portraits; the one which caught Lissar's eye first was evidently very old. It was of a man, stiff in uniform, standing with his hand on the back of a chair that might have been a throne, staring irritably at the portrait painter who was wasting so much of his time. "That's Raskel's son-first in a long line of underachievers, of whom I am the latest." As he spoke, Ossin was sorting through more portraits, Lissar saw, which were smaller and less handsomely framed, lying on a table in the center of the room.

  She looked up at the wall again; several of the other portraits were of young women, and looked newer, the paint uncracked, the finish still bright. "Ah," said Ossin, and held something up. He went over to the window and threw back the curtains; afternoon sunshine flooded in. He turned to Lissar and offered her what he held. She walked over to him and stood facing the windows.

  It was a portrait, indifferently executed, of a plump young woman in an unflattering dress of a peculiarly dismaying shade of puce. Perhaps the color was the painter's fault, and not the young woman's; but Lissar doubted that the flounces and ribbons were products of the painter's imagination. "That's Trivelda," said Ossin with something that sounded like satisfaction. "Only one evening, you remember, eh?

  Looks just like her. What do you think?"

  Lissar hesitated and then said, "She looks like someone who thinks hunting hounds are dirty and smell bad."

  "Exactly." The prince sat down on the edge of the table, swinging one leg. She turned a little toward him. "What are all these-portraits?"

  The prince grimaced. "Seven or eight or nine generations of courtly spouse-searches. Mostly it's just us royals-or at least nobles-very occasionally a commoner either strikingly wealthy or strikingly beautiful creeps in. There are a few of the little handsized ones of the impoverished but hopeful."

  "I don't think I understand."

  "Oh. Well. When you're a king or a queen and you have a son or a daughter you start wanting to marry off, you hire a tame portrait painter to produce some copies of your kid's likeness, preferably flattering, the number of copies depending on how eager or desperate you are, how much money you have to go with the package, and whether you can find a half-good painter with a lot of time to kill, and perhaps twelve or so children to support of his or her own. Then you fire off the copies to the likeliest courts with suitable-you hope suitable-unmarried offspring of the right gender.

  "The one my father hired kept making my eyes bigger and my chin smaller-I'm sure from praiseworthy motives, but that kind of thing backfires, as soon as the poor girl-or her parents' emissary-gets here and takes a good look at me.

  "No one has come up with a good way of disposing of these things once their purpose is accomplished-or in most cases failed. It seems discourteous just to chuck them in the fire. So they collect up here." He lifted the corners of one or two and let them fall again with small brittle thumps. "Occasionally one, of the painters turns out to be someone famous, and occasionally we get some collector wanting to look through what's in here, in hopes of finding a treasure. I don't think that's going to happen with Trivelda."

  Lissar was smiling as she looked up, turning, now facing the wall, noticing the deep stacks of paintings leaning against its foot, the sunlight bright on the portraits hanging above. Second from the right, some little distance from the door, now on her left, that they had come in by, was a portrait that now caught her attention.

  A young woman stood, her body facing a little away from the painter, her face turned back toward the unknown hand holding the brush, almost full-face. Her long pale gold skirts, sewn all over with knots of satin and velvet rosebuds, fell into folds as perfect as marble carved to clothe the statue of a goddess. Her face was composed but a little distant, as if she were thinking of something else, or as if she kept herself carefully at some distance behind the face she showed the world. Her mahogany-black hair was pulled forward to fall over her right shoulder. She wore a small diadem with a point that arched low over her brow; a clear stone rested at the spot mystics called the third eye. Her own hazel-green eyes gleamed in the light the painter chose to cast across the canvas. Her left hand, elbow bent, rested on the head of a tall, silver-fawn dog, who looked warily out of the picture, wary in that it believed the girl needed guarding, and it would guard her if it could. Its gaze was much sharper and more present than the girl's.

  It was Ash she recognized, not herself. This painter was a better craftsperson than whoever had painted poor Trivelda; Lissar could not decide her mind, during those first moments, floundering for intellectual details to keep the shock and terror at bay, if she would have recognized Ash anywhere, however bad the likeness, because she was Ash; or if it was the painter's cleverness in catching that wary look, a look Lissar had seen often in the last few months, as Ash stared at six eager, clumsy, curious puppies. It was only because she could not refuse to acknowledge Ash that she had to look into her own flat, painted eyes and aloof expression and say Yes, that was I.

  Standing, for hours, it seemed, though she was allowed frequent rests; the young painter, very much on his mettle, anxious to please, too anxious to speak to the princess; the princess too unac
customed to speaking to any stranger to initiate; court women and the occasional minister came and went, that the two of them were never alone together. It was the women, or the ministers, who decided when Lissar should step down and rest. She remembered those sittings-or standings; curious how her memory brought up something, carefully enclosed, that led nowhere, to stave off the worst of the recognition of her own past; she could remember nothing around those occasions of standing being painted. She remembered nothing of the decision to have it done; she had no memory of how many copies might have been made, who they might have been sent to; when all of this had been accomplished.... She remembered, looking into her poised, uninhabited face, the faint surprise she felt at the portrait's being commissioned at all. It seemed so unlike . . . unlike ... she couldn't remember. But she was so unused to strangers, and these portraits would be sent out into the world, to strangers; she was unused to strangers because ... it was not that she was shy, although she was, it was because ... she remembered the ministers coming in, to see how the work was progressing, the court ministers, her father's ministers....

  King's daughter King's daughter King's daughter

  The memory ended. Her legs were trembling. So were her hands, as she moved a stack of paintings and sat down, sideways, her body turned toward the painting, but both feet still firmly on the ground. But she turned her face back toward the window and raised her chin, closing her eyes, as if she were only enjoying the sunlight. "Who is the girl in the golden dress, with the fleethound? The hound might be one of yours." Her voice sounded odd, feverish, but she hoped it was only the banging of her heart in her own ears.

  "That's Lissla Lissar," said Ossin, easily, as if the name were no different from any other name: Ossin, Ob, Goldhouse, Lilac, Deerskin. "And that is one of my dogs. Lissar's mother died when she was fifteen; I was seventeen, and still deeply romantic-those were the years I was dreaming of Moonwoman and, coincidentally, raising my first litters of first-class pups. I sent her one of my pups, the best of her litter; I thought it a fine generous gesture, worthy of the man Moonwoman could come to love. I named the pup Ash." Ossin's gaze dropped to Ash, who had raised her own at the sound of her name. "She was exactly the same silver-fawn color as yours-except, of course, she had short hair."

  He looked back up at Lissar. Lissar could see him thinking, rejecting what he thought even as he thought it. She tried to smile from her new, thin face at him; for the old Lissar had been rounder, and there were no lines in that Lissar's face. And she knew what he saw when he looked at her: a woman with prematurely white hair, from what unknown loss or sorrow; and with eyes black from secrets she herself could not look at.

  But she closed her black eyes suddenly; for she remembered again what she had known all along, the life that went with the name she had retained. She remembered what she had, briefly, remembered on the mountaintop, before the Moonwoman had rescued her; that she was ... not an herbalist's apprentice, but a king's daughter, and the reiteration of king's daughter in her brain was battering open the doors that had closed, opening the dark secrets lying at the bottom of her eyes; it went through her like a physical pain, like the agonizing return of blood to a frozen limb. King's daughter, daughter of a king who ... who had. . .

  No, not blood to a frozen limb; it was the thrust of the torch into the tarred bonfire, and the lick of the fire was cruel. The memories flared into brightness, seared her vision, stabbed through her eyes into the dark protected space inside her skull.... She wanted to scream, and could not, could not breathe, even so little movement as the rise and fall of her belly and breast-the involuntary blinking of her eyes as ordinary sight tried to bring her back into the room where the only warm things were her and Ossin and Ash, surrounded by cool paint on canvas, and dust-even this much motion, reminding her that she still lived, stretched her skin to bursting. It was as well she could not speak, even to moan; any cry would drive her over the lip of the pit, the pit she had forgotten, though her feet had never left its edge, and now that she had looked, and seen again, she could not look away. There were some things that took life and broke it, not merely into meaninglessness, but with active. malice flung the pieces farther, into hell.

  She would die, now, die with the benevolent sun on her face, leaning against a table in the quiet store-room of a man who was her friend and to whom she had lied about everything, lied because she could not help herself, because she knew nothing else to tell. She remembered the last three days and nights of her life as a princess; remembered the draining away of that life, and the last violent act that she believed had killed her. Even now, her body's wounds healed by time and Ash and snow and solitude and Moonwoman, and six puppies, and the friendship of a prince and a stable-hand; even now the memory of that act of violence would shatter her; she could not contain the memory even as her body had not been able to contain the result of its betrayal.

  "Deerskin," said her friend. "What is wrong?"

  Silky fur between her fingers; the reality of one dog, one dog's life, bringing her back to her own, as it had several times before. Her fingers clutched, hard, too hard, but Ash only stood where she was, bearing what she could for her beloved person's sake. Lissar, looking down into those brown eyes looking up, thought, Who can tell what she remembers of that night? But she is here as am I, and if I am to die of that night's work, let it not be before this man who gave me good work to do, and who has tried to speak to me as a friend.

  I did not lie to him about everything, she thought. I told him that I liked dogs. And without conscious volition, her fingers searched out the lump at the back of Ash's skull. Ash had not carried her head as if it were sore in many months, not since Lissar had woken up wearing a white deerskin dress for the first time; but the lump was still there, for fingers that knew where to look.

  "Forgive me," she said; her brain, still stunned, could not come up with even a bad reason for her faintness; any reason, that is, other than the truth, which she could not tell him, even to change her habit of lying to him. "Forgive me. It is over now. Will you"-her lips were stiff, and she could not think what question she might ask, to lead him away from her own trouble, and so she asked a question bred of memory and confusion: "Will you marry Lissar?"

  Ossin smiled. "Not I. Not a chance. I am far beneath her touch. Her father is a great king, not a hunting-master with a rather large house, like mine. She's his only daughter, and . . ." He hesitated, looking at her, seeing her distress in her face, but seeing also that she did not wish to speak of it, and trying to let her, as he thought, lead him away from the source of that distress. He did not want to talk about Lissar; but the fate of a princess in a far-away country should be a safe topic. "After his wife died, the story was that he went mad with grief, and when he got over it, he grew obsessed with his daughter, and believed that no king or prince or young god with powers of life and death was good enough for her. Had I wished to run at that glass mountain I would have slid off its slick sides even before I was banished for my arrogance in wanting to try."

  Lissar thought he looked at the painting almost with longing; perhaps he was remembering the first-class dog he had lost in a moment's romantic whim. "But you were sent a painting," she said, her mouth still speaking words that her brain was not conscious of forming. "You must have been considered an eligible suitor."

  The longing look deepened. "I have wondered about that myself. My guess is that it was part of her father's wealth and importance that he could send paintings to every unmarried prince and king in his world." After a moment he went on: "I quite like the painting-who I imagine the person painted to be. She is watching from behind her eyes, her princess's gown-do you see it?" But Lissar was watching him.

  "Her mother was said to be the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, and that her daughter grew more like her every year. She is beautiful, of course, the glossy hair, that line of cheekbone, the balance of features; but it's not her beauty that I keep seeing in that painting. It's her ... self, her humanity. Or maybe
I just like the way her hand rests on her dog's head, and the way the dog is looking out at us, saying, mess with my lady if you dare, but don't forget me. I like thinking that Ash is appreciated."

  He turned away, embarrassed. "Pardon me. Here I've just been telling you that these portraits are invariably fraudulent, and now I am spinning a fairy-tale about a woman I have never met as painted by someone whose whims and imagination I have no guess of." Another pause. "Perhaps I was sent a painting in acknowledgement of the dog I bred; who knows how great kings think? I received no other acknowledgement, except Mik, who delivered the pup, was favorably taken by Lissar as a potential dog-owner."

  Lissar dared to turn around and look at herself once more. "It is a very handsome dog."

  "Hmm?" said Ossin. "Oh. Yes. It is a very handsome bitch." He smiled a little, again, sheepishly. "Perhaps I give myself permission to believe in how this painter presents the princess because the dog is so well done by. She looks so like her mother; that same wary look, when I was asking her to do something she considered of dubious merit. She would certainly have looked just so had I required her to sit for her portrait."

  There was a longer pause. Lissar thought that Ossin would stir from his reflections, and suggest they leave, and they would leave; although Lissar's ghosts would go with her. But then they had been with her all along; now, only, she had names for them. And was not naming a way of establishing a pattern, of declaring control? She remembered the Moonwoman's words to her, and she wanted to say, It is not enough. I am sorry to be one of your failures, but I cannot bear it. I still cannot bear it.

  Lissar straightened a little, still sitting on the edge of the table. "Whom did Lissar marry, after all?"

  "She didn't. Although it's rather murky what exactly did happen. Usually we get quite good gossip at this court-we all like hearing how the real royals live-but somehow this story never quite got to the circle of our friends. I think she is supposed to have died; there was this uproar, and the king went very strange again, like after his wife died. No one would say if Lissar had actually died or if so what of.