Robin McKinley

by Deerskin

  There was even a story that a lion leaped over the princess's garden wall and seized her; as soon say a dragon flew off with her, I think. But it was definitely given out that the king was now suddenly without heir.

  "I favor the story that she ran off with a farmer and is happily growing lettuces somewhere. And raising puppies, although I don't like thinking what she might find to cross Ash with. I'd offer her any dog in my kennel for the pick of the litter, even now, when she probably doesn't have too many litters left. Her mother had her last litter at twelve, her idea, I didn't mean to have her bred any more, and those last five were as fine as any puppies she'd borne in her prime.... I suppose the king will marry again. I don't believe he's all that old, even though this now happened, oh, must be five years ago."

  The king will marry again. The words went through her like swords; she barely heard Ossin's final words, and did not at first register them. The king will marry again. But Ossin was still speaking, Ossin, her friend, and the sound of his voice staunched her wounds, and she found that she was not plunging into the chaos and terror after all. She had paused on the brink to hear what he had to say, trying to distract herself as she felt her strength running out; and now she found that she had regained her balance, at least, while she listened. She was still weak and shaken, but she could stand without straining; there was little further call on her diminished strength. She could still hear the roar of the fire demons at the bottom of the pit, behind Ossin's voice; but it was not now her inevitable fate to fall to her death among them.

  She listened, half attending to the prince, half attending to the knowledge that her own skin still enclosed her, that she was alive and aware and herself, feeling her chest rising and falling easily with her breathing, newly feeling the elasticity of her skin, and the sun's warmth on it, and Ash's long hair under her fingers. Feeling herself, with all that meant: as if her consciousness were a gatekeeper, now going round to all the doors of a house just relieved of a siege it had not thought to win.

  The king will marry again.... No, no, it could not happen; it would not happen; she could not think of it, she saw her mother's blazing eyes striking down any who stood before the king's throne, her mother's eyes burning in the more-than-life-size portrait that hung on the wall behind. It would not happen.

  She would win out. She was winning; she was here and she was not mad, and she remembered. She supposed it was necessary for her to take her life back, even when her life had been what it was. She risked taking a deep breath ... and raised her eyes to Ossin's face. She could not tell him.

  "Please?" said Ossin.

  The sound of his voice had been her lifeline, but she did not know what words he had said. She smiled, glad to have him there to smile at, embarrassed that she did not know what he was asking; delighting in her own ability to decide to smile, to speak, to walk; afraid of the moment when she would turn too quickly, lose her balance-for the chasm was there. What had happened to her the night she had fled her father's court and kingdom was a part of her, a part of her flesh and of her spirit. It was perhaps better to know than not to know-she was not yet sure-but the knowing did not make the chasm any less real, the grief any less debilitating, it only gave it a name, a definition. But the fact of definition implied that it had limits-that her life went on around it. They were only memories. She had lived. They were now only memories, and where she stood now the sun was shining.

  Five years ago.

  The Moonwoman had said, I give you the gift of time.

  Time enough to grow strong enough to remember. Maybe the Moonwoman had known Lissar well enough after all.

  "It is, you remember, only one evening," finished the prince. "Let's get out of here; it's a depressing place, the vain hopes and dreams of generations of my family.

  You're looking a little grey-unless you're just trying to buy time to think up an excuse to say no."

  Time, she thought. I have all the time in the world. Only one evening is ... I lay four years on a mountaintop, till the shape of my and my dog's bodies had worn themselves into the mountain itself. If we went back there, we would still see the little double hollow, like two commas bent together in a circle.

  One evening. "Do I need an excuse?" she said cautiously. She stood up, and found that she could walk slowly after him to the door; she did not look at the painting of Lissar as she passed.

  "My mother and her ladies will be raiding their wardrobes anyway so that anyone who wants to come may, so you will have a dress for the asking. Camilla's old dresses are only for children, it will be a few years before she's much of a resource; although being who she is she has rather to be forcibly restrained from having dresses made to give away. She'll be a queen like our mother, I think; I hope she finds the right king to marry.

  "So you can't beg off because you have nothing to wear. And I doubt that you've been invited to any other grand performances that evening; this is a small place, and we're the biggest thing in it."

  Lissar finally grasped that he was asking her again to come to the ball. "Oh, no, I couldn't!" she said, and stopped dead.

  Ossin stopped too, looking at her. "Have you really not been listening? Or did you only think I couldn't be serious?

  "Or did something in the portrait room disturb you that much? I am sorry, Deerskin, sorry, my ... it was a rude trick to play, I had not thought.

  "I am serious. Please do come."

  "I can't," she said again; she had only just remembered her last royal ball, remembered how it fitted into her new pattern of memory.

  "Why can't you?"

  She shook her head mutely.

  "What if I order you to come? Would that help? Offer to throw you in the dungeon and so on, if you don't? We do have dungeons, I believe, somewhere, someone probably knows where they are, or we could simply put you in the wine-cellars-with no cork-puller."

  She laughed in spite of herself and he looked pleased. This was a different ball they were discussing, she said to herself, she was not who she had been, and this was not the man who had led her through those old dancing figures. "Do you have many herbalists' failed apprentices at your royal balls then?"

  "Then you've remembered!" he said, and her eyes were on him as he said it, and she saw the dreaded ball disappear from his face. "You've remembered!"

  She had told him, those long nights with the puppies when she was too tired to remember what she could or couldn't say, should or shouldn't, that she had been ill, and lost much of her memory. She was both frightened and heartened by his interest now, and she said, smiling a little, "I don't know how much I've remembered"-this was true; the fire still burned, reflecting off surfaces she did not yet recognize-"but your portrait room, I'm not sure, it shook something loose."

  "Looking at Trivelda makes me feel a trifle unsettled myself," said the prince. "I did think you were looking a bit green there; you should have said something to me earlier. But see, then you must come to the ball."

  "I do not see at all."

  Ossin waved a hand at her. "Do not ruin the connection by analyzing it. Come meet Trivelda, and rescue me." Impulsively he seized her hands, standing close to her. He was shorter than her father, she noticed dispassionately, but bulkier, broader in both shoulders and belly.

  "Very well," she said. "The kennel-girl will scrub up for one night, and present herself at the front door. Wearing shoes will be the worst, you know."

  "Thank you," he said, and she noticed that he meant it.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE NEXT DAY WHEN SHE RETURNED FROM TAKING THE PUPPIES

  FOR a long romp through the meadows, despite a thick drizzly fog and mud underfoot, there were a series of long slender bundles waiting for her, hung over the common-room table. She dried her hands carefully, and loosened the neck of one, and realized, just before her fingers touched satin, what these must be: dresses for the ball. A choice of dresses: a wardrobe just for one night, like a princess. Even her fingertips were so callused from kennel work that she could n
ot run them smoothly over the slippery cloth; there was slight friction, the barest suggestion of a snag. Not satin, she thought.

  She dropped the bag, whistled to the puppies, and put them in their pen. They looked at her reproachfully when she closed the door on them. "Have I ever missed feeding you on time?" she said. One or two, convinced that she was going to go off and have interesting adventures without them, turned their backs and hunched their shoulders; the others merely flung themselves down in attitudes of heartbreak and resignation.

  Ash, of course, accompanied her back to the common-room; Hela was there this time. "Queen's own messenger," she said, nodding toward the bundles on the table.

  "Oh," said Lissar, a little startled; she had not taken Ossin's suggestion seriously that his mother would be willing, let alone prompt, to provide the kennel-girl with a ball-gown, and with a choice of ball-gown at that. The further thought intruded: anyone can go who wishes to: but they will not all be wearing satin.

  "Better you than me," said Hela.

  "Have you ever been to a ball?" said Lissar.

  Hela shook her head. "I was a maid-servant up there when I first came to the yellow city, till Jobe rescued me. I waited on a few balls. I like dogs better."

  "So do I," said Lissar feelingly, but she took her armful up to her room, and spread the dresses out on the seldom-used bed. After teaching the puppies to climb stairs she found she was more comfortable on the ground floor after all, unrolling a mattress in their pen which, now that they were old enough to understand about such things, always smelled clean and sweet with the dry meadowgrass the scrubbers bedded it with. From the ground floor also it was easier to creep out-of-doors in the middle of the night, seven soft-footed dogs at her heels, and sleep under the sky. It was late enough in the season that even the night air was warm; Lissar began to keep a blanket tucked in a convenient tree-crotch, and she and the puppies returned to the kennels at dawn, as if they had been out merely for an early walk. She did not know how many of the staff knew the truth of it. On the nights it rained she most often lay awake, listening to the fall of water against the roof, grateful to be dry but wishing to be away from walls and ceilings nonetheless.

  The last time they had all slept in Lissar's room was the day after they had found the little boy. She had stayed awake long enough that morning to walk down the hillside to the village, where a royal waggon, much slower than the prince's riding party, lumbered up to them, and where Lissar was made intensely uncomfortable by the gratitude of the boy's mother-the woman who had found her in the meadow the evening before. The woman had ridden home in her husband's market-cart, having managed not to tell him where she had gone and who she had seen during her long absence from their stall; and when she got home again she had kept vigil all night.

  She had known the Moonwoman would find her Aric.

  Lissar had not liked the longing, hopeful, measuring, cautious looks the other villagers, attracted by the commotion and the royal crest on waggon and saddle-skirt, had sent her when they heard the story, and it was a relief in more ways than one when she could climb into the waggon, well bedded with straw and blankets, and collapse. Ossin had offered her a ride behind him on his big handsome horse, when they had met upon the hillside; but she had preferred to walk to the village-though she found herself clutching his stirrup, for she was so tired she staggered, and could not keep a straight line. He, at last, dismounted too, but she would not let him touch her; and so the party had come slowly down to the village, everyone mounted but Ossin and Lissar and ten fleethounds; the boy lay cradled in the arms of one of Ossin's men, and the sbort-legged scent-hounds the prince's party had brought rode at their ease across saddle-bows and cantles.

  She remembered the scene as if through a fever; the euphoria of the night before, that queer, humming sense of knowing where she was to go, had departed, leaving her more tired and empty than she could ever remember being; so empty that the gaps in her memory did not show. She had stayed awake just long enough to tell the prince how to find the thing in the tree; and then even the jerking of the (admittedly well sprung) waggon over village roads could not keep her awake.

  She thought of all that now as she shook the dresses free of their sacks, thinking that the queen had sent the kennel-girl four dresses to choose from, dresses of silk and satin and lace. She had slept through the bringing-home of the thing in the tree; she had slept through the first conversations, first responses, to her adventure. She had been glad to sleep through them. But she wondered, now, with four ball-gowns fit for a queen spread out before her in the plain little room of a member of the royal kennel staff, what version of the story might even have penetrated to the heart of the court: wondered and did not want to wonder. Wondered what version of the story of the six doomed puppies might have been told. Wondered what the version of the kennel-girl's friendship with the prince might be.

  Lissar found it incomprehensibly odd that a kennel-girl should pull the straw out of her hair and dust the puppy fur off her backside and put on a fancy dress and go to a ball. It was not how her father's court had been run...... "Not a hunting master with a rather large house," Ossin had said. Beech, the first huntswoman, was going to the ball. Beech, who, at the height of hunting season, stopped taking her leaders to her room, and unrolled a mattress in the pack's stall. During the winter, when everyone relaxed (and recuperated), she would go back upstairs again. All of the kennel folk slept with a few special dogs bestowed around them on their ordinary human beds; it seemed, upon reflection, that since Lissar had seven dogs special to her it was more efficient for her to sleep with them instead of the other way around.

  She wondered if the story of her sleeping most nights out-of-doors with her seven special dogs had travelled beyond the confines of the kennels.

  The satin dress was very beautiful, a dark bright red with ribbons and cascades of lace around the neckline; but she did not want to wear it, with her rough hands going shh ssshhh every time her fingers brushed the skirts.

  The second dress was blue, light as cobwebs, with insets of paler blue and lavender; but it was a dress for a young girl, whose worst nightmares contained fantastic creatures and undefined fears never met in waking life, and whose dreams were full of hope.

  The third dress was golden, vivid as fire, with gold brocade, a dress for a princess to stand and have her portrait taken in, not for a kennel-girl to wear, even if she has combed her hair and washed her hands. Even if she had once been such a princess, with her soft uncallused hand resting on her dog's neck. Especially because she had once been such a princess.

  The fourth was the one she would wear. It was silver-grey, a few shades darker than Ash's fur, and it shimmered like Moonlight in a mist. The skirt was very full, and soft; her hands stroked it soundlessly. The bodice was cut simply; no ribbons or brocade. It was, however, sewn all over with tiny, twinkling stones, colorless, almost invisible, but radiant as soon as the light touched them. This was the dress she would wear, although her hands shook as she held it up.

  The queen's messenger was back in the morning, bowing as he accepted three dress-sacks, and with a roll of brown paper under his arm, upon which he took tracings of Lissar's feet and hands, "that my lady's shoes and gloves may be made to fit."

  The prince might decry balls in general and a ball for Trivelda in particular, but the atmosphere through and around the yellow city over the next sennight took on a distinctive, festive cast, which Lissar now knew why she recognized.

  Lilac, whose parents, it turned out, were not such small farmers after all, nor quite so angry with her for running off to the king's city, would be attending the ball in a gown not begged from queen or princess but bought with money they sent her, to purchase the work of a local seamstress.

  "Fortunately Marigold is a friend of mine," Lilac said; "all the seamstresses are swamped, and my gown isn't nearly as grand a piece of work as the court women's.

  Indeed, you know," she added, showing an uncharacteristic hesitancy in
her speech,

  "I'll have money left over, if there's anything you need and don't want, you know, to ask for; I don't need it, but if I send money home my parents will be disappointed."

  Lissar told her, equally hesitatingly, about the gloves and shoes. There was a barely noticeable pause before Lilac said, in her usual tone, "You are lucky. I've known one or two people who've shown up barefoot. Usually there's this terrific run on plain slippers just before a ball, for everyone who has borrowed or been given a dress from someone at the court, it's pretty simple to make a dress that doesn't quite fit do well enough, but shoes are much harder, especially if you are going to dance in them."

  "What happens at a grand ball when someone comes barefoot?" said Lissar, fascinated, remembering the courtiers of her childhood.

  "What happens?" said Lilac, puzzled. "I don't know, really, this is my first ball here too; I've just heard the stories. Their feet get sore, I suppose, and perhaps they're very careful to choose graceful dancing-partners. Ask Redthorn; his wife is one of them, though I don't see Redthorn as being that light on his feet."

  Lilac, as usual, seemed to know everything that was happening in the city, as well as all the details about the ball itself. Lissar longed to ask her ... why the queen might have sent four ball-gowns to a kennel-girl; but she did not. Surely the queen had better sense than to believe that Moonwoman might take a job in a kennel, even a royal kennel. Ossin had never said what his mother had felt about the whole tale of the Moonwoman; only that she noticed it had no strong queens in it. The king rode out in the hunting-parties occasionally, the princess too; the queen stayed mostly at home, on the ground. Lilac had said once, kindly but pityingly, that the queen found horses a bit alarming.