by Deerskin
Lilac offered to dress Lissar's hair for the ball; Lissar remembered, suddenly, a neck-wearying headdress she had once worn, so heavy and ornate she had felt it would slowly crush her down, till she lay on the ground to rest her head. And yet it was far simpler than some she had seen on the other ladies' heads, structures pinioned to the crown of the skull, the hair scraped over them, with hairpieces attached, adding bulk and weight, if the hair growing on the head proved insufficient, as it inevitably did.
As Lissar thought of this, Lilac had untwisted the braid Lissar commonly kept her hair contained in, and was stroking a shining handful with a brush, saying, "I've wanted an excuse to do something with your hair, Deerskin, it's such an extraordinary color."
"White," said Lissar. "Nothing extraordinary about white."
"Old people's hair isn't like this," said Lilac, thoughtfully. "Yours is almost iridescent. It breaks light like a prism."
Lissar tipped her head up to look at her friend. "You're imagining things," she said.
Lilac took a fresh grip, gently moving Lissar's head till she faced front, away from her, again. "We call it-imagining things-following the Moon," she said. "Children are natural Moon-followers. Some of us grow out of it more than others. I'm not known for it, myself," she added.
There was a little pause. Lissar, with a small effort of will, relaxed against Lilac's hands and deliberately closed her eyes. "Just keep it simple, please," she said. "I want to know it's still my hair when you're done."
Lilac laughed. "You needn't worry! You'd need a real hairdresser for the kind of thing you mean. Trivelda was wearing a menagerie, the last time she was here-birds and deer and gods know what all-these little statues, worked into this net thing she was wearing on her head. It was quite extraordinary. It's become a sort of legend.
The joke was that it was as near as she ever got to real animals . . . you can't count her lap-dogs. No one has ever seen one walk on its own, and she has them bathed every day, and they wear her perfume.
"Veeery simple," she said after a moment. "All I have to do is decide what color ribbons." She opened the little bag she'd arrived wearing round her neck; a visual cacophony of ribbons poured out: ribbons thin as a thread, as wide as the thickness of three fingers, ribbons of all colors, ribbons woven of other ribbons, ribbons of silk and velvet, ribbons with tiny embroidered figures and patterns, ribbons with straight edges, ribbons with scalloped edges, ribbons of lace.
"Mercy!" said Lissar, sitting up.
"Oh, Marigold let me borrow these. I'll take back what we don't want. Now, your dress is silver, is it not? Burgundy in your hair, then, and black like your eyes, and ...
let's see ... maybe the palest pink, to set off your complexion. The palest pink. If it weren't for your hair I'd say your skin was white.... Now hold still." Her hands began braiding. "Everyone thinks this is it, you see. That's why everyone is so excited about this particular ball. I don't think anyone will come barefoot to this one."
"This is it?" said Lissar, finding herself enjoying having her hair brushed, like one of the dogs on a grooming table, lulled by the motion and the contact. She ran her fingers down the smooth midline of Ash's skull, Ash's head being on her knee.
"How do you mean?" she asked, only half attending.
"Oh, that Ossin will offer for Trivelda. It's no secret that the king and queen are impatient to marry him off; he's gone twenty-five, you know, and they want the ordinary sort of grandchildren, not the kind that bark and have four legs, and besides, there's Camilla, who will turn seventeen in the spring, and there's this very tiresome tradition that the royal heir is supposed to marry first.
"There's an even more tiresome tradition that all noble families are supposed to marry off their children in chronological order, but it's really only the heirs that anyone pays much attention to. Ossin knows this of course-so does Camilla. Cofta and Clem are afraid she's getting too fond of that pretty count, he knows so well how to be charming and she's so young, and if they sent him away it might just make it all worse. But they can't really do much about pushing her elsewhere till Ossin is officially done with. And Ossin's fond of his sister, and likes Dorl even less than his parents do."
Lissar found herself strangely dismayed by this news, and the long gentle strokes of the hairbrush, and smaller busyness of fingers plaiting, suddenly annoyed her.
"But he doesn't like Trivelda."
Lilac chuckled. "How much do you think that has to do with it?"
"They don't want Camilla to marry Dorl."
"That's different. Dorl really isn't much except charm-and old blood-and neither of those, even, is laid very thick. There are very few real princesses around, or even wealthy farmers' daughters, and most of them have gotten married while the prince has been out hunting his dogs."
"Chasing the Moonwoman," murmured Lissar.
"Eh?"
"Nothing."
"It won't be so bad because they'll have nothing to do with one another. It would be much worse if she wanted to ride and hunt; she's an appalling rider, hates horses, and her idea of a dog ... well, those things of hers look like breakfast-rolls with hair.
And they all bark, if you want to call it barking. Anyway, she'll stay out of the barns-and kennels-and he'll stay out of the drawing-rooms. Knowing Ossin, he'll be glad of the excuse, come to that."
"It doesn't sound ... very satisfying," said Lissar.
Lilac laughed. Ash pricked her ears. "Deerskin, I've caught you out at last; you're a romantic. I would never have guessed. Do you know, I think I want a shade a little rosier than the palest pink after all. I have a brooch, I'll loan it to you, it will look perfect right here," and she stabbed a finger at the side of Lissar's head.
"You're a wealthy farmer's daughter," said Lissar, still distressed that Ossin should be thrown away on a princess with hairy breakfastrolls for dogs.
"Hmm? What?" said Lilac, fingers busy. "Who, me? Marry Ossin? In the first place, he wouldn't have me. In the second place his parents wouldn't have me. My parents aren't that wealthy, and I'm still a stable-girl. And third, I wouldn't have him. I know he's admirable in every way and the country is lucky to have him to look forward to as their next king. But he's so admirable he's boring. I don't think he's ever been drunk in his life, or broken a window when he was a boy playing hurlfast, or spoken an unmerited harsh word. He's so responsible. Ugly, too."
Lissar, stung, said, "He's not ugly."
Lilac, now working from the front, paused and looked into Lissar's face. There was a tight little pause, while Lissar remembered the nights together in the puppies'
pen, guessing that that story would have been heard in the stables. Had she ever told Lilac herself? She couldn't remember.
Lilac, irrepressible, started to smile. "You marry him," she said.
TWENTY-NINE
NOT ONLY SHOES AND GLOVES ARRIVED IN THE FINAL PACKAGE
FROM the queen, but a cloak as well; and on the evening as Lissar was bundling everything up to meet Lilac in the room of the Gold House they had been assigned for their final toilettes (to keep the dog- and horse-hair down to a minimum, one short hall's rooms had been given over to those of the animal staff who wished to come to the ball), something else arrived: a small package, wrapped in a white cloth, left on the common-room table again, with only a slip of paper with her name, Deerskin, on it.
"This must be for you," said Hela, catching her as she came downstairs, explaining to Ash that she would be back soon and meanwhile wouldn't she prefer to stay with the puppies, nearly full-grown now and not puppies except by the glints in their eyes and their tendency to forget their training for no reason beyond sunshine, or rain, or the shadow of a bird's wing, or the fascination of their own tails, and of being alive and frisky. Ash was not convinced. Her back was humped and her tail between her legs as Lissar put her hand on her rump and pushed her through the half-door. The puppies were delighted to see their leader, and fawned at her feet, waiting to see if she would stoop to play
ing with them, or if she would demand they leave her alone. Lissar left them to it.
"I think this is probably yours," Hela said again, emerging from the common-room, and held out the parcel. The flowing hand that had written Deerskin was both graceful and legible. "Yes," said Lissar; "that is my name on it."
"Ah," said Hela. "We guessed. The rest of us can't read, you know."
Lissar looked up, startled.
"What cause for us to learn?" said Hela, smiling at Lissar's expression, and returned to the common-room.
"We'll want to hear all about it," Berry called, as she went hastily past the door.
Lilac was already dressed when Lissar arrived. "Anyone would think you didn't want to come," she said, almost cross. "The rest have gone before us. We'll be late, and I want to see Trivelda come in. I want to see what she has thought up, after the menagerie last time.... What's that?"-as the bundle Hela had given her dropped from under Lissar's arm.
"I don't know. It was left for me this evening. Open it while I get my dress on."
"Ribbons," said Lilac. "Look." And she held up two handsful of ribbons: pink, blood-red, black, dark green, silver-grey. "Who sent them?"
"I have no idea." There was one significant difference between these ribbons and the ones provided by Lilac; these were sewn with the same tiny bright stones as the dress Lissar was wearing.
"Hmm," said Lilac, staring at the card with Lissar's name and nothing else on it.
"It was Ossin who invited you, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said Lissar shortly, not wishing to remember the end of their last conversation about the prince. "But his mother supplied the dress. Help me-ugh,"
she said, tugging futilely at her hair, which was caught on the tiny hooks that fastened the tight bodice together.
"Hold still. Stop pulling; I want all your hair still in your head for this evening.
Now sit down. I may use one or two of my ribbons just for contrast. And I brought that brooch."
They were, as it happened, in plenty of time; for the princess Trivelda was very late. Whether she was late on account of the time it took her to finish dressing-her entourage had only arrived the day before, and much had been made of how tired she and her breakfast-food dogs were as a result of the journey-or because she wished to make a grand entrance, Lissar did not know; but make an entrance she did.
Her gown was green, and her hair, much redder than in the painting Lissar had seen, was dressed both high on her head and permitted to fall, in a questionable profusion of curls, down her back. She was both short and plump, and the hair already made her look a trifle ridiculous, for there seemed to be more hair than person; and to make her waist look small, her skirts were tremendous, flaring out as though she and they would empty the ballroom of everyone else. Her skirts were worked in some dizzying pattern, also, that shimmered as the light caught it, and made it difficult to look at for any length of time, with the result that watching her small arrogant figure march down the long hall gave a faint sense of sea-sickness.
Lissar had established herself near a long curtain hanging from a pillar projecting from the wall; she recognized several other people from the king's house similarly clinging to the scenery, looking awkward in their fine clothes but at the same time glancing around with interest, and too absorbed in the spectacle to be uncomfortably self-conscious. Lissar stood absently rubbing her fingers together. Her hands felt as imprisoned by gloves as her feet did by shoes; simultaneously both were a comfort: costume, not clothing, stage set for the evening's performance.
The prince's friends were not the courtier sort, so there were enough of them (us, thought Lissar, for she was Deerskin here, Deerskin in costume) that no one need feel lonesome or truly out of place. She looked around for the Cum of Dorl, whom she had seen the first time the day Ossin had offered her six puppies to raise; he was easily spotted among all the people not trying to be visible, for he was wearing yellow as bright as a bonfire at harvest festival; he seemed to glitter as he turned. He bowed with a grace that might almost match one of Ossin's dogs, and it was as if the entire ballroomful of people paused a moment to watch him.
Certainly the princess Trivelda paused, and offered him a curtsey rather more profound than a mere Cum required, but Dorl often had that effect on people, particularly women: Lissar saw Camilla watching him, with an anxious, wistful little smile on her face, as if she wished she did not care, wished that she did not wish to watch him, though she was as poised as she had been on the day Lissar had first seen them both.
Then the prince moved forward to greet his guest; Lissar, though she had been looking for him, had not noticed him before. He too was dressed in green, but a dark green, the color of leaves in shadow; and he stepped forward with all the grace of an unhappy chained bear to welcome the woman most of those watching believed would soon be his wife. He looked like a rough servant, cleaned up for special duty, perhaps; perhaps the special duty of waiting on the scintillant Dorl: and both of them knew it, as did Trivelda, who smirked. Lissar, sharply aware of her gorgeous borrowed dress, found herself forgetting her own discomfort, forgetting to notice the ghosts that encircled her, that whispered in her ears, that crept between the folds of her skirt; forgetting as she watched her friend walk stiffly down the ballroom floor and bow to Trivelda, still like a bear performing a trick he has learned but does not understand, like a bear performing in fear of a yank on the chain if he does not perform adequately. He moved as if his clothing chafed him; there was none of the careless grace of easy strength and purpose that he had in the fields with his hounds, or on horseback. Here he was bulky, awkward, overweight, his eyes too small and his chin too large; he looked dazed and stupid.
For a moment her own ghosts dissolved absolutely in the heat of her sympathy; she was but a young woman watching a friend in trouble. Almost she forgot where she was and called out to him. She did not speak aloud, but she moved restlessly out of the shadowed niche between column and curtain; and the prince's eyes, sweeping the crowd, saw her movement, identified her; and his face lightened-as if it had been she he was looking for-for a moment he looked like the man she saw every day in the kennels, as if his real nature came out of hiding and inhabited his face for a moment.
She did not know what to do; he was about to offer his hand to Trivelda, his future wife, and a hundred people stood between him and Lissar, her back to a pillar.
She could not speak, say, "I am with you." She could not rub the back of his neck as she had done once or twice during the longest of the puppy nights, when four o'clock in the morning went on for years and dawn never came; she could do nothing.
And so she curtseyed: her deepest, most royal curtsey, the curtsey a princess would give a prince, for when she had remembered who she was, with that knowledge came the memory of her court manners. She had not known that those memories had returned to her, nor, if she had, would she have guessed they would be of any use to her; had she known she might have wished to banish them, as one rejects tainted food once one has been sick. She curtseyed, had she known it, as beautifully as her mother might once have curtseyed, for all that Lissar had learned her court manners mostly as a mouse might, watching her glamorous mother and splendid father from her corner. And as she curtseyed she moved farther out into the room, fully away from the shadowing curtain; and the tiny gems on her dress and in her hair caught the light from the hundreds of candles set in the huge chandeliers, and she blazed up in that crowd as if she were the queen of them all.
Trivelda's back was to her, and so she did not know what had happened; but she felt that something had, felt the attention of the crowd falter and shift away from her: saw the prince look over her head and suddenly straighten and smile and look, for a moment, like a prince, instead of like an oaf in fancy dress. She was not pleased; more, she was jealous, that Ossin should look well for someone else. She stiffened, and drew herself up to her full, if diminutive, height, and prepared to turn around and see what or who was ruining her grand moment-
and to do battle.
Ossin, who was well drilled in courtliness, for all that he had no gift for it, saw Trivelda stiffen, knew what it meant, and snapped his attention back to her at once.
Lissar rose from her curtsey in time to see what was happening between him and Trivelda; and so by the time Trivelda had graciously accepted his proffered hand, and moved surreptitiously forward and to one side so that she could see in the direction that the prince's defection had occurred, there was nothing to see. Lissar had resubmerged herself into the shadow of the crowd.
She had meant to return to her pillar, but the prince had not been the only person who noticed her curtsey; and she found that there were abruptly a number of persons who wished to speak to her, and several young men (and one or two old ones) who wished to invite her to dance with them.
She glanced down at her jewel-strewn skirts, rubbed one softgloved hand over them; no one need guess her current profession by her work-roughened hands tonight. "Thank you," she said to the smallest and shyest of the young men, who flushed scarlet in delight, and drew her forward to join the line that the prince and Trivelda led. The young man proved to be a very neat and precise dancer, but an utterly tongue-tied conversationalist, which suited Lissar perfectly. She had not danced since her old life; and the memories her body held, in order to use the knowledge of how to dance, how to curtsey, brought too much of the rest with it.
Her heart beat faster than the quick steps of the dance could explain, for she was fit enough to run for hours with her dogs; here she had to open her lips a little, to pant, like a dog in summer. But the young man held her delicately, politely at arm's length; and when she caught his eye he blushed again, and looked at her as adoringly as a fortnight-old puppy to whom she meant milk. She smiled at him, and he jerked his gaze down. To her gloved hands he muttered something.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I asked, what is your name?"
"Lissar," she said, without thinking; but she had spoken as softly as he had uttered his first question, and the musicians were playing vigorously, to be heard over any amount of foot-tapping, dress-rustling, and conversation, including the stifled grunts of those trodden on by inept partners. In his turn he now said: "I beg your pardon?"