by Deerskin
She turned to him, and tears of fire and blood were spilling down her cheeks, and her eyes, draining of their blackness, were fire-amber. "Lissar," he said, wonderingly; for now he saw what once had been the girl in the portrait, although the woman before him was much more than the poor, proud, though undeniably beautiful girl in the portrait gave any promise of becoming. "Lissar," he said, with love and sorrow, and reached fearlessly out to touch her burning face.
But she flinched away from his touch, as she had flinched away from him on a balcony half a year ago, and he saw the stricken look come into her clear amber eyes, followed by yearning and despair; and then she turned away from him, and sprang down from the dais, and ran to the broken doors; and the long ribbon of lion-dogs uncoiled itself and ran after her. The way opened for her, like a silvery line of Moonbeam; but behind her it closed in again, like shadows. But more solid than shadows, for when he reached after her, bodies blocked him, as there was a rush for the dais from his courtiers, to catch the foreign king as he fell.
She had a long start on him, for he would not force his way through the shocked, bewildered crowd at the risk of hurting anyone, and it was some minutes before he won his way to the gaping doors. And he knew how swiftly she could go. But he refused to lose her again, and he set his teeth, and thought, agonized and hopeful, that she must be weary to heart and bone; she could not go far without rest. Not even to escape him. When she had fled from him the night of the ball it had been too dark to see clearly; but today he had seen her face, lit by her own light, and he had seen the yearning and the stricken look. He would not let her escape, and he thought he understood now how he might hold her-or he knew how he might try, and then hope and agony blinded him. If he had not needed to pursue her at once, he would have killed her father with his bare hands, he who offered a prayer that his shaft or blade might fly straight to the heart of every beast he caught hunting, to spare it pain and fear, and thanked its spirit after its death for giving him meat for his people. He could have killed this other human being with his bare hands.
In the stir of people talking, of people discovering that they could still talk, and move, he could hear nothing of her soft-footed flight; but when he reached the door and said to Longsword, "Which way?" Longsword pointed without a word of query. Ossin ran on, aware of the slow heavy sound of his own footsteps. He thought he could guess that she would head out across the fields behind the kennels, through the little stand of wood beyond, and toward the crossroads where the Happy Man stood. It was a longer way out of the city's environs than through the Redvine Gate, but he believed that she would prefer the way that would give her bare earth under her feet, rather than the shorter way through the city streets.
He needed to catch her before she went beyond the crossroads, however, for the land began to turn emptier then, with farms biting chunks from the emptiness, but doing little to disturb the vast secrecy of the wilder hunting-lands; and for the first time he cursed his own and his people's fondness for the life his dogs were bred to, that wild land should lie so near the king's city.
He was running out of breath, and a fine fool he must look, every unaccustomed step jarring his body, used as it was to riding not running. He bolted down the back streets of his city, mostly deserted on account of the grand doings at the king's house, where the front courtyard and the wide street that led to it were jammed so close that no one could easily move from the tiny foot-sized space of land where each stood. He could hear the babble of the crowd, and fancied he felt the reverberation of so many hearts beating in the air, or in the ground under his running feet. He spun in his tracks at the sound of hoofbeats, and saw some small farmer, dressed carefully in his best clothes, dismounting from his young cob, and looking cautiously around him. "Sir!" cried the prince. "If I may borrow your horse!"
It did not occur to Ossin that one of his subjects might not recognize him, and fortunately this man had seen the prince at hunting more than once; though Ossin's court clothes-which in fact this particular prince spent most of his life avoiding-might well have suggested to this farmer that he would do best to say yes to this request, whether he recognized his supplicant or not. As Ossin swung into the saddle-damning those same court clothes for their awkwardness for running or riding-his mind was frantically trying to calculate if he saved more time in commandeering a farmer's idea of a riding horse, or if he would have done better to have taken the long detour to the royal stables for one of his own horses. How much longer was the longer way through the fields after all? Might he have done better to follow the way she would have gone and hoped to catch sight of her? He convinced the cob, who was young enough to have retained a sense of adventure, that, unlike its master, he really did want to gallop. The cob put its ears forward and galloped.
But there were still people and alleys and obstacles; he even lost his way, once, in the labyrinthine, ancient backside of the Gold House, by not paying enough attention to the immediate three-dimensional twists and turns before him; and that made him all the more frantic.
He changed his mind halfway and ducked out a small side-gate, down a lane, and into some of the waste land below the city walls that was left unused as a buffer between city and farm. His heart sank, for no matter how he strained his hunting vision, accustomed to sighting the smallest indicative shivers in grass and leaf, he saw no sign of Lissar. But he set out across the field as if the crossroads were his certain target. The cob, though rough-gaited, was sound, and willing, and kept a good pace, but with every stride Ossin cried out silently at the slowness of it, and thought longingly of Greywing, standing idle in her stall. And then the cluster of buildings that heralded the crossroads loomed up before him, and still no sign of Lissar or her seven dogs.
But instead there was a figure riding out in such a direction as obviously intending to meet with him; and as he drew up, resenting the pause but hoping for news, he recognized Lilac, who, as soon as she saw him draw rein, dismounted, and held out her own reins. Lilac had lost what little fear she had had of him as the prince and king's heir after seeing him once or twice in the early morning after a long night with Lissar's puppies, months ago; and they respected each other, cautiously, without thinking about it, because each knew the other stood as a good friend to Lissar.
"Take mine," she said now. "He is one of Skyracer's get, and runs in his stall if he is not given enough running outside it. Lissar went that way"-she said, and pointed, her hand a little unsteady, like her tongue on the new name-"but a few minutes ago. I lost her in the trees, but she cannot yet have gone far."
"My thanks," said Ossin, meaning it, accepting the reins she held out to him; she said no word further, but her face was a little less drawn than he felt his own to be.
He would have said one word more to comfort her, could he have thought of one.
But he could not, and he settled into the saddle and gave the horse his head. Trust Lilac to have persuaded Redthorn to let her take one of the most promising young horses in the king's stables on a page's errand. The colt seized the bit and flew.
And so he burst through the veil of trees into the first wide swathe of farmland, and there, at last, he saw what he sought; and he saw too that they were tired, weary nearly unto death, although he could not say for sure where this knowledge came from, for they were all still running, running as lightly as Moon on water.
But his heart was sick in him that she should run herself to death to escape him, for he was sure that she knew he would follow; and almost he took the bit from the colt and turned him away from their quarry. But he remembered the look on Lissar's face when she had turned away from him, and remembered too what else she ran from, what she had faced and broken by her own strength before the eyes of everyone in the throne room, and then he closed his legs around the colt's sides a little more firmly, and leaned a little lower over his flying mane. For he knew also that if he looked into Lissar's eyes now, now that the past had burned away, if he looked into those clear eyes and still saw a despa
ir that could not be healed, he would return and kill her father; and he needed to know if he must do this or not.
The colt caught up with the dogs only a few steps before the first of the real woodlands began; the cob would never have got him there in time. But it abruptly occurred to Ossin that he did not know what to do now that he had come abreast of them. He could not hold them captive; they could, if they chose, duck around him and dodge into the cover of the trees after all; and he would not be able to follow them closely, a man on horseback, through the undergrowth. He could, he supposed, seize Lissar herself somehow.... But he would not. He hoped she would decide to stop of her own will. She did. She stopped like a branch breaking, and stood swaying; several of the dogs flopped down immediately and lay panting on their sides.
Ossin dismounted, pulled the reins over the colt's head and dropped them; he'd had enough of running for one morning, and would perhaps stay as he was trained.
"Lissar," said the prince.
"Go away," she said, between great mouthsful of air.
"No," he said. "Don't send me away. I let you leave me the first time because I thought that was what you wanted-that what you wanted didn't include me. But. . ."
"I do want you," she said, her voice still weak with running, and with what else had happened that day. And as she stood she began to tremble, and her teeth rattled together; and it was all Ossin could do to stand his ground, not to touch her. "I had forgotten that I have thought of you every hour since the night of the ball; I had convinced myself that I thought of you only every day. I remembered the truth of it when I saw you today, standing beside ... your sister." She was too tired not to speak the truth; having him before her, himself, the warm breathing reality of him, struck down her last weak defenses; she thought she had never been so tired, and yet the strength of her love for the man who stood before her was not a whit lessened by her body's exhaustion. Her voice had dwindled away to little more than a whisper. "But it does not matter. I am. . . not whole. I am no wife for you, Ossin."
"I don't care about-" he began; but she made an impatient gesture.
"I don't mean ... only that I have no maidenhead to offer a husband on our wedding night. I am hurt ... in ways you cannot see, and that I cannot explain, even to myself, but only know that they are there, and a part of me, as much as my hands and eyes and breath are a part of me."
Ossin looked at her, and felt the hope draining out of his heart, for the red and gold were gone from her. Even her yellow eyes were closed, and her face was as pale as chalk, and nearly as lifeless. Only her glinting dark hair held its color. "Then you do not love me?" he said in a voice small and sad.
Her eyes flew open and she looked at him as if he had insulted her. "Love you?
Of course I love you. Ask Lilac, or Hela or Jobe, or-or Longsword. Ask anyone I ever spoke your name to last summer."
"Then marry me," said Ossin. "For I love you, and I do not believe there is anything so wrong with you. You are fair in my eyes and you lie fair on my heart. I-I was there, this morning, when you when you showed the scars you wear, and I accept that you bear them, and will always bear them, as-as Ash bears hers," for even in his preoccupation he had seen and, unlike Lilac, recognized what he saw of Lissar's seventh hound.
"It is not like that," she whispered. "It is not like that."
"Is it not?" said Ossin. "How is it not?" And in his voice, strangely, was the sound of running water, and of bells.
There was a little pause, while they looked at each other, and Ossin knew that it could go either way. He understood that she did not believe that last summer was more important than the truth he had heard spoken at such cost only an hour ago; and he could think of nothing he might say to change her mind, if his love could not reach her, if she counted the love in her own heart as nothing.
And then Ash moved forward from Lissar's side, and leaned against Ossin's leg, and sighed. And they both looked down at her. Almost Ossin held his breath, afraid that this was the last stroke, the final fragment that would produce Lissar's decision, whole and implacable and-the wrong one, the one Ossin feared. And so he broke into speech, saying anything, wanting to prevent Lissar from putting that last piece into its place and presenting him with his fate. But his tongue betrayed him, betrayed the fact that he could not think of life without her, now that he had her again, now that he had caught her when she had run away-now that he had heard her say that she loved him. "This is the Ash I sent you when your mother died," he said, "and some day I want to hear why she grew a long coat, as none of my dogs has ever done and as I as their arrogant breeder am inclined to count an insult to my skill, and why she then lost it again, and what happened since I saw you last that left this mark in her side."
Lissar's eyes were fixed on her dog, who had left her to lean against her lover; but then she lifted her eyes and her gaze met Ossin's, and he saw the hot amber was a little cooled by green, and the green was very clear and calm. Her tone was wondering as she answered: "Lilac asked the same thing. It was a toro-a large toro-and I did not set them on it, for I have more sense; but Ash would not be called back. I do not know myself about her coat. She protected me by disguising herself-protecting me as she has always done." As she believes she is protecting me now, she thought, and guessed that Ossin heard these words too, though she did not say them aloud. "The night I ... ran away.... After my father left me, I waited only to die. And I only did not die because Ash lived, and because she wished me to live too." Will you desert me now, Ash, if I do not choose as you would have me choose, after all that has come before?
They both heard more unspoken words, this time Ossin's. What do you owe me, then, for Ash? Your life? What risk will you take for her risk? For me? But he heard her answers to the words he did not speak: It is not like that. It is not like that. You do not understand.
I do not have to understand, he said. I have seen the scars you carry, and I love you. If you and Ash cannot run quite so far as you used because of old wounds, then we will run less far together. "I was never a runner anyway," he murmured aloud, and Lissar stirred but made no answer.
Aloud he said: "There is another reason we should marry; for you are the only person I've ever known who loves dogs, these fleethounds, as much as I do; and therefore I suspect that I am the only person you have ever known who loves them as you do."
Lissar almost smiled, and a little color came back into her face, and her eyes were hazel now. "And I promised you puppies, didn't I? Ash is pregnant by Ob now, I believe."
"You did promise me puppies," said Ossin, trembling now himself, fighting to keep his words low and kind, as he would speak to a dog so badly frightened it might be savage in its fear; knowing that she wanted to come to him, not knowing if he could depend on that wanting, clamping his arms to his sides to prevent himself from seizing her to him as he wanted to do.
"Ossin," Lissar said, and sighed, and the sigh caught in her throat; and she held one hand out toward him, hesitantly, and he put his arms around her, gently. I cannot decide; she said but not aloud; and so I will let you-and Ash-and my heart decide for me. But I do not know if this is the right thing. She remembered the Moonwoman's words: Ash is looking forward to running through meadows again; can you not give yourself leave to run through meadows too? But she remembered also that Moonwoman had said, It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.
"It is not so easy as running and not running," she said, and found that she had spoken aloud; but she was in Ossin's arms as she said it, and knew that she would stay there-for now. And she promised, herself and Ossin, and Ash and the puppies, that she would try to stay there, for as long as the length of their lives; that she would put her strength now and hereafter toward staying and not fleeing. But I do not know how strong I am, she said. I cannot promise.
It is enough, said Ossin. For who can make such promises? No one of us is so whole that he can see the future.
Then she stepped
toward him of her own volition, and put her own arms around him, and he heaved his own sigh, and bent his head, and kissed her, and she relaxed forward, against his breast. And the dogs closed around them, pressing up against their thighs, wagging their tails, rubbing their noses against the two figures who were holding each other so tightly that they seemed only one figure after all.
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Document ID: 94da7848-d0a8-4885-a400-6e3400f400f9
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Document creation date: 8.6.2011
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Deerskin
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