Deerskin

  “Will you marry me?”

  There was thunder in her ears, and before her eyes were the walls of a small round room hung in a dark stained pink that had once been rose-colored, and the dull brutal red was mirrored in a gleaming red pool on the floor where a silver-fawn dog lay motionless; and there was a terrible weight against her own body, blocking her vision, looming over her, blotting out the stars through the open door, and then a pain, pain pain pain pain

  Some things grew no less with time. Some things were absolutes. Some things could not be gotten over, gotten round, forgotten, forgiven, made peace with, released.

  —she did not quite scream. “No!” she said. “No! I cannot.”

  The prince put his hand to his face for a moment, and dropped it. He was deep in his own fears; he did not see, in the darkness, either her trembling or the shadows in her black eyes; he heard the anguish in her voice, but misread it utterly. It did not surprise him that she could not love him.

  She remained where she was, unable to move, unable with what felt like the same paralysis of the limbs and the will that had left her helpless on the night that her father had opened the garden door. But Ossin did not know this; and when she remained where she was, he let himself hope that this meant that she was willing to listen to him.

  “I love you, you know,” he said conversationally, after a little pause. Through her own fear she thought she heard a tremor in his voice, but she scorned it, telling herself it was her own ears’ failure. “Trivelda would be … in some ways the easier choice; even my poor mother, I think, would not say ‘better,’ she merely wants me to make up my mind to marry someone. I might, a few months ago, have let myself be talked into Trivelda; I have always known that I would marry some day, and I would like to have children.

  “I was beginning to think perhaps there was something wrong with me, that I could not fall in love with any real woman, any woman other than the woman of the Moon, whom I had dreamed of when I was a child. I know what they call you behind your back, but I do not believe it. Moonwoman would not raise puppies the hard way, staying up all night, night after night, till she’s grey and snarly with exhaustion, and being puked on, and cleaning up six puppies’ worth of vile yellow diarrhea. I believe you’re as human as I am, and I’m glad of that, because I love you, and if you really were Moonwoman I wouldn’t have the nerve. I have found out that I can love—and I won’t marry anyone else now that I know.”

  Lissar heard this as if from a great distance, though she felt the sweet breath of the prince’s words kiss her cheek; but they and he were not enough, and her own heart broke, for she loved him too, and could not bear this with that other, terrible knowledge of what had happened to her, what made her forever unfit for human love. Her heart broke open with a cry she heard herself give voice to, and the tears poured down her face as hot as the river of hell. “Oh, I cannot, I cannot!” She turned her face up to take one long last look at him, and the Moonlight fell full on her. Wonderingly Ossin raised a hand to touch her wet face; but she turned and fled from him.

  He did not follow her. She did not know where she was going; she knew she did not want to return to the ball, and so with what little sense that had survived the last few minutes, she thought to turn the opposite way, down the long hall that led to the ballroom. She blundered along this way for some time, the pain of Ash’s supposed death and her own body’s ravaging as fresh in her as if she were living those wounds for the first time. She met no one. She knew, distantly, to be grateful for this. She felt like a puppy, dragged along on a leash by some great, towering, cruel figure who would not wait to see that her legs were too short and weak to keep up. She wished the other end of the leash were in better hands. Dimly she realized she knew where she was, which meant—like a tug on the leash—that she knew where to go, knew the way out.

  The doors were unbarred, perhaps for the benefit of late-comers; she bolted past the guards, or perhaps she surprised them, or perhaps she looked too harmless—or distressed—to challenge; for none did. She ran across the smooth surface of the main courtyard, and through the twisting series of alleys and little yards, till she came to the kennels. At some point she had paused and pulled off her shoes and stockings, and the touch of the ground, even the hard cobblestones of the king’s yards, against her bare feet steadied her, and her head cleared a little of the smoke of old fires, when her innocence and her future had been burned away.

  She crept up the outside stairs and into her room, holding the queen’s shoes in her hands. She was still trembling so badly it was difficult to take the beautiful dress off without damaging it—the beautiful dress suddenly so horribly like the dress she had worn on her seventeenth birthday—but she did it, and laid it carefully across the bed she did not sleep in. Taking her hair down was worse; her numb shaking fingers refused to understand what Lilac had done, and she had a wild moment of wishing just to cut it off, have it done, have it over, cut her hair, just her hair, but the blood on the floor, running down her face, her breast, running from between her legs … the ribbons came free at last, and she laid them out next to the gloves, and Lilac’s borrowed brooch.

  The she turned, and eagerly, frantically, pulled open the door of her little wardrobe, groping under her neatly folded kennel clothes, and drew out the white deerskin dress. Its touch soothed her a little, as the touch of the earth against her bare feet had done; her vision widened from its narrow dark tunnel, and she could see from the corners of her eyes again, see the quiet, pale, motionless walls and the ribbons against the coverlet that were not blood but satin. She snatched up her knife and the pouch that held her tinder box and throwing-stones, and then paused on the threshold of the little room, knowing she would not see it again: a little square room with nothing on its walls, kind and harmless and solid.

  Barefoot and silent she padded down the front stairs, into the long central corridor of the kennels. The dogs never barked at a familiar step, but as soon as her foot hit the floor there was a rustle and a murmur from the pen where Ash waited with the puppies.

  She meant to let only Ash out; but Ob was going to come too, for he knew, in the way dogs often inconveniently know such things, that something was up; and he was quite capable of howling the roof down if thwarted. She did not need to see the look in his eyes to know that this was one of those occasions. As she stood a moment in the stall door, holding back the flood, knowing that she had no real choice in the matter, she heard Ossin’s voice saying, “They’re yours, you know. I’ll take a litter or three from you later, in payment, if you will, but they’re yours to do with what you like otherwise. You’ve earned them.”

  Earned them. Earned as well the responsibility of keeping them. But it was too late now, for they too knew they were hers, knew in that absolute canine way that had nothing to do with ownership and worth and bills of sale. Their fates were bound together, for good or ill. Too late now. She let the door swing open. If Ob was coming, so were the others.

  Some heads lifted, ears pricked, and eyes glinted, in other runs; but there was nothing wrong with one of the Masters taking her own dogs—for all the dogs knew whose masters were whose—out, at any hour of day or night. There were perhaps a few wistful sighs, almost whines, from dogs who suspected that they were being left out of an adventure; but that was all.

  Seven dogs poured down the corridor; she unbarred the small door that was cut into the enormous sliding door that opened the entire front wall of the kennel onto its courtyard, where the hunt collected on hunting days, and where dogs were groomed and puppies trained on sunny days. Seven dogs and one person leaped silently through the opening, which the person softly closed again. Then the master and her seven hounds were running, running, running across the wide, Moon-white meadows toward the black line of trees.

  THIRTY-ONE

  AT FIRST LISSAR MERELY RAN AWAY; AWAY FROM THE YELLOW CITY, away from the prince whom she loved with both halves of her broken heart. But in the very first days of her flight she was force
d to recognize how much care and feeding seven dogs required. If she had not been in the grip of a fear much larger than her sense of responsibility toward her seven friends, she might have let the lesser fear of not being able to keep the puppies fed drive her back to the king’s city again. But that was not to be thought of; and so she did not think it. She allowed herself half a moment to remember that she did owe Ossin a litter or three in payment, but there was no immediate answer to this, and so she set it aside, in relief and helplessness and sorrow and longing. Then she set her concentration on the problem of coping with the situation she was in.

  After two days of too few rabbits, they had a piece of extraordinary luck: Ash and Ob pulled down a deer. Much of Ob’s puppy pigheadedness was the boldness of a truly superior dog trying to figure out the structure of his world, and he worshipped the ground Ash and Lissar walked on. His adoration had the useful result of making him preternaturally quick to train (even if it also and equally meant that he had to be trained preternaturally quickly and forcefully); and all the puppies seemed to comprehend, after their first hungry night on the cold ground (and no prince and waggon to rescue them the next day), that something serious was happening, and that they had to stop fooling around and pay close attention.

  Ash focussed and froze first on the leaf-stirring that wasn’t the wind. Lissar noticed how high up the movement was happening, and felt her heart sink; she hoped it wasn’t another iruku, another monster such as Ash and Blue and Bunt and Kestrel had flushed, almost to disaster. She hoped that Ash could tell what it was, and that the fact she looked eager meant that it wasn’t an iruku. Lissar gathered the puppies together, and they began to circle upwind; as they approached the point where the animal would scent them, Ash struck off on her own, Ob and Ferntongue following at her heels. Lissar and the rest kept their line.

  It was beautifully done. The deer broke cover, and Ash and the two puppies flanked it. Lissar was astonished all over again at how swift her lovely dogs were; and they tracked the deer, keeping pace with its enormous, fear-driven bounds, their ears flat to their heads, without making a sound. The deer, panicking, tried to swerve; Ob blocked it, and Ash, with a leap almost supernatural, sprang to grab its nose; the weight of the dog and the speed at which they were moving flipped the deer completely over. It landed with a neck-breaking crash, and did not again stir. Ash got up, shook herself, looked over her shoulder to find Lissar’s face, and dropped her lower jaw in a silent dog-laugh.

  Everyone’s bellies were full that night, and the next. Ash woke up snarling the second night, and whatever it was that had been thinking of trying to scavenge the deer carcass changed its mind, and thrashed invisibly away through the undergrowth again. Lissar threw a few more sticks on the fire and put her head back on Ash’s flank. She could hear the last murmur of growl going on, deep in Ash’s chest, even after Ash put her own head down.

  It was the fifth night after they had fled the king’s city, during which time Lissar had merely headed them all for the wildest country she could find the nearest to hand, that she heard, or felt, that inaudible hum for the second time; the same subliminal purr that had led her to the lost boy some weeks before. She felt like an iron filing lining up to an unsuspected magnet: she thrummed with seeking.

  She put her head down on her knees and thought to ignore it; but it would not be ignored. Then she breathed a little sigh of something like relief, for it had been difficult, even over no more than five days, not to think about what she was doing, not to know that she had no idea what to do next, where to go. Five days not to think of Ossin. She stood up and stamped out their little fire; turned to orient herself to the line of the call, chirruped to her dogs, and set off.

  This time it was only a lamb she found; but when she set it in the young shepherd’s arms—for the call had merely realigned itself once she’d found the little creature, and told her where to take it—the girl’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you,” she said. “I am too young, and my dog is too old, but we are all there is, and we need our sheep.”

  A week later Lissar brought another little boy home to his parents; and four days after that she was bending over an odd little carpet of intensely green plants bearing a riot of tiny leaves when her hands, without any orders from her, began gathering them, at the same time as she felt the now-familiar iron-filing sensation again. The plants’ roots were all a single system, so they were easier to pull up and hold than they initially looked; she plucked about a third, and broke off–the central root so that it would repopulate itself. When she came to a small cabin just outside the village she had returned the boy to a few nights previously, she tapped on the door.

  A woman somewhere between young and old opened the door and looked unsurprised at Lissar and her following; and then looked with deep pleasure at the festoon of green over Lissar’s left arm. “Do your dogs like bean-and-turnip soup?” she said. “There is enough for all of you.”

  The prince’s ball had been toward the end of the hunting season, the end of harvest, when the nights were growing discernibly longer, and the mornings slower to warm up. But the early weeks of the winter were far less arduous than the time Lissar and Ash had spent alone in the mountains. A large territory imperceptibly became theirs, and many villages came to know them, catching glimpses occasionally on Moonlit nights of seven long-legged dogs and one long-legged woman with her white dress kilted high over her thighs, running silently through the stubbly fields or, rarely, bolting down a brief stretch of road before disappearing. It was an interesting fact that no domestic animal protested their passing; no guardian dog barked, no anxious chicken squawked, no wary horse snorted.

  And Lissar came to welcome the sound that was not a sound, the iron-filing feeling, for this often earned her and her dogs hot meals of greater variety than they could otherwise catch, and many barns were permanently opened to them. Lissar saw no point in sleeping on the increasingly cold ground if she could help it; hay stacks were to be preferred. The puppies learned to climb barn-ladders, not without accidents, none severe.

  Lissar now also had hearths to drag her proud company’s kills to; they did not have to guard their trophies from other predators any more, and between their increasing skills as hunters, and Lissar’s finding of missing people, creatures, and miscellaneous desirable items, they rarely went hungry. No one questioned her right to hunt wild game any more than they questioned her right to the dogs at her heels; any more than anyone had ever asked her about the origin of her white deerskin dress. Everyone called her Deerskin to her face, and she established a semi-permanent camp for herself and her seven dogs, in a hollow of a hill, not too far from the herbwoman’s village.

  She waited for news of Ossin’s upcoming marriage, but she heard none. She wondered if she would hear it; but how could her new friends not tell her, when they told her so much else, about their cows and their cousins, their compost heaps and their crop rotations. About their babies, their sweethearts and—occasionally—about the yellow city. Ossin’s name was mentioned once or twice, and Lissar believed that she was not seen to wince; but no one mentioned Trivelda. It was hard to know what the farm folk knew or guessed; that they knew she had lived at court, and that six of the dogs that followed her had originally belonged in the prince’s kennels, she assumed; for the rest she did not guess.

  It did not occur to her that she was shutting out thoughts of Ossin, and of her—happiness—during the time she was a kennel-girl in a way too similar to the way she had shut out all memory of the pain and terror in her past when she and Ash had fled their first life. She had had no choice, that first time; this time … it had all happened too quickly, and she could not see if she had had a choice or not. The day in the portrait-room had been followed too soon by the evening of the ball. She had been beset by too much at once, and she could not think clearly. She still could not think clearly—but now it was because she did not think she could. It did not occur to her that she might. And so she did not try; and her forgetting b
egan slowly to usurp her life again.

  Lissar wondered sometimes what went on behind Fiena’s measuring looks; Fiena was the herbwoman who had fed them bean-and-turnip soup on the first evening of their acquaintance. But Fiena never asked embarrassing questions, and evenings might be spent there in silence, but for the slurping sounds of seven dogs eating stew. It was Fiena who made Lissar a pair of deerskin boots, from the hide of one of the beasts Lissar’s hounds had pulled down, so that by the time the first snow fell, she was no longer barefoot, although the boots, like any ordinary clothing, showed dirt and wear, as her deerskin dress did not.

  She travelled in a wide swathe; revisited Ammy and Barley, who were glad to see her, quartered the towns in a larger and larger … eventually she acknowleged that she moved in a circle around the king’s city as if it were her tether and she on a long rope. She spiralled in—not too close; she spiralled out—not too far. But circle she did, around and around, restlessly, relentlessly, endlessly.

  Autumn had been gentle and winter began mildly. The game remained in good condition and the puppies grew into an efficient hunting team; more than efficient, joyful. Lissar began directing them more and more carefully, till they as often as not could make their kill near their home-hill, or near one of the farms who would welcome them. She was proud of them, and she knew that had they remained in the prince’s kennels they would have been taken only on puppy hunts next summer, and would not be considered worth joining the real hunting-parties till the summer after that.