Deerskin

  There was more activity on the road this year; she heard the word “wedding” once too often, and struck out across the fields, her skein of pale and brindle-marked dogs stretching out behind her. This year she knew her way, for she had hunted all over this country, and need not keep to the road even for its direction; and the word she heard now, more than once, as they trotted through dawns and twilights, was “Moonwoman.”

  She did not herself understand the urgency; it was as if her feet hurt—not if she kept on for too long, but if she stopped. She kept one eye always on Ash, and half an eye on Harefoot, whose leg seemed perfectly sound no matter how she bolted ahead or circled around the rest of them. It became a habit, this watchfulness, like checking between the dogs’ toes for incipient sores; like running her fingers down the long vivid scar on Ash’s side and belly. But there was no heat, no swelling, no tenderness; Ash, Lissar thought, was amused, but she had never been averse to extra attention, and if Lissar’s desire now was to stroke a perfectly healthy side several times a day, then that was all right with Ash. But as they passed through the last days in what had become not a journey to the city but a flight to the city, the dogs caught Lissar’s restlessness, and seemed as little able as she to settle down to rest for more than an hour or two.

  And so they came to a water-cistern at a crossroads after a night of no sleep, just as Ash and Lissar had done the year before, a crossroads at the outskirts of the city, not far from the city gates, where it had become inescapably evident that farms had given way to shops, warehouses, inns and barracks—the water-cistern where Lissar had met Lilac, leading two couple of the king’s horses. And they stopped again to drink. Lissar was refreshing her face with handsful of the cold water when she heard, “Moonwoman,” but she paid it no heed, for she never paid that name any heed.

  Till a hand gripped her elbow, spinning her around; and it was Lilac herself, and she threw her arms around Lissar. “I am so glad you have come back! I have missed you so much. No one would say where you had gone or why—why could not you have sent me just one word? —No, no, I will not scold you, I am too glad to see you, and Ossin was cross and gloomy and silent for weeks after you disappeared, so I knew you must have left, somehow, about him, which made your just vanishing like that a little more—oh, I don’t know, acceptable, except that I did not accept it at all … I mean, I have spent so much time wondering what had become of you, but that’s all … I just told myself, well, that’s the way you’d expect the Moonwoman to behave.…” Lilac’s voice suddenly went very high, and her voice broke on the last word.

  Lissar found there were tears in her eyes. She blinked. Not knowing what else to say, how to explain, she struck on her usual protest, and said, “But I’m not the Moonwoman.”

  They had been standing there with their arms around each other, and Lissar’s neck was wet with the shorter Lilac’s tears. Lilac stirred at this, and backed half an arm’s length away, bending back so she could look into Lissar’s face. “Aren’t you?” she said. She looked down at the dogs then, and Lissar could see her looking for the one shaggy one, and then anxiously counting, coming up with the right number, and then looking again. Ash turned toward her, her right side exposed, and Lilac’s eyes widened. “Gods, what was that?”

  “A rather large toro,” said Lissar.

  “A toro? You’re mad. You don’t tackle a full-grown toro alone with a few dogs.”

  “It wasn’t my idea; it was Ash’s; and she would not be called off. I might have found it under other circumstances reassuring that not all of Ash’s ideas are good ones, but in this case …”

  Lilac knelt by Ash’s side, which was the signal for seven dogs to try to lick her face, and, unheedingly bumping dog noses away with her other hand, ran her fingers over the scar, just as Lissar herself so often did; Lissar could have sworn that when Ash raised her eyes to meet Lissar’s her look was ironic. If a dog can have a sense of humor, as Ash manifestly did, could she not also have a sense of irony? Lissar knew that at heart she believed that a good dog was capable of almost anything: Ossin would understand because he agreed.

  She thought of the days and nights when the puppies were only babies, and wished she had thought to ask if he believed a dog capable of irony, for she would not have another opportunity.

  “I think you are lucky to be alive,” said Lilac.

  There was a little pause during which the friends thought of the many things they might say to each other and the many things they wished to say to each other. Lissar found that she wished so badly to tell Lilac everything—everything she knew, including that Ossin had said that he loved her and wanted her to be his wife, and everything she remembered, including the first winter she and Ash had spent alone on the mountain, and everything she … could neither remember nor not remember, but only feel in her heart and bones and blood and the golden guarded space behind her navel, like how it was she came to leave her old life—that she could not speak at all. There was a noise in her ears not unlike the roaring of the demons at the gates of her own mind, before she had learned what monsters they guarded. The demons roared no longer, but she dared not tell her friend of the monsters; and the despair that rose in her then was the same that had driven her from Ossin last autumn, and her tears spilled over, and she stood in a silence she could not break, and thought, it is no use; I should not have come back. I should go, now, right away, away from here. What I owe Ossin does not matter, Ash’s puppies do not matter; nothing matters so much as that I must take myself away from this place where I have friends who love me, because I cannot tell them who I really am.

  Lilac, seeing this, thought only that she wept for Ash, for the memory of seeing her when the blow had just been dealt, when fear of her dying would have squeezed Lissar’s heart to a stop; for she had some good guess, as a friend will, of what these two meant to each other, though she had no guess of why. And she knew too that Lissar could not speak, though she again guessed only that it was to do with Ash: and she cast around for something to break the silence. Anything would do. “What … you must have had to sew it together. What did you use?”

  “Flax thread,” said Lissar. “It was … awful. But she didn’t mind when I pulled them out; O-Ossin,” she said, stumbling over the name, “had told me that they don’t hurt coming out, but I didn’t believe it: I had been there when Jobe stitched up Genther’s side, after he was struck by a boar.” But her tears fell only faster.

  “And her hair came out with the stitches,” said Lilac, watching her friend’s face worriedly, guessing now that there was some great trouble that was not healed like Ash’s side. “An interesting side effect. She really is a fleethound now, you know. She even looks like one of ours—of Ossin’s. I see the ones that people from Fragge or Dula bring, fleethounds, and your Ash looks like she was bred here.”

  There was another pause, and Lissar’s tears stopped falling. “Yes,” she said at last. She opened her mouth to say more, but knew she could not, and closed it again.

  Lilac smiled a little. “I’ve been sorry, occasionally, that your tongue doesn’t run on wheels, as mine does. It gives me more room, of course, and I dislike anyone talking over me! But I would know your history several times over by now, if you were a talker, and I can listen, I just think silence is wasteful when there is someone to talk to. I guess …” She looked into Lissar’s face and saw the unhealed trouble there, and realized that she believed her friend would tell her of it if she could; and wished there were some better way to show her sympathy than only in not pressing her about it.

  She said at last: “You’ve come back just this sennight rather than the next for the wedding, I suppose? Leave it to the Moonwoman to have heard of it even from the top of her mountain.”

  Lissar found she still could not speak.

  “One would expect the Moonwoman to keep track of time well, of course,” said Lilac, “even if your reappearance just now is a trifle melodramatically late. You should get used to it, Deerskin; they’ve been
calling you Moonwoman since I first found you, and after you spent last autumn haring around—pardon me, Harefoot—silently catching toros and finding rare herbs and lost children, there was no more chance of your being spared. And Deerskin isn’t your real name either, is it?” Lilac went on without pausing, without looking at Lissar. “And if you’re not thinking of coming back to stay”—here she risked a look up, and Lissar shook her head. Lilac sighed before she went on. “Well, you have yourself and seven dogs to keep, and the Moonwoman will always be welcome.”

  “I will give the puppies back.” But her voice was a croak.

  Lilac looked down. When she had stood up from examining Ash, the dogs had rearranged themselves around Lissar, as integral a part of her as the spokes of a wheel were to the hub, even if the hub remained unaware of it. “Of course you will,” said Lilac; “and I will fly over the rooftops to get back to the stables with these abominable streamers that simply must be attached to the carriage trappings or the wedding can’t possibly come off. If you’ll wait a little, I’ll come with you to the city; they’ve got every seamstress working on it, they should be done before midday. And stay with me if you’d … rather not go back to the kennels.”

  Lissar found her voice at last. “I thank you. I—I don’t know quite what I want to do. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Just—when I heard—”

  “It will be pretty spectacular; gold ribbons on black horses, and a golden carriage—real gold, they say, or anyway real gold overlay. He likes showing off, that one.”

  “He?” said Lissar, slowly. “It’s not Trivelda?”

  “Trivelda?” said Lilac. “She’s not getting married till summer, and it won’t happen here in all events; the Curn has fallen on his feet there. The wedding Trivelda’s parents will lay on for her should gratify even his vanity, though the country will be paying for it into their grandchildren’s time.”

  “But …” faltered Lissar. “But I thought Ossin …”

  “Ossin’s not getting married,” said Lilac, watching her closely. “Certainly not to Trivelda. He wasn’t very nice to her at the ball, you know; went off in the middle of it and only came back at the very end with this really lame excuse about a sick dog. You could see poor Clementina turning pale even from where I was standing; and Trivelda’s father turning purple. I found out what he’d said later, about the dog, I mean; my friend Whiteoak was waiting on Clementina that night, and just then standing very near.

  “You might accept that excuse, or I, but not our Trivelda. She was furious. I gather she hadn’t liked the ball very well anyway; there were too many low people there from places like the kennels and the stables. No, she’s marrying the Curn of Dorl, who attended her beautifully all that otherwise unsatisfactory evening, blinking his long curling eyelashes and comparing his soft pink hands and smooth round fingernails with hers, I imagine.”

  Lissar barely heard most of this. “Then who—?”

  “Camilla. Ossin’s sister.” Lilac frowned. “It’s all been very quick; it’s only two months ago his emissaries arrived, and he followed them … well, I’m not the only one who thinks there’s something a little too hasty about it; but there isn’t anything anyone can point to about its being wrong.

  “Camilla is willing; of course it’s very flattering for her. I don’t think she ever really loved the Curn, but it must have been a little hard on her, and she’s so young; but I really think that it’s not the flattery alone, but the feeling that she’s doing her best by her own country by making so grand a match. She’s like that, you know. Not much sense of humor but a lot of responsibility—and she’s always been like that, since she was a baby.

  “And it’s flattering for the whole country, come to that. If the stories are right his palace is about the size of our city. Cofta and Clementina are a little dazed, I think, but Ossin would stop it if he could, because Camilla is so young; but he has nothing to work with, the rest of the family and all the court sort of smiling bemusedly and saying but it’s such an opportunity for her as if marriage were a kind of horse race, where if you see a gap between the leaders you automatically drive for it. And Camilla herself has a will of iron, and she’s decided that she is going to do this. It’s not that she loves him; she’s barely met him, and he’s very stiff and proud.”

  “I—I thought the heir was supposed to marry first,” said Lissar, wondering why she felt no relief that Ossin was not to marry.

  “Ah, yes, that is sticky. But I think Cofta and Clem are a bit put out at the way he missed his chance—again—worse than missed it—with Trivelda, and are glad to be marrying anyone off. It’s also why Ossin’s not in a good position to try and stop it. And I think probably at least partly why Camilla is so set on it: take herself off her parents’ hands and do it brilliantly as well. Because it is such a grand alliance, that works against everything too—or for it, depending on your point of view.”

  There was no reason for the rising panic Lissar felt; she should be feeling—guilty, embarrassed, crestfallen, relieved. But the question came up at once: why had she been drawn here so urgently for Ossin’s sister, whom she barely knew; as it was not to show herself that she had done right—that Ossin had returned to his proper track—in fleeing him, six months ago, then why? She had thought she must be coming here to set that part of her life finally aside. She felt as if she were standing in a world suddenly strange, as if she had looked around and discovered the trees were pink and orange instead of green; her mind spun, and yet the directional buzz was as strong as ever. She had come to where she was supposed to be; but she had never come to the place directed before and not known what she was to do there.

  The urgency boiled up all the higher, pressing against the inside of her ribcage, against her heart, feeling like a fist in her throat: she swallowed. “Who—who is it Camilla is to marry?”

  “I can never remember his name. He’s old—a lot older than Camilla—his wife died some years ago, and he went into seclusion for some time then, and then his only daughter died five or six years ago, and he withdrew again, but this time when he came out I guess he realized he had to marry again since he had no heirs, and I guess he decided to waste no time.

  “I remember—he or his ministers sent Ossin, or Goldhouse, a portrait of his daughter not too long before she died, and everyone here wondered why, even us farmhands, because a big powerful king like him who can afford a golden coach for his bride was certainly not going to marry his only child to a tin-cup prince of a back-yard kingdom like ours—where a wedding coach is just the same as any other coach with a few posies tied to the rails, except that there’s usually no coach at all. There was a whole swarm of courtiers who came with the portrait, the whole country knew about it. We thought he must just be puffing out his importance. And now it’s him going to marry our princess. I still can’t remember his name. Oh, wait—his daughter’s name was Lissla Lissar. Funny I remember that, but it’s such a pretty name. Her mother had been called the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms and she supposedly took after her—I never saw the portrait. I’ve even heard a story that old Cofta paid court to the mother before he settled down with Clementina. Deerskin—are you all right?”

  Lissar seized the arm held out to her. “They—they aren’t married yet?” Lissar shook her head, failing to clear it, although the directional hum was gone, vanished with Lilac’s words. “I don’t even know what your marriage rituals are.”

  “Noo, they’re not married yet,” said Lilac, looking worriedly into Lissar’s face. “But as good as, or nearly. They’re taking their vows today, although the public show and the party for everyone who can walk, ride or crawl here is tomorrow—the one we can go to—the one the golden coach is for. They aren’t really married till tomorrow. She sleeps alone with her ladies in the next room, one last time, tonight. She only turned seventeen a few days ago—but she forbid any notice to be taken of it, saying it was her marriage that mattered. She’s so young … Deerskin, what is the matter?”

&nb
sp; “Where?”

  “Where do they take their vows? In the throne room. Not the receiving-room, where you went your first day. The throne room is behind it, smaller, and grand. Very grand. It’s not used much. Is it that you know something about him?”

  Lissar’s eyes slowly refocussed on her friend’s face, but her own face felt stiff and expressionless. “Yes—I know something about him.”

  There was a tiny silence, a silence unlike any either of them had experienced before, as if the silence were a live thing, making space for itself, expanding, pushing the noise of the inn and the crossroads back, so that the two of them stood in another little world: a little world where it was known that this king was no fit husband for the young, kind, responsible princess Camilla. No fit husband for any woman.

  “It is curious, I was so sure I would see you today, I kept looking out of the front window. I told myself I was just bored, that I was thinking of you because this is where we first met. But I was really expecting you. The ceremony will be read out at midday; you’ll have to hurry. Do you want my horse?” Lilac’s words dropped into the silence, echoing, almost, as if they stood in a chamber with thick bare walls.

  Lissar shook her head. “No; the dogs and I will make our own way quicker; but I thank you.”

  Lilac smiled a little. “It’s true, it would look odd, the Moonwoman on horseback; they’ll make way for you more quickly, this way.”

  “I am not the Moonwoman.”

  “Perhaps you are not, after all; would the Moonwoman not know what she had come for? But then the stories never say that she always knows what she’ll find; only that she arrives in time. Sometimes just in time.”

  Lissar was already gone; Lilac touched her cheek where her friend had kissed it, knowing that she had done so and yet not remembering its happening. She could not even see Lissar on the road ahead of her.