Robin McKinley - Deerskin

"You look worse than I feel," said Lilac a few minutes later. They had brought their horses to their stalls, unhooked the leadlines, and let them loose. Lissar was in the stall with Tessa, trying to decide which of the many buckles on the headstall she needed to unfasten to get it off without merely taking it to bits. Two, she saw, as Lilac did it. It was hard to focus her eyes, and she couldn't stand still without leaning against something. "D'you want to skip supper? You can talk to Redthorn in the morning, and eat breakfast twice."

Lissar nodded dumbly. Lilac led her up what felt like several thousand stairs to a little room with ... all she saw was the mattress. She didn't care where it was. She lay down on it and was asleep before Ash was finished curling up next to her and propping her chin on her side.

EIGHTEEN

THERE WAS A WINDOW, BECAUSE SHE AWOKE IN DAYLIGHT. ASH

had her neck cramped at an impossible angle and was snoring vigorously. Lissar staggered upright and leaned out the window. It was still early; she could tell by the light and the taste of the air-and the silence. She' was in a small bare corner of a long attic-looking room full of boxes and dusty, more mysterious shapes. She looked around for a moment, let her eyes linger on the snoring Ash, and then left quietly, closing the door behind her. In the unlikely event of Ash's waking up voluntarily, she didn't want her wandering around; she didn't know what the rules of this new place were. She'd come back in a little while to let her outdoors.

She met a young man at the foot of the stairs (which were still long, even going down them after a night's sleep) who stared at her blankly for a moment. His face cleared, and he said, "You must be Deerskin. I'll show you where the women's washroom is. Breakfast's in an hour. You want to clean some stalls?" he said hopefully; but his gaze rested on the white deerskin dress and his expression said, I doubt it.

She washed, let Ash out, and cleaned two stalls before breaklast, Testor having demonstrated one first. "It's not like it takes skill. You heave the dung out with your pitchfork"-he did so-"leaving as much of the bedding behind as possible. Then you sort of poke around"-he did so-"looking for a wet spot. Then," he said, each word punctuated by stab-and-lift, "you fluff everything dry." He cleaned six stalls to her two.

"May the gods be listening," said Lilac, when she saw. "Testor, you pig, couldn't you have found her a pair of boots? Nobody should have to muck stalls barefoot."

"I never noticed," said Testor sheepishly.

Ash, released from the attic (or rather reawakened and hauled forth), made herself implausibly small and fitted under Lissar's chair at breakfast, although her waving tail, which uncurled itself as soon as Lissar began dropping toast and sausages under the table, made walking behind her treacherous. There were eighteen of them at the table, including the limping Jed; and Redthorn sat at the head.

Everyone wanted to know where Lissar and Ash had come from; but the questions evaporated so quickly when Lissar showed some distress that she guessed there must be other secrets among the company, and she felt hopeful that perhaps here they would let you become yourself in the present if you wished to leave your history behind. She felt the hope and wondered at it, because she knew it meant that she wished to find a place here in the yellow city, where she was uncomfortable walking the streets and alarmed by the number of people, wished to find a place so that she could stay. Stay for what purpose? Stay for how long?

Redthorn did ask her bluntly if she had any particular skills; but he looked at her kindly even when she said in a small voice that she did not. I can run thirty miles in a day and then thirty miles the day after that; I can hit a rabbit five times out of seven with a flung stone; I can survive a winter in a mountain hut; I can survive.... The thought faltered, and she looked down at her white deerskin dress, and rubbed her fingers across her lap. Her fingers, which had just introduced another sausage under her chair, left no grease-mark on the white surface.

She looked up sharply for no reason but that the movement might break the thread of her thoughts; and saw a dozen pairs of eyes instantly averted. The expressions on the faces varied, and she did not identify them all before courtesy blanked them out again. Curiosity she understood, and wariness, for the stranger in their midst and no mutual acquaintance to ease the introduction. She was startled by some of the other things she saw: wistfulness ... longing ... hope. A glimpse of some other story she saw in one pair of eyes; a story she did not know if she wished to know more of or not.

She moved her own eyes to look at Lilac, spearing a slab of bread with her thov, and Lilac glanced up at just that moment, meeting her eyes straightforwardly.

There was nothing in her gaze but herself; no shadows, nor shards of broken stories; nothing she wanted to make Lissar a part of; the smile that went with the look was similarly kind and plain and open. Lissar was Lissar-or rather she was Deerskin-Lilac was willing to wait on the rest. Lissar smiled back.

The consensus was that while Redthorn could find work for her, at least till Jed was active again, she should present herself to the court first. Everyone agreed that the prince would like Ash.

"It's, you know, polite," said Lilac. "I went myself, after about a sennight; I was just curious, if nothing else, there's a king and a queen and a prince and a princess a stone's throw away from you-a stone's throw if you don't mind braining a doorkeeper and breaking a few windows-it's a waste not to go look at 'em, you know? So I did. Got a real bad impression of the prince, though-I told you, he looks eight kinds of vegetable slouched down in some chair of state, covered with dog hair, he's always got a few of the dogs themselves with him and they look better than he does. I keep wondering what he must be like at formal banquets and so on; I know they have 'em. Cofta is easy-going but he still remembers he's a king. But that's no mind really. You'll end up liking him-Ossin-too after you've seen him coming in from running the young hounds for the first time, with burrs in his hair.

Clementina's the practical one-that's the queen-lots of people would rather go to her with their problems than the king because she understands things at once and starts thinking what to do about them. Cofta's dreamier, although his dreams are usually true."

"There's a saying," broke in Jed, "that Cofta can't see the trees for the forest, and Clem the forest for the trees."

"Camilla's the beauty," continued Lilac. "It's so unexpected that that family should produce a beauty-the Goldhouses have been squat and dreary-looking for centuries, you can see it in the portraits, and Clem's just another branch of the same family; she and Cofta are some kind of cousins-that they're all struck rather dumb by it. By Camilla: And she's so young that being beautiful absorbs her attention pretty thoroughly. She may grow up to be something; she may not. I don't think anyone knows if she's bright or stupid."

Breakfast was over by then, and Lilac and Lissar were leaning on a post outside the barn, and Lissar was watching out of the corner of her eye, while listening with most of her attention, the bustle of the morning's work at the king's stable. Jed paused beside them when he needed to rest his ankle. "She's probably not even beautiful, you know," he said. "It's just that she's a stunner next to the rest of them.

Besides, she's ours, so we like her," and he grinned. He was himself good-looking, and knew it.

"Except for that Dorl," said Lilac. "Since Camilla got old enough, he's started hanging around."

Lissar knew that while Redthorn might well find work for her, she did not belong at the stables. She knew little of horses, though this she might learn, and less, she thought, of getting along with other people; that she feared to learn, although she remembered the hope she felt at the idea of finding a place for herself in the yellow city, which was so very full of people. Choices were choices; that did not mean they were simple ones. But she had not liked the eyes around the breakfast-table.

So she borrowed a brush and comb, and took turns working on her own hair and Ash's. When either of them whined and ducked away too miserably she switched over to the other for a while. Finger-combing was frustrating and time-consuming and she had neglected both of them in the last weeks.

Cofta's general receiving was this afternoon; the sooner she got it over with the better. It would be another three days to wait if she missed today. There were voices in her head again, and not the quiet voice from the mountaintop. These voices were .

. . "The king was very handsome and grand, but the queen was the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms." It was a story she had heard somewhere, but she could not remember where; and trying to remember made her feel tired and weak and confused.

In her mind's eye she was wearing another white dress, not of deerskin, but of silk; and Ash was beside her, but the Ash she was remembering, as her fingers lost themselves in the long cool waves of the skirt, had short fine hair instead of thick curls. Ash? No, she did remember, Ash had grown her heavy coat this last winter, when they had been snowbound for so long. But Ash was not a young dog, a puppy reaching her adulthood and growing her adult coat; she could remember holding the puppy Ash had been in her arms for the first time, and she had been smaller then herself. She remembered the kind look of the man who handed the puppy to her; and she remembered there were a great many other people around....

Perhaps it was a market day, and she had come to town with Rinnol, to whom she had been apprenticed. She opened her hands, laying the brush down for a moment.

I give you the gift of time, the Lady said.

Her winter sickness had robbed her of so much. What did she even remember surely that she once had known how to do? Something to give her some direction to pursue, to seek, a door to open? What did she know how to do? Nothing. This morning she had discovered that while she understood the theory and purpose of stall-mucking, the pitchfork did not feel familiar in her hand, as the leather rein had.

But neither the familiarity nor the unfamiliarity led to anything more.

I give you the gift of time, the Lady said.

Even the memory of the Lady was fading, and Lissar thought perhaps she had been only a fever dream, the dream following the breaking of the fever, her own body telling her she would live. What was the gift of time worth?

As she stared at her hands she saw the white dress again, and there were bright, flickering lights around her, so many that they made her head swim, and the noise and perfumes of many splendidly dressed people....

No.

The thought ended, and all thoughts blanked out. She was sitting, feeling tired and weak and confused, in the small mattressfurnished end of a long attic room with a steeply pitched roof over one end of the king's stables. She had only the memory of a memory of when she had first held Ash in her arms, and the only white dress she remembered wearing was the one she wore now; and Rinnol was only a name, and she was not sure if she had been real.

A bad fever it was, it had killed ...

She could not remember what it had killed, nor did she understand why her lack of memory seemed more like a wall than an empty space.

But she remembered the touch of the Lady's fingers on her cheek, and the sound of her voice, bells and running water. She looked down at her lap, her anxious hands. And there was the deerskin dress. If the Lady had been a dream, then some dreams were true.

She picked up the hairbrush again. Ash, watching the brush, retired into the shadows of the opposite end of the room and tried to look like dust and old wooden beams.

NINETEEN

LILAC WENT WITH HER FAR ENOUGH TO ENSURE THAT SHE

WOULD not get lost. There was a stream of people, narrow but steady, going the same way they were. Lilac knew the doorkeepers and had a friendly word for each of them, accompanied by the same clear, straightforward look that had rescued Lissar that morning at breakfast-and, she thought, had first weighed and considered her at the water cistern.

"I'll leave you here," Lilac said at last, at the end of one hall. "You can't miss it from here. Straight through those silly-looking doors"-they were carved as if the open entry were a monster's roaring mouth-"and then look around. There'll be a group of ordinary-looking folk off to one side, and a lot of unordinary folk wandering around trying to look important. You go stand with the first lot." She grinned. "I'd stay with you a little and watch the show, but I've skipped enough work for one day. Redthorn is a good fellow, but you put your hours in or he won't keep you."

Lissar was finding it hard to see; she blinked, but as soon as her eyes were open, she saw ... two different pictures, one superimposed upon the other. She could see the monster-mouth doorway, and the friendly, casual doorkeepers, who seemed not to lose nor fear losing any of their dignity by speaking to all the mixture of people that passed in and out. Through this scene or over it she saw another, taller, plainer doorway, with guards standing by it, dressed in golden uniforms with breastplates bright enough to be mirrors; and a doorkeeper so haughty that he seemed grander than most of the stately, expensively dressed people he permitted to pass through the doors; two flunkies stood at his elbows, tense with watching for his orders.

"Thank you," she said to Lilac, blinking again. "I'm sure I'll find the way from here."

"Are you feeling quite well?" Lilac asked abruptly. "You've gone pale." She touched Lissar's arm. "Did you get a touch of heatstroke yesterday? Or maybe Cala's sausages don't agree with you. Gods only know what all she puts into them."