Robin McKinley - Deerskin

courage; but their strength was limited, and they had already had a long day. A second chance they might give her, did she survive a miss; not a third.

She thought, It's a pity we cannot simply leave it and run, as we did the dragon.

And then there was a smaller pale flash streaking from behind her, and Ob valiantly leaped and caught an ear. Harefoot followed him, but grabbed badly at a thigh, and was kicked for her effort and yelped, but got up again at once. Not the puppies! Lissar thought. They will only get themselves killed! She felt she had been standing for hours, frozen in fear and indecision, and yet her heart had pounded in her ears only half a dozen beats; and then she threw herself forward as irrevocably as any hunting dog.

There was nothing to hang onto. She grasped with her free hand at the wiry, greasy hair, being bumped by her own dogs, grimly clinging to their holds. She needed the weak spot at the base of the skull, before the great lump of shoulder began; her small knife was not made for this. She scarred the back of the creature's neck enough to draw blood, but it only shrieked again, and threw her down. It tried to turn and trample her; but Ash rearranged her grip, and the blood flowed freshly out, and the thing seemed to go mad, forgetting Lissar for the moment. Its screams were still more of an anger past anger, that pain should be inflicted upon it, than of the pain itself. Bunt was shaken loose, and when he fell he did not bounce back to his feet but struggled upright and stood dazed.

Two more of the puppies had leaped for a hold; at least they were the ones she could see, and she was afraid to look too closely at the dark ground under the great beast's hoofs. Lissar ran forward again, seized the free ear, hooked one leg behind the creature's elbow as best she could, buried her knife to its hilt as far up on its neck as her arm would reach, and held on.

The thing paused, and shuddered. Lissar could barely breathe for its stench. She risked pulling her blade free, and plunged it in again, perhaps a little farther in, a little farther up, nearer the head. The thing bucked, but it was more of a convulsion. One last time, Lissar, half holding on, half dragged, raised her knife and stabbed it down.

The thing took several steps forward; then its knees buckled. It remained that way, its hind legs still straight, swaying, for several long moments; and then it crumpled, and crashed to its side.

Lissar sat down abruptly; she was shaking so badly she could not stand, and there were tears as well as blood on her face. She put her head between her knees for a moment and then sat up again in time to see Ash walk slowly and deliberately over to Blue, seize him by the throat, and throw him to the ground, growling fiercely.

Lissar was so astonished-and stupid with the shock of the scene they had just survived-that she did nothing. Blue cried like a puppy and went limp in Ash's grip, spreading his hind legs and curling his long tail between them.

Ash shook him back and forth a few times and dropped him, immediately turning away; she walked slowly over to Lissar and sat down with a thump, as if exhausted, as well you might be, Lissar thought at her dog, putting out a hand to her as she laid her bloody muzzle on Lissar's drawn-up knees.

Lissar looked into the brown eyes looking so lovingly at her, and remembered how the creature who now lay dead had burst out of the stand of trees, with Blue nearest it, as if driving it. Ash had just told him, "You fool, this was no well-armed and armored hunting party; this was my person and six puppies; you could have gotten us all killed." And Blue, now lying with his feet bunched up under him and his neck stretched out along the ground, his tail still firmly between his legs, was saying,

"Yes, I know, I'm very sorry, it's the way I was trained, I'm not bred to think for myself." Kestrel and Bunt were still standing by their kill, and Kestrel was washing Bunt's face; Lissar hoped this meant that Bunt had been no more than briefly stunned. She knew that the first thing she had to do was count her puppies.

Ob came crawling to her even as she thought that, so low on his belly that she was heart-stoppingly afraid that he had been grievously wounded; but then she recognized the look on his face and realized that he was only afraid that he had done wrong and was in disgrace. My hunting blood was too much for me, his eyes said; I could not help myself. I know, she replied to him silently, and stroked his dirty head, and he laid his head on her thigh and sighed.

The other puppies followed, all of them with their heads and tails down, not sure what just had happened, and wanting the reassurance of their gods, Ash and Lissar; and for a few minutes they all merely sat and looked at each other and were merely glad they were all still there to do it together.

Lissar raised her head at last. Their kill, she thought. She stood slowly, tiredly, achingly, up. There was dinner-and breakfast and noon and dinner and latemeal for a week besides, if she were in fact a hunting party. But if she did not do something with it soon, the smell of fresh blood would shortly bring other creatures less fastidious. She'd never gutted anything so big before; she supposed it was all the same principle. She thought, I need not gut it at all; I can chop off enough for us for tonight, and leave the rest; we can camp far enough away that what comes for our kill need not threaten us. But even as she was thinking this she knew that it was not what she was going to do; she felt a deep reluctance to give up, without a struggle, the prize they had won so dangerously. She wanted the recognition that such a feat would bring-not her, but her dogs, Ash and the puppies, and even Bunt and Blue and Kestrel. She could not fail them, by throwing away what they had achieved; she had to make her best human attempt to preserve it, as a hunting master would.

Pur crept forward and lapped tentatively at a trickle of blood; but Kestrel was on him immediately, seizing him gently but inexorably by the back of the neck. He yelped, and she let him go, and he trotted away, trying to look as small as possible.

Ossin's hunting dogs were well-trained; and the dogs knew they ate nothing but what the lord of the hunt gave them. Lissar sighed. That was she, and no escape; there was a little wry humor in the thought that she owed it to Ossin not to put his dogs in the position of being tempted to break training. She took a deep breath, shook herself, looked at the creature and then, mournfully, at her little knife.

A long, hot, sticky, dreadful interval later, she'd let the dogs loose on the offal, and was experimenting with looping the leashes she had almost forgotten she had with her around the thing's legs. She thought perhaps she could hoist it into a tree far enough that it would still be there in the morning. As she dragged it, it hung itself up on every hummock and root-knob, but she found she was too tired not to go on; that she wanted something to show for the mess and the danger and the exhaustion.

She had been irritated by Hela's insistence that she take the leashes, although Hela was quite right that if in their wanderings they inadvertently came too near a hunting party, Lissar could not depend on her authority to keep Kestrel and Blue and Bunt with her. If she had thought of it since, she would have dropped the leashes somewhere she could find them again as soon as she left Aric's mother; but she would not annoy Hela unnecessarily by losing them deliberately. And now ... the leashes were excellent leather (from the king's workshop), and bore the abuse they were receiving with no sign of fraying.

Ash left her dinner to inquire if she could help. "You're not built to be a draught animal," Lissar said, panting; "but then neither am I," she added thoughtfully, and looped a leash around Ash's shoulders, threw herself at the end of her two remaining leashes, and called her dog. Ash took a few moments to comprehend that she had been attached to this great jagged lump of flesh for a purpose. She wondered, briefly, if she should be offended; but Lissar herself was doing the same odd thing, and Ash scorned nothing her person accepted. So she pulled.

Lissar didn't know if it was Ash's strength or the moral support of company, but they got it to the edge of the trees, and then Lissar used Ash as part of a snub to hold the carcass in place as she slowly hauled it off the ground. This was easier to explain, for Ash knew the command Stand!, and when the weight began dragging her forward, No, stand! made her dig her feet in, hump her back, and try to act heavy. It was not done well, but it was done at last.

Then Lissar started a fire, rescued a bit of the heart and the liver, stuck them on the ends of two peeled sticks, and fell asleep before they finished cooking.

She woke up to the smell of meat burning, rescued it, and stood waving it back and forth till it was cool enough to eat. The dogs were asleep as well, sprawled anyhow from where the creature had died, and she'd performed the messy and disgusting business of gutting it, to where she stood by the fire she had started, a little distance from where the monster now hung dripping from its tree. She nibbled tentatively at the heart, thinking, if the story is true, then let me welcome this creature's strength and courage while I reject its hate and rage. The meat burned her tongue.

She was as tired as her dogs, but this was not the place to linger; there would be other meat-eaters coming to investigate, and to try how far from the ground the prize hung. Besides, she wanted water, both to drink and to wash the sticky reek away.

She chewed and swallowed, bit off another chunk; found that she was waking up against all probability; perhaps this was the fierceness of the creature's heart.

Ash, she said softly, and Ash was immediately and silently at her side (and cross that she had slept through an opportunity to beg for cooked meat). Ob, she said.

Meadowsweet, Harefoot, Fen. She whispered the puppies' names, wakened them with a touch on neck or flank; a few murmured a protest, but they rolled to their feet, stretched front and rear, shook their heads till their ears rattled against their skulls with a curiously metallic sound; then they came quietly. Dark eyes glinted in the Moonlight; black nostrils flared and tails lifted. Lissar had the sudden, eerie sense that they all knew where they were going-and that she knew best of all. Blue, she said. Kestrel. Bunt. But they were awake already, their training strong in them: go on till you drop.

She set out at an easy trot, for they had some distance to travel, and the puppies would tire soon again; but it was as if there were a scent in her own nostrils or a glittering trail laid out before her, the path of the Moon. It was like the directionless direction, the windless wind on her cheek, when she and Ash had come down from the mountains, only a few months before.

Fleethounds hunt silently; the only sound was the soft pad of many feet. Lissar kilted her dress up around her hips that she might run the more easily, and so they flowed across meadowland and poured through one of the slender outflung arms of the yellow city, almost a town of its own; and while it was late, it was not so late that there were no people drinking and eating and changing horses, mounting and dismounting, loading and unloading, at the crossroads inn, the Happy Man, that was the reason the city bulged out so in this direction. And so a number of people saw the tall, white-legged woman in her white dress surrounded by tall silver hounds run soundlessly past, and disappear again in the shadows beyond the road. Speech and motion stopped for a long moment; and then, as if at a sign, several low voices: Moonwoman, they muttered. It is the White Lady and her shadow hounds.

Lissar knew none of this; she was barely aware of the crossroads, the inn; what she saw and heard was in her mind, but it led her as strongly as any leash. And so it was that when midnight was long past and dawn not so far away, she and her dogs entered a little glade in a forest on a hill behind a village, and there, curled up asleep in a nest of old leaves, was the lost boy.

The glamour fell from her as soon as her worldly eyes touched him; the glittering Moon trail, the mind's inexplicable knowledge, evaporated as if it had never been.

The dogs crowded round her as she knelt by the boy, knowing still this much, that it was he whom she sought. He slept the sleep of exhaustion and despair, not knowing that he was near his own village, that his long miserable wandering had brought him back so near to home. She did not know if she should wake him, or curl up beside him and wait for dawn.

He shivered where he lay, a long shudder which shook the thin leaves, and then a quietness, followed by another fit of shivering. At least she and the dogs could keep him warm. She slipped her arms under him, and recognized her own exhaustion; the decision was no longer a choice, for the muscles of her arms and back, having carried half-grown puppies and wrestled a monster, would do no more that night. He nestled himself against her belly not unlike a larger, less leggy puppy, making little noises also not unlike a puppy's, and sighed, relaxing without ever waking up.

She slid down farther, not minding the knobbly roots of the tree, and felt the dogs bedding down around her, spinning in little circles and tucking their legs into their surprisingly small bundles, thrusting noses under paws and tails. Some large warm thing-or a series of smaller warm things-pressed up against her back; and then Ash bent over her and breathed on her face, and settled down, tucking her face between Lissar's head and shoulder, her long hair shadowing the boy's face, and one curl touching his ear.

Lissar never felt her leave; but it was one sharp, crisp bark from Ash, standing watch at dawn, that brought the prince and his company to the glade.

TWENTY-SIX

LISSAR HEARD THE PAUSE, AFTER THAT, WHEN ANYONE CALLED

HER by the name she had given first to Lilac, Deerskin; and she could no longer refuse to recognize the whispers: Moonwoman. It was Ossin she asked, finally, wanting to know the story that others had given her, but not liking to ask anyone she suspected of calling her so. Even Lilac, straightforward as ever in all other ways, had a new secret in her eyes when she looked at her friend. Lissar wished she did not have to ask him; but he was the only one who still named her Deerskin without an echo, who still met her eyes easily-as, it occurred to her, she met his. Even his kennel folk, who had learned not to call him "your greatness," never quite forgot that he was their prince. Lissar wondered at herself, for she was ... only an herbalist's apprentice.