Deerskin - Robin McKinley

Had she worms, perhaps? But she had examined her own feces, and Ash's as well, and found no signs of worms; and the dubious meat she cooked for them was boiled very well before they ate it. Perhaps her distended belly was caused by some form of malnutrition; she had heard of such things, as Rinnol's apprentice, of herbs and green leaves to banish such afflictions. Ash's needs as a dog were different; perhaps some human need was being overlooked.

She remembered what she could, but it was winter, and there was little green to be had; nor had Rinnol time to teach her everything, and Lissar could remember nothing specific of an antidote to this odd sort of belly-bloat ... she tried to remember what she did know of the causes of any kind of belly-bloat ... Rinnol had not had time to teach her everything ... it would have taken years, and Lissar had been her student only some months, and an unofficial student at that ... reasons for belly-bloat, and a sudden image of blood flowing between her legs; her Moon-blood, which she had not seen since she and Ash had begun the journey that had brought them here; but it was not Moon-blood that ran down her legs ... Lissar's breath came short, and the words fell into her mind like blades, like flaming arrows, and there were none on the walls to defend her, the guardians were dumb, dead, escaped, banished, crippled ...

an unofficial student, for Rinnol never quite forgot that she was telling her king's daughter what to do....

Rinnol.

King's daughter.

Her swollen belly ...

The panic roared at her, a red mouth opening, a monster with jaws gaping wide enough to swallow her, and within its gullet the sight of her father's face as he turned from Ash's body, no longer human as he loomed over her, his striking hands larger than boulders, his body huge as a mountain, blackening the sky and the white snow, tearing the vision from her eyes, smashing her to the floor with the weight of an avalanche.

What brought her back to animal wakefulness was a terrible, seizing cramp in her belly. There was blood on the floor beside her, pooling beneath her outflung legs.

The pain came again, doubling her over; her breath came out with a jolt, jerking from her half a grunt, half a cry.

There was a noise at the door.... But it was Ash; Ash had returned.

Lissar struggled up off the floor, seizing her blanket-towel to wrap around her against the cold, and opened the door. Ash leaped in and flung a squirrel at her feet, and then nosed at her anxiously, smelling blood; perhaps feeling the tremor of another spasm passing through the body of her person. Lissar, without thinking, let her desperate fingers claw down beneath Ash's chin, and cling there.

She sank slowly to her knees, her hands still clinging around Ash's neck, and pressed her face against Ash's breast, feeling Ash's wet nose against her cheek, and suddenly loud whuffly breathing in her ear, thinking, Ash has adapted to this life. So can I. So can I. And a pang ripped through her so sharply that she screamed.

She slipped into timelessness, into a space where she bore what she did because choice had withdrawn itself from her. She did not think in terms of living and dying because she was beyond thought. She paced when she could not lie still, and lay still when she could not move. But she did not sleep, and lay down seldom, and the earth's evening and night passed, and by dawn she was exhausted; exhausted enough that she no longer knew the difference between her private visions and the snow and trees and the hard blood-stained floor of the cabin.

She saw a tall man who stood laughing beside her, a man she feared with all her heart and soul, despite the great crowd surrounding them that insisted he was her friend, insisted in a susurration of voices that sounded like the pleas of the damned.

As she cowered away from the man, he opened his mouth to laugh the louder, for it seemed that her fear amused him, and she saw that he had the fangs of a wild animal, and the long curling fiery tongue of a dragon.

She turned and fled, flinging herself through the door of the hut, into the snow and the icy light of fading stars and rising sun. Her staring eyes saw only the vision her terrified mind could not dislodge, and her ears heard the roaring that was her heartbeat, but which she believed to be the man-dragon, and the screams she believed were the crowd, but were from her own dry throat.

The snow hampered her, and that part of her body that still wished to live ignored the ravings of her mind and began desperately to shiver; for she had run outdoors naked, and she would not last long in this cold, if nothing brought her back to her ordinary senses.

What she saw instead of snow and trees and the cold dawn sky as she ran from the man-dragon, looking fearfully over her shoulder as she stumbled and wavered and dragged herself along, was a great woman's face rising up even higher than the man's tall figure; and the woman was laughing too, and her headdress was made all of fire, as were her scarlet finger-nails, as she reached out around the man-dragon, toward Lissar, her arms longer than any human being's, as long as the flight of an arrow from a strongly stretched bow, and they came on as rapidly as arrows: her scarlet fingernails were tiny worms of flame, with glittering eyes, and mouths that opened and hissed; and each mouth was as large as one of Lissar's hands, and there were words in the hisses, and the words were At last.

The earth, Lissar believed, quaked under her, as her feet stumbled over the writhing backs of more fire-worms, but these were large, their rounded backs wider than her hopeless feet, and now the long fire-tipped arms had reached past her, and the wrists bent inward, and the fingers stretched back toward her as she ran, so close that she could feel the hot breath of the tiny hissing mouths on her fevered face; and she slowed to a halt, appalled, for she could not run toward or away any longer. She recognized she was trapped, and as she began to turn, to look back behind her, the vivid backs of the fire-worms still heaving beneath her feet, she felt the man-dragon's hand on her shoulder, and she knew she felt her death.

But then a strange calm coolness banished the fire and the pain; and then it was coolness no more, but warmth, a beautiful warmth with a beautiful silence; and then it was silence no longer either, but a sound like bells, or not quite like bells, but something like the sound that trees might make if they tried to speak with human voices, for the sound had a good deal of the sweet murmur of running water about it.

Lissar knew that she lay curled up on something soft, but she did not open her eyes, for her eyes would see nothing of what she was seeing now, a tall, black-skinned, black-haired woman who sat beside her, with one cool-warm hand on Lissar's cheek. But no, the hand was white, and the woman's skin was white, as was her hair; and then as she turned her face toward Lissar she was both black and white, shadowed and unshadowed, a blackness with a light upon it and a whiteness shining from the dark.

"My poor daughter," she said, and her voice was like bells and running water, and Lissar saw that both her white-black skin and hair had green gleams, and her slender fingers had a translucence almost like the first leaves of spring. Her hair was the white of apple-blossom, and the black of a deep hollow in an old tree; and she wore a long robe which was both black and white, and it shimmered with an iridescent green, like water in sunlight. She raised her hand gently from Lissar's face, and as she spread her fingers, Lissar could see through the flesh between her thumb and first finger, as if a candle were burning just behind her hand, as if her hand were itself the sun.

"My poor daughter," she said again. "But rest you now with a quiet mind and heart, for this short story within this life's journey has an ending you may call happy, which makes you one of the fortunate ones. Rarely does fate's wheel turn so quickly for any soul." She paused, and stroked Lissar's hair, and Lissar thought she had never experienced anything so wonderful as the woman's touch.