Deerskin - Robin McKinley

Lissar ate three sandwiches and fed two to Ash. Lilac wandered away presently in what looked like an aimless fashion, but a second plate of sandwiches-this one brought by a young boy-appeared shortly after. Lissar ate another one, and fed two more to Ash.

Afternoon was drawing toward evening, and Lissar's head was spinning with exhaustion and noise and strangeness and smells and crowding by the time she woke up enough to stop before she ran into the hindquarters of Lilac's pair. Tessa and Blackear had prudently halted a step or two before, and it was the drag against her shoulders that awoke her to her surroundings. They were halted at another gate, where a doorkeeper flicked a glance at Lissar and at Ash, tried to suppress his obviously lively curiosity, smiled, and nodded them through.

"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."