Deerskin - Robin McKinley

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."

Lissar shook her head-gingerly, still blinking. "No. I'm just-still not accustomed to so many people."

Lilac looked at her a moment longer, and dropped her hand. "I still wish you'd let me loan you some shoes. Barefoot before the king and queen!" She shook her head, but she was smiling again.

Lissar murmured, "I like to know where I'm walking. In shoes I'm always walking on shoes."

"Well, it identifies you as a stranger, anyway, and strangers are often exotic. But it makes you look like you have no friends. Now remember, come back to the stables tonight, whatever happens. We won't keep you in the boxroom forever."

Lissar nodded, and Lilac, after looking at her anxiously a moment longer, turned away.

"Lilac-"

Lilac, who had moved a few steps away, stopped at once and turned back.

"What do you call them, the king and queen, I mean? Your-your"-the word fell out of her mouth-"splendor?" It tasted ill, as if the name were an insult, and for a moment she braced herself for anger, but Lilac answered easily enough.