Deerskin - Robin McKinley

She would win out. She was winning; she was here and she was not mad, and she remembered. She supposed it was necessary for her to take her life back, even when her life had been what it was. She risked taking a deep breath ... and raised her eyes to Ossin's face. She could not tell him.

"Please?" said Ossin.

The sound of his voice had been her lifeline, but she did not know what words he had said. She smiled, glad to have him there to smile at, embarrassed that she did not know what he was asking; delighting in her own ability to decide to smile, to speak, to walk; afraid of the moment when she would turn too quickly, lose her balance-for the chasm was there. What had happened to her the night she had fled her father's court and kingdom was a part of her, a part of her flesh and of her spirit. It was perhaps better to know than not to know-she was not yet sure-but the knowing did not make the chasm any less real, the grief any less debilitating, it only gave it a name, a definition. But the fact of definition implied that it had limits-that her life went on around it. They were only memories. She had lived. They were now only memories, and where she stood now the sun was shining.

Five years ago.

The Moonwoman had said, I give you the gift of time.

Time enough to grow strong enough to remember. Maybe the Moonwoman had known Lissar well enough after all.

"It is, you remember, only one evening," finished the prince. "Let's get out of here; it's a depressing place, the vain hopes and dreams of generations of my family.

You're looking a little grey-unless you're just trying to buy time to think up an excuse to say no."

Time, she thought. I have all the time in the world. Only one evening is ... I lay four years on a mountaintop, till the shape of my and my dog's bodies had worn themselves into the mountain itself. If we went back there, we would still see the little double hollow, like two commas bent together in a circle.

One evening. "Do I need an excuse?" she said cautiously. She stood up, and found that she could walk slowly after him to the door; she did not look at the painting of Lissar as she passed.

"My mother and her ladies will be raiding their wardrobes anyway so that anyone who wants to come may, so you will have a dress for the asking. Camilla's old dresses are only for children, it will be a few years before she's much of a resource; although being who she is she has rather to be forcibly restrained from having dresses made to give away. She'll be a queen like our mother, I think; I hope she finds the right king to marry.

"So you can't beg off because you have nothing to wear. And I doubt that you've been invited to any other grand performances that evening; this is a small place, and we're the biggest thing in it."

Lissar finally grasped that he was asking her again to come to the ball. "Oh, no, I couldn't!" she said, and stopped dead.

Ossin stopped too, looking at her. "Have you really not been listening? Or did you only think I couldn't be serious?

"Or did something in the portrait room disturb you that much? I am sorry, Deerskin, sorry, my ... it was a rude trick to play, I had not thought.

"I am serious. Please do come."

"I can't," she said again; she had only just remembered her last royal ball, remembered how it fitted into her new pattern of memory.

"Why can't you?"

She shook her head mutely.

"What if I order you to come? Would that help? Offer to throw you in the dungeon and so on, if you don't? We do have dungeons, I believe, somewhere, someone probably knows where they are, or we could simply put you in the wine-cellars-with no cork-puller."

She laughed in spite of herself and he looked pleased. This was a different ball they were discussing, she said to herself, she was not who she had been, and this was not the man who had led her through those old dancing figures. "Do you have many herbalists' failed apprentices at your royal balls then?"

"Then you've remembered!" he said, and her eyes were on him as he said it, and she saw the dreaded ball disappear from his face. "You've remembered!"

She had told him, those long nights with the puppies when she was too tired to remember what she could or couldn't say, should or shouldn't, that she had been ill, and lost much of her memory. She was both frightened and heartened by his interest now, and she said, smiling a little, "I don't know how much I've remembered"-this was true; the fire still burned, reflecting off surfaces she did not yet recognize-"but your portrait room, I'm not sure, it shook something loose."

"Looking at Trivelda makes me feel a trifle unsettled myself," said the prince. "I did think you were looking a bit green there; you should have said something to me earlier. But see, then you must come to the ball."

"I do not see at all."

Ossin waved a hand at her. "Do not ruin the connection by analyzing it. Come meet Trivelda, and rescue me." Impulsively he seized her hands, standing close to her. He was shorter than her father, she noticed dispassionately, but bulkier, broader in both shoulders and belly.

"Very well," she said. "The kennel-girl will scrub up for one night, and present herself at the front door. Wearing shoes will be the worst, you know."

"Thank you," he said, and she noticed that he meant it.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE NEXT DAY WHEN SHE RETURNED FROM TAKING THE PUPPIES

FOR a long romp through the meadows, despite a thick drizzly fog and mud underfoot, there were a series of long slender bundles waiting for her, hung over the common-room table. She dried her hands carefully, and loosened the neck of one, and realized, just before her fingers touched satin, what these must be: dresses for the ball. A choice of dresses: a wardrobe just for one night, like a princess. Even her fingertips were so callused from kennel work that she could not run them smoothly over the slippery cloth; there was slight friction, the barest suggestion of a snag. Not satin, she thought.

She dropped the bag, whistled to the puppies, and put them in their pen. They looked at her reproachfully when she closed the door on them. "Have I ever missed feeding you on time?" she said. One or two, convinced that she was going to go off and have interesting adventures without them, turned their backs and hunched their shoulders; the others merely flung themselves down in attitudes of heartbreak and resignation.

Ash, of course, accompanied her back to the common-room; Hela was there this time. "Queen's own messenger," she said, nodding toward the bundles on the table.

"Oh," said Lissar, a little startled; she had not taken Ossin's suggestion seriously that his mother would be willing, let alone prompt, to provide the kennel-girl with a ball-gown, and with a choice of ball-gown at that. The further thought intruded: anyone can go who wishes to: but they will not all be wearing satin.

"Better you than me," said Hela.

"Have you ever been to a ball?" said Lissar.

Hela shook her head. "I was a maid-servant up there when I first came to the yellow city, till Jobe rescued me. I waited on a few balls. I like dogs better."

"So do I," said Lissar feelingly, but she took her armful up to her room, and spread the dresses out on the seldom-used bed. After teaching the puppies to climb stairs she found she was more comfortable on the ground floor after all, unrolling a mattress in their pen which, now that they were old enough to understand about such things, always smelled clean and sweet with the dry meadowgrass the scrubbers bedded it with. From the ground floor also it was easier to creep out-of-doors in the middle of the night, seven soft-footed dogs at her heels, and sleep under the sky. It was late enough in the season that even the night air was warm; Lissar began to keep a blanket tucked in a convenient tree-crotch, and she and the puppies returned to the kennels at dawn, as if they had been out merely for an early walk. She did not know how many of the staff knew the truth of it. On the nights it rained she most often lay awake, listening to the fall of water against the roof, grateful to be dry but wishing to be away from walls and ceilings nonetheless.