Deerskin - Robin McKinley

"I think this is probably yours," Hela said again, emerging from the common-room, and held out the parcel. The flowing hand that had written Deerskin was both graceful and legible. "Yes," said Lissar; "that is my name on it."

"Ah," said Hela. "We guessed. The rest of us can't read, you know."

Lissar looked up, startled.

"What cause for us to learn?" said Hela, smiling at Lissar's expression, and returned to the common-room.

"We'll want to hear all about it," Berry called, as she went hastily past the door.

Lilac was already dressed when Lissar arrived. "Anyone would think you didn't want to come," she said, almost cross. "The rest have gone before us. We'll be late, and I want to see Trivelda come in. I want to see what she has thought up, after the menagerie last time.... What's that?"-as the bundle Hela had given her dropped from under Lissar's arm.

"I don't know. It was left for me this evening. Open it while I get my dress on."

"Ribbons," said Lilac. "Look." And she held up two handsful of ribbons: pink, blood-red, black, dark green, silver-grey. "Who sent them?"

"I have no idea." There was one significant difference between these ribbons and the ones provided by Lilac; these were sewn with the same tiny bright stones as the dress Lissar was wearing.

"Hmm," said Lilac, staring at the card with Lissar's name and nothing else on it.

"It was Ossin who invited you, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Lissar shortly, not wishing to remember the end of their last conversation about the prince. "But his mother supplied the dress. Help me-ugh,"

she said, tugging futilely at her hair, which was caught on the tiny hooks that fastened the tight bodice together.

"Hold still. Stop pulling; I want all your hair still in your head for this evening.

Now sit down. I may use one or two of my ribbons just for contrast. And I brought that brooch."

They were, as it happened, in plenty of time; for the princess Trivelda was very late. Whether she was late on account of the time it took her to finish dressing-her entourage had only arrived the day before, and much had been made of how tired she and her breakfast-food dogs were as a result of the journey-or because she wished to make a grand entrance, Lissar did not know; but make an entrance she did.

Her gown was green, and her hair, much redder than in the painting Lissar had seen, was dressed both high on her head and permitted to fall, in a questionable profusion of curls, down her back. She was both short and plump, and the hair already made her look a trifle ridiculous, for there seemed to be more hair than person; and to make her waist look small, her skirts were tremendous, flaring out as though she and they would empty the ballroom of everyone else. Her skirts were worked in some dizzying pattern, also, that shimmered as the light caught it, and made it difficult to look at for any length of time, with the result that watching her small arrogant figure march down the long hall gave a faint sense of sea-sickness.

Lissar had established herself near a long curtain hanging from a pillar projecting from the wall; she recognized several other people from the king's house similarly clinging to the scenery, looking awkward in their fine clothes but at the same time glancing around with interest, and too absorbed in the spectacle to be uncomfortably self-conscious. Lissar stood absently rubbing her fingers together. Her hands felt as imprisoned by gloves as her feet did by shoes; simultaneously both were a comfort: costume, not clothing, stage set for the evening's performance.

The prince's friends were not the courtier sort, so there were enough of them (us, thought Lissar, for she was Deerskin here, Deerskin in costume) that no one need feel lonesome or truly out of place. She looked around for the Cum of Dorl, whom she had seen the first time the day Ossin had offered her six puppies to raise; he was easily spotted among all the people not trying to be visible, for he was wearing yellow as bright as a bonfire at harvest festival; he seemed to glitter as he turned. He bowed with a grace that might almost match one of Ossin's dogs, and it was as if the entire ballroomful of people paused a moment to watch him.

Certainly the princess Trivelda paused, and offered him a curtsey rather more profound than a mere Cum required, but Dorl often had that effect on people, particularly women: Lissar saw Camilla watching him, with an anxious, wistful little smile on her face, as if she wished she did not care, wished that she did not wish to watch him, though she was as poised as she had been on the day Lissar had first seen them both.

Then the prince moved forward to greet his guest; Lissar, though she had been looking for him, had not noticed him before. He too was dressed in green, but a dark green, the color of leaves in shadow; and he stepped forward with all the grace of an unhappy chained bear to welcome the woman most of those watching believed would soon be his wife. He looked like a rough servant, cleaned up for special duty, perhaps; perhaps the special duty of waiting on the scintillant Dorl: and both of them knew it, as did Trivelda, who smirked. Lissar, sharply aware of her gorgeous borrowed dress, found herself forgetting her own discomfort, forgetting to notice the ghosts that encircled her, that whispered in her ears, that crept between the folds of her skirt; forgetting as she watched her friend walk stiffly down the ballroom floor and bow to Trivelda, still like a bear performing a trick he has learned but does not understand, like a bear performing in fear of a yank on the chain if he does not perform adequately. He moved as if his clothing chafed him; there was none of the careless grace of easy strength and purpose that he had in the fields with his hounds, or on horseback. Here he was bulky, awkward, overweight, his eyes too small and his chin too large; he looked dazed and stupid.

For a moment her own ghosts dissolved absolutely in the heat of her sympathy; she was but a young woman watching a friend in trouble. Almost she forgot where she was and called out to him. She did not speak aloud, but she moved restlessly out of the shadowed niche between column and curtain; and the prince's eyes, sweeping the crowd, saw her movement, identified her; and his face lightened-as if it had been she he was looking for-for a moment he looked like the man she saw every day in the kennels, as if his real nature came out of hiding and inhabited his face for a moment.

She did not know what to do; he was about to offer his hand to Trivelda, his future wife, and a hundred people stood between him and Lissar, her back to a pillar.

She could not speak, say, "I am with you." She could not rub the back of his neck as she had done once or twice during the longest of the puppy nights, when four o'clock in the morning went on for years and dawn never came; she could do nothing.

And so she curtseyed: her deepest, most royal curtsey, the curtsey a princess would give a prince, for when she had remembered who she was, with that knowledge came the memory of her court manners. She had not known that those memories had returned to her, nor, if she had, would she have guessed they would be of any use to her; had she known she might have wished to banish them, as one rejects tainted food once one has been sick. She curtseyed, had she known it, as beautifully as her mother might once have curtseyed, for all that Lissar had learned her court manners mostly as a mouse might, watching her glamorous mother and splendid father from her corner. And as she curtseyed she moved farther out into the room, fully away from the shadowing curtain; and the tiny gems on her dress and in her hair caught the light from the hundreds of candles set in the huge chandeliers, and she blazed up in that crowd as if she were the queen of them all.