Deerskin - Robin McKinley

THIRTY-ONE

AT FIRST LISSAR MERELY RAN AWAY; AWAY FROM THE YELLOW

CITY, away from the prince whom she loved with both halves of her broken heart.

But in the very first days of her flight she was forced to recognize how much care and feeding seven dogs required. If she had not been in the grip of a fear much larger than her sense of responsibility toward her seven friends, she might have let the lesser fear of not being able to keep the puppies fed drive her back to the king's city again. But that was not to be thought of; and so she did not think it. She allowed herself half a moment to remember that she did owe Ossin a litter or three in payment, but there was no immediate answer to this, and so she set it aside, in relief and helplessness and sorrow and longing. Then she set her concentration on the problem of coping with the situation she was in.

After two days of too few rabbits, they had a piece of extraordinary luck: Ash and Ob pulled down a deer. Much of Ob's puppy pigheadedness was the boldness of a truly superior dog trying to figure out the structure of his world, and he worshipped the ground Ash and Lissar walked on. His adoration had the useful result of making him preternaturally quick to train (even if it also and equally meant that he had to be trained preternaturally quickly and forcefully); and all the puppies seemed to comprehend, after their first hungry night on the cold ground (and no prince and waggon to rescue them the next day), that something serious was happening, and that they had to stop fooling around and pay close attention.

Ash focussed and froze first on the leaf-stirring that wasn't the wind. Lissar noticed how high up the movement was happening, and felt her heart sink; she hoped it wasn't another iruku, another monster such as Ash and Blue and Bunt and Kestrel had flushed, almost to disaster. She hoped that Ash could tell what it was, and that the fact she looked eager meant that it wasn't an iruku. Lissar gathered the puppies together, and they began to circle upwind; as they approached the point where the animal would scent them, Ash struck off on her own, Ob and Ferntongue following at her heels. Lissar and the rest kept their line.

It was beautifully done. The deer broke cover, and Ash and the two puppies flanked it. Lissar was astonished all over again at how swift her lovely dogs were; and they tracked the deer, keeping pace with its enormous, fear-driven bounds, their ears flat to their heads, without making a sound. The deer, panicking, tried to swerve; Ob blocked it, and Ash, with a leap almost supernatural, sprang to grab its nose; the weight of the dog and the speed at which they were moving flipped the deer completely over. It landed with a neck-breaking crash, and did not again stir.

Ash got up, shook herself, looked over her shoulder to find Lissar's face, and dropped her lower jaw in a silent dog-laugh.

Everyone's bellies were full that night, and the next. Ash woke up snarling the second night, and whatever it was that had been thinking of trying to scavenge the deer carcass changed its mind, and thrashed invisibly away through the undergrowth again. Lissar threw a few more sticks on the fire and put her head back on Ash's flank. She could hear the last murmur of growl going on, deep in Ash's chest, even after Ash put her own head down.

It was the fifth night after they had fled the king's city, during which time Lissar had merely headed them all for the wildest country she could find the nearest to hand, that she heard, or felt, that inaudible hum for the second time; the same subliminal purr that had led her to the lost boy some weeks before. She felt like an iron filing lining up to an unsuspected magnet: she thrummed with seeking.

She put her head down on her knees and thought to ignore it; but it would not be ignored. Then she breathed a little sigh of something like relief, for it had been difficult, even over no more than five days, not to think about what she was doing, not to know that she had no idea what to do next, where to go. Five days not to think of Ossin. She stood up and stamped out their little fire; turned to orient herself to the line of the call, chirruped to her dogs, and set off.

This time it was only a lamb she found; but when she set it in the young shepherd's arms-for the call had merely realigned itself once she'd found the little creature, and told her where to take it the girl's eyes filled with tears. "Thank you,"

she said. "I am too young, and my dog is too old, but we are all there is, and we need our sheep."

A week later Lissar brought another little boy home to his parents; and four days after that-she was bending over an odd little carpet of intensely green plants bearing a riot of tiny leaves when her hands, without any orders from her, began gathering them, at the same time as she felt the now-familiar iron-filing sensation again. The plants' roots were all a single system, so they were easier to pull up and hold than they initially looked; she plucked about a third, and broke off the central root so that it would repopulate itself. When she came to a small cabin just outside the village she had returned the boy to a few nights previously, she tapped on the door.

A woman somewhere between young and old opened the door and looked unsurprised at Lissar and her following; and then looked with deep pleasure at the festoon of green over Lissar's left arm. "Do your dogs like bean-and-turnip soup?"

she said. "There is enough for all of you."

The prince's ball had been toward the end of the hunting season, the end of harvest, when the nights were growing discernibly longer, and the mornings slower to warm up. But the early weeks of the winter were far less arduous than the time Lissar and Ash had spent alone in the mountains. A large territory imperceptibly became theirs, and many villages came to know them, catching glimpses occasionally on Moonlit nights of seven long-legged dogs and one long-legged woman with her white dress kilted high over her thighs, running silently through the stubbly fields or, rarely, bolting down a brief stretch of road before disappearing. It was an interesting fact that no domestic animal protested their passing; no guardian dog barked, no anxious chicken squawked, no wary horse snorted: And Lissar came to welcome the sound that was not a sound, the iron-filing feeling, for this often earned her and her dogs hot meals of greater variety than they could otherwise catch, and many bams were permanently opened to them. Lissar saw no point in sleeping on the increasingly cold ground if she could help it; hay stacks were to be preferred. The puppies learned to climb barn-ladders, not without accidents, none severe.

Lissar now also had hearths to drag her proud company's kills to; they did not have to guard their trophies from other predators any more, and between their increasing skills as hunters, and Lissar's finding of missing people, creatures, and miscellaneous desirable items; they rarely went hungry. No one questioned her right to hunt wild game any more than they questioned her right to the dogs at her heels; any more than anyone had ever asked her about the origin of her white deerskin dress. Everyone called her Deerskin to her face, and she established a semi-permanent camp for herself and her seven dogs, in a hollow of a hill, not too far from the herbwoman's village.

She waited for news of Ossin's upcoming marriage, but she heard none. She wondered if she would hear it; but how could her new friends not tell her, when they told her so much else, about their cows and their cousins, their compost heaps and their crop rotations. About their babies, their sweethearts and-occasionally-about the yellow city. Ossin's name was mentioned once or twice, and Lissar believed that she was not seen to wince; but no one mentioned Trivelda. It was hard to know what the farm folk knew or guessed; that they knew she had lived at court, and that six of the dogs that followed her had originally belonged in the prince's kennels, she assumed; for the rest she did not guess.