Deerskin - Robin McKinley

No. It was not she who had made it nothing, but her father.

She turned away, but Ammy said, "Will you not stay? I know Barley would like to see you again too."

Lissar shook her head again, firmly this time, and spoke at last, "There are too many of us to house and feed this year-and I do not like how Ob and Pur eye your chickens. It has been a long winter-they may have forgotten their manners. We are better off away from farmland. Perhaps"-she hesitated-"we'll meet in the yellow city, when you come for the wedding."

Ammy was smiling at her. "You have been on your old mountain too long if you think anyone will be able to find anyone else in the crowds that the city will host for this wedding. But perhaps you will come back here for a little quiet space afterwards. I do not believe any dog that travels with you would stoop to eat a chicken if you told him nay.

"We are far enough out here you know that our countryside is not much hunted; you could provide us with an autumn's game and spend next winter here; we've missed having a hunting-master, there has been no one willing to settle in so dull a place since Barley and I were children. But I do not like seeing you look so thin and pale. Spend the winter here; I will teach you to spin. Our weaver is forever complaining that she has not enough work."

Lissar forgot the wedding for a moment, and smiled. "I thank you. I will remember it. For your barn is by far the most comfortable I have slept in." And my winter home has disappeared, she thought. My home. For the king's city is no home for me. Not now. Not ever. How could she have thought otherwise? "Perhaps you will see me again sooner than you think." She wished she could push the voice, the directional hum, away from her, as she might slap at a fly; for so long as it buzzed at her, she had to go to the yellow city whether she would or not. She would go, then, but she would also leave.

"Good!" said Ammy, and made no further move to stop them, but watched with her curiously bright eyes as they walked back up to the road again. Lissar felt Ammy's eyes as she dropped the latch back in place. She lifted a hand in greeting and farewell, and turned away; and she and the dogs picked up the slow, long-striding trot they used to cover distance.

There was more activity on the road this year; she heard the word "wedding"

once too often, and struck out across the fields, -her skein of pale and brindle-marked dogs stretching out behind her. This year she knew her way, for she had hunted all over this country, and need not keep to the road even for its direction; and the word she heard now, more than once, as they trotted through dawns and twilights, was "Moonwoman."

She did not herself understand the urgency; it was as if her feet hurt-not if she kept on for too long, but if she stopped. She kept one eye always on Ash, and half an eye on Harefoot, whose leg seemed perfectly sound no matter how she bolted ahead or circled around the rest of them. It became a habit, this watchfulness, like checking between the dogs' toes for incipient sores; like running her fingers down the long vivid scar on Ash's side and belly. But there was no heat, no swelling, no tenderness; Ash, Lissar thought, was amused, but she had never been averse to extra attention, and if Lissar's desire now was to stroke a perfectly healthy side several times a day, then that was all right with Ash. But as they passed through the last days in what had become not a journey to the city but a flight to the city, the dogs caught Lissar's restlessness, and seemed as little able as she to settle down to rest for more than an hour or two.

And so they came to a water-cistern at a crossroads after a night of no sleep, just as Ash and Lissar had done the year before, a crossroads at the outskirts of the city, not far from the city gates, where it had become inescapably evident that farms had given way to shops, warehouses, inns and barracks-the water-cistern where Lissar had met Lilac, leading two couple of the king's horses. And they stopped again to drink. Lissar was refreshing her face with handsful of the cold water when she heard,

"Moonwoman," but she paid it no heed, for she never paid that name any heed.

Till a hand gripped her elbow, spinning her around; and it was Lilac herself, and she threw her arms around Lissar. "I am so glad you have come back! I have missed you so much. No one would say where you had gone or why-why could not you have sent me just one word? -No, no, I will not scold you, I am too glad to see you, and Ossin was cross and gloomy and silent for weeks after you disappeared, so I knew you must have left, somehow, about him, which made your just vanishing like that a little more-oh, I don't know, acceptable, except that I did not accept it at all. . .

. I mean, I have spent so much time wondering what had become of you, but that's all ... I just told myself, well, that's the way you'd expect the Moonwoman to behave.

. . ." Lilac's voice suddenly went very high, and her voice broke on the last word.

Lissar found there were tears in her eyes. She blinked. Not knowing what else to say, how to explain, she struck on her usual protest, and said, "But I'm not the Moonwoman."

They had been standing there with their arms around each other, and Lissar's neck was wet with the shorter Lilac's tears. Lilac stirred at this, and backed half an arm's length away, bending back so she could look into Lissar's face. "Aren't you?" she said. She looked down at the dogs then, and Lissar could see her looking for the one shaggy one, and then anxiously counting, coming up with the right number, and then looking again. Ash turned toward her, her right side exposed, and Lilac's eyes widened. "Gods, what was that?"

"A rather large toro," said Lissar.

"A toro? You're mad. You don't tackle a full-grown toro alone with a few dogs."

"It wasn't my idea; it was Ash's; and she would not be called off. I might have found it under other circumstances reassuring that not all of Ash's ideas are good ones, but in this case . . ."

Lilac knelt by Ash's side, which was the signal for seven dogs to try to lick her face, and, unheedingly bumping dog noses away with her other hand, ran her fingers over the scar, just as Lissar herself so often did; Lissar could have sworn that when Ash raised her eyes to meet Lissar's her look was ironic. If a dog can have a sense of humor, as Ash manifestly did, could she not also have a sense of irony? Lissar knew that at heart she believed that a good dog was capable of almost anything: Ossin would understand because he agreed.

She thought of the days and nights when the puppies were only babies, and wished she had thought to ask if he believed a dog capable of irony, for she would not have another opportunity.

"I think you are lucky to be alive," said Lilac.

There was a little pause during which the friends thought of the many things they might say to each other and the many things they wished to say to each other. Lissar found that she wished so badly to tell Lilac everything-everything she knew, including that Ossin had said that he loved her and wanted her to be his wife, and everything she remembered, including the first winter she and Ash had spent alone on the mountain, and everything she ... could neither remember nor not remember, but only feel in her heart and bones and blood and the golden guarded space behind her navel, like how it was she came to leave her old life-that she could not speak at all. There was a noise in her ears not unlike the roaring of the demons at the gates of her own mind, before she had learned what monsters they guarded. The demons roared no longer, but she dared not tell her friend of the monsters; and the despair that rose in her then was the same that had driven her from Ossin last autumn, and her tears spilled over, and she stood in a silence she could not break, and thought, it is no use; I should not have come back. I should go, now, right away, away from here. What I owe Ossin does not matter, Ash's puppies do not matter; nothing matters so much as that I must take myself away from this place where I have friends who love me, because I cannot tell them who I really am.