Deerskin - Robin McKinley

Viaka had to look up at her, as she hurried beside her; Viaka had been the taller a year ago, but Lissar had grown.

Perhaps it was the unusual angle, or the unusual expression on Lissar's face-unlike the very grand lady, Viaka knew Lissar's face often bore high color and animation; but the very grand lady had never seen the princess playing with her dog. This was nothing like the beaming face she daily turned to Ashand to Viaka; this was an obsessed intensity that-Viaka thought suddenly-made her indeed resemble the queen.

Lissar parted her lips a little and flared her nostrils, and Viaka remembered something her parents had said of the queen: "When she lets her lower lip drop a little, and her chin comes up and her nostrils flare-get out of the way! If she notices you, you'll be sorry."

"Lissar-" Viaka began, hesitatingly.

Lissar stopped. Viaka stumbled several more steps before she caught her balance to stop and turn; her friend was still staring straight ahead with that queer glassy fierce look. But then Ash, re-emerging from the quieting froth of petticoats, put her nose under her mistress's hand, and Lissar's gaze came back into ordinary focus.

Her chin dropped, and as it did so her headdress overbalanced her, and she put her free hand up to it with a little grimace of irritation. With that grimace Lissar was herself again. She looked at Viaka and smiled, if a little wryly.

"Well, I am not my mother, of course," she said. "Even if I am wearing too much hair and too many petticoats today. And that's all that really matters, isn't it?" She ran a thoughtful finger down the delicate ridge in the center of Ash's skull. "You know they've rehung the-the portrait"-Viaka did not have to ask what portrait "in the ballroom, don't you?" Viaka nodded. Lissar tried to laugh, and failed. "That should stop everyone from thinking I look like my mother. I'll try to be grateful. Come, help me dress, will you?"

"Oh yes," said Viaka, whose own toilette would be much simpler. "Yes, I would like to."

"Thank you. You can protect me from Lady Undgersim," Lissar said; Lady Undgersim was the very grand lady. "Shall we go to your rooms first, and get you in your dress: it will be practice for all the buttons and laces and nonsense on mine."

Viaka laughed, for her own dress was very pretty, and both of them knew that Viaka did not envy Lissar her splendid dress nor the position that went with it. "Yes, let's."

SEVEN

THE PRINCESS'S FIRST BALL WAS AS GRAND AS ANY PROUD AND

domineering lady could want. Lissar, watching from the corner of her eye, could see Lady Undgersim swell with gratified vanity at the immediate attention, the reverberent bustle involving many servants and lesser notables, that their entrance produced.

Lady Undgersim, indeed, had visible difficulty not pushing herself forward into the center of events; Lissar, on the other hand, would have been delighted to permit her to do so, and wished it were possible. She, Lissar, would be overlooked in Lady Undgersim's large shadow--or, better yet, her invisibility could have been such that she could have remained quietly in her little round room, keeping Ash company.

Ash, who hated to be parted from her princess, was capable on such occasions (said the maids, and there were the shredded bedding and seat covers as proof) of actual, incontrovertible bad temper. Lissar guessed there would be some marks of chaos when she got back. She wished she could shred a blanket herself, or rip a pillow apart, and throw the feathers into all these staring eyes.

Without warning, her father, resplendent in sapphire blue, was at her side, offering her his arm. Too suddenly: for she did not have time to compose herself, to prevent her body's automatic recoil from his nearness; and she knew by the tiny ripple of stillness around her that her involuntary step back had not been unnoticed. She swallowed, laid a suddenly cold, reluctant hand on his arm, and said, in a voice she did not recognize, "Forgive me my surprise. My eyes are dazzled by the lights, and I did not at once understand the great blue shadow that stooped over me." She thought that the courtiers would accept this-for how else to explain an only daughter, especially one so richly taken care of, cringing away from the touch of her father's hand? How indeed?

She looked briefly into his face and saw there the look she had spent the last two years eluding; the look she found treacherous but with no word for the treachery.

She had the sudden thought that these last two years of her life had been pointless, that she had learned nothing that was of any use to her, if she still could not escape that look in her father's eyes. It was all she could do not to snatch her hand away again, and the palm felt damp against the hot blue velvet.

The crowd parted as the king led the princess down the length of the huge hall; at the far end hung the painting of the dead queen. Lissar felt that she watched them come, but she dared not look into the queen's blazing face for fear of what she would find there: not treachery but understanding of treachery, and from that understanding; hatred. She kept her eyes fixed on the bottom of the frame, upon the small plaque, too small to read at a distance, that stated the queen's name and the artist's. "How beautiful she is!" Lissar heard, and her first thought was that they spoke of the queen.

"How beautiful she has grown!"

"How handsome he is!"

"What a beautiful couple they make!"

No, no! Lissar wanted to cry out; we do not make a beautiful Couple! He is my father!

"It is almost like seeing the king and queen when he first brought her home! She looks so like her mother! And see how proud he is of her! He is young again in his pride; he might not he a day over twenty himself, with the queen at his side!"

There was a wide clear space in front of the painting of the queen, for this was where the dancing was to be held. To one side the musicians sat, and she felt their eyes piercing her; their gaze felt like nails, and she felt dizzy, as if from loss of blood.

Her father swept her around, to face back the way they had come; her full white skirts whirled as she turned, and twinkled in the light. She raised her chin to look out steadily over the heads of her father's people, and she heard a collective sigh as they stared at her. Then she felt her father's big heavy hand clamp down over the fingers that rested so gingerly on his sleeve, and she felt as if his hand were a gaoler's bracelet of iron, and as she caught her breath in a gasp she heard, like a chorus with an echo, "How like her mother she is!"

"She is the perfect image of her mother!"

She found herself trembling, and her father's hand weighed on her more and more till she thought she would go mad, and there before all the people staring at her, try to gnaw her hand off at the wrist, like an animal in a trap. Her mouth fell open a little and she panted, like a trapped animal. Her headdress was as heavy as a mountain, and she could not keep her chin up; it was pushing her down, down to the floor, through it to the cold implacable earth, and she could feel her father's body heat, standing next to him, standing too close to him.

"She is just as her mother was!"

"How proud he must be!"

"How proud he is! You can see it in his eyes!"

"I give you," said the king, and at his side the princess trembled, "the princess Lissla Lissar, my daughter, who is seventeen years old today!"

The applause and cheers filled the room like thunder. She took the occasion to snatch her hand free, to bury both hands in her flooding skirts, and curtsey low to the people who hailed her. They loved this, and the cheers grew as enthusiastic as courtiers, well aware of their own dignity, ever permit themselves to become. The king raised his hands for silence, and the princess rose gracefully, tipping her chin up again in just the way her mother had, the white flowers in her headdress framing her young regal face. The king gestured to the musicians and caught the princess around the waist.

Perhaps a few of the onlookers noticed how stiffly the princess responded, how awkward she seemed to find it, held so in her father's arms. But the occasion was grand and dizzying, and she was known to be a modest girl. The light flickered as if the air itself were the breeze-ruffled surface of some great bright lake. There were thousands of candles hung in the great chandeliers of silver and gold, and thousands of clear drops and icicles of crystal that reflected each candleflame thousands upon thousands of times. The saner, more sober oil lamps that stood at all times at intervals around the huge room were lit, and, as always, polished till they were almost as bright as the crystals on the chandeliers, and the light they reflected was golden.

But for grand occasions there were also heavy gem-studded rings hung round their throats, and these on this night flashed and sparkled as well.

The costumes the courtiers wore were the grandest thing of all, grander even than the tapestries that hung on the walls, that were worth the fortunes of many generations of kings. All the colors and fabrics that were the finest and richest shone and gleamed upon arms and shoulders, backs and breasts. Local seamstresses and tailors had outdone themselves, and when even this surpassing splendor was not enough, messengers had been sent far away for strange rare decorations heretofore unseen in this country; for Lissar's father's courtiers were very conscious that they were the richest of the seven kingdoms and must not be outshone by any visitors, however lofty and important. All the jewellery that present wealth could buy or past victories bestow upon its heirs was on display.

It is unlikely that anyone there was entirely undazzled, entirely themselves, or much inclined to see anything that they had not already decided beforehand that they would see. Almost everyone decided that the young princess looked just like her mother, and looked no further. Only two sets of eyes saw anything different: Viaka watched anxiously, but from such a distance, as she was not an important person, that she could not say for sure that the princess's frozen look was anything but the grandness of the occasion and the gorgeous dishonesty of thousands of candles reflected in thousands of gems and crystal drops. And the queen's eyes knew the truth, and hated it, but she was only paint on canvas, and could do nothing but watch.

And within her costume, her magnificence, her heritage, Lissar moved, invisible to the crowd. The music howled in her ears; it sounded no different to her, no more like music, than had the cheers of the crowd earlier. She went as her father guided her, and had no need to listen to the music, for this was the easiest thing she did that whole long desperate night, moving as quickly as possible away from her father's lightest touch, that he might not touch her any more firmly. As the king was an excellent dancer, Lissar stepped here and there as if she were an accomplished dancer herself, as if the music itself moved her feet.

And so the royal couple passed, magnificent, as dazzling as any chandelier, with the shining medals and golden chains upon the king's breast, and the gleaming tiny colored stones sewn upon Lissar's white dress, down the long hall they had walked up. And then the first dance was over, and most people stopped looking at the king and princess so that they might look for a partner, and seized upon whom they would or could; and the dancing became general.

The king courted the princess as assiduously as a young lover might; rarely and reluctantly, it seemed, did he release her into another man's arms. One foreign prince took offense, for he had understood that the purpose of the ball had been to introduce the princess to possible suitors, and he saw the king's reluctance as an insult to his eligibility. He and his courtiers left early, watched in dismay by the king's ministers, for he was a very wealthy prince. Two of the ministers then bore down upon the king; one took Lissar's hand and presented her to a duke who was looking for a young wife, and could afford to pay for one that suited him.