Deerskin - Robin McKinley

"Deerskin," said her friend. "What is wrong?"

Silky fur between her fingers; the reality of one dog, one dog's life, bringing her back to her own, as it had several times before. Her fingers clutched, hard, too hard, but Ash only stood where she was, bearing what she could for her beloved person's sake. Lissar, looking down into those brown eyes looking up, thought, Who can tell what she remembers of that night? But she is here as am I, and if I am to die of that night's work, let it not be before this man who gave me good work to do, and who has tried to speak to me as a friend.

I did not lie to him about everything, she thought. I told him that I liked dogs. And without conscious volition, her fingers searched out the lump at the back of Ash's skull. Ash had not carried her head as if it were sore in many months, not since Lissar had woken up wearing a white deerskin dress for the first time; but the lump was still there, for fingers that knew where to look.

"Forgive me," she said; her brain, still stunned, could not come up with even a bad reason for her faintness; any reason, that is, other than the truth, which she could not tell him, even to change her habit of lying to him. "Forgive me. It is over now. Will you"-her lips were stiff, and she could not think what question she might ask, to lead him away from her own trouble, and so she asked a question bred of memory and confusion: "Will you marry Lissar?"

Ossin smiled. "Not I. Not a chance. I am far beneath her touch. Her father is a great king, not a hunting-master with a rather large house, like mine. She's his only daughter, and . . ." He hesitated, looking at her, seeing her distress in her face, but seeing also that she did not wish to speak of it, and trying to let her, as he thought, lead him away from the source of that distress. He did not want to talk about Lissar; but the fate of a princess in a far-away country should be a safe topic. "After his wife died, the story was that he went mad with grief, and when he got over it, he grew obsessed with his daughter, and believed that no king or prince or young god with powers of life and death was good enough for her. Had I wished to run at that glass mountain I would have slid off its slick sides even before I was banished for my arrogance in wanting to try."

Lissar thought he looked at the painting almost with longing; perhaps he was remembering the first-class dog he had lost in a moment's romantic whim. "But you were sent a painting," she said, her mouth still speaking words that her brain was not conscious of forming. "You must have been considered an eligible suitor."

The longing look deepened. "I have wondered about that myself. My guess is that it was part of her father's wealth and importance that he could send paintings to every unmarried prince and king in his world." After a moment he went on: "I quite like the painting-who I imagine the person painted to be. She is watching from behind her eyes, her princess's gown-do you see it?" But Lissar was watching him.

"Her mother was said to be the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, and that her daughter grew more like her every year. She is beautiful, of course, the glossy hair, that line of cheekbone, the balance of features; but it's not her beauty that I keep seeing in that painting. It's her ... self, her humanity. Or maybe I just like the way her hand rests on her dog's head, and the way the dog is looking out at us, saying, mess with my lady if you dare, but don't forget me. I like thinking that Ash is appreciated."

He turned away, embarrassed. "Pardon me. Here I've just been telling you that these portraits are invariably fraudulent, and now I am spinning a fairy-tale about a woman I have never met as painted by someone whose whims and imagination I have no guess of." Another pause. "Perhaps I was sent a painting in acknowledgement of the dog I bred; who knows how great kings think? I received no other acknowledgement, except Mik, who delivered the pup, was favorably taken by Lissar as a potential dog-owner."

Lissar dared to turn around and look at herself once more. "It is a very handsome dog."

"Hmm?" said Ossin. "Oh. Yes. It is a very handsome bitch." He smiled a little, again, sheepishly. "Perhaps I give myself permission to believe in how this painter presents the princess because the dog is so well done by. She looks so like her mother; that same wary look, when I was asking her to do something she considered of dubious merit. She would certainly have looked just so had I required her to sit for her portrait."

There was a longer pause. Lissar thought that Ossin would stir from his reflections, and suggest they leave, and they would leave; although Lissar's ghosts would go with her. But then they had been with her all along; now, only, she had names for them. And was not naming a way of establishing a pattern, of declaring control? She remembered the Moonwoman's words to her, and she wanted to say, It is not enough. I am sorry to be one of your failures, but I cannot bear it. I still cannot bear it.

Lissar straightened a little, still sitting on the edge of the table. "Whom did Lissar marry, after all?"

"She didn't. Although it's rather murky what exactly did happen. Usually we get quite good gossip at this court-we all like hearing how the real royals live-but somehow this story never quite got to the circle of our friends. I think she is supposed to have died; there was this uproar, and the king went very strange again, like after his wife died. No one would say if Lissar had actually died or if so what of.

There was even a story that a lion leaped over the princess's garden wall and seized her; as soon say a dragon flew off with her, I think. But it was definitely given out that the king was now suddenly without heir.

"I favor the story that she ran off with a farmer and is happily growing lettuces somewhere. And raising puppies, although I don't like thinking what she might find to cross Ash with. I'd offer her any dog in my kennel for the pick of the litter, even now, when she probably doesn't have too many litters left. Her mother had her last litter at twelve, her idea, I didn't mean to have her bred any more, and those last five were as fine as any puppies she'd borne in her prime.... I suppose the king will marry again. I don't believe he's all that old, even though this now happened, oh, must be five years ago."

The king will marry again. The words went through her like swords; she barely heard Ossin's final words, and did not at first register them. The king will marry again. But Ossin was still speaking, Ossin, her friend, and the sound of his voice staunched her wounds, and she found that she was not plunging into the chaos and terror after all. She had paused on the brink to hear what he had to say, trying to distract herself as she felt her strength running out; and now she found that she had regained her balance, at least, while she listened. She was still weak and shaken, but she could stand without straining; there was little further call on her diminished strength. She could still hear the roar of the fire demons at the bottom of the pit, behind Ossin's voice; but it was not now her inevitable fate to fall to her death among them.

She listened, half attending to the prince, half attending to the knowledge that her own skin still enclosed her, that she was alive and aware and herself, feeling her chest rising and falling easily with her breathing, newly feeling the elasticity of her skin, and the sun's warmth on it, and Ash's long hair under her fingers. Feeling herself, with all that meant: as if her consciousness were a gatekeeper, now going round to all the doors of a house just relieved of a siege it had not thought to win.

The king will marry again.... No, no, it could not happen; it would not happen; she could not think of it, she saw her mother's blazing eyes striking down any who stood before the king's throne, her mother's eyes burning in the more-than-life-size portrait that hung on the wall behind. It would not happen.

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?"