Deerskin - Robin McKinley

He did not follow her. She did not know where she was going; she knew she did not want to return to the ball, and so with what little sense that had survived the last few minutes, she thought to turn the opposite way, down the long hall that led to the ballroom. She blundered along this way for some time, the pain of Ash's supposed death and her own body's ravaging as fresh in her as if she were living those wounds for the first time. She met no one. She knew, distantly, to be grateful for this. She felt like a puppy, dragged along on a leash by some great, towering, cruel figure who would not wait to see that her legs were too short and weak to keep up. She wished the other end of the leash were in better hands. Dimly she realized she knew where she was, which meant-like a tug on the leash-that she knew where to go, knew the way out.

The doors were unbarred, perhaps for the benefit of late-comers; she bolted past the guards, or perhaps she surprised them, or perhaps she looked too harmless-or distressed-to challenge; for none did. She ran across the smooth surface of the main courtyard, and through the twisting series of alleys and little yards, till she came to the kennels. At some point she had paused and pulled off her shoes and stockings, and the touch of the ground, even the hard cobblestones of the king's yards, against her bare feet steadied her, and her head cleared a little of the smoke of old fires, when her innocence and her future had been burned away.

She crept up the outside stairs and into her room, holding the queen's shoes in her hands. She was still trembling so badly it was difficult to take the beautiful dress off without damaging it-the beautiful dress suddenly so horribly like the dress she had worn on her seventeenth birthday-but she did it, and laid it carefully across the bed she did not sleep in. Taking her hair down was worse; her numb shaking fingers refused to understand what Lilac had done, and she had a wild moment of wishing just to cut it off, have it done, have it over, cut her hair, just her hair, but the blood on the floor, running down her face, her breast, running from between her legs ... the ribbons came free at last, and she laid them out next to the gloves, and Lilac's borrowed brooch.

Then she turned, and eagerly, frantically, pulled open the door of her little wardrobe, groping under her neatly folded kennel clothes, and drew out the white deerskin dress. Its touch soothed her a little, as the touch of the earth against her bare feet had done; her vision widened from its narrow dark tunnel, and she could see from the corners of her eyes again, see the quiet, pale, motionless walls and the ribbons against the coverlet that were not blood but satin. She snatched up her knife and the pouch that held her tinder box and throwing-stones, and then paused on the threshold of the little room, knowing she would not see it again: a little square room with nothing on its walls, kind and harmless and solid.

Barefoot and silent she padded down the front stairs, into the long central corridor of the kennels. The dogs never barked at a familiar step, but as soon as her foot hit the floor there was a rustle and a murmur from the pen where Ash waited with the puppies.

She meant to let only Ash out; but Ob was going to come too, for he knew, in the way dogs often inconveniently know such things, that something was up; and he was quite capable of howling the roof down if thwarted. She did not need to see the look in his eyes to know that this was one of those occasions. As she stood a moment in the stall door, holding back the flood, knowing that she had no real choice in the matter, she heard Ossin's voice saying, "They're yours, you know. I'll take a litter or three from you later, in payment, if you will, but they're yours to do with what you like otherwise. You've earned them."

Earned them. Earned as well the responsibility of keeping them. But it was too late now, for they too knew they were hers, knew in that absolute canine way that had nothing to do with ownership and worth and bills of sale. Their fates were bound together, for good or ill. Too late now. She let the door swing open. If Ob was coming, so were the others.

Some heads lifted, ears pricked, and eyes glinted, in other runs; but there was nothing wrong with one of the Masters taking her own dogs-for all the dogs knew whose masters were whose-out, at any hour of day or night. There were perhaps a few wistful sighs, almost whines, from dogs who suspected that they were being left out of an adventure; but that was all.

Seven dogs poured down the corridor; she unbarred the small door that was cut into the enormous sliding door that opened the entire front wall of the kennel onto its courtyard, where the hunt collected on hunting days, and where dogs were groomed and puppies trained on sunny days. Seven dogs and one person leaped silently through the opening, which the person softly closed again. Then the master and her seven hounds were running, running, running across the wide, Moon-white meadows toward the black line of trees.

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.