Deerskin - Robin McKinley

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.

It did not occur to her that she was shutting out thoughts of Ossin, and of her happiness during the time she was a kennel-girl, in a way too similar to the way she had shut out all memory of the pain and terror in her past when she and Ash had fled their first life. She had had no choice, that first time; this time . . . it had all happened too quickly, and she could not see if she had had a choice or not. The day in the portrait-room had been followed too soon by the evening of the ball. She had been beset by too much at once, and she could not think clearly. She still could not think clearly-but now it was because she did not think she could. It did not occur to her that she might. And so she did not try; and her forgetting began slowly to usurp her life again.

Lissar wondered sometimes what went on behind Fiena's measuring looks; Fiena was the herbwoman who had fed them bean-and-turnip soup on the first evening of their acquaintance. But Fiena never asked embarrassing questions, and evenings might be spent there in silence, but for the slurping sounds of seven dogs eating stew. It was Fiena who made Lissar a pair of deerskin boots, from the hide of one of the beasts Lissar's hounds had pulled down, so that by the time the first snow fell, she was no longer barefoot, although the boots, like any ordinary clothing, showed dirt and wear, as her deerskin dress did not.

She travelled in a wide swathe; revisited Ammy and Barley, who were glad to see her, quartered the towns in a larger and larger ... eventually she acknowleged that she moved in a circle around the king's city as if it were her tether and she on a long rope. She spiralled in-not too close; she spiralled out-not too far. But circle she did, around and around, restlessly, relentlessly, endlessly.

Autumn had been gentle and winter began mildly. The game remained in good condition and the puppies grew into an efficient hunting team; more than efficient, joyful. Lissar began directing them more and more carefully, till they as often as not could make their kill near their home-hill, or near one of the farms who would welcome them. She was proud of them, and she knew that had they remained in the prince's kennels they would have been taken only on puppy hunts next summer, and would not be considered worth joining the real hunting-parties till the summer after that.

But as the season deepened she found herself less at peace than ever, roaming farther and farther away from the villages, with a buzzing in her head like the iron-filing sensation, only without the comfort of a direction to clarify it. At last she found herself in the wilder hilly region on the outskirts of King Goldhouse the Seventeenth's realm-the northern boundary where she had come down last spring.

She stood, surrounded by dogs, staring up the tree-covered slopes, and in herself a sudden great longing....

She turned abruptly, and began a determined trot south and west, to Fiena's village and their home-hill, composing a half-acknowledged list in her mind. Onions; apples; potatoes; squash; herbs, both medicinal and for cooking; blankets; a bucket.

A comb. A lamp. Something to keep the rain off. An axe. With six more dogs to think of, more than would be comfortable for her alone to carry. She cast an appraising look at her proud sleek hunting hounds.

Ash felt her dignity very much compromised by the makeshift harness Lissar put together, useful but unbeautiful as it was. But, as ever, she was willing to perform any task Lissar asked of her so long as it was plain what the task was. She suffered having the harness put on, but once she realized that when the pack was in place it was heavy, she set about getting back out of it again. Lissar contrived to dissuade her of this and Ash reluctantly accepted the inevitable, standing in her characteristic pose of disgruntlement with her back humped, her feet bunched together, and her head low and outthrust and flat-eared, swinging back and forth to keep Lissar pinned by her reproachful gaze.

Lissar had accumulated much of the gear she wanted to take already at her camp; for the rest, after some anxious thought, she called in various favors from several different villages, that none need feel preyed upon-nor any guess her plans. Then she had had to devise a harness, and sew it together; this all had taken time, while the thrumming in her head went on, persistently, almost petulantly, as if it would snatch the needle, thread, and mismatched straps out of her hands and say, Go now. The puppies, who felt that so long as they kept Lissar under their eyes they had nothing to fear, had little reaction to Lissar's new activities. Ash, who had known her longer, was suspicious of the bits of leather and stiff cloth Lissar dealt with so painstakingly; but, her look said, when Lissar had hung the first results on her, she had never guessed anything as dire as this.

The puppies had watched the drama of the harnessing of Ash very intently, so when Lissar turned to Ob with another harness, he dropped his head and tail but did not protest. If the perfect Ash permitted this and the adored Lissar asked it then he could not possibly refuse. She had made only three harnesses, to begin with, for the three strongest dogs-Pur, still the biggest, was the third-and distributed her bundles among them, keeping the most awkward items, including the bucket and axe, for herself. But then the other dogs were jealous of the special favor of the harnesses, of the work these three were honored to perform: they knew that Ash was their leader, and Ob her second-in-command, and Pur the toughest. The remaining four sulked.

Thus it happened that seven dogs wore harnesses, and while this put off their departure, it meant Lissar could carry more supplies than she had planned; all the better.

The sky was an ominous grey the morning they set out; she hoped she had not delayed too long. But she shook herself, like a dog, she thought, smiling, settling the unwieldy pack on her own back-she had spent more thought over balancing her dogs' burdens-and as she did so, she felt the same orienting tingle that she had now so often felt. This time she knew, as she did not usually know, what it was that drew her: a small hut, high in the mountains, where she had spent one winter, one five-year winter. Where she had met the Moonwoman.

The dogs were all sniffing the air too, tails high, ready for an adventure, even if they had to carry freight with them. Meadowsweet sidled up to Harefoot, bit her neatly in the ear, and bolted-not quite fast enough. Harefoot's jaws missed her, but seized a strap of her harness, and in less time than a breath there were two dogs rolling on the ground, their voices claiming that they wanted to kill each other but their ears and tails telling another story entirely.

Lissar was on them at once, grabbing each by the loose skin over the shoulders, barking her knuckles on the packs to get a good grip. "Shame on you," she said. It wasn't easy, lifting the front ends of two ninety-pound dogs, whose shoulders were thigh-high on her to begin with, plus their packs, simultaneously; but she shifted her grasp to the harness straps, which had been laboriously made to withstand a good deal of abuse, and heaved.

She managed to shake the two miscreants two and a half times before her shoulders gave out; the big dogs hung in her hands as if they were still twenty-pound puppies. She set them down again and they stared at the ground, pointedly away from each other, while she resettled their packs. The other dogs were ambling around as if indifferent: none would tease another being scolded; the scolding was enough, not to mention the possibility of the scolding being redirected to include more dogs. One or two were sitting, respectfully watching the show. She hoped they all in their own ways were paying attention. Pur was notorious for picking up nothing by example, no matter how closely he appeared to be watching; Lissar thought that too many of his brains had been given over to monitoring his astonishing physical growth and that there weren't enough left for intelligence.

Ash, on the other hand, whose back was deliberately turned, could be depended on to know and understand exactly what happened; she was merely being polite.

Lissar guessed it was Ash's refusal to add to another's humiliation during the puppies' early training that had led to their all being so implausibly willing to leave wrong-doers alone instead of joining into the fray. One of the reasons puppies weren't hunted till their second year was because this restraint was not a general characteristic of the race; Lissar had helped, once or twice, sort out the melee in a back meadow when training turned into a free-for-all. Not, of course, that there had ever been any question that Ash would demean herself by puppy antics; her style, since she had ceased to be a puppy herself, was more in her refusal ever quite to remember that she was not supposed to put her paws on Lissar's shoulders and lick her face any time she chose, whatever Lissar might be doing at the time.

It began to snow mid-morning. They had been running across open land, but Lissar decided-to cut back to the road, to make travelling a little easier. The haunted feeling behind her eyes that told her where she was aiming would keep them from going wrong; but there was no point in falling in snow-covered holes any deeper than necessary, and the holes in the roads were shallower. The snow began to come down heavily. Lissar halted long enough to pull her boots out of her pack, and reluctantly put them on. She felt half lost as soon as her feet were no longer in contact with the earth; but the snow was burning her skin. They ran on.

THIRTY-TWO

THE ROAD GREW STEEPER, AND THE GREY LIGHT BECAME

FAINTER as the trees crept closer and closer to the narrowing road. And then it was no longer a road at all, but a rough track. The dogs, with four long slender legs apiece, seemed never to have any trouble keeping their footing; she, two-legged and top-heavy, was clumsier. As the incline grew their pace slowed, and steaming pink tongues were visible. Ash, who originally led the way, dropped back to stay at Lissar's side; Lissar curled her fingers in the long ruff as she had often done before, although the physical warmth was the least she took from the contact.

They had to camp several nights on the way. It was hard to tell in the snow; one camp, it seemed to her, might have been the same shallow cave Ash and she had huddled in the night after meeting the dragon. Nor could she guess how long it would take them to get to the little cabin she remembered, for she and Ash had wandered for some weeks before she had made up her mind to come down to flat farming country again, and look for people.