Deerskin - Robin McKinley

And I think probably at least partly why Camilla is so set on it: take herself off her parents' hands and do it brilliantly as well. Because it is such a grand alliance, that works against everything too-or for it, depending on your point of view."

There was no reason for the rising panic Lissar felt; she should be feeling-guilty, embarrassed, crestfallen, relieved. But the question came up at once: why had she been drawn here so urgently for Ossin's sister, whom she barely knew; as it was not to show herself that she had done right-that Ossin had returned to his proper track-in fleeing him, six months ago, then why? She had thought she must be coming here to set that part of her life finally aside. She felt as if she were standing in a world suddenly strange, as if she had looked around and discovered the trees were pink and orange instead of green; her mind spun, and yet the directional buzz was as strong as ever. She had come to where she was supposed to be; but she had never come to the place directed before and not known what she was to do there.

The urgency boiled up all the higher, pressing against the inside of her ribcage, against her heart, feeling like a fist in her throat: she swallowed. "Who-who is it Camilla is to marry?"

"I can never remember his name. He's old-a lot older than Camilla-his wife died some years ago, and he went into seclusion for some time then, and then his only daughter died five or six years ago, and he withdrew again, but this time when he came out I guess he realized he had to marry again since he had no heirs, and I guess he decided to waste no time.

"I remember-he or his ministers sent Ossin, or Goldhouse, a portrait of his daughter not too long before she died, and everyone here wondered why, even us farmhands, because a big powerful king like him who can afford a golden coach for his bride was certainly not going to marry his only child to a tin-cup prince of a back-yard kingdom like ours-where a wedding coach is just the same as any other coach with a few posies tied to the rails, except that there's usually no coach at all.

There was a whole swarm of courtiers who came with the portrait, the whole country knew about it. We thought he must just be puffing out his importance. And now it's him going to marry our princess. I still can't remember his name. Oh, wait-his daughter's name was Lissla Lissar. Funny I remember that, but it's such a pretty name. Her mother had been called the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms and she supposedly took after her-I never saw the portrait. I've even heard a story that old Cofta paid court to the mother before he settled down with Clementina.

Deerskin-are you all right?"

Lissar seized the arm held out to her. "They-they aren't married yet?" Lissar shook her head, failing to clear it, although the directional hum was gone, vanished with Lilac's words. "I don't even know what your marriage rituals are."

"Noo, they're not married yet," said Lilac, looking worriedly into Lissar's face.

"But as good as, or nearly. They're taking their vows today, although the public show and the party for everyone who can walk, ride or crawl here is tomorrow-the one we can go to-the one the golden coach is for. They aren't really married till tomorrow. She sleeps alone with her ladies in the next room, one last time, tonight.

She only turned seventeen a few days ago-but she forbid any notice to be taken of it, saying it was her marriage that mattered. She's so young ... Deerskin, what is the matter?"

"Where?"

"Where do they take their vows? In the throne room. Not the receiving-room, where you went your first day. The throne room is behind it, smaller, and grand.

Very grand. It's not used much. Is it that you know something about him?"

Lissar's eyes slowly refocussed on her friend's face, but her own face felt stiff and expressionless. "Yes-I know something about him."

There was a tiny silence, a silence unlike any either of them had experienced before, as if the silence were a live thing, making space for itself, expanding, pushing the noise of the inn and the crossroads back, so that the two of them stood in another little world: a little world where it was known that this king was no fit husband for the young, kind, responsible princess Camilla. No fit husband for any woman.

"It is curious, I was so sure I would see you today, I kept looking out of the front window. I told myself I was just bored, that I was thinking of you because this is where we first met. But I was really expecting you. The ceremony will be read out at midday; you'll have to hurry. Do you want my horse?" Lilac's words dropped into the silence, echoing, almost, as if they stood in a chamber with thick bare walls.

Lissar shook her head. "No; the dogs and I will make our own way quicker; but I thank you."

Lilac smiled a little. "It's true, it would look odd, the Moonwoman on horseback; they'll make way for you more quickly, this way."

"I am not the Moonwoman."

"Perhaps you are not, after all; would the Moonwoman not know what she had come for? But then the stories never say that she always knows what she'll find; only that she arrives in time. Sometimes just in time."

Lissar was already gone; Lilac touched her cheek where her friend had kissed it, knowing that she had done so and yet not remembering its happening. She could not even see Lissar on the road ahead of her.

THIRTY-SIX

IT MUST HAVE BEEN TRUE, WHAT LILAC SAID, FOR LISSAR FOUND

nothing but empty road spinning out before her. She was dimly aware of people lining the narrow clear way, dimly aware of the noise of them, but she seemed to move in the little world of silence that had been born in her last words to Lilac, silence undisturbed by the quietness of her bare feet striking the ground, and the dogs' paws. For they ran swiftly, the last desperate effort before exhaustion; but that last effort was a great one, and so seven dogs and one Moonwoman fled, fleeter than any deer or hare, and the people rolled back before them like waves, parting before the prow of a ship running strongly before the wind.

It was a long way from the crossroads to the last innermost heart of Goldhouse's city, and the woman and the dogs were already tired, for they had come far in a very short time. Ash ran on one side of Lissar, Ob on the other, and the other five ran as close behind as the afterdeck rides behind the bow. The wind whistled out of their straining lungs, and flecks of foam speckled the dogs' sides, but there was no faltering; and the people who saw them go would tell the story later that they moved like Moonbeams. Some, even, in later years, would say that they glowed as the full Moon glows, or that mortal eyes saw through them, faintly, as Moonlight may penetrate a fog.

But Lissar knew none of this. What she knew was that she had to get to the throne room before Camilla's vows were uttered; somehow, that Camilla should merely be bodily rescued was not enough.

Those vows would be a stain on her spirit, and a restraint on her freely offering her pledge to some other, worthier husband; that Camilla should have that clean chance of that other husband seemed somehow of overwhelming importance to Lissar; that she was driven by her own memory of fleeing from Ossin on the night of the ball did not occur to her. But having lost her own innocence she knew the value of innocence, and of faith, and trust; and if she could spare another's loss she would.

What the people she passed saw was a look of such fear and rage and pain on the Moonwoman's face that they were moved by it, moved in sorrow and in wonder: sorrow for the mortal grief they saw and wonder that they saw it. For they were accustomed to the Moon going tranquilly about her business in the sky while they looked up at her and thought her beautiful and far away. They knew the new tales of the lost children, and the cool bright figure with her hounds who returned them, but the stories shook and shivered in their memories as they looked at her now among them, running the streets of their own city, and with such a look on her face. Their hearts smote them, for they had believed her greater than they. And some of these people fell in behind her and followed her to Goldhouse's threshold, hurrying as they could, with some sense that even the Moonwoman might like the presence of friends, mere slow mortals that they were.

"Tomorrow," said Longsword the doorkeeper, standing as if to bar the way.

"Today is for the family, and for the private words; tomorrow is the celebration for everyone, and we look forward to seeing you all." But Longsword was not a strong swordarm only, and he remembered Deerskin, and read her face as had the people who followed her now; and the official words died on his lips, which turned as pale as the Moon. "Deerskin," he said, in quite a different voice. "What ails-?"

"You must let me pass," said Lissar, as if Longsword's duty were not to bar those from the king's door that the king had decreed should be barred; as if she had the power to direct him. But he stood aside with no further question, and she ran by him, her dogs at her heels, having paused for less time than it takes to draw a breath on the doorstep.

She did not remember the way, but the urgency guided her as clearly as any beckoning finger; as clearly as she had ever known, in the last year, where to find a missing child, or a cabin on a mountaintop. She burst into the receiving-room, where a number of grandly dressed people waited to be the first to congratulate the newly married pair. Their natural impulse was to recoil from so abrupt and outlandish an intrusion as that of a barefoot woman in a rough plain white deerskin dress, her wild hair down her back, accompanied by seven tall dogs. What was Longsword doing?

Why had he not called up his guards?

And so Lissar was past them before they had any thought of what to do to stop her; none had looked into her face. And she flung open the doors to the inner sanctum.

The room was big enough to hold two hundred people, and the picture they made, in their richest clothes, against the backdrop of the finest possessions of Goldhouse's ancestors, was a spectacle to dazzle the eye; no evidence here of a tin-cup, back-yard kingdom, with precious gems and metals wrought into graceful forms and figures shaping the room like a chalice. But the company, as they turned, in horror, toward the crash of the doors striking the walls, were themselves dazzled by the sight of a woman, so tall her head seemed to brush the lintel of the door, blazing like white fire, and guarded by seven dogs as great and fierce as lions.

She was so tall that as she strode into the room, even those farthest from her could see her towering head and shoulders above the crowd, her flame-white hair streaming around her like an aureole.

The group on the dais at the far end of the crowded room turned also to look toward the door. Lissar saw five frightened faces turned toward her: Ossin, Camilla, the king and queen, and the priest, whose hand, which had been upraised, dropping stiffly to his side again, as if released by a string instead of moved by conscious human volition.... The sixth figure remained facing away from the door a moment longer: as if he knew what the sound of the crashing doors meant, that his fate and his doom had arrived.

And so Lissar's first sight of her father in five and a half years was of his broad back. He stood as tall and proud as he ever had, and he stood too as a strong man stands, his feet planted and his shoulders squared; like a man who feared nothing, like a man who might have brought a leaf from the tree of joy and an apple from the tree of sorrow as a bride-present to his truelove's father, and thought little of the task. And yet, staring at his back, what she remembered was the look in his eyes, the hot stink of his body, the gauntleted hands hurling her dog into the wall: and that he was also a tall handsome man was like a poor description by someone who was a careless observer. His golden hair was as thick as ever, though there was white in it now, which had not been there five years before.

Lissar glanced once, only once, at Ossin; she could not help herself. And she saw his lips shape the name he knew her by: Deerskin. She did not understand the fear in his face; anger she would have expected, anger for this intrusion, anger after their last meeting, to meet again after what had passed between them, in these circumstances: anger she would have understood and submitted to. She did not like it that Ossin should look at her with fear. But she could not deny her poor heart one more look at his beloved face; and her heart saw something else there, love and longing, stronger than the fear. But this she discarded as soon as noticed, telling her heart it was blind and foolish.

Then she turned back to the task she had come to do, and prepared not to look at Ossin again, ever again. But she let her eyes sweep over the rest of the group before the priest, and saw the fear in their faces too, and wondered at it, and wondered too that in none of their faces was recognition; it was only Ossin who had known who she was.

"Father!" said the blazing woman; and the doors slammed shut again, but as they jarred in their frames they shattered, and through the gaping hole a wind howled, and lifted the tapestries away from the walls, and the great jewelled urns shivered on their pedestals, and the light through the stained glass turned dull and faint and flickering, like a guttering candle, though it was a bright day outside. Several people screamed, and a few fainted.

And the foreign king who was to have married Camilla turned slowly around and faced his daughter.

"You shall not marry this woman, nor any woman, in memory of what you did to me, your own daughter," said the blazing figure; and the people in the receiving-hall heard the words, borne on a storm-wind, as did the people who had followed the Moonwoman's race through the city; as did Lilac, who sat, her head in her hands, on the edge of a water-cistern at a crossroads where not far away seamstresses sat embroidering streamers of gold and felt their fingers falter, and a chill fall on them, for no reason they knew, and they suddenly felt that the streamers so urgently ordered would never be used. But Lilac, her head in her hands, heard no storm-wind; the words Lissar spoke, over a league away, in Goldhouse's throne room, fell into the silence around her, the silence that had held her since Lissar had left her, and the words were as clear as if Lissar had returned and stood before her.