Deerskin (44 page)

She said at last: “You’ve come back just this sennight rather than the next for the wedding, I suppose? Leave it to the Moonwoman to have heard of it even from the top of her mountain.”

Lissar found she still could not speak.

“One would expect the Moonwoman to keep track of time well, of course,” said Lilac, “even if your reappearance just now is a trifle melodramatically late. You should get used to it, Deerskin; they’ve been calling you Moonwoman since I first found you, and after you spent last autumn haring around—pardon me, Harefoot—silently catching toros and finding rare herbs and lost children, there was no more chance of your being spared. And Deerskin isn’t your real name either, is it?” Lilac went on without pausing, without looking at Lissar. “And if you’re not thinking of coming back to stay”—here she risked a look up, and Lissar shook her head. Lilac sighed before she went on. “Well, you have yourself and seven dogs to keep, and the Moonwoman will always be welcome.”

“I will give the puppies back.” But her voice was a croak.

Lilac looked down. When she had stood up from examining Ash, the dogs had rearranged themselves around Lissar, as integral a part of her as the spokes of a wheel were to the hub, even if the hub remained unaware of it. “Of course you will,” said Lilac; “and I will fly over the rooftops to get back to the stables with these abominable streamers that simply must be attached to the carriage trappings or the wedding can’t possibly come off. If you’ll wait a little, I’ll come with you to the city; they’ve got every seamstress working on it, they should be done before midday. And stay with me if you’d … rather not go back to the kennels.”

Lissar found her voice at last. “I thank you. I—I don’t know quite what I want to do. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Just—when I heard—”

“It will be pretty spectacular; gold ribbons on black horses, and a golden carriage—real gold, they say, or anyway real gold overlay. He likes showing off, that one.”

“He?” said Lissar, slowly. “It’s not Trivelda?”

“Trivelda?” said Lilac. “She’s not getting married till summer, and it won’t happen here in all events; the Curn has fallen on his feet there. The wedding Trivelda’s parents will lay on for her should gratify even his vanity, though the country will be paying for it into their grandchildren’s time.”

“But …” faltered Lissar. “But I thought Ossin …”

“Ossin’s not getting married,” said Lilac, watching her closely. “Certainly not to Trivelda. He wasn’t very nice to her at the ball, you know; went off in the middle of it and only came back at the very end with this really lame excuse about a sick dog. You could see poor Clementina turning pale even from where I was standing; and Trivelda’s father turning purple. I found out what he’d said later, about the dog, I mean; my friend Whiteoak was waiting on Clementina that night, and just then standing very near.

“You might accept that excuse, or I, but not our Trivelda. She was furious. I gather she hadn’t liked the ball very well anyway; there were too many low people there from places like the kennels and the stables. No, she’s marrying the Curn of Dorl, who attended her beautifully all that otherwise unsatisfactory evening, blinking his long curling eyelashes and comparing his soft pink hands and smooth round fingernails with hers, I imagine.”

Lissar barely heard most of this. “Then who—?”

“Camilla. Ossin’s sister.” Lilac frowned. “It’s all been very quick; it’s only two months ago his emissaries arrived, and he followed them … well, I’m not the only one who thinks there’s something a little too hasty about it; but there isn’t anything anyone can point to about its being wrong.

“Camilla is willing; of course it’s very flattering for her. I don’t think she ever really loved the Curn, but it must have been a little hard on her, and she’s so young; but I really think that it’s not the flattery alone, but the feeling that she’s doing her best by her own country by making so grand a match. She’s like that, you know. Not much sense of humor but a lot of responsibility—and she’s always been like that, since she was a baby.

“And it’s flattering for the whole country, come to that. If the stories are right his palace is about the size of our city. Cofta and Clementina are a little dazed, I think, but Ossin would stop it if he could, because Camilla is so young; but he has nothing to work with, the rest of the family and all the court sort of smiling bemusedly and saying but it’s such an opportunity for her as if marriage were a kind of horse race, where if you see a gap between the leaders you automatically drive for it. And Camilla herself has a will of iron, and she’s decided that she is going to do this. It’s not that she loves him; she’s barely met him, and he’s very stiff and proud.”

“I—I thought the heir was supposed to marry first,” said Lissar, wondering why she felt no relief that Ossin was not to marry.

“Ah, yes, that is sticky. But I think Cofta and Clem are a bit put out at the way he missed his chance—again—worse than missed it—with Trivelda, and are glad to be marrying anyone off. It’s also why Ossin’s not in a good position to try and stop it. 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.

T
HIRTY
-S
IX

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?