Deerskin

"You can, but it will brand you worse than your feet. Call them `your greatness.'

`Splendor' is unfashionable here. Like lap-dogs."

Lissar nodded again, and made her way down the hall, to the yawning doors. One of the keepers said to her cordially, "Welcome. You are here for the general receiving?"

Lissar nodded, hoping it was not necessary to speak. Evidently it was not; the doorkeepers were accustomed to ordinary folks' stage fright upon the prospect of being introduced to royalty. "Go straight in; you will see there is a place to wait. You will have your turn; do not worry. The king and queen see everyone who comes. Not only the prince is here today, but the princess, and the Cum of Dorl," he added, as if she would be glad to hear this; she smiled a little at his tone.

With her smile, he seemed to focus on her at last, to forget his prepared announcement for a moment; and his eyes swept over her, her white hair, black eyes, deerskin dress, bare feet, silver-fawn dog; and something came into his face, something like what she had seen in the faces of Lilac's fellows, and again she did not want to understand, to guess at a name for it. She turned her own eyes away, and went through the door.

She was aware of a number of things simultaneously, too many things, and this confused her. She was still more accustomed to being among crowds of trees than crowds of people, and she was unaccustomed to the pointless (it seemed to her) movement and gestures, the purposeless chattering of human crowds. She remembered the forest, the mountains, with longing, where one day was much like the next, where the priorities were simple and plain: water, food, warmth, defense.

Sound had meaning in the wild; as also did smell. She felt suffocated by the smells here, perfume and tobacco and too-rich food.

There was something else as well; with every breath and step she expected to see and hear ... something other than what she saw and heard; yet her expectation was always a little before or behind her thought, and she could never identify it. It made her feel off-balance, as if she were walking on the swaying limb of a tree instead of on solid earth. Just now, for example, as she stepped through the door, she lifted her eyes to see the portrait at the end of the long room ... and yet this was a square room, and there were no portraits; tapestries of hunting scenes hung on the walls, interspersed with sconces and niches. What portrait? And why was the absence of an imaginary portrait such a relief?

She did not know, and yet her eyes would not quite focus on what lay around her now, even as her mind could not quite bring into recognition what her eyes looked for.

She shook her head and moved cautiously to her left. The blaze of colors-the density of perfumes--0n her right told her that this was not where the common supplicants waited. There was quite a little group of the latter, smelling reassuringly human, and so she had some time to look around her before it was her turn to present herself to the king and his family.

She found them first. The royal family sat on a dais near the center of the room-a little nearer the back wall, where tall doors opened and closed beneath the sconces and between the tapestries, than to the single huge door by which she had entered. A series of tall chairs stood on the dais, but she could identify the king and queen by their attitude as well as by the fact of their chairs being the tallest and most central.

She identified the prince next, for his location at the king's right hand, and by the long narrow dog-face poking out from behind his chair. Without Lilac's description she might have guessed that the young man at the queen's left must he the prince, for he sat and looked about him in a more princely manner. Between the queen and the young man sat a young girl. Her cushioned chair was backless, and yet she sat straight and still and poised; and there was a golden circlet upon her head, which declared her the princess. The prince was bare-headed.

The receiving moved briskly. She believed that the king and queen did listen to each of their subjects, however humble both in appearance and in the tale each had to tell; even at this distance she could see the expressiveness of their faces, hear the responsive lone of their voices when they asked questions or made rulings. Mostly, she thought, the rulings were popular; most sets of shoulders on the people leaving the royal presence were square and relieved.

She wished the rumble of conversation around her would diminish that she might hear what was said around the dais. It was not that the voices of those she wanted to listen to were so far away or so soft; it was that she could not distinguish one voice from the next. She could only listen to all of them at once and therefore understand nothing. This was a knack, she thought, one that she had perhaps had in her old life; it would come back to her. Meanwhile she took in, without wanting to, the tale of the old woman behind her and her sickly only son, and the tale of the old woman with her, whose previous husband had come back from the dead, as she had supposed, and not to wish ill upon the living since it now seemed he was living, but she had liked him better dead, for he was a ne'er-do-well and her second husband suited her much better, and she wished to keep him. These voices fell the nearest upon her ear, and she could not turn her listening away from them.

Ash had stayed quietly at her side, pressed up against her, her wide brown eyes moving quickly, her fleethound's muscles vibrating faintly at all the tempting or dubious shadows and sudden bursts of motion; but she was no longer a puppy, and not only her own dignity but her person's demanded she stay where she was.

As the crowd before her thinned, Lissar could see the folk on the dais more clearly. She liked the queen's brightness of eye, the king's ready smile; she Jiked that bath of them were quietly dressed (not all of their court were so modest); she liked that they seemed to speak no more than was necessary. She liked that neither of them was handsome.

The young man to the queen's left was handsome. His hair was thick and curly, his eyes large and brilliant, his lashes long, his hands slender and graceful: Lissar could see the women, young and old, look at him when they went to address the king and queen; and they looked long and longingly. The young man looked back, smiling, without arrogance, but with a kind of selfconsciousness that Lissar did not like. He rarely spoke, and then only if the king or queen spoke to him first.

The princess was not beautiful in the common way, but she drew the eye and then held it. There was something about her, as if she were always poised on the brink of doing something surprising and wonderful; an air as if she too believed she were about to do something surprising and wonderful. Sitting so close to the beautiful young man neither put her out of her composure, nor put her in the shade of his more predictable beauty. She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.

The prince spoke as little as possible, and there were long pauses before his answers, if a question was addressed to him. But she noticed that everyone, including the king and queen, paid sharp attention when he did speak, and her impression was that his words on more than one occasion had significant influence on the outcome of the particular situation under discussion. This was, she thought, reassuring, as there was so little at all princely in his demeanor.

He was probably tall, though it was difficult to be sure, for he hung in his chair as if he rested on the middle of his spine instead of his pelvis; and he sprawled over one arm of the chair as well, his head negligently propped on one fist. His hair, though thick, was inclined to be lank, his eyes were a little too small, his nose a little too square, his chin a little too large-as was his waistline. His hands were big and broad, and either of his boots looked long enough for a yerig to den in. As she was thinking this, he uncrossed one leg from the other and stomped that foot on the floor; she startled, as if he had known what she was thinking, and her involuntary movement, for some reason, among all the gaudy motion of the court, caught his eye.

It was almost her turn; perhaps he had been looking her way already, searching longingly for the end of the queue, the end of this afternoon's work. He looked, and his gaze paused. She knew what he saw: a black-eyed, white-haired woman in a white deerskin dress; she was an exotic figure, enough taller than the average that she stood out even before the oddity of her clothing (and bare feet) might be remarked.

And she was growing accustomed to the way other people seemed to leave a little space around her; it was no different from her feeling separate from the rest of humanity, though she had no name for what the separation meant or was made of.

And, whatever the truth of it was, she was glad to be spared the closest proximity of the crowd. Then the woman ahead of her stepped forward, and Lissar stood next in line, and the prince saw Ash.

He straightened up in his chair then, and she saw that he was tall; she also saw that he was capable of enthusiasm, and not so sluggish as she would first have guessed. His eyes brightened, and he shoved his hair back from his forehead. He was paying no attention whatsoever to the woman now telling her story.

With his motion, two long narrow heads rose from behind his chair; or rather, the one she had already noticed rose as the dog sat up, and a second head appeared around the shoulder of the first. One was fawn-colored, a little more golden than the silvery Ash; the other was brindle, with a white streak over its muzzle, continuing down its chin, throat and chest. The two looked first in response to their master's interest, and then they, too, saw Ash. Ash went rigid under Lissar's hand.

The king and queen said something to the woman before them, and she bowed, slowly and deeply, and made her way to the door all the supplicants left by, different from the one they had entered, a smaller and simpler door, as if exiting was a much easier, less complex and less dangerous matter than was the feat of going in in the first place. It was Lissar's turn, and she had heard nothing of what had just occurred between the woman next to her in line and the king and queen, for she had been distracted by the prince and his dogs. Now she had to go forward without the reassurance of seeing someone else do it first. She walked forward.

The prince's eyes were on her dog, the king's on her dress, and the queen's on her feet. She did not notice where the handsome young man's eyes rested, or the princess's, or if perhaps they might have found her too dismaying an object to look at straight at all. Her bare feet were silent on the glossy floors, against which even the softest shoes were liable to tap or click; Ash's nails were well worn down from the many leagues she had travelled with her person, and so she too made no sound.

Lissar felt that the whole court had fallen silent though she knew this was not true; but a little bubble of silence did enclose the dais. The two dogs rose fully to their feet and came to stand by the prince's chair; an almost negligent wave of his big square hand, however, and they stopped where they were, although their tails and ears were up. Ash was Lissar's shadow, and she stopped when Lissar stopped, but Lissar kept her hand on her shoulder, just to reinforce her position. She bowed, still touching her dog.

"Welcome to the yellow city," said the king in a friendly voice. "I say welcome, for I have not seen you before, and I like to think that I see most of my subjects more than once in their lifetimes. New you are at least to this our city, I think."

"Yes, your greatness, and to your country as well; and so I thank you for your greeting." Lissar hesitated, uncertain how to proceed. "I-I was told that you would hear anyone who presented herself to you. I-have little to present. But I-think I would like to stay here, if I could, and so I need work."

"What can you do?" said the prince, not unkindly. The handsome young man laughed, just a little, gently, and at that moment Lissar decided she disliked him. Her eyes moved in his direction and she noticed the princess sitting straitly on her bench, and thought that for the moment she did not look poised, but stiff, as if her backbone had turned to iron. She thought, The princess does not like the handsome young Cum of Dorl either: but what does she think of her brother?

She looked at the prince as she answered honestly: "I do not know what I can do." She did not know what inspired her to add: "But I like dogs."

"Where is yours from?" said the prince. "If it were not for her long coat, I would say she is a line of my breeding."

"Ossin," said the king.

The prince smiled, unabashed, and shrugged, as if to say that a dog was a dog and he could not help himself. The Cum of Dorl made a little, catlike wriggle in his chair, and for a moment his beautiful profile presented itself to Lissar, and out of the corner of her eye she caught the curl of his lip; but she remained facing the prince.

The humor faded from Ossin's face and now she realized that he looked tired and sad, and that the droop of his shoulders as he slumped forward again was of a weary burden. He said softly, "One of my best bitches died this morning. She left a litter of puppies a few hours old. The pups haven't a hope unless they are nursed most carefully; they probably haven't a hope even with nursing, but I dislike giving up without a struggle-and their mother was a very special dog. There are eight of them. If any survive it will have been worth almost any price to me. Would you care to play wet-nurse? It will be disgusting work, you know; they'll be sick at both ends right up through weaning time, most likely, if any should live so long, and you won't get much sleep at first."

"I will do it," said Lissar, "but you will have to teach me how."

TWENTY

THAT WAS THE END OF HER AUDIENCE; SHE BOWED, AND IF SHE did not include the Cum in her courtesy, she doubted that anyone noticed but herself.

The prince spoke a few words to a servant, who came to Lissar, bowed himself, and said, "If the lady will follow me." Lissar thought to bow again to the dais because the servant did; somewhere she recalled that one always bows last thing before leaving the royal presence, even if one has already bowed several times previously.

Somehow she remembered this from the wrong angle, as if she were sitting on the dais.... She followed the servant, leaning a little on Ash as a brief wash of dizziness assailed her.

The servant led her to a small antechamber off a vast hall similar to the one she had entered by. She sat down when the man bowed her to a chair, but she was not comfortable, and as soon as he left the room she stood up again, and paced back and forth. Ash remained sitting next to the chair with her chin propped on its seat but she kept an eye and an ear toward Lissar. Lissar was thinking, I have been in the wilds too long, this great building oppresses me. Why do I remember sitting while someone bows to me? I am an herbalist's apprentice-an herbalist's apprentice who has lost most of her memory to a fever she was not clever enough to cure herself of.

And yet her own thought rang strangely in her head, for a voice very like the one that had spoken to her on the mountain, the voice that had left her without guidance since she and Ash had come down from the wild lands, said, It is not that you have been in the wilderness too long. But this brought her no comfort; instead she felt angry, that she was permitted to understand so little; that even her own mind and memory spoke warily, behind barricades, to each other, without trust; that her guiding voice was not to be relied on, but spoke like an oracle, in riddles that she must spend her time and thought to unravel, to little effect.

She began to feel caged, began to feel that there was something searching for her; perhaps the creature whose gullet led to the royal receiving-room would tear itself free of its bondage and come looking for her. She heard a distant rumble like roaring, she heard a swift panting breath.

She started violently when a long nose was thrust into her hand, but as she looked down into Ash's brown eyes she recognized the panting breath as her own.

Deliberately she slowed her breathing, and she had regained her self-possession when the servant re-entered the room, another servant on his heels, bearing a small table, and yet another servant behind him, carrying a tray. Lissar, standing, still breathing a little too hard, barefoot, in the middle of the velvet-hung room, longing for her mountains, suddenly laughed, and then the roaring in her ears went away entirely. With the laugh she felt strangely whole and healthy again.

She looked with interest at the plate of fruit and small cakes on the tray, and was spilling crumbs down herself (which Ash swiftly removed as soon as they touched the floor) when the prince entered without warning.

She stopped chewing, and bowed, half a cake still in one hand. "By all the gods and goddesses, high, low, wandering or incarnate, never bow to me unless I'm pinned to that blasted chair in that blasted room," he said feelingly, "or, I suppose, if my parents are present, or my sister-she's suddenly gotten very conscious of her standing-that's Dorl's doing, drat him, and she doesn't even like him. Pardon me," he said, his voice a little calmer. "All my staff knows not to bow to me, that's my first instruction, but usually-I hope-handed out a little more graciously. It has not been a pleasant afternoon, and I was up all night. I didn't want to believe that Igli would let herself die on me.

"But today has been worth it--even with Dorl there-to have someone to take care of the puppies. My regular staff are all falling in each other's way to avoid it; they all have better sense than I do, and it's a grim business watching little creatures die when you're wearing yourself out trying to keep them alive."

He was not as tall as she had expected, looking up at him and his big booted feet on the dais from her place on the floor; but he was broad-shouldered and solid, and his feet were still big, even looking down at them from standing height instead of having them at chest level. "Come on, then, I'll introduce you to them."

He picked up a piece of fruit from the table and paused a moment, looking at Ash. He frowned, not an angry frown but a puzzled one. "It's true, I don't know northhounds much, but she looks so much like another bitch of mine who died a few years ago-never threw a bad pup, all her children are terrific. She was my first really top-quality dog, and when I was still a kid I gave too many of her get away to impress people-too dumb, or obsessed, to realize that most people, particularly the so-called nobility, who are, I suppose, obliged to have other things on their minds, don't know the difference between a great dog and an ordinary one. Even those who can tell a good dog from a bad one. I look at yours and I could swear. . ." He shook his head.

Lissar cast her mind back; but in the anxious, pleading, elusive way her fragmented memory now presented itself to her, she could not remember exactly how Ash had come to her. She remembered the kind man handing her an armful of eager puppy.... She remembered wearing a black-ribboned dress, as if she were in mourning.... She looked down at her dog, who, conscious of her person's gaze, moved her own from this interesting new person who smelled so fetchingly of other dogs, to meet Lissar's eyes. Her ears flattened fractionally. In public, on her dignity in the presence of a stranger, she was not going to do anything so obvious as wag her tail, or rear up on her hind legs, put her paws on Lissar's shoulders, and lick her face.

"She was a gift," Lissar said finally. "I do not know where she came from," she added truthfully. It was hard to think of her life before Ash, as if trying to remember life before walking or speech. She knew, theoretically, that such a period existed in her history, but it was very vague, as if it had happened to someone else. As if the rest of my life were not vague, she thought, in a little spasm of bitterness.

"Wherever she came from, she is obviously your dog now," said the prince, who could read dogs and their people, and knew what the look Ash was giving Lissar meant, even without tailwagging.

He had idly eaten the remaining cakes on the tray, and now he went through the door. Lissar followed with Ash at her heels; just outside the two dogs that had sat behind the prince's chair sprang to attention. Ash stopped and the other two froze; heads and tails rose, toplines stiffened. Ossin looked from one to the next. "Nob, Tolly, relax," he said, and tapped the nearer on the skull with one gentle finger. "I hope yours isn't a great fighter," he added, as his two moved forward on only slightly stiff legs.

Lissar thought of the black dog that had chased them, and said nothing.

There was some milling about-Ash did some extremely swift end-to-end swapping when she felt the two strangers were taking unfair advantage of their number-and Lissar noticed with interest that Ash was standing a little ahead and the other two a little behind when all three chose to remember the presence of human beings. "Hmm," said the prince, doubtless noticing the same thing; and strode off.

Lissar and the dogs followed.

They went down a dozen hallways, took two dozen left and right turns, and crossed half a dozen courtyards. Lissar gave up trying to remember the way, and gave herself instead to looking around her, at people and rooms and sky and paving stones, and horses and wagons, and feet and shoes and the size and shape of burdens and the faces of the people and beasts who carried them; and the end result was that she still felt hopeful about the place she had come to.

Many of the people hailed the prince, and many bowed to him, but she noticed that the ones whose greetings he answered the most heartily bowed the most cursorily. There were other dogs, but both Ash and the prince's dogs disdained to notice them.

The kennels smelled of warm dog, straw, and meat stew. Several tall silent dogs approached to investigate Ash; but Ash, apparently feeling that two at a time was enough, raised her hackles and showed a thin line of teeth, and growled a growl so low it was more audible through the soles of the feet than the ears. "Con, Polly, Aster, Corngold, away," said the prince, as carelessly as he had gestured at the two dogs behind his chair; and the dogs departed at once, though there was much glancing over shoulders as they trotted soundlessly back into the kennel hall.

The prince strode after them without pause; Nob and Tolly circled Ash carefully to stay at his heels. Lissar and Ash followed a little more warily. The floor was hard-packed earth, and wellswept; Lissar thought of the double handful she had combed out of Ash that morning, and wondered how often someone swept here, even with short-haired dogs. The hall was lined with half-doors, the tops mostly open and the bottoms mostly shut. One wall by the wide doorway was covered with hooks from which hung a wide assortment of dog-harness.

The roof was much higher on one side than the other, and the high side held a line of windows, so that the entire area was flooded with light (Lissar was faintly reassured to see a few short dog-hairs floating in the sunbeams). The dogs that had come out to look them over were retiring through one or two of the open half-door bottoms; one disappeared through a tall open arch, and Lissar heard: "It is not mealtime, as you perfectly well know, Corngold! Get out of here or I'll lock you up."

Corngold, looking not the least abashed, trotted out again, exchanged looks with Ash, and went off after the others.

Ossin paused and opened the top of one of the half-doors. Lissar stepped forward and looked over the bottom half. There was a small, pathetically small, rounded, lumpy pile in one corner of the small room, which was ankle-deep in straw.

A small window-this room was on the low side of the hall, and the door ran up to the ceiling-let sunlight in, a long yellow wedge falling across the floor and brightening the white-and-brindle rumps of a couple of the tiny puppies in the pile. Lissar could see blanket-ends protruding from under tiny heads and feet.

"There they are," said the prince sadly. "I thought of putting a bitch in with them, but my two most reliable mothers have litters of their own. By the time I found out if one of the others would accept them and start producing milk, if the answer was no, it would probably be too late to try again."

Lissar softly pulled the bolt on the lower half-door and stepped inside. She knelt down beside them and touched a small back, ran a finger down the fragile spine. The puppy made a faint noise, half murmur, half squeak, a minuscule wriggle, and subsided. She looked around. Ash was standing in the doorway with a look of what Lissar guessed to be consternation on her face; Nob and Tolly were nowhere to be seen. There was a water dish with a piece of straw floating in it, near the puppy-heap. The little run was very clean.

"That water dish is doing a lot of good," said the prince irritably. "Jobe-has anyone tried to feed Ilgi's litter?"

Lissar heard footsteps stop. "Hela tried, but I don't think she got too far." The voice was that of the messenger who is not completely sure that his message won't get him killed.

"Oh, get out of here, I'm not asking you to be wet-nurse," said the prince in the same tone. The footsteps began again, quicker this time, and then a pause, and a voice, as if thrown back over a shoulder, "There's six left."

"There were nine born, live and perfect," said Ossin, and there was both anger and grief in his voice. "While they're asleep, I'll show you where your room is-after I ask Berry what's available. Cory's old room, I expect."

Lissar shook her head. "I'll sleep here, if you don't mind, and I have no possessions to keep. Ash will stay with me." She looked up, sitting on her folded legs; the prince was looking at her with an expression she could not read. It might have been surprise, or relief. It was not wistfulness or longing; it might have been hope. "They will have to be fed every couple of hours anyway," she said. "And kept warm."

The prince shook himself, rather like a dog. "As you wish. Washrooms and baths are that way"-he raised an arm, the hand invisible behind the frame of the door.

"Jobe and Hela and Berry can get you anything you need-milk, meal, rags and so on-you and the dogs get the same stew, most of the time, but my dogs eat very well, so it's not a hardship, and the baker is the same one providing bread for my father's table." The prince's smile reappeared, and fell away again immediately. "I have to go attend some devils-take-it banquet tonight, and I will probably be trapped till late. I'll come by when I can, to see how you are doing."

Lissar was aware that his anxiety was for the puppies, not for her, but she said sincerely, "I thank you."

He took a deep breath, and as he turned and the sunlight fell fully on his face, she saw how tired he was, remembering that he had said that he had been up all the night before with the bitch he could not save. "I hope I don't fall asleep in the middle of it," he added. "The count is the world's worst bore, and he always wants to tell me his hunting stories. I've heard most of them a dozen times."

After he left, she went out to find someone who would provide her with the requisites for her attempt at puppy care. Jobe was watching for her, and led her through the open archway that Corngold had been earlier turned away from, where he introduced her to Hela and to Berry, who left at once, several dogs in his wake.

Jobe was lugubrious and Hela brisk, but they treated her as if she knew what she was doing, which she both appreciated and simultaneously rather wished they would condescend to her instead, if the condescension would provide her with any useful advice.

The puppies were beginning to stir and make small cheeping noises, bumbling blindly through the straw, when she returned, looking for someone who was not there. Twilight was falling; as she sat down cross-legged on the floor with her bowl of warm milk and rags, Jobe appeared with a lantern, which he hung on a hook in the wall inside the door to the puppies' stall. "There's an old fire-pot somewhere," he said. "Hela's gone to look. It would be easier if you could heat your milk here, during the nights, when our fire is banked." "Our" fire burnt in the common-room, where the staff-and most of the dogs, come evening-collected, and there was a pot of stew, firmly lidded in case of inquisitive dogs, simmering there now. "And it would give you a little extra warmth, too, as long as . . ."

"As long as I can prevent the puppies from frying themselves," Lissar answered, and saw the faint look of approval cross his long face as he nodded. "Thank you,"

said Lissar. "It would be helpful."

Jobe seemed inclined to linger, but hesitated over what he wished to say. "You'll do your best and all that, of course, my lady, but the prince isn't an unfair man. He knows as well as I do you've a hopeless task, and he won't fault you for it. None of us would take it, you know."

Lissar looked up at him, thinking of her bare feet and long plait of hair. "Why do you call me 'my lady'?"

Jobe's expression was of patience with someone who was asking a very old and silly riddle that everyone knows the answer to. "Well, you are one, ain't you? No more than yon bitch is a street cur. They don't generally let people bring livestock to the receiving-hall, you know." He smiled a little at his own joke, and left her.

TWENTY-ONE

SILENCE FELL AFTER HE LEFT; SHE HEARD THE OCCASIONAL

YIP-these dogs all seemed to bark as little as Ash did-and the occasional crisp word from a human voice. My lady, she thought. I was only the apprentice to an herbalist.

Perhaps this is why the title makes me uncomfortable; I am pretending to be what I am not. But am I not pretending worse than that, in being here at all?

She picked up the nearest puppy, who had blundered up against her foot and was nosing it hopefully. The sounds the puppies made were no louder than rustled straw.

She dipped a rag in the milk, and offered it to the puppy, who ignored it, now exploring her lingers. Its squeaks began to sound more anxious and unhappy, and she noticed that the little belly was concave, and the tiny ribcage through the thin hair felt as delicate and unprotected as eggshell. She squeezed the tiny raw mouth open, and dropped the milky rag inside, but the puppy spat it out again immediately, in its uncoordinated, groping way, and would not suck.

She paused, cradling the pup in one hand. I cannot fail so immediately and absolutely, she thought. If the puppy will not suck, I must pour it down his throat somehow. I wonder what Jobe meant when he said Hela hadn't "gotten too far"?

Had she gotten anywhere at all?

The pup was now lying flat on her open hand, as if it had given up its search; but its little mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. The other puppies were struggling among themselves, some of them falling over the edge of the blanket and trying to propel themselves on their stomachs with dim, swimming motions of their tiny legs.

One very bold one found Ash, and was making as much noise as it could, convinced that it had found what it was looking for, if only she would cooperate. It clambered at her front feet, mewing insistently, while poor Ash stood, her back arched as high as it would go and her four feet tightly together, pressing herself as far into the corner by the closed door as she would fit, desperately willing this importunate small being away, but too well-mannered to offer any force against anything so small and weak.

Lissar's eye fell on the straw that made up the puppies' bedding; or rather on the straws. She picked up a stout, hollow one, blew through it once, then stopped, sucked up a strawful of milk, held it by the pressure of her tongue over the end in her mouth, gently squeezed the puppy's jaws open again, placed the straw in his mouth, and released the stream. The puppy looked startled; several drops of milk dribbled out of the sides of his mouth, but Lissar saw him swallow. And, better yet, having swallowed, he lifted his little blind face toward the general direction the straw-and-milk had come from.

None of the puppies would suck the milky rag, but she squirted strawsful of milk down them all. Even with day-old puppies it took several squirts before Lissar was satisfied with the roundness of their small bellies. Her lips trembled with exhaustion and her tongue was sore by the end of their supper, and she'd worn out several hollow straws, but at least she had not failed her first attempt. The fed puppies were willing to lie more or less contentedly in her lap and around her knees, and Ash, having been rescued from that very dangerous puppy, had relented enough to sit down, although she would not go so far as to lie down. Her eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the puppies in case one should make threatening gestures at her again.

There was a little milk left in the bottom of the bowl, and quite a bit of it on, rather than in, the puppies, Lissar, and the surrounding straw; but there was no doubt that six little bellies were distended with the majority of it. The puppies bestirred themselves erratically to make the small vague gestures at one another that in a few weeks would be rowdy play, including growls, pounces, savage worrying, and squeals from the losers. At the moment they looked like mechanical toys whose springs were almost wound down, and since their eyes were not yet open, even the most daring of them kept losing track of what it was doing.

Lissar looked up to a small noise and saw Hela leaning over the half-door.

"There's supper for you any time you want it. I congratulate you on your empty bowl; I didn't get so far."

Lissar held up her last straw, which looked rather the worse for wear. "Hollow,"

she said; her cheek muscles were stiff, and speaking was awkward. "Mostly they swallowed instead of spitting it up." She rubbed her face. "I'm sore."

"Clever," said Hela, but something in her voice made Lissar look up at her again, and there was that expression, much like what she had seen in so many of the faces she had looked at since she came down from the mountains: something like awe, something like wistfulness, something like wariness.

The prince had not looked at her like that. She wasn't sure, as she thought about it, that she had registered with him at all; he was more interested in Ash than in her human companion. Lilac hadn't looked at her that way either. She thought, Why should I care? I need not care. I have a purpose-these people have given me a purpose-and that is all that matters. I need only be grateful that they have welcomed a stranger. "I have to hope it went into their stomachs and not their lungs-but they wouldn't suck." She gestured at the rejected rag.

She dropped her gaze to the mostly now-sleeping puppies, and smiled.

Tomorrow she would find out how to make her way back to the stables and tell Lilac what had become of her. One puppy was attempting to worry the hem of her dress. She touched its tiny blunt muzzle with a finger, and it turned its attention to her fingertip, chewing on it with soft naked gums. "They don't look anything like fleethounds," said Lissar. "You'd never know."

"They're always like that at first," said Hela. "All puppies look very much alike when they're just born, only bigger or smaller."

"It has no legs at all, or almost," said Lissar, picking up the one who was failing to make progress with her finger. She held it up, and its stubby legs waved feebly.

"And its head is square."

"In a fortnight you'll start to see the head and the legs," said Hela. "Er-haven't you raised dogs before?"

"No," said Lissar. "I've only raised Ash, and she was weaned when I got her. She looked like what she was going to be, only smaller, except for her feet."

"Ah," said Hela. "That explains how Ossin convinced you to take this job-begging your pardon-none of us who knows better will do it."

Lissar nodded, setting the doomed puppy down to huddle among its equally doomed siblings. She was beginning to wish that people would stop reminding her quite so often that she had taken on a hopeless project. "I know. But I have no other job, and-and I like dogs," realizing as she said it that it was what she had said to the prince in the receiving-hall.

Several expressions crossed Hela's face; among them was a look that said that she expected not to understand, but the final look was one of sympathy. "All the more reason not to want to do it, but we're all glad you're here, so I'll be quiet. Do you know about rubbing their bellies to make their bowels work?"

"No," said Lissar.

"Yes," said Hela, with an inscrutable glance into Lissar's face. "Mum'd do it if she was here. We've lots of blankets-the royal kennels have better laundry service than my whole village back home-I brought you some more. Make it easier for cleaning up."

"Thank you," said Lissar.

"And-er-there's a room for you upstairs, when you want it, and I-er-laid out some clothes for you, a tunic and leggings and-er-boots. If they don't fit, we'll find other ones. Ossin's staff also dresses better than most of my village. We-I-er-thought you won't want to get your ... dress dirty. That all comes with the job, the room and board and clothing."

"Thank you," said Lissar again, brushing at a milk-spot on her lap. It was still wet.

It would bead up as it dried, she knew, and brush right off. A tunic might make her less conspicuous, however, which she would prefer; perhaps it would stop some of the strange looks that came to her; perhaps Hela's natural friendliness would win out over her imposed caution.

"Your bitch has never had puppies, has she?" said Hela.

"No."

"She has that look to her," said Hela, amused; " 'what are these things? I don't care! Just take them away!'-How old is she?" There was a pause.

"I'm not sure," Lissar said at last. "I-I have trouble remembering certain things."

Hela flushed to the roots of her hair and dropped her head. "My lady, forgive me," she said in a voice very unlike the one she had used till then; and before Lissar could think of something to say in response, Hela went hastily away. Lissar could hear her quick steps down the main aisle, back toward the common-room.

When Lissar followed her a little later (having produced nothing in response to the belly-rubbing; perhaps there was a trick to it, I would not do to have succeeded at step one and failed at step two; she adamantly refused to let this happen, even if she did not yet see, straight away, what to do about it), conversation stopped as soon as she appeared, barefoot and silent, in the doorway. Yet she had heard what they were discussing as she walked past the heaps of sleeping dogs, for whom she must already bear the correct smell of a fellow pack-member, for none challenged her or Ash. The common-room discussion was of a recent hunt, during which one dog had done particularly well; nothing, Lissar thought, that they should have cared about her, or anyone, overhearing, nor anything that, in a collection of dog people, should have broken off upon the entry of another person.

Jobe stood up and served her a bowl of stew, and set another one down on the floor for Ash. Lissar never quite got over her amazement at how swiftly and delicately Ash could inhale large amounts of food; it was like a magic trick, the mystic word is spoken, the hand gesture performed and presto! the food disappears, without a crumb or speck left behind. Ash looked up hopefully at the bowl in Lissar's hands.

"Come and sit," said a man Lissar did not know. She went and sat, but she did not stay long; the conversation tried to start up again around her, but it lurched and stumbled-barely more deft than a day-old puppy. She set her bowl on the floor for Ash to perform her magic on, took a hunk of bread and a tall mug of malak-whose name drifted into her mind as she tasted it for the first time, in, when?-said

"good-night," and left as silently as she had entered. A chorus of "good-night"

followed her, sounding both eager and sad, like a dog who is hoping for a kind word and doubts its luck. She paused and looked back at them as they looked at her; and realized that they were not anxious for her to Ieave even if they were uneasy in her company. She smiled a little, not understanding, and returned to the puppies' pen.

Some of them in her absence had responded in the desired way to the belly-rubbing, and some cleaning up was in order, since they did not differentiate between one substance, like straw or sibling's body, and the next. Lissar thought, frowning, that she would have to keep track of who needed more belly-rubbing. She sighed; tiredness fell on her suddenly, with the arrival of food in her own belly. She would figure it all out tomorrow.

The fire-pot had arrived while she was at supper, and there was a low, heavy-bottomed jug of milk beside it.

The puppies were all asleep again in their heap, as soon as she set down the cleaned-up ones. She wondered how the ones on the bottom were managing to breathe. She laid out two more of the blankets Hela had brought for a mattress, and lay down herself. Ash was standing by the closed door in alarm: You don't mean we're spending the night in here with-them?

"Come," said Lissar. "You can lie next to the wall, and I will protect you."

She fell asleep in some anxiety, not knowing how she would awaken to feed the puppies again. They could not be left all night, and she was too tired to remain awake. But her anxiety made her sleep lightly, and the first uncertain murmuring protests from the puppy-heap brought her awake at once, staring around a moment in fright, feeling the ceiling leaning down close to her, not able to remember where she was, or what it was that had awakened her. She staggered upright, the ceiling returning to its normal position, and went to warm the milk. Ash, who could ordinarily not be moved by force once she was comfortably asleep for the night, got up at once and perched near her. Ash had a lot to say about the whole situation, in a low rumbling mutter.

Lissar's cheek muscles were aching before the first puppy was fed; by the sixth she was balancing the pup on her knees because she needed her other hand to keep her lips clamped on the straw. Tomorrow, she told herself fuzzily, without moving her lips, I will find an alternative. The puppies were weaving themselves back into their pile; it became impossible in the dim light to differentiate one puppy from the next. The puppyheap was one creature, fringed by tails and a surprising number of feet.

She stroked a nearby back. Two of the puppies were discernibly weaker than the other four. She remembered what everyone kept telling her about the pups' future, and the uselessness and duration of her temporary job; what she was doing was only to reassure the prince that his bitch's last litter hadn't automatically been given up on.

But she wanted to succeed. She didn't want to be reasonable. She wanted the pups to live. She didn't even want four pups to live; she wanted all of the remaining six.

There was a sudden, surprising rush of heat like anger as she thought this; and, warmed and strengthened by it, she began lifting the puppies up again, one by one, and massaging their bellies. Tomorrow she would ask for an old glove, and cut the fingers off , and make a tiny hole in a fingertip, and pour milk down the puppies'

throats that way.

TWENTY-TWO

LISSAR WOKE UP VERY WARM. ONE LARGE DOG WAS KNOTTED UP

against her back and six tiny dogs who had, by some osmosis, slowly oozed their way the short distance across the floor during the night, were now piled up in a small irregular sausage from her breastbone to her thighs. There were various sounds of protest when she moved; a baritone grumble from behind her and a series of fairylike cheeps from before.

"It's morning," she whispered. "Is everybody still alive?" Everybody was. Her throat relaxed, and there was suddenly more room in her chest for her heart to beat.

But the two weak pups had been joined by a third. The worst was a tiny grey bitch, who simply lay limp in Lissar's hand, without moving her head, without making the least fluttering movement with feet or tail. "Don't die," said Lissar, sadly, "don't die": and she was warmed by another swift blaze of anger. "You haven't been alive yet; what did you go and get born for if you're just going to die?"

It was so early there was almost no one else stirring; but Berry was in the common-room grumbling over a shortage of biscuit-meal to make dog breakfasts with, and he found her an old pair of gloves, and a pin to prick with. She took her new supplies back to the puppy pen, sawed off a glove-finger, and prepared to try out her invention. The little grey bitch lay exactly as Lissar had laid her down, looking almost more like a small grey puddle than a dog. She picked her up first.

The pup lay dully in her hand. She weighed so little Lissar felt that if she tossed her into the air, the puppy would float to the ground, whisking gently back and forth like a leaf. Lissar wined her over, cupped her in her hand, and wiggled the little muouth open till she could get the glove-tip inside. The jaw, once open, merely hung slack; the glove-tip would not go in far enough, nor stay put. Lissar wrestled for a minute or two. The milk only leaked out of the puppy's indifferent mouth. She did not swallow, she did not resist; she did nothing. She lay in the position Lissar had pinned her among her own fingers, the any ribcage only barely registering the tiniest of breaths.

Lissar lay the glove-finger down, picked up a straw, stared at it, sighed. She thrust the tip in the bowl of milk, sucked it full, thrust the straw down the pup's throat, and let the milk loose. The pup gasped, coughed, choked-and kicked; the milk all came out again. But the pup was startled; she made a little mewling noise, her blind head trembled, her tiny paws twitched.

Lissar refilled the straw hastily, stuck it not quite as far down the puppy's throat, and released the milk. This time the puppy gasped, choked, kicked-and swallowed.

Very little milk reappeared. The puppy swallowed several more strawsful without further complaint; her little belly had a faint new convexity of outline. Lissar laid her down very tenderly.

As predicted deprecatingly by Jobe and Hela, the puppies all developed diarrhea.

The first night was the last real sleep Lissar had for ten days. Hela helped sometimes, but it was obvious her heart was not in it, and she avoided handling the puppies herself. She said it was because as few people as possible should handle puppies so young; but Lissar did not think that was the real reason. She was grateful for Hela's help in fetching milk and clean cloths, and cleaning up; but she knew that she and the puppies were still ostracized-and the puppies at least, condemned.

Ossin himself was a more valuable assistant. He had looked in and seen them all sleeping, that first night, and gone quietly away again; but after that he came every day. He had no qualms about touching the pups, although at first the little bodies were so dwarfed by his big hands that she wondered how he could cope with handling anything so small. But he fed them more easily than she did-and praised her ingenuity with straws and glove-fingers, although she knew that these ideas were not new, that her ingenuity was only that she was willing to think about how to keep the pups alive and then put her ideas into practice.

He never spoke a sharp or angry word himself, however sharp Lissar's exhaustion made her, and how much she forgot to whom she spoke, or rather, did not speak, for she was too tired for courtesy. He insisted instead that she not forget herself entirely; he brought her her meals occasionally, when those in the commonroom suspected she had missed eating; he sent her off for a nap in the bathhouse ("just don't drown") saying that an hour there would do her more good than an entire night of unbroken sleep.

And once she woke with the horrid awareness that she had slept too long, and saw him with a puppy in one hand and a damp, distended glove-finger in the other; and straw in his hair. He had been there all night; she remembered him bringing her her supper, and how she had sunk down, her head on her arm, to rest for just a few minutes. And now there was early morning creeping through the window.

"All still alive?" she said. It was a reflex. She said these words more often than any others, even when her first words should have been, Your greatness, I am so sorry, why did you not awaken me?

He turned his face toward her, and there was no reproach in it; instead a tired smile curled the corners of his mouth. "Yes," he said, with evident satisfaction, as if her question were the correct response to his presence.

But she was not unaware, and she began to make her belated excuses, whereupon his face closed down and he turned away from her again. "I wish to make your impossible task as nearly possible as-as mortal flesh and blood can. It is I who wished it tried at all, and I who know, none better, that no one will help you but me. I am glad to do it. Here, you"-and he directed his attention to the puppy in his hand, who was attempting to play with the glove-finger instead of nurse from it.

Lissar pushed the hair out of her face, and crawled toward the puppies. Two or three of them now had narrow slits of eye showing between the lids, and most of them were swimming, belly to the floor, fairly actively; occasionally they took a few staggering almost-steps, their little legs crooked out at painfullooking angles, moving like turtles, as if they bore great unwieldy weights on their backs. But there were still two who moved very little, who moved only when they were lifted up for milk, whose heads hung over the palms of the hands that held them if they were not picked up carefully, as if their necks were nothing but bits of string; who would not nurse but needed straws thrust down their throats, who needed the most belly-rubbing and yet simultaneously had the most persistent diarrhea.

Lissar looked at the six of them-all still alive, against the odds-and her heart quailed; there were still long weeks ahead of her before her task could be declared accomplished, success or failure; and if it was over before then it was only because she had absolutely failed. She picked up one of the two smallest puppies, rolling its unprotesting body in her hand; feeling the butterfly heartbeat, and picked up a hollow straw.

Without speaking a word about it, Ossin fell into the habit of spending every other night in the puppy pen; and Lissar got a little more sleep that way, although never again did she embarrass herself by sleeping through the night. The prince stayed sitting up, snoring faintly sometimes as his head dropped to his chest; Lissar lay down, near the wall, with Ash stretched out behind her. Ossin never acknowledged his own regular presence by pressing Lissar to leave the puppies to him and go to her own room, the bed she had never yet slept in; and so Lissar never quite dared protest what he was doing. And at some dim distance she also knew that she appreciated his company, not only for the practical help and human reassurance he provided.

Over the course of every night, wherever the puppy-heap had begun, it rearranged itself to spill over Lissar's hands and feet, or to press against her belly. Ash mellowed to the point where she would not instantly leap to her feet on a puppy's coming in contact with her; but she never offered to let Lissar lie next to the wall either. Lissar woke up sometimes by the sensation of a puppy being gently lifted off her; which meant that the prince had already warmed the milk on the tiny fire-pot, rust-free and freshly blacked, that stood always in the corner of the stall. After this had happened two or three times Lissar woke once to a large shadowy figure reaching down to her, stooped over her, and she sat up with a gasp, throwing herself backwards, against Ash, who yelped.

Ossin straightened up and took a step backwards. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's only me, not a night-monster. We turn them away at the city gates, you know. You can sleep quietly here." He was standing perfectly still, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. She recognized the tone of voice even as it worked on her: he wished to soothe her as he might a frightened dog.

"I-forgive me. I-I must have been having a bad dream, although I ... don't remember it."

The first three weeks were the worst. Not only was there the persistent fear of one of the weaker ones giving up entirely-and the need therefore to feed them oftener because they would swallow or keep down less, and used it less efficiently than the stronger ones-but as soon as they all seemed more or less thriving for half a day, that was a sure sign that one whose health she had begun to take for granted would suddenly reject its food, or cry and cry and refuse to defecate or to settle down to sleep. Lissar worried also that they would strangle on a broken straw, or a shred of blanket; that one of the bigger puppies would smother one of the weaker ones and she would not notice till too late; that she herself would crush one in her sleep, for none of them had any sense about where they disposed themselves around her.

Every time one of the pups coughed she knew it was about to die: that due to her carelessness in thrusting straws down their throats, some milk had gone down the wrong way and produced pneumonia.

But none of them died.

By the end of the first fortnight she had grown accustomed to the sense of trying to climb an avalanche. She still had nightmare fragments during her fragments of sleep; but these nightmares were different from the ones she had had when she and Ash were still alone. These were not about her; and when she woke from them, she had something to do: check the puppies. When she found them all still breathing the sense of release and of peace was so extraordinary that sometimes she sat or lay for several minutes or a quarter hour, thinking of nothing but that her charges were well, and that she was ... happy. She noticed, but did not pursue the thought, that she felt most content with her world on the nights that Ossin was snoring gently in his corner.

She remembered, as if she would remember a dream, that the first days of the Lady's peace had been much like this; but it was different as well, more complicated; this was a peace of wind or running water rather than a peace of solid rock or quiet ground. It was a contentment of motion, of occupation, instead of stillness: it was a contentment more like the Lady herself.

Sometimes it seemed her contentment was not that at all but a mere physical reaction to the numbness of exhaustion. She awakened when the puppies stirred, and her hands began their work while her brain was too tired to recognize what was going on. The little muffled squeaking noises they made, slowly evolving into recognizable canine yips, reassured her even as they woke her up. Sometimes puppy-noises were part of the nightmares, and then her sleeping self laughed and said, It's only the puppies, and she woke up calmly and sweetly.

These uneasy dreams and these awakenings were so very different from ones that she remembered ... remembered ... from before.

And none of the puppies died.

By the end of the third week several of them were almost plump, and walked on their feet instead of paddling on their bellies; and they all had their eyes open, and the grand sweep of breastbone and tucked-up stomach characteristic of all the sighthounds began to be apparent. Some of them were growing coordinated enough to begin knocking their brothers and sisters around. They were developing unmistakable personalities, and with their personalities inevitably came names.

Pur was the biggest, but Ob the most active. Fen and Meadowsweet were still the smallest and weakest. She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.

Ferntongue yawned the most ecstatically, and Harefoot, to Lissar's eye, already had longer legs and a deeper girth than any of the rest. She named them, spoke to them using their names, as if the names were charms to keep them safe; she knew it wasn't over, they could still catch some wandering illness that would kill all six of them in a day or a sennight. But she began to have some real hope, irrational and stupid with sleeplessness as it was, that Ossin might have some reward for his stubbornness.

She did not think in terms of rewarding her own.

As the weeks passed, and the puppies grew and thrived, the look of wistful awe in the faces of the rest of the kennel staff when they looked over the half-door into Lissar's little domain grew so clear and plain that Lissar stopped going into the common-room at all, except to fetch her meals, milk and mush for the puppies, or to ask questions, which were gravely answered. She thought: I have asked questions so ignorant they should shock you; why do you look at me as if I were setting you a trial that you are not sure you will master?

Her heart still hurt her when she looked at her puppies, and yet looking at them was a pleasure unlike any pleasure she could remember; raising Ash had been different, she thought, not only because Ash was a big strong puppy when they met, but because she and Ash had, it seemed to her, grown up together. But those memories were still vague, still hemmed round with walls she could not breach, as solid, it seemed, as real brick and stone.

When she grew very tired, and hallucinations crept round the edges of her vision, she remembered that she was accustomed to hallucinations too. She did not remember why she had spent the last winter on the mountain, but she remembered what it had been like.

She also remembered that the most brutal dream she had had ended with the Lady, the Moonwoman, and that when she had awoken, the supple white dress that now lay folded away on a shelf in a bare little room over the kennels, had remained, as real as she was, as real as Ash's long coat was.

And Ossin was real; realer somehow than Hela or Jobe or Berry or Tig, perhaps because they had given up on the puppies when Ilgi died, and Ossin had not. Or because of the way they looked at her, and Ossin looked at her only as if she were another human being. But when he walked into the pen, it was as if the sunlight came with him.

She remembered him as if he dressed in bright colors: red and green and yellow and blue. And yet his clothing was usually the drab, practical sort one would want to wear in a kennel, when a puppy might vomit over your lap at any moment; although it was true that he often wore bright shirts under his tunics, or that the tunics themselves had bright cuffs or collars or hems. She also thought of his face and hair and eyes as bright, when in fact he was as drab as his clothing, and his hair and eyes were a dull brown. But his smile lit his dull square features as fire lightens darkness; and so when her memory of him startled her when she set her eyes again on the reality, his smile reminded her of what she chose to remember.

Sometimes they kept watch together in the small hours, too tired even to sleep; for while he did sleep in a bed every other night, he was still expected to keep up his other duties as the king's only son and his heir, and he was no less tired than she.

"Fortunately I'm already known as less than a splendid conversationalist," he told her ruefully; "I'm now gaining a reputation as a total blockhead." They talked softly, the puppies clean and fed and asleep, and Lissar's long hairy head- or foot-rest snoring gently.

He talked more than she did, for she had only half a year's experience available to her, and much of it was about not remembering what went before-about fearing to remember what went before; and the rest was not particularly interesting, about hauling water and chopping wood, and walking down a mountain. She did not mean to tell him this, that she did not remember what her life had been, but at four o'clock in the morning, when the world is full of magic, things may be safely said that may not be uttered at any other time, so long as the person who listens believes in the same kind of magic as the person who speaks. Ossin and Lissar did believe in the same kinds of magic, and she told him more than she knew herself, for she was inside her crippled memory, and he was outside.

But one thing she always remembered not to tell him was her name. Since she remembered so little else, and since she had a name-Deerskin-this created no suspicion in his mind; but she wondered at it herself, that she should be so sure she dared not tell him this one fact-perhaps the only other fact she was sure of beyond Ash's name.

He in turn told her of his life in ordinary terms. There were no gaps in his memory, no secrets that he could remember nothing of but the fearful fact of their existence. He was the only son of his parents, who had been married four years before he was born; his sister was eight years younger. He could not remember a time when he had not spent most of his waking hours with dogs-except for the time he spent with horses-or a time in which he had not hated being dressed up in velvets and silk and plonked on a royal chair atop a royal dais, "like a statue on a pedestal, and about as useful, I often think. I think my brain stops as soon as brocade touches my skin."

"You should replace your throne with a plain chair then," said Lissar. "Or you could take one of the crates in the common-room with you."

"Yes," said Ossin, "one of the crates. And we could hire an artist to draw running dogs chasing each other all the way around it, as an indication of my state of mind."

TWENTY-THREE

SPRING HAD PASSED AND THE WARMTH NOW WAS OF HIGH summer.

When Lissar paused on the way to the bathhouse and lifted her face to the sky, the heat of the sun struck her like the warmth of the fire in the little hut had struck her last winter, as a lifegiving force, as a bolt of energy that sank through her flesh to her bones. She took a deep breath, as if welcoming her life back; as if the six small furry life-motes in the kennels behind her were ... not of no consequence, but possessed of perfect security.

It was a pleasant sensation; she stood there some minutes, eyes closed, drinking the sun through her pores; and then Hela's voice at her shoulder, "There, you poor thing, you've fallen asleep on your feet." Lissar hadn't heard her approach. She opened her eyes and smiled.

Two days later she and Ossin took the pups outdoors for the first time. He carried the big wooden box that held all six of them, and she had occasion to observe that the bulk of his arms and shoulders, unlike that of his waistline, had nothing to do with how many sweet cakes he ate. She and Ash followed him, Lissar carrying blankets, as anxious as any nursemaid about her charges catching a chill.

The puppies tumbled out across the blankets. The bolder ones at once teetered out to the woolly edges and fell off, and began attacking blades of grass. They were adorable, they were alive, and she loved them; and she laughed out loud at their antics. Ossin turned to her, smiling. "I have never heard you laugh before." She was silent.

"It is a nice sound. I like it. Pardon me if I have embarrassed you."

She shook her head; and at that moment Jobe came up to ask Ossin something, a huge, beautiful, silver-and-white beast pacing solemnly at his side. It and Ash threw measuring looks at each other, but both were too well-behaved to do any more: or simply too much on their dignity to initiate the first move. Lissar still had only the vaguest idea of the work that went on around her every day in the kennels; she heard dogs and people, the slap of leather and the jingle of metal rings, the shouts of gladness, command, correction-and frustration; smelled food cooking, and the aromas from the contents of the wheelbarrows the scrubbers carried out twice a day.

The scrubbers were not lightly named; they did not merely clean, they scrubbed.

Lilac came to visit her occasionally, the first time the day after Lissar had gone to meet the king and queen in the receiving-hall. By the mysterious messenger service of a small community, word had reached her that evening of what had become of her foundling, and why Lissar had not returned as she had promised. "I knew you would land on your feet," she said cheerfully in greeting.

Lissar, after one nearly sleepless night, and weeks of them to come, and six small dog-morsels threatening to die at any moment, was not so certain of Lilac's estimation of her new position, and looked at her with some irony.

Lilac, who had dropped to her knees beside the puppies, did not see this.

"They're so tiny," she whispered, as if speaking loudly might damage them. "I'm used to foals, who are born big enough that you know it if one stands on your foot."

"I'm supposed to keep them alive," Lissar said, as softly as Lilac.

"You will," said Lilac, looking up, and for just one moment Lissar saw a flash of that look she saw in almost everyone's face. Lilac's eyes rested briefly on the white dress Lissar had not yet changed for kennel clothes; and Lissar wondered, suddenly, for the first time, why Lilac had spoken to her at the water trough, what seemed a lifetime ago already, and was yet less than three days.

The glimpse left her speechless. "You will," said Lilac again, this time turning it into a croon to a puppy, who, waking up, began to crawl toward the large warm bulk near him, cheeping hopefully. This was the one Lissar would name Ob: he was growing adaptable already, and was realizing that more than one large warm bulk provided food.

As the pups grew and blossomed, the names she had at first almost casually chosen, as a way of keeping them sorted out, instead of calling them "white with brindle spot on left ear," "small grey bitch," or "big golden-fawn," began to feel as if they belonged, that they did name; and she slipped, sometimes, and called them by their private names when someone else was near. At first it was only Lilac. Then, one day, Ossin.

"I-I am sorry, your greatness," she said, catching herself too late. "They're your pups; you have the naming of them. It is only that I-I am so accustomed to them."

Ossin shook his head. "No; they are yours, as they would tell you if we asked them. I am sure you have chosen good names for them." After a moment he added:

"I am sure you are hearing their names aright."

She knew that he did not mean that the pups belonged to her, but she was more relieved than she liked to admit that he would let her names for them stand; she feared a little her own tendency to think of names as safety-charms, helping to anchor them more securely to their small tender lives. And the names did fit them; not entirely unlike, she thought, she was "hearing" them, in the prince's odd quaint phrase. "Thank you," she said.

He was smiling, reading in her face that she was not taking him as seriously as he meant what he was saying. "I have wondered a little that you have not named them before; pups around here have names sometimes before their eyes are open-although I admit the ones likèPigface' and `Chaos' are changed later on. And I think you're imagining things about Harefoot, but that's your privilege; a good bit of money-and favors-pass from hand to hand here on just such questions.

"Mind you," he added, "the pups are yours, and if you win races with Harefoot the purses are yours, although I will think it a waste of a good hunting dog. But I shall want a litter or two out of the bitches, and some stud service from at least one of the dogs-Ob, isn't it?-I have plans for that line, depending on how they grow up."

If they grow up, she thought, but she did not say it aloud; she knew in her heart that she was no longer willing even to consider that she might lose so much as one of them, and she kept reminding herself "if they grow up" as if the gods might be listening, and take pity on her humility, and let her keep them. "Of course, your greatness," she said, humoring his teasing.

"And stop calling me 'your greatness.' "

"I'm sorry, y-Ossin."

"Thank you."

A day or so later, watching puppies wading through a shallow platter of milk with a little cereal mixed in, and offering a dripping finger to the ones who were slow to catch on (this was becoming dangerous, or at least painful, as their first, needlelike teeth were sprouting), she heard a brief conversation between the prince and Jobe, standing outside the common-room door. This was at some little distance from the puppies' pen, but conversations in the big central aisle carried.

"Tell them none of that litter is available."

"But it looks like they're all going to live," Jobe said, obviously surprised. "You can always change your mind if something knocks most of them off after all."

"You're not listening," said Ossin patiently. "Yes, they are all going to live, barring plague or famine. They are going to live. That's not the issue. He can offer me half his kingdom and his daughter's hand in marriage for all I care. None of Ilgi's last litter is available. Offer him one of Milli's; that line is just as strong, maybe stronger."

There was a pause, while Jobe digested his master's curious obstinacy-or was it sentimentality? Lissar wondered too. "I've heard the daughter isn't much anyway,"

said Jobe at last.

The prince's splendid laughter rang out. "Just so," he said. "She neither rides nor keeps hounds."

When did I start finding his laughter splendid? Lissar thought, as her fingers were half-kneaded, half-punctured by little gums that were developing thorns.

When she went to the bathhouse now, upon her return the puppies all fell on her, wagging their long tails, clambering up her ankles, scaling her lap as soon as she knelt among them. Even Ash now lowered her nose to them and occasionally waved her tail laconically while they greeted her. Her lack of enthusiasm for them never cured them of greeting her eagerly. She would still spring up, dramatically shedding small bodies, if they tried to play with her when she lay down; but if one or three curled up for a nap between her forelegs or against her side, she permitted this.

Lissar saw her lick them once or twice, absently, as if her mind were not on what she was doing; but then for all her reserve her restraint was also perfect, and she never, ever offered to bite or even looked like she was thinking about it, however tiresomely the puppies were behaving.

Lissar was deeply grateful for this; she could not exile her best friend for objecting to her new job. Perhaps Ash understood this. Perhaps she didn't mind puppies so much, it was more that she didn't know what to do with them.

The puppies grew older; now they looked like what they were, fleethounds, among the most beautiful creatures in the world; perhaps the most graceful even among all the sighthound breeds. Though they were puppies still, they lost the awkwardness, the loose-limbedness, of most puppies while they were still very, young. They seemed to dance as they played with each other, they seemed to walk on the ground only because they chose to. When they flattened their ears and wagged their tails at her, it was like a gift.

She loved them all. She tried not to think about Ossin's teasing about their being hers; she tried not to think of how they must leave her soon, or she them. She knew they would be old enough soon to need her no longer-indeed they no longer needed her now, but she supposed that the prince would let her remain with them to the end of their childhood, and she was glad of the reprieve: to enjoy them for a little while, after worrying about them for so long.

During the days now they wandered through the meadows beyond the kennels, she and Ash and a low silky pool of puppies that flowed and murmured around them. Even on most wet days they went out, for by the time the puppies were two months old, getting soaked to the skin was preferable to trying to cope with six young fleethounds' pent-up energy indoors. Even worrying that they might catch cold was better than settling the civil wars that broke out if they stayed in their pen all day.

Lissar could by now leave them as she needed to, although the tumultuousness with which they greeted her reappearance was a discouragement to going away in the first place. She no longer slept every night in the pen; but then neither did they. Her room was up two flights of stairs, and even long-legged fleethound puppies need a little time to learn to climb (and, more important, descend) stairs; and she had assumed that as weaning progressed she ought to wean them of her presence as well. But the little bare room felt hollow, with just her and Ash in it, and it recalled strongly to her mind her lingering dislike of sleeping under roofs. She thought about the fact that the prince's two favorite dogs went almost everywhere with him (they slept by the door of the puppies' pen on the nights he spent there), and that Jobe and Hela and the others usually had a dog or three sleeping with them.

No one but Lissar had seven. She had crept up very late the first night out of the pen, puppies padding and tumbling and occasionally yelping behind her. She'd been practicing for this with some outside steps conveniently located for such a purpose.

The puppies were ready-they were always ready-for anything that looked like a game; Climbing Stairs was fine with them. Harefoot was the cleverest at it straight away; she and Pur were the two tallest, but she carried her size the more easily. At first they only spent half the night upstairs; two flights were simply too many to have to go up and down more than once, and the puppies were learning that there was a difference between under-a-roof and out-of-doors in terms of where they were allowed to relieve themselves. Fleethounds were tidy dogs, and quick to catch on; but infant muscular control can do only so much. By the end of the first week of the new system, they were waking Lissar up at midnight, and going to stand by the pen door in an expectant manner; although Meadowsweet and Fen took turns needing to be carried upstairs, and occasionally Ferntongue forgot as well. But there were only one or two accidents on the bare, easily cleaned floor of the bedroom, neatly deposited in some corner, well away from the mattress Lissar had dragged off the bed so they could all sleep on it more comfortably.

Her puppies were sleeping through the night by the time they were three months old.

"That's extraordinary," Hela said, when, at three and a half months, Lissar told her this. "That's extraordinary," was also what Hela had said the first time she saw the puppy waterfall pouring down the stairs.

"They're extraordinary puppies," said Lissar proudly, trying not to grin foolishly, at the same time reaching over to pry Fen's teeth out of Pur's rump. But she looked up, smiling, at Hela's face, and there was that look again; the look at Lilac's breakfast table, the look the kennel staff had given her the first evening in the common-room.

The look that had become almost palpable the afternoon she had told the story of Ash and her escape from the dragon. She had only even told it accidentally, uneasy as she was in the common-room, and not accustomed to lingering there. She was there because Ossin was, and because he obviously assumed that she would stay-that she belonged there, as the rest of the kennel staff did.

"No one can outrun a dragon," Jobe said.

"I know. We were lucky. It couldn't have been very hungry, not to have chased us." But she looked around at the faces looking back at her, and did not see "luck"

reflected in their expressions; and she wished she had said nothing.

But Ossin smiled at her, meeting her eyes as the others had not, and said, "Yes, I remember once when Nob and Tolly and Reant, do you remember him? He ran afoul of that big iruku that long winter we had, when he was only four-we were out looking for the signs of a herd of bandeer that someone had brought word of, and we surprised a pair of dragons feeding on a dead one. They're slower, of course, when they're eating, and they never really believe that anything would dare chase them away from their prey, so they aren't all that belligerent, just mean by nature-but we got out of there in a hurry. I gave the order to scatter, so they'd have a harder time, I hoped, deciding whom to chase. I don't know if that's why they decided to leave us alone or not; the dead bandeer was bigger than any of us."

TWENTY-FOUR

THERE WAS MUCH ACTIVITY IN THE KENNELS DURING HIGH summer.

From midsummer through the harvest was the hunting season; winter began early here, and the snow could be deep soon after harvest. Sometimes the last ricks and bales were raked up while the snow sifted down; sometimes the last hunts were cancelled and the hunters, royal and courtier or district nobility and vassal, helped their local farmers, the snow weighing on shoulders and clogging footsteps with perfect democratic indifference. As often as not the stooked fields were turned briefly into sharp white ranges of topographically implausible peaks and pinnacles before the farm waggons came along to unmake them gently into their component sheaves and bear them off to the barns.

The hunting-parties went out as late in the year as they could; while the season lasted-so long as the weather threatened neither blizzards nor heatstroke-Ossin rode out himself nearly every day. The inhabitants of the king's court depended on the huntsfolk and their dogs to provide meat for the table. The court held no farmland of its own, and while the king could tax his farmers in meat, no king ever had. All the wild land, the unsettled land, belonged to the royal family, who leased it as they chose to smallholders, or awarded it to their favorites-or took it back from those who angered or, betrayed them. Their own flocks were the wild beasts of the forests and hills; and wild game was considered finer meat, more savory and health-giving, than anything a farmer could raise. Rights and durations of royal land use leases were very carefully negotiated; if the land was to be cleared for agriculture, then cleared it must be; if it was to be kept wild for hunting, the king had the power to declare, each year, how much game could be taken on each leasehold (the position of royal warden, and advisor to the king on the delicate question of yearly bags, was much prized), and to name who led and maintained any local hunt. (In practice, however, the latter generations of Goldhouses were all good-natured, and almost always said "Yes" to any local nomination.) This also meant that if any aristocratic or royal tastes ran toward chicken or mutton, the noble bargainer was in an excellent position to make a trade.

The prince hunted not only for those lucky enough to live in the king's house, but also for all those that royalty owed favors, or wished to create a favor in, by a gift of wild game, or a lanned skin; for wild leather was also considered superior. The k,ing himself rode with the hunt but seldom any more, but the leather that he and his craftsmen produced was very fine, and it vas not merely the cachet of royalty that produced its reputation. Potted meat from the royal kitchens was also highly prized; no meat was ever allowed to go to waste, no matter how hot the summer, and the apprentice cooks were rigorously taught drying and salting, boiling and bottling.

There was always work to be done in the kennels at any time of year; but as the summer progressed the pace became faster. Lissar initially helped the scrubbers when some of the more senior of these were taken hunting in the hunting-parties.

Hela told her in something like dismay and alarm that other people could do the cleaning-that if she wanted occupation they would use her gladly working with the dogs. Without anyone saying it openly, there seemed to be a consensus that she had a gift for it. It was true that her guess at Harefoot's promise of more than usual speed was already coming true; and it was also true that a nervous dog, in Lissar's company, despite the seven dogs that this company included, was calmer. This had been discovered when they gave her dogs to groom; after Ash, all the short-haired fleethounds seemed almost a joke in comparison, but the touch of her hands most dogs found soothing.

So occasionally they gave her a tired or anxious dog for a few days; and each of those dogs returned from its odd holiday better able to listen to its training and adapt itself to its job. This made no sense on the surface of it, since six of Lissar's seven dogs wished to play vigorously with every creature they met, and could be ruthless in their persistence (only to Ash did they defer); but somehow that was the way of it nonetheless.

Lissar herself did not know why it was true, nor could she explain why it was so clear to her that the small pudgy Harefoot would justify her name soon enough. She did acknowledge that dogs listened to her. It seemed to her merely obvious that the way to make acquaintance with a dog was to sit down with it for a little while, and wait till it looked at you with... the right sort of expression. Then you might speak to it while you looked into each other's face.

She heard, that summer, for the first time, the name Moonwomun spoken aloud.

Deerskin they called her to her face; but Moonwoman she heard more than once when she was supposed to be out of earshot. She thought of the Lady, and she did not ask any questions; she did not want to ask any questions, and when she heard the name uttered, she tried to forget what she had heard.

She and Ash and the puppies, and occasionally one of her fourlegged reclamation projects, often went out to watch the hunt ride out. Particularly on the days when someone wealthy or important was being entertained- "Gods! Give me a sennight when we can just hunt!" groaned Ossin. "If we have many more weeks like this one, with my lord Barbat, who does not like riding through heavy brush, we may be hungry this winter!"-it was a grand, and sometimes colorful, sight. Ossin and his staff dressed plainly, but their horses were fine and beautiful, no matter how workmanlike the tack they wore; and the great creamy sea of fleethounds, most of them silver to grey to fawn to pale gold, with the occasional brindle, needed no ornament. A few scent-hounds went with them, brown and black and red-spotted, lower and stockier than the sighthounds; and then some members of Goldhouse's court attended, bearing banners and wearing long scalloped sleeves and tunics in yellow and red; and if there were visiting nobility, they often dressed very finely, with embroidered breastplates and saddle-skirts for the horses, and great sweeping cloaks and hats with shining feathers for the riders. Occasionally some of these carried hawks on their arms. Lissar had eyes mostly for the fleethounds.

Hela and the other staff left behind sometimes came out as well with half-grown dogs on long leashes. Lissar's puppies were loose (only once had one, Pur, bolted after the hunting-party; when, the next day, he was the only one of them all on a leash he was so humiliated that forever after he would face away from the hunters, and sit down, or possibly chase butterflies, resolutely ignoring everything else around him).

After the party had ridden out, there were lessons in the big field, although occasionally these were shortened if there were visitors waiting to see available pups put through their paces. The prince's interdiction about Lissar's family continued to hold; but Lissar preferred to stay out of the way of these activities nonetheless, just in case someone who could not be said "no" to took an incurable liking to one of her puppies, or merely made the prince an offer he could not refuse, including perhaps half a kingdom and a daughter who did ride and hunt.

It was on one of her long afternoons wandering beyond the cultivated boundaries of the king's meadow that a woman approached her. Lissar had begun wearing her deerskin dress again of late; she found it curiously more comfortable for long rambles, for all the apparent practicality of the kennel clothing standard. She was barefoot, of course, and on this day she had three leashes wrapped around her waist, in case she should need them. The dogs had all registered a stranger long before Lissar could differentiate this human form from any other, the puppies bounding straight up into the air to see over the tall grass, and the other three grown dogs and Ash standing briefly, gracefully, on their hind legs. Ash, as leader, made whuffling noises through her long nose. Lissar was not worried, but she was a little wistful that her solitary day was coming to an end sooner than she had wished.

Ordinarily she would not have stayed away even so long; she had missed out on doing any of the daily chores. But she had the three extra dogs with her today, dogs that Ossin had said of, "These need only one or two of Deerskin's days; but they've been hunted a little harder than they should, and they need a holiday." These three had the usual perfect manners of the prince's hunting dogs, and were no trouble; each of them had looked her mildly in the eye almost at once when she sat down to make their acquaintance; and they showed a tendency to like being petted, as if in their secret hearts they wished to be house-dogs instead of hunters. "One day," she told them, "when you have retired, you will go to live with a family who will love you for your beauty and nothing more, and if you're very lucky there will be children, and the children will pet you and pet you and pet you. Ossin has a list, I think, of such children; he sends his hunting-staff out during the months they are not needed for that work, to look for them, and add names to the list." The fleethounds stared back at her with their enormous dark liquid eyes, and believed every word.

She had spoken to each in turn, cupping her hand under their chins, and smiling at them; and then she had taken enough bread for her, and biscuit for all ten of her companions, for a noon meal. She took a few throwing-stones as well, just in case she saw something she wished to try, for she felt out of practice, and her eyes were still better for the crouched and trembling rabbit in the field than the dogs' were; their eyes responded to motion. Not that there was much chance of any honest hunting whatsoever, with the puppies along; but the three extra adults were helping to keep order, and it would be too bad if she missed an opportunity.

She was aware that she was getting hungry now as the shadows lengthened in the afternoon light, that supper would be welcome; and the two ootag she had in fact been able to kill today would be barely a mouthful each divided eleven ways. But she wasn't hungry enough yet, and there were still several hours of summer daylight. She sighed as the stranger came nearer.

It was a woman; Lissar could see the scarf wrapped around her hair, and then could recognize that the legs swishing through the tall grass were wearing a farmwife's long skirt. As she grew nearer, Lissar was teased by the notion that the woman looked a little familiar; but the thought remained teasing only.

The woman walked straight through the dogs, who were so startled at being ignored that not even the irrepressible Ob tried to leap up and lick her face. When she came to Lissar, who was standing, bemused, still hoping that the woman had made a mistake and would go away, she flung herself at Lissar's feet.

Lissar, alarmed, thought at first she had fainted, and bent down to help her; but the woman would not be lifted, and clutched at Lissar's ankles, her sleeves tickling Lissar's bare feet, speaking frantically, unintelligibly, to the ground. Lissar knelt, put her hand under the woman's chin, and lifted; and Lissar's life in the last eight months had made her strong. The woman's head came up promptly, and Lissar saw the tears on her face. "Oh, please help me!" the woman said.

Lissar, puzzled, said, "I will if I am able; but what is your trouble? And why do you ask me? I know little of this land, and have no power here."

But these words only made fresh tears course down the woman's face. "My lady, I know you are here just as you are. I would not ask were it anything less, but my child! Oh, my Aric! He is gone now three days. You cannot say no to me-no, please do not say no! For you have long been known for your kindness to children."

Lissar shook her head slowly. She knew little of children, to have kindness for them or otherwise; this poor woman had mistaken her for someone else, in her distraction over her child. "I am not she whom you seek," she said gently. "Perhaps if you tell me, I can help you find who-"

The woman gasped, half-laugh, half-choke. "No, you will not deny me! Destroy me for my insolence, but I will not let you deny it! The tales-" She released Lissar's ankles and clutched at her wrists; one hand crept up Lissar's forearm and hesitantly stroked her sleeve. "I recognized you that day in the receiving-hall, you with your white dress and your great silver dog; and Sweetleaf, with me, she knew who you were too; and her cousin Earondem is close kin with Barley of the village Greenwater; and Barley and his wife Ammy had seen you come down from the mountain one dawn. And I would not trouble you, but, oh-" And her tears ran again, and she put her hands over her face and sobbed.

"Who am I, then?" said Lissar softly; not wanting to hear the answer, knowing the name Moonwoman murmured behind her back, knowing the truth of the Lady, ashamed that she, Lissar, might be confused with her. And yet she feared to hear the answer too, feared to recognize what she was not; feared to understand that by learning one more thing that she was not that it narrowed the possibilities of what she was; that if those possibilities were thinned too far, that she would no longer be able to escape the truth. Her truth.

"Tell me then," she said strongly. "Who am I?"

The woman's hands dropped away from her face, her back and shoulders slumped. "I have offended you, then," she said, dully. "I did not wish that. It is only that I love my Aric so much-" She looked into Lissar's face, and whatever she saw there gave her new hope. "Oh, I knew you were not unkind! Deerskin," she said, "if it is Deerskin you wish to be called, then I will call you Deerskin. But we know you, the White Lady, the Black Lady, Moonwoman, who sees everything, and finds that which is lost or hidden; and my Aric was lost three days ago, as your Moon waxed; I know you would not have missed him. Oh, my lady, please find my Aric for me!"

Lissar stared at her. It was her own wish to know, and not know, her own story, that had caused her to ask the woman to name her; even knowing what the answer must be, the false answer.... The woman knelt again, staring into Lissar's face with an expression that made the breath catch in Lissar's throat. She knew nothing of the finding of lost children; she did not know what to do. But she did know that she could not deny this woman; she could not walk away. A search was demanded of her; the search, at least, she could provide.

"I will go," she said slowly, "but"-raising a hand quickly before the woman could say anything-"you must understand. I am not ... what you claim for me. My eyes are mortal, as are my dogs. Therefore I ask you two things: do not speak that other name to me or to anyone when you speak of me: my name is Deerskin. And, second, go to the king's house, and ask for a messenger for the prince, and tell him what you have told me; say that Deerskin has gone to look, that no time be wasted; but that I have no scent-hounds; the prince will know that these are what is needed.

The prince, or someone for him, will send dogs after me.

"Now, tell me what village you are from, and where Aric was lost."

TWENTY-FIVE

IN DEEPENING TWILIGHT, LISSAR AND HER DOGS TROTTED

ACROSS whispering grassland, for the village the woman named lay most quickly as the crow flies, and not by road. Lissar thought wistfully of dinner, but had not wanted, for reasons not entirely clear to herself, to accompany the woman across the field in the opposite direction, to the kennels and the king's house, even to eat a hot meal and pick up a blanket for sleeping. Bunt and Blue and Kestrel could be used for hunting, and Ash would hunt without direction as she had done during their long months on the mountain, so long as the puppies could be prevented from spoiling everything. There would have been more ootag, and rabbits, today, were it not for the puppies. And as for blankets, she had slept without before.

She was reluctant to remain in the woman's company. Though she believed the woman would keep her promise to use only the name Deerskin, there was no mistaking the reverence of her manner, and that reverence had nothing to do with Lissar. She had no wish to be embarrassed before Hela and Jobe and whoever else might be around; the lives of six doomed puppies, and the dragon she had escaped, was enough to read in their eyes.

Meadowsweet wore out the soonest, as Lissar had known she would; she had persistently been the weakest pup during the long weeks when Lissar checked the puppy-heap every morning to see if they were all still breathing. Meadowsweet still had the least stamina, although she was among the sweetest tempered. Lissar slowed to a walk, and picked her up; she weighed comparatively little, although her long legs trailed. Lissar heaved her up so she could hang her forepaws over Lissar's shoulder; she turned her head and gratefully began washing Lissar's face. Next to collapse was Fen, as Lissar also expected; he went over Lissar's other shoulder, and she and the dogs walked on, gently, while twilight deepened, till the Moon came out, full and clear and bright.

Ash began walking with the look of "food nearby" that Lissar knew well; and Blue and Bunt and Kestrel knew it too but looked, as if they had trained with Ash since puppyhood, to her for a lead. Then suddenly all four dogs were gone, so rapidly that they seemed to disappear before Lissar heard the sounds of their motion. They were out of meadowland now, and into crackling scrub. Lissar had been growing tired; even undergrown fleethound puppies become heavy after a while. She turned her head, listening, and smelling hopefully for water; and as she paused, something shot out of the low scrub row of trees at her.

"Here!" she shouted, and the puppies, startled and inclined to be frightened, all bumbled toward her, even Ob and Harefoot showing no inclination to disobey.

Lissar slid the puppies off her shoulders hastily; they had woken from their half-drowse with her shout, and were glad to hunker down with their fellows. As she knelt to let them scramble to the ground she was feeling in her pocket for stones; no more than the time for one breath had passed since she had first seen the animal burst out of the thicket toward her.

She rose from her crouch, rock in hand, saw the teeth, the red tongue, the hanging jaw of the thing; saw a glint of eye in the Moonlight, let her rock go with all the strength of her arm behind it, readying the next rock with her other hand before she had finished her swing-what was it? And she had been thinking of how many rabbits they would need to feed all of themselves satisfactorily; this creature was big enough, the gods knew, if it didn't eat them first

It shrieked, a high, rageful shriek, when her stone struck it; and it swerved away from her, less, she thought, from the pain than from the confusion caused by suddenly being able to see only out of one eye. She saw no other plausible target for a second stone, and paused, and as she paused became aware of three pale and one brindle long-legged ghosts tearing out of the forest after the creature. Three were to one side of her and the puppies; the nearest one, to the other side, was by itself. She recognized the silver-blue coat a fraction of a moment before she recognized the fuzzier outline of one of the other three ghosts, as Ash bolted forward, ahead of the others, and hurled herself at her prey's nose. The beast, half-blind, staggered, but it was dangerous yet; Lissar saw the long tusks in the Moonlight. It was too big, or Ash had not judged her leap perfectly, for it threw her off, and, as it saw her fall, lurched after her.

She rolled, leaped to her feet and aside-barely in time; but by then Bunt and Kestrel were there, seizing its cheek and flank; and then Blue, at last, bit into its other flank. It screamed again, bubbling its wrath, and Ash launched herself at its nose once more.

There was nothing for it, Lissar thought; it could kill them all still. She was already holding her slender knife in her hand; the knife that ordinarily cut no more than big chunks of meat into smaller chunks for the puppies' meals. The creature was thrashing itself around-Kestrel had lost her grip, fallen, leaped back again-Lissar stared at the great dark shape. You shouldn't tackle anything this big unless you were a hunting party, dozens of dogs and riders strong! she thought wildly; did Kestrel or Blue or Bunt--0r, for that matter, her foolhardy Ash-notice the unevenness of this battle? Lissar might have more than one chance, for she did not doubt the dogs'

courage; but their strength was limited, and they had already had a long day. A second chance they might give her, did she survive a miss; not a third.

She thought, It's a pity we cannot simply leave it and run, as we did the dragon.

And then there was a smaller pale flash streaking from behind her, and Ob valiantly leaped and caught an ear. Harefoot followed him, but grabbed badly at a thigh, and was kicked for her effort and yelped, but got up again at once. Not the puppies! Lissar thought. They will only get themselves killed! She felt she had been standing for hours, frozen in fear and indecision, and yet her heart had pounded in her ears only half a dozen beats; and then she threw herself forward as irrevocably as any hunting dog.

There was nothing to hang onto. She grasped with her free hand at the wiry, greasy hair, being bumped by her own dogs, grimly clinging to their holds. She needed the weak spot at the base of the skull, before the great lump of shoulder began; her small knife was not made for this. She scarred the back of the creature's neck enough to draw blood, but it only shrieked again, and threw her down. It tried to turn and trample her; but Ash rearranged her grip, and the blood flowed freshly out, and the thing seemed to go mad, forgetting Lissar for the moment. Its screams were still more of an anger past anger, that pain should be inflicted upon it, than of the pain itself. Bunt was shaken loose, and when he fell he did not bounce back to his feet but struggled upright and stood dazed.

Two more of the puppies had leaped for a hold; at least they were the ones she could see, and she was afraid to look too closely at the dark ground under the great beast's hoofs. Lissar ran forward again, seized the free ear, hooked one leg behind the creature's elbow as best she could, buried her knife to its hilt as far up on its neck as her arm would reach, and held on.

The thing paused, and shuddered. Lissar could barely breathe for its stench. She risked pulling her blade free, and plunged it in again, perhaps a little farther in, a little farther up, nearer the head. The thing bucked, but it was more of a convulsion. One last time, Lissar, half holding on, half dragged, raised her knife and stabbed it down.

The thing took several steps forward; then its knees buckled. It remained that way, its hind legs still straight, swaying, for several long moments; and then it crumpled, and crashed to its side.

Lissar sat down abruptly; she was shaking so badly she could not stand, and there were tears as well as blood on her face. She put her head between her knees for a moment and then sat up again in time to see Ash walk slowly and deliberately over to Blue, seize him by the throat, and throw him to the ground, growling fiercely.

Lissar was so astonished-and stupid with the shock of the scene they had just survived-that she did nothing. Blue cried like a puppy and went limp in Ash's grip, spreading his hind legs and curling his long tail between them.

Ash shook him back and forth a few times and dropped him, immediately turning away; she walked slowly over to Lissar and sat down with a thump, as if exhausted, as well you might be, Lissar thought at her dog, putting out a hand to her as she laid her bloody muzzle on Lissar's drawn-up knees.

Lissar looked into the brown eyes looking so lovingly at her, and remembered how the creature who now lay dead had burst out of the stand of trees, with Blue nearest it, as if driving it. Ash had just told him, "You fool, this was no well-armed and armored hunting party; this was my person and six puppies; you could have gotten us all killed." And Blue, now lying with his feet bunched up under him and his neck stretched out along the ground, his tail still firmly between his legs, was saying,

"Yes, I know, I'm very sorry, it's the way I was trained, I'm not bred to think for myself." Kestrel and Bunt were still standing by their kill, and Kestrel was washing Bunt's face; Lissar hoped this meant that Bunt had been no more than briefly stunned. She knew that the first thing she had to do was count her puppies.

Ob came crawling to her even as she thought that, so low on his belly that she was heart-stoppingly afraid that he had been grievously wounded; but then she recognized the look on his face and realized that he was only afraid that he had done wrong and was in disgrace. My hunting blood was too much for me, his eyes said; I could not help myself. I know, she replied to him silently, and stroked his dirty head, and he laid his head on her thigh and sighed.

The other puppies followed, all of them with their heads and tails down, not sure what just had happened, and wanting the reassurance of their gods, Ash and Lissar; and for a few minutes they all merely sat and looked at each other and were merely glad they were all still there to do it together.

Lissar raised her head at last. Their kill, she thought. She stood slowly, tiredly, achingly, up. There was dinner-and breakfast and noon and dinner and latemeal for a week besides, if she were in fact a hunting party. But if she did not do something with it soon, the smell of fresh blood would shortly bring other creatures less fastidious. She'd never gutted anything so big before; she supposed it was all the same principle. She thought, I need not gut it at all; I can chop off enough for us for tonight, and leave the rest; we can camp far enough away that what comes for our kill need not threaten us. But even as she was thinking this she knew that it was not what she was going to do; she felt a deep reluctance to give up, without a struggle, the prize they had won so dangerously. She wanted the recognition that such a feat would bring-not her, but her dogs, Ash and the puppies, and even Bunt and Blue and Kestrel. She could not fail them, by throwing away what they had achieved; she had to make her best human attempt to preserve it, as a hunting master would.

Pur crept forward and lapped tentatively at a trickle of blood; but Kestrel was on him immediately, seizing him gently but inexorably by the back of the neck. He yelped, and she let him go, and he trotted away, trying to look as small as possible.

Ossin's hunting dogs were well-trained; and the dogs knew they ate nothing but what the lord of the hunt gave them. Lissar sighed. That was she, and no escape; there was a little wry humor in the thought that she owed it to Ossin not to put his dogs in the position of being tempted to break training. She took a deep breath, shook herself, looked at the creature and then, mournfully, at her little knife.

A long, hot, sticky, dreadful interval later, she'd let the dogs loose on the offal, and was experimenting with looping the leashes she had almost forgotten she had with her around the thing's legs. She thought perhaps she could hoist it into a tree far enough that it would still be there in the morning. As she dragged it, it hung itself up on every hummock and root-knob, but she found she was too tired not to go on; that she wanted something to show for the mess and the danger and the exhaustion.

She had been irritated by Hela's insistence that she take the leashes, although Hela was quite right that if in their wanderings they inadvertently came too near a hunting party, Lissar could not depend on her authority to keep Kestrel and Blue and Bunt with her. If she had thought of it since, she would have dropped the leashes somewhere she could find them again as soon as she left Aric's mother; but she would not annoy Hela unnecessarily by losing them deliberately. And now ... the leashes were excellent leather (from the king's workshop), and bore the abuse they were receiving with no sign of fraying.

Ash left her dinner to inquire if she could help. "You're not built to be a draught animal," Lissar said, panting; "but then neither am I," she added thoughtfully, and looped a leash around Ash's shoulders, threw herself at the end of her two remaining leashes, and called her dog. Ash took a few moments to comprehend that she had been attached to this great jagged lump of flesh for a purpose. She wondered, briefly, if she should be offended; but Lissar herself was doing the same odd thing, and Ash scorned nothing her person accepted. So she pulled.

Lissar didn't know if it was Ash's strength or the moral support of company, but they got it to the edge of the trees, and then Lissar used Ash as part of a snub to hold the carcass in place as she slowly hauled it off the ground. This was easier to explain, for Ash knew the command Stand!, and when the weight began dragging her forward, No, stand! made her dig her feet in, hump her back, and try to act heavy. It was not done well, but it was done at last.

Then Lissar started a fire, rescued a bit of the heart and the liver, stuck them on the ends of two peeled sticks, and fell asleep before they finished cooking.

She woke up to the smell of meat burning, rescued it, and stood waving it back and forth till it was cool enough to eat. The dogs were asleep as well, sprawled anyhow from where the creature had died, and she'd performed the messy and disgusting business of gutting it, to where she stood by the fire she had started, a little distance from where the monster now hung dripping from its tree. She nibbled tentatively at the heart, thinking, if the story is true, then let me welcome this creature's strength and courage while I reject its hate and rage. The meat burned her tongue.

She was as tired as her dogs, but this was not the place to linger; there would be other meat-eaters coming to investigate, and to try how far from the ground the prize hung. Besides, she wanted water, both to drink and to wash the sticky reek away.

She chewed and swallowed, bit off another chunk; found that she was waking up against all probability; perhaps this was the fierceness of the creature's heart.

Ash, she said softly, and Ash was immediately and silently at her side (and cross that she had slept through an opportunity to beg for cooked meat). Ob, she said.

Meadowsweet, Harefoot, Fen. She whispered the puppies' names, wakened them with a touch on neck or flank; a few murmured a protest, but they rolled to their feet, stretched front and rear, shook their heads till their ears rattled against their skulls with a curiously metallic sound; then they came quietly. Dark eyes glinted in the Moonlight; black nostrils flared and tails lifted. Lissar had the sudden, eerie sense that they all knew where they were going-and that she knew best of all. Blue, she said. Kestrel. Bunt. But they were awake already, their training strong in them: go on till you drop.

She set out at an easy trot, for they had some distance to travel, and the puppies would tire soon again; but it was as if there were a scent in her own nostrils or a glittering trail laid out before her, the path of the Moon. It was like the directionless direction, the windless wind on her cheek, when she and Ash had come down from the mountains, only a few months before.

Fleethounds hunt silently; the only sound was the soft pad of many feet. Lissar kilted her dress up around her hips that she might run the more easily, and so they flowed across meadowland and poured through one of the slender outflung arms of the yellow city, almost a town of its own; and while it was late, it was not so late that there were no people drinking and eating and changing horses, mounting and dismounting, loading and unloading, at the crossroads inn, the Happy Man, that was the reason the city bulged out so in this direction. And so a number of people saw the tall, white-legged woman in her white dress surrounded by tall silver hounds run soundlessly past, and disappear again in the shadows beyond the road. Speech and motion stopped for a long moment; and then, as if at a sign, several low voices: Moonwoman, they muttered. It is the White Lady and her shadow hounds.

Lissar knew none of this; she was barely aware of the crossroads, the inn; what she saw and heard was in her mind, but it led her as strongly as any leash. And so it was that when midnight was long past and dawn not so far away, she and her dogs entered a little glade in a forest on a hill behind a village, and there, curled up asleep in a nest of old leaves, was the lost boy.

The glamour fell from her as soon as her worldly eyes touched him; the glittering Moon trail, the mind's inexplicable knowledge, evaporated as if it had never been.

The dogs crowded round her as she knelt by the boy, knowing still this much, that it was he whom she sought. He slept the sleep of exhaustion and despair, not knowing that he was near his own village, that his long miserable wandering had brought him back so near to home. She did not know if she should wake him, or curl up beside him and wait for dawn.

He shivered where he lay, a long shudder which shook the thin leaves, and then a quietness, followed by another fit of shivering. At least she and the dogs could keep him warm. She slipped her arms under him, and recognized her own exhaustion; the decision was no longer a choice, for the muscles of her arms and back, having carried half-grown puppies and wrestled a monster, would do no more that night. He nestled himself against her belly not unlike a larger, less leggy puppy, making little noises also not unlike a puppy's, and sighed, relaxing without ever waking up.

She slid down farther, not minding the knobbly roots of the tree, and felt the dogs bedding down around her, spinning in little circles and tucking their legs into their surprisingly small bundles, thrusting noses under paws and tails. Some large warm thing-or a series of smaller warm things-pressed up against her back; and then Ash bent over her and breathed on her face, and settled down, tucking her face between Lissar's head and shoulder, her long hair shadowing the boy's face, and one curl touching his ear.

Lissar never felt her leave; but it was one sharp, crisp bark from Ash, standing watch at dawn, that brought the prince and his company to the glade.

TWENTY-SIX

LISSAR HEARD THE PAUSE, AFTER THAT, WHEN ANYONE CALLED

HER by the name she had given first to Lilac, Deerskin; and she could no longer refuse to recognize the whispers: Moonwoman. It was Ossin she asked, finally, wanting to know the story that others had given her, but not liking to ask anyone she suspected of calling her so. Even Lilac, straightforward as ever in all other ways, had a new secret in her eyes when she looked at her friend. Lissar wished she did not have to ask him; but he was the only one who still named her Deerskin without an echo, who still met her eyes easily-as, it occurred to her, she met his. Even his kennel folk, who had learned not to call him "your greatness," never quite forgot that he was their prince. Lissar wondered at herself, for she was ... only an herbalist's apprentice.

"You don't have stories of the Moonwoman where you're from?" Ossin said in surprise. "She's one of our favorite legends. I was in love with her"-he was grooming Aster as he spoke; Aster was standing rigidly still in the ecstasy of the attention-"when I was a boy, her and her coursing hounds.

"The story goes that she was the daughter of the strongest king in the world, and that all the other kings sought her hand in marriage." The most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms drifted across Lissar's mind, but she could not remember where it came from, and she did not like the taste of it on her tongue.

"All the other kings sought her hand in marriage because the man who married her would become the strongest king in the world himself by inheriting her father's kingdom. Not a country," he added, rubbing Aster's hindquarters with a soft brush,

"who believed in strong queens. My mother liked to point this out," he said, smiling reminiscently, "which annoyed me no end when I was still young, why did she have to go spoiling the story with irrelevancies? Anyway, this princess did not like any of the kings and princes and dukes who presented themselves to her, all of them looking through her to her father's throne, and she declared she would have none of them.

"She further declared that she would give up her position as royal daughter, and that her father could choose his heir without her help, without her body as intermediary; and she and her fteethound set off to find-the story doesn't say what she wanted to find, the meaning of life, one supposes, something of that sort.

"But one of the suitors followed her, and forced himself on her, thinking-who knows what a man like that thinks-thinking that perhaps what the girl needed was to understand that she could be taken by a strong man, or that rape would break her spirit, make her do what she was told.... She was beautiful, you see, so her attraction was not only through what her father would give her husband. And thinking also, perhaps, that her father would admire the strong commanding action of another strong man, like a general outflanking an opposing army by one daring stroke; or even that his daughter's intransigence was a kind of challenge to her suitors.

"But it did not turn out quite as he had hoped, for the princess herself hated and reviled him for his action, and returned to her father's court to denounce him. But in that then she was disappointed, and her father and his court's reaction was not all that she wishedsome versions of the story say that her attacker did in fact follow her father on the throne; even that her father told her that she deserved no better for rejecting her suitors and running away from her responsibilities.

"Whatever the confrontation was, it ended by her saying that she did not wish to live in this world any more, this world ruled by her father and the other kings who saw it as he did.

"And so she fled to the Moon, and lived there, alone with her dog, who soon gave birth to puppies. And because of what happened to her-and because of her delight in her bitch's puppies-she watches out for young creatures, particularly those who are alone, who are hurt or betrayed, or who wish to make a choice for themselves instead of for those around them. And sometimes she flies down from the Moon with her dogs, and rescues a child or a nestling. Or a litter of puppies. The story goes that she has, over the years, become much like the Moon herself: either all-seeing or blind, sometimes radiant, sometimes invisible."

He paused, and his brushing hand paused too. Aster stood motionless, hoping that he would forget how much brushing she'd had already, and begin again. But he laughed, picking her up gently from the grooming table and setting her on the ground. She looked up at him sadly and then wandered off. "There's another bit to the story that occasionally is repeated: that our Moonwoman is still seeking a man to love her, that she would bear children as her dog, her best friend, did."

He looked at Lissar and smiled. "I liked that very much when I was younger and tenderer: I thought perhaps she'd marry me-after all, we both love dogs, and the Moonwoman's hounds are fleethounds, or something very much like them. Then I got a little older and recognized that I'm only the stodgy prince of a rather small, second-class country, that produces grain and goods enough to feed and clothe itself, and not much else, and that neither I nor my country is much to look at besides. We're both rather dullish and brownish. I don't suppose my choices are any more limited than the handsome prince of a bigger, more powerful country's are; but I fancy that the princesses of first-rate countries are more interesting. Perhaps the duchesses and princesses of small second-class countries say the same about me....

I lost my hope for Moonwoman about the same time as I recognized the other. I was lucky, I suppose; if there had been any overlap it would have been a hard burden to bear.... I was tender for a rather longer time than most, l think.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a pause, while he watched her brushing Ash. He had groomed three dogs, while she went on working at Ash. Ash had her own special comb for tangles and mats, specially procured by Ossin, and hung on the grooming-wall with all the soft brushes; its teeth looked quite fierce in such company. "I'm sorry to go on so. I've been thinking . . . about myself, I suppose, because there's to be another ball, ten days from now, and I am to meet the princess Trivelda. Again. We met five years ago and didn't like each other then; I don't imagine anything will have changed." He sighed. "Trivelda' s father runs what might charitably be called a rather large farm, south and west of us, and most of his revenues, I believe, go for yard goods for Trivelda's dresses. She would not stoop to me if she had any better chances; she thinks hunting hounds are dirty and smell bad."

"Probably many ladies from the grandest courts think the same," said Lissar, with a strong inner conviction of the truth of her words.

"Probably ... I find myself determined to think the worst of my ... likely fate. It's a weakness of character, I dare say. If I were a livelier specimen I would go out and find a Great Dragon to slay, and win a really desirable princess; I believe that's the way to do it. But there haven't been any Great Dragons since Maur, I think, and Aerin, who was certainly a highly desirable princess, didn't need any help, and the truth is I'm very glad that all happened a long time. ago and very far away. You're smiling."

"Must you marry a princess? Can't you marry some great strapping country girl who rides mighty chargers bareback and can whistle so loudly she calls the whole country's dogs at once?"

Ossin laughed. "I don't know. If I met her perhaps I could rouse myself for argument. I think my mother would understand, and my father would listen to her.

But I haven't met her. And so they keep presenting me with princesses. Hopefully."

"It is only one evening, this ball."

Ossin looked at her. "You have attended few balls if you can describe it as ònly one evening.' " He brightened. "I have a splendid idea-you come. You can come and see what you think of ònly one evening.' "

Lissar's heart skipped a beat or two, and there was a feeling in the pit of her stomach, a knot at the back of her skull; she was an herbalist's apprentice, what did she know of balls? Where were these sight-fragments coming from, of chandeliers, spinning around her, no, she was spinning, through the figures of a dance, blue velvet, she remembered blue velvet, and the pressure of a man's hand against her back, his hot grasp of her hand, her jewel-studded skirts sweeping the floor-jewel-studded?

"Are you all right?" Ossin's hands were under her elbows; she started back.

"Yes-yes, of course I am. It's only-the fever hurt my memory, you see, and sometimes when memories come back they make me dizzy. I saw a princess once; she was wearing a dress with jewels sewn all over it, and she was dancing with a man she did not like."

Ossin was looking at her; she could see him hesitating over what he thought of saying, and hoped he would decide to remain silent. She concentrated on the fine fawn hairs of Ash's back. She put out a hand, fumbled with the comb, picked up the brushing mitt instead. Ossin moved away from her.

But that was not the end of the matter. The next day she was soaping and waxing leashes with the puppies spilled at her feet when Ossin appeared and said he had something he wished her opinion on. She assumed it had something to do with dogs, and went with him without question or much thought; Ash at her heels, the puppies shut up protestingly in their pen. Nob and Tolly, who had come with Ossin, were left with Hela.

Lissar was puzzled when he led her back into the main portion of the Gold House, the big central building from which nearly a city's worth of smaller buildings grew, like mushrooms growing at the feet of a vast stony tree. It was still easy for Lissar to get lost in the maze of courtyards and alleys and dead-ends into wings and corners and abutments. She knew her way from the kennels to the open fields and back, and to the stables, where she visited Lilac-but that was nearly all. It was going to be embarrassing when Ossin dismissed her and she didn't know where to go. But the house servants were almost without exception kind, she could ask one of them; perhaps she would even see one that she knew, Tappa or Smallfoot or Longsword the doorkeeper.

The hallways they passed through grew progressively grander. "The oldest part of the house was built by old King Raskel, who thought he was founding a dynasty that would rule the world. His idea of support for his plans was to build everything with ceilings high enough to contain weather beneath them. I used to fancy stormclouds gathering up there and then with a clap of thunder the rain falls and drowns an especially deadly state banquet." He flung open a set of doors. "Or a ball. Not a bad idea, if I knew how one made a thunderstorm. Raskel is the one who first called himself Goldhouse, seventeen generations ago."

They were in the ballroom. Lissar didn't need to be told. There were servants in livery hanging long ribbons and banners of crimson and gold and blue and green around the walls; the banners bore heraldic animals, dogs and horses, eagles and griffins. Goldhouse's own badge, which hung above the rest, held a rayed sun with a stubby yellow castle, a horse, a deep-chested and narrow-bellied dog, and some queer mythological beast, set around it. Ossin saw her looking at it. "Fleethounds are in the blood, you might say. Or if there wasn't already one there, I'd've put one in, although it would ruin the design. No, I would have taken the elrig out: ugly thing anyway. It's supposed to be an emblem for virtue, virtue commonly being ugly, you know."

Other servants were taking down plain drab curtains and hanging up other curtains to match the banners. "What do you think?" Ossin said, but it was a rhetorical question, and she only shook her head. He set out across the vast lake of floor, and she followed uneasily, dodging around servants with mops and buckets and polishing cloths; the smell of the floor polish made her eyes water. "They lay the stuff down now so the smell will be gone by the night," he offered over his shoulder.

"And the doors will be barred when they're finished, so that people like me, who lack the proper attitude, can't tramp through and ruin the gloss." His footsteps echoed; the servants all wore soft shoes, and if they spoke, they spoke in whispers.

Lissar's bare feet made no noise, but she had the uncomfortable feeling of the floor polish adhering to her feet, so that she would slide, whenever she set her foot down, for some time after, leaving a sparkling trail like a snail's.

They left by another, smaller door, went up two flights of stairs and down a hall of a more modest size, with a ceiling whose embossed flower pattern was near enough to see in detail. Then Ossin opened another door.

TWENTY-SEVEN

THIS ROOM WAS SMALL AND, WHILE IT WAS OBVIOUSLY

DUTIFULLY aired at regular intervals, smelled unused. It was dim, the windows closed and curtains drawn over them; light came in only from the hall windows behind them. There were a few paintings hanging on the wall to their left as they walked in; they hung crowded together and uneven, as if they had been put up where there were already nails to hold them, without regard to how they looked.

The paintings were all portraits; the one which caught Lissar's eye first was evidently very old. It was of a man, stiff in uniform, standing with his hand on the back of a chair that might have been a throne, staring irritably at the portrait painter who was wasting so much of his time. "That's Raskel's son-first in a long line of underachievers, of whom I am the latest." As he spoke, Ossin was sorting through more portraits, Lissar saw, which were smaller and less handsomely framed, lying on a table in the center of the room.

She looked up at the wall again; several of the other portraits were of young women, and looked newer, the paint uncracked, the finish still bright. "Ah," said Ossin, and held something up. He went over to the window and threw back the curtains; afternoon sunshine flooded in. He turned to Lissar and offered her what he held. She walked over to him and stood facing the windows.

It was a portrait, indifferently executed, of a plump young woman in an unflattering dress of a peculiarly dismaying shade of puce. Perhaps the color was the painter's fault, and not the young woman's; but Lissar doubted that the flounces and ribbons were products of the painter's imagination. "That's Trivelda," said Ossin with something that sounded like satisfaction. "Only one evening, you remember, eh?

Looks just like her. What do you think?"

Lissar hesitated and then said, "She looks like someone who thinks hunting hounds are dirty and smell bad."

"Exactly." The prince sat down on the edge of the table, swinging one leg. She turned a little toward him. "What are all these-portraits?"

The prince grimaced. "Seven or eight or nine generations of courtly spouse-searches. Mostly it's just us royals-or at least nobles-very occasionally a commoner either strikingly wealthy or strikingly beautiful creeps in. There are a few of the little handsized ones of the impoverished but hopeful."

"I don't think I understand."

"Oh. Well. When you're a king or a queen and you have a son or a daughter you start wanting to marry off, you hire a tame portrait painter to produce some copies of your kid's likeness, preferably flattering, the number of copies depending on how eager or desperate you are, how much money you have to go with the package, and whether you can find a half-good painter with a lot of time to kill, and perhaps twelve or so children to support of his or her own. Then you fire off the copies to the likeliest courts with suitable-you hope suitable-unmarried offspring of the right gender.

"The one my father hired kept making my eyes bigger and my chin smaller-I'm sure from praiseworthy motives, but that kind of thing backfires, as soon as the poor girl-or her parents' emissary-gets here and takes a good look at me.

"No one has come up with a good way of disposing of these things once their purpose is accomplished-or in most cases failed. It seems discourteous just to chuck them in the fire. So they collect up here." He lifted the corners of one or two and let them fall again with small brittle thumps. "Occasionally one, of the painters turns out to be someone famous, and occasionally we get some collector wanting to look through what's in here, in hopes of finding a treasure. I don't think that's going to happen with Trivelda."

Lissar was smiling as she looked up, turning, now facing the wall, noticing the deep stacks of paintings leaning against its foot, the sunlight bright on the portraits hanging above. Second from the right, some little distance from the door, now on her left, that they had come in by, was a portrait that now caught her attention.

A young woman stood, her body facing a little away from the painter, her face turned back toward the unknown hand holding the brush, almost full-face. Her long pale gold skirts, sewn all over with knots of satin and velvet rosebuds, fell into folds as perfect as marble carved to clothe the statue of a goddess. Her face was composed but a little distant, as if she were thinking of something else, or as if she kept herself carefully at some distance behind the face she showed the world. Her mahogany-black hair was pulled forward to fall over her right shoulder. She wore a small diadem with a point that arched low over her brow; a clear stone rested at the spot mystics called the third eye. Her own hazel-green eyes gleamed in the light the painter chose to cast across the canvas. Her left hand, elbow bent, rested on the head of a tall, silver-fawn dog, who looked warily out of the picture, wary in that it believed the girl needed guarding, and it would guard her if it could. Its gaze was much sharper and more present than the girl's.

It was Ash she recognized, not herself. This painter was a better craftsperson than whoever had painted poor Trivelda; Lissar could not decide her mind, during those first moments, floundering for intellectual details to keep the shock and terror at bay, if she would have recognized Ash anywhere, however bad the likeness, because she was Ash; or if it was the painter's cleverness in catching that wary look, a look Lissar had seen often in the last few months, as Ash stared at six eager, clumsy, curious puppies. It was only because she could not refuse to acknowledge Ash that she had to look into her own flat, painted eyes and aloof expression and say Yes, that was I.

Standing, for hours, it seemed, though she was allowed frequent rests; the young painter, very much on his mettle, anxious to please, too anxious to speak to the princess; the princess too unaccustomed to speaking to any stranger to initiate; court women and the occasional minister came and went, that the two of them were never alone together. It was the women, or the ministers, who decided when Lissar should step down and rest. She remembered those sittings-or standings; curious how her memory brought up something, carefully enclosed, that led nowhere, to stave off the worst of the recognition of her own past; she could remember nothing around those occasions of standing being painted. She remembered nothing of the decision to have it done; she had no memory of how many copies might have been made, who they might have been sent to; when all of this had been accomplished.... She remembered, looking into her poised, uninhabited face, the faint surprise she felt at the portrait's being commissioned at all. It seemed so unlike . . . unlike ... she couldn't remember. But she was so unused to strangers, and these portraits would be sent out into the world, to strangers; she was unused to strangers because ... it was not that she was shy, although she was, it was because ... she remembered the ministers coming in, to see how the work was progressing, the court ministers, her father's ministers....

King's daughter King's daughter King's daughter

The memory ended. Her legs were trembling. So were her hands, as she moved a stack of paintings and sat down, sideways, her body turned toward the painting, but both feet still firmly on the ground. But she turned her face back toward the window and raised her chin, closing her eyes, as if she were only enjoying the sunlight. "Who is the girl in the golden dress, with the fleethound? The hound might be one of yours." Her voice sounded odd, feverish, but she hoped it was only the banging of her heart in her own ears.

"That's Lissla Lissar," said Ossin, easily, as if the name were no different from any other name: Ossin, Ob, Goldhouse, Lilac, Deerskin. "And that is one of my dogs. Lissar's mother died when she was fifteen; I was seventeen, and still deeply romantic-those were the years I was dreaming of Moonwoman and, coincidentally, raising my first litters of first-class pups. I sent her one of my pups, the best of her litter; I thought it a fine generous gesture, worthy of the man Moonwoman could come to love. I named the pup Ash." Ossin's gaze dropped to Ash, who had raised her own at the sound of her name. "She was exactly the same silver-fawn color as yours-except, of course, she had short hair."

He looked back up at Lissar. Lissar could see him thinking, rejecting what he thought even as he thought it. She tried to smile from her new, thin face at him; for the old Lissar had been rounder, and there were no lines in that Lissar's face. And she knew what he saw when he looked at her: a woman with prematurely white hair, from what unknown loss or sorrow; and with eyes black from secrets she herself could not look at.

But she closed her black eyes suddenly; for she remembered again what she had known all along, the life that went with the name she had retained. She remembered what she had, briefly, remembered on the mountaintop, before the Moonwoman had rescued her; that she was ... not an herbalist's apprentice, but a king's daughter, and the reiteration of king's daughter in her brain was battering open the doors that had closed, opening the dark secrets lying at the bottom of her eyes; it went through her like a physical pain, like the agonizing return of blood to a frozen limb. King's daughter, daughter of a king who ... who had. . .

No, not blood to a frozen limb; it was the thrust of the torch into the tarred bonfire, and the lick of the fire was cruel. The memories flared into brightness, seared her vision, stabbed through her eyes into the dark protected space inside her skull.... She wanted to scream, and could not, could not breathe, even so little movement as the rise and fall of her belly and breast-the involuntary blinking of her eyes as ordinary sight tried to bring her back into the room where the only warm things were her and Ossin and Ash, surrounded by cool paint on canvas, and dust-even this much motion, reminding her that she still lived, stretched her skin to bursting. It was as well she could not speak, even to moan; any cry would drive her over the lip of the pit, the pit she had forgotten, though her feet had never left its edge, and now that she had looked, and seen again, she could not look away. There were some things that took life and broke it, not merely into meaninglessness, but with active. malice flung the pieces farther, into hell.

She would die, now, die with the benevolent sun on her face, leaning against a table in the quiet store-room of a man who was her friend and to whom she had lied about everything, lied because she could not help herself, because she knew nothing else to tell. She remembered the last three days and nights of her life as a princess; remembered the draining away of that life, and the last violent act that she believed had killed her. Even now, her body's wounds healed by time and Ash and snow and solitude and Moonwoman, and six puppies, and the friendship of a prince and a stable-hand; even now the memory of that act of violence would shatter her; she could not contain the memory even as her body had not been able to contain the result of its betrayal.

"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?"

"Then you've remembered!" he said, and her eyes were on him as he said it, and she saw the dreaded ball disappear from his face. "You've remembered!"

She had told him, those long nights with the puppies when she was too tired to remember what she could or couldn't say, should or shouldn't, that she had been ill, and lost much of her memory. She was both frightened and heartened by his interest now, and she said, smiling a little, "I don't know how much I've remembered"-this was true; the fire still burned, reflecting off surfaces she did not yet recognize-"but your portrait room, I'm not sure, it shook something loose."

"Looking at Trivelda makes me feel a trifle unsettled myself," said the prince. "I did think you were looking a bit green there; you should have said something to me earlier. But see, then you must come to the ball."

"I do not see at all."

Ossin waved a hand at her. "Do not ruin the connection by analyzing it. Come meet Trivelda, and rescue me." Impulsively he seized her hands, standing close to her. He was shorter than her father, she noticed dispassionately, but bulkier, broader in both shoulders and belly.

"Very well," she said. "The kennel-girl will scrub up for one night, and present herself at the front door. Wearing shoes will be the worst, you know."

"Thank you," he said, and she noticed that he meant it.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE NEXT DAY WHEN SHE RETURNED FROM TAKING THE PUPPIES

FOR a long romp through the meadows, despite a thick drizzly fog and mud underfoot, there were a series of long slender bundles waiting for her, hung over the common-room table. She dried her hands carefully, and loosened the neck of one, and realized, just before her fingers touched satin, what these must be: dresses for the ball. A choice of dresses: a wardrobe just for one night, like a princess. Even her fingertips were so callused from kennel work that she could not run them smoothly over the slippery cloth; there was slight friction, the barest suggestion of a snag. Not satin, she thought.

She dropped the bag, whistled to the puppies, and put them in their pen. They looked at her reproachfully when she closed the door on them. "Have I ever missed feeding you on time?" she said. One or two, convinced that she was going to go off and have interesting adventures without them, turned their backs and hunched their shoulders; the others merely flung themselves down in attitudes of heartbreak and resignation.

Ash, of course, accompanied her back to the common-room; Hela was there this time. "Queen's own messenger," she said, nodding toward the bundles on the table.

"Oh," said Lissar, a little startled; she had not taken Ossin's suggestion seriously that his mother would be willing, let alone prompt, to provide the kennel-girl with a ball-gown, and with a choice of ball-gown at that. The further thought intruded: anyone can go who wishes to: but they will not all be wearing satin.

"Better you than me," said Hela.

"Have you ever been to a ball?" said Lissar.

Hela shook her head. "I was a maid-servant up there when I first came to the yellow city, till Jobe rescued me. I waited on a few balls. I like dogs better."

"So do I," said Lissar feelingly, but she took her armful up to her room, and spread the dresses out on the seldom-used bed. After teaching the puppies to climb stairs she found she was more comfortable on the ground floor after all, unrolling a mattress in their pen which, now that they were old enough to understand about such things, always smelled clean and sweet with the dry meadowgrass the scrubbers bedded it with. From the ground floor also it was easier to creep out-of-doors in the middle of the night, seven soft-footed dogs at her heels, and sleep under the sky. It was late enough in the season that even the night air was warm; Lissar began to keep a blanket tucked in a convenient tree-crotch, and she and the puppies returned to the kennels at dawn, as if they had been out merely for an early walk. She did not know how many of the staff knew the truth of it. On the nights it rained she most often lay awake, listening to the fall of water against the roof, grateful to be dry but wishing to be away from walls and ceilings nonetheless.

The last time they had all slept in Lissar's room was the day after they had found the little boy. She had stayed awake long enough that morning to walk down the hillside to the village, where a royal waggon, much slower than the prince's riding party, lumbered up to them, and where Lissar was made intensely uncomfortable by the gratitude of the boy's mother-the woman who had found her in the meadow the evening before. The woman had ridden home in her husband's market-cart, having managed not to tell him where she had gone and who she had seen during her long absence from their stall; and when she got home again she had kept vigil all night.

She had known the Moonwoman would find her Aric.

Lissar had not liked the longing, hopeful, measuring, cautious looks the other villagers, attracted by the commotion and the royal crest on waggon and saddle-skirt, had sent her when they heard the story, and it was a relief in more ways than one when she could climb into the waggon, well bedded with straw and blankets, and collapse. Ossin had offered her a ride behind him on his big handsome horse, when they had met upon the hillside; but she had preferred to walk to the village-though she found herself clutching his stirrup, for she was so tired she staggered, and could not keep a straight line. He, at last, dismounted too, but she would not let him touch her; and so the party had come slowly down to the village, everyone mounted but Ossin and Lissar and ten fleethounds; the boy lay cradled in the arms of one of Ossin's men, and the sbort-legged scent-hounds the prince's party had brought rode at their ease across saddle-bows and cantles.

She remembered the scene as if through a fever; the euphoria of the night before, that queer, humming sense of knowing where she was to go, had departed, leaving her more tired and empty than she could ever remember being; so empty that the gaps in her memory did not show. She had stayed awake just long enough to tell the prince how to find the thing in the tree; and then even the jerking of the (admittedly well sprung) waggon over village roads could not keep her awake.

She thought of all that now as she shook the dresses free of their sacks, thinking that the queen had sent the kennel-girl four dresses to choose from, dresses of silk and satin and lace. She had slept through the bringing-home of the thing in the tree; she had slept through the first conversations, first responses, to her adventure. She had been glad to sleep through them. But she wondered, now, with four ball-gowns fit for a queen spread out before her in the plain little room of a member of the royal kennel staff, what version of the story might even have penetrated to the heart of the court: wondered and did not want to wonder. Wondered what version of the story of the six doomed puppies might have been told. Wondered what the version of the kennel-girl's friendship with the prince might be.

Lissar found it incomprehensibly odd that a kennel-girl should pull the straw out of her hair and dust the puppy fur off her backside and put on a fancy dress and go to a ball. It was not how her father's court had been run...... "Not a hunting master with a rather large house," Ossin had said. Beech, the first huntswoman, was going to the ball. Beech, who, at the height of hunting season, stopped taking her leaders to her room, and unrolled a mattress in the pack's stall. During the winter, when everyone relaxed (and recuperated), she would go back upstairs again. All of the kennel folk slept with a few special dogs bestowed around them on their ordinary human beds; it seemed, upon reflection, that since Lissar had seven dogs special to her it was more efficient for her to sleep with them instead of the other way around.

She wondered if the story of her sleeping most nights out-of-doors with her seven special dogs had travelled beyond the confines of the kennels.

The satin dress was very beautiful, a dark bright red with ribbons and cascades of lace around the neckline; but she did not want to wear it, with her rough hands going shh ssshhh every time her fingers brushed the skirts.

The second dress was blue, light as cobwebs, with insets of paler blue and lavender; but it was a dress for a young girl, whose worst nightmares contained fantastic creatures and undefined fears never met in waking life, and whose dreams were full of hope.

The third dress was golden, vivid as fire, with gold brocade, a dress for a princess to stand and have her portrait taken in, not for a kennel-girl to wear, even if she has combed her hair and washed her hands. Even if she had once been such a princess, with her soft uncallused hand resting on her dog's neck. Especially because she had once been such a princess.

The fourth was the one she would wear. It was silver-grey, a few shades darker than Ash's fur, and it shimmered like Moonlight in a mist. The skirt was very full, and soft; her hands stroked it soundlessly. The bodice was cut simply; no ribbons or brocade. It was, however, sewn all over with tiny, twinkling stones, colorless, almost invisible, but radiant as soon as the light touched them. This was the dress she would wear, although her hands shook as she held it up.

The queen's messenger was back in the morning, bowing as he accepted three dress-sacks, and with a roll of brown paper under his arm, upon which he took tracings of Lissar's feet and hands, "that my lady's shoes and gloves may be made to fit."

The prince might decry balls in general and a ball for Trivelda in particular, but the atmosphere through and around the yellow city over the next sennight took on a distinctive, festive cast, which Lissar now knew why she recognized.

Lilac, whose parents, it turned out, were not such small farmers after all, nor quite so angry with her for running off to the king's city, would be attending the ball in a gown not begged from queen or princess but bought with money they sent her, to purchase the work of a local seamstress.

"Fortunately Marigold is a friend of mine," Lilac said; "all the seamstresses are swamped, and my gown isn't nearly as grand a piece of work as the court women's.

Indeed, you know," she added, showing an uncharacteristic hesitancy in her speech,

"I'll have money left over, if there's anything you need and don't want, you know, to ask for; I don't need it, but if I send money home my parents will be disappointed."

Lissar told her, equally hesitatingly, about the gloves and shoes. There was a barely noticeable pause before Lilac said, in her usual tone, "You are lucky. I've known one or two people who've shown up barefoot. Usually there's this terrific run on plain slippers just before a ball, for everyone who has borrowed or been given a dress from someone at the court, it's pretty simple to make a dress that doesn't quite fit do well enough, but shoes are much harder, especially if you are going to dance in them."

"What happens at a grand ball when someone comes barefoot?" said Lissar, fascinated, remembering the courtiers of her childhood.

"What happens?" said Lilac, puzzled. "I don't know, really, this is my first ball here too; I've just heard the stories. Their feet get sore, I suppose, and perhaps they're very careful to choose graceful dancing-partners. Ask Redthorn; his wife is one of them, though I don't see Redthorn as being that light on his feet."

Lilac, as usual, seemed to know everything that was happening in the city, as well as all the details about the ball itself. Lissar longed to ask her ... why the queen might have sent four ball-gowns to a kennel-girl; but she did not. Surely the queen had better sense than to believe that Moonwoman might take a job in a kennel, even a royal kennel. Ossin had never said what his mother had felt about the whole tale of the Moonwoman; only that she noticed it had no strong queens in it. The king rode out in the hunting-parties occasionally, the princess too; the queen stayed mostly at home, on the ground. Lilac had said once, kindly but pityingly, that the queen found horses a bit alarming.

Lilac offered to dress Lissar's hair for the ball; Lissar remembered, suddenly, a neck-wearying headdress she had once worn, so heavy and ornate she had felt it would slowly crush her down, till she lay on the ground to rest her head. And yet it was far simpler than some she had seen on the other ladies' heads, structures pinioned to the crown of the skull, the hair scraped over them, with hairpieces attached, adding bulk and weight, if the hair growing on the head proved insufficient, as it inevitably did.

As Lissar thought of this, Lilac had untwisted the braid Lissar commonly kept her hair contained in, and was stroking a shining handful with a brush, saying, "I've wanted an excuse to do something with your hair, Deerskin, it's such an extraordinary color."

"White," said Lissar. "Nothing extraordinary about white."

"Old people's hair isn't like this," said Lilac, thoughtfully. "Yours is almost iridescent. It breaks light like a prism."

Lissar tipped her head up to look at her friend. "You're imagining things," she said.

Lilac took a fresh grip, gently moving Lissar's head till she faced front, away from her, again. "We call it-imagining things-following the Moon," she said. "Children are natural Moon-followers. Some of us grow out of it more than others. I'm not known for it, myself," she added.

There was a little pause. Lissar, with a small effort of will, relaxed against Lilac's hands and deliberately closed her eyes. "Just keep it simple, please," she said. "I want to know it's still my hair when you're done."

Lilac laughed. "You needn't worry! You'd need a real hairdresser for the kind of thing you mean. Trivelda was wearing a menagerie, the last time she was here-birds and deer and gods know what all-these little statues, worked into this net thing she was wearing on her head. It was quite extraordinary. It's become a sort of legend.

The joke was that it was as near as she ever got to real animals . . . you can't count her lap-dogs. No one has ever seen one walk on its own, and she has them bathed every day, and they wear her perfume.

"Veeery simple," she said after a moment. "All I have to do is decide what color ribbons." She opened the little bag she'd arrived wearing round her neck; a visual cacophony of ribbons poured out: ribbons thin as a thread, as wide as the thickness of three fingers, ribbons of all colors, ribbons woven of other ribbons, ribbons of silk and velvet, ribbons with tiny embroidered figures and patterns, ribbons with straight edges, ribbons with scalloped edges, ribbons of lace.

"Mercy!" said Lissar, sitting up.

"Oh, Marigold let me borrow these. I'll take back what we don't want. Now, your dress is silver, is it not? Burgundy in your hair, then, and black like your eyes, and ...

let's see ... maybe the palest pink, to set off your complexion. The palest pink. If it weren't for your hair I'd say your skin was white.... Now hold still." Her hands began braiding. "Everyone thinks this is it, you see. That's why everyone is so excited about this particular ball. I don't think anyone will come barefoot to this one."

"This is it?" said Lissar, finding herself enjoying having her hair brushed, like one of the dogs on a grooming table, lulled by the motion and the contact. She ran her fingers down the smooth midline of Ash's skull, Ash's head being on her knee.

"How do you mean?" she asked, only half attending.

"Oh, that Ossin will offer for Trivelda. It's no secret that the king and queen are impatient to marry him off; he's gone twenty-five, you know, and they want the ordinary sort of grandchildren, not the kind that bark and have four legs, and besides, there's Camilla, who will turn seventeen in the spring, and there's this very tiresome tradition that the royal heir is supposed to marry first.

"There's an even more tiresome tradition that all noble families are supposed to marry off their children in chronological order, but it's really only the heirs that anyone pays much attention to. Ossin knows this of course-so does Camilla. Cofta and Clem are afraid she's getting too fond of that pretty count, he knows so well how to be charming and she's so young, and if they sent him away it might just make it all worse. But they can't really do much about pushing her elsewhere till Ossin is officially done with. And Ossin's fond of his sister, and likes Dorl even less than his parents do."

Lissar found herself strangely dismayed by this news, and the long gentle strokes of the hairbrush, and smaller busyness of fingers plaiting, suddenly annoyed her.

"But he doesn't like Trivelda."

Lilac chuckled. "How much do you think that has to do with it?"

"They don't want Camilla to marry Dorl."

"That's different. Dorl really isn't much except charm-and old blood-and neither of those, even, is laid very thick. There are very few real princesses around, or even wealthy farmers' daughters, and most of them have gotten married while the prince has been out hunting his dogs."

"Chasing the Moonwoman," murmured Lissar.

"Eh?"

"Nothing."

"It won't be so bad because they'll have nothing to do with one another. It would be much worse if she wanted to ride and hunt; she's an appalling rider, hates horses, and her idea of a dog ... well, those things of hers look like breakfast-rolls with hair.

And they all bark, if you want to call it barking. Anyway, she'll stay out of the barns-and kennels-and he'll stay out of the drawing-rooms. Knowing Ossin, he'll be glad of the excuse, come to that."

"It doesn't sound ... very satisfying," said Lissar.

Lilac laughed. Ash pricked her ears. "Deerskin, I've caught you out at last; you're a romantic. I would never have guessed. Do you know, I think I want a shade a little rosier than the palest pink after all. I have a brooch, I'll loan it to you, it will look perfect right here," and she stabbed a finger at the side of Lissar's head.

"You're a wealthy farmer's daughter," said Lissar, still distressed that Ossin should be thrown away on a princess with hairy breakfastrolls for dogs.

"Hmm? What?" said Lilac, fingers busy. "Who, me? Marry Ossin? In the first place, he wouldn't have me. In the second place his parents wouldn't have me. My parents aren't that wealthy, and I'm still a stable-girl. And third, I wouldn't have him. I know he's admirable in every way and the country is lucky to have him to look forward to as their next king. But he's so admirable he's boring. I don't think he's ever been drunk in his life, or broken a window when he was a boy playing hurlfast, or spoken an unmerited harsh word. He's so responsible. Ugly, too."

Lissar, stung, said, "He's not ugly."

Lilac, now working from the front, paused and looked into Lissar's face. There was a tight little pause, while Lissar remembered the nights together in the puppies'

pen, guessing that that story would have been heard in the stables. Had she ever told Lilac herself? She couldn't remember.

Lilac, irrepressible, started to smile. "You marry him," she said.

TWENTY-NINE

NOT ONLY SHOES AND GLOVES ARRIVED IN THE FINAL PACKAGE

FROM the queen, but a cloak as well; and on the evening as Lissar was bundling everything up to meet Lilac in the room of the Gold House they had been assigned for their final toilettes (to keep the dog- and horse-hair down to a minimum, one short hall's rooms had been given over to those of the animal staff who wished to come to the ball), something else arrived: a small package, wrapped in a white cloth, left on the common-room table again, with only a slip of paper with her name, Deerskin, on it.

"This must be for you," said Hela, catching her as she came downstairs, explaining to Ash that she would be back soon and meanwhile wouldn't she prefer to stay with the puppies, nearly full-grown now and not puppies except by the glints in their eyes and their tendency to forget their training for no reason beyond sunshine, or rain, or the shadow of a bird's wing, or the fascination of their own tails, and of being alive and frisky. Ash was not convinced. Her back was humped and her tail between her legs as Lissar put her hand on her rump and pushed her through the half-door. The puppies were delighted to see their leader, and fawned at her feet, waiting to see if she would stoop to playing with them, or if she would demand they leave her alone. Lissar left them to it.

"I think this is probably yours," Hela said again, emerging from the common-room, and held out the parcel. The flowing hand that had written Deerskin was both graceful and legible. "Yes," said Lissar; "that is my name on it."

"Ah," said Hela. "We guessed. The rest of us can't read, you know."

Lissar looked up, startled.

"What cause for us to learn?" said Hela, smiling at Lissar's expression, and returned to the common-room.

"We'll want to hear all about it," Berry called, as she went hastily past the door.

Lilac was already dressed when Lissar arrived. "Anyone would think you didn't want to come," she said, almost cross. "The rest have gone before us. We'll be late, and I want to see Trivelda come in. I want to see what she has thought up, after the menagerie last time.... What's that?"-as the bundle Hela had given her dropped from under Lissar's arm.

"I don't know. It was left for me this evening. Open it while I get my dress on."

"Ribbons," said Lilac. "Look." And she held up two handsful of ribbons: pink, blood-red, black, dark green, silver-grey. "Who sent them?"

"I have no idea." There was one significant difference between these ribbons and the ones provided by Lilac; these were sewn with the same tiny bright stones as the dress Lissar was wearing.

"Hmm," said Lilac, staring at the card with Lissar's name and nothing else on it.

"It was Ossin who invited you, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Lissar shortly, not wishing to remember the end of their last conversation about the prince. "But his mother supplied the dress. Help me-ugh,"

she said, tugging futilely at her hair, which was caught on the tiny hooks that fastened the tight bodice together.

"Hold still. Stop pulling; I want all your hair still in your head for this evening.

Now sit down. I may use one or two of my ribbons just for contrast. And I brought that brooch."

They were, as it happened, in plenty of time; for the princess Trivelda was very late. Whether she was late on account of the time it took her to finish dressing-her entourage had only arrived the day before, and much had been made of how tired she and her breakfast-food dogs were as a result of the journey-or because she wished to make a grand entrance, Lissar did not know; but make an entrance she did.

Her gown was green, and her hair, much redder than in the painting Lissar had seen, was dressed both high on her head and permitted to fall, in a questionable profusion of curls, down her back. She was both short and plump, and the hair already made her look a trifle ridiculous, for there seemed to be more hair than person; and to make her waist look small, her skirts were tremendous, flaring out as though she and they would empty the ballroom of everyone else. Her skirts were worked in some dizzying pattern, also, that shimmered as the light caught it, and made it difficult to look at for any length of time, with the result that watching her small arrogant figure march down the long hall gave a faint sense of sea-sickness.

Lissar had established herself near a long curtain hanging from a pillar projecting from the wall; she recognized several other people from the king's house similarly clinging to the scenery, looking awkward in their fine clothes but at the same time glancing around with interest, and too absorbed in the spectacle to be uncomfortably self-conscious. Lissar stood absently rubbing her fingers together. Her hands felt as imprisoned by gloves as her feet did by shoes; simultaneously both were a comfort: costume, not clothing, stage set for the evening's performance.

The prince's friends were not the courtier sort, so there were enough of them (us, thought Lissar, for she was Deerskin here, Deerskin in costume) that no one need feel lonesome or truly out of place. She looked around for the Cum of Dorl, whom she had seen the first time the day Ossin had offered her six puppies to raise; he was easily spotted among all the people not trying to be visible, for he was wearing yellow as bright as a bonfire at harvest festival; he seemed to glitter as he turned. He bowed with a grace that might almost match one of Ossin's dogs, and it was as if the entire ballroomful of people paused a moment to watch him.

Certainly the princess Trivelda paused, and offered him a curtsey rather more profound than a mere Cum required, but Dorl often had that effect on people, particularly women: Lissar saw Camilla watching him, with an anxious, wistful little smile on her face, as if she wished she did not care, wished that she did not wish to watch him, though she was as poised as she had been on the day Lissar had first seen them both.

Then the prince moved forward to greet his guest; Lissar, though she had been looking for him, had not noticed him before. He too was dressed in green, but a dark green, the color of leaves in shadow; and he stepped forward with all the grace of an unhappy chained bear to welcome the woman most of those watching believed would soon be his wife. He looked like a rough servant, cleaned up for special duty, perhaps; perhaps the special duty of waiting on the scintillant Dorl: and both of them knew it, as did Trivelda, who smirked. Lissar, sharply aware of her gorgeous borrowed dress, found herself forgetting her own discomfort, forgetting to notice the ghosts that encircled her, that whispered in her ears, that crept between the folds of her skirt; forgetting as she watched her friend walk stiffly down the ballroom floor and bow to Trivelda, still like a bear performing a trick he has learned but does not understand, like a bear performing in fear of a yank on the chain if he does not perform adequately. He moved as if his clothing chafed him; there was none of the careless grace of easy strength and purpose that he had in the fields with his hounds, or on horseback. Here he was bulky, awkward, overweight, his eyes too small and his chin too large; he looked dazed and stupid.

For a moment her own ghosts dissolved absolutely in the heat of her sympathy; she was but a young woman watching a friend in trouble. Almost she forgot where she was and called out to him. She did not speak aloud, but she moved restlessly out of the shadowed niche between column and curtain; and the prince's eyes, sweeping the crowd, saw her movement, identified her; and his face lightened-as if it had been she he was looking for-for a moment he looked like the man she saw every day in the kennels, as if his real nature came out of hiding and inhabited his face for a moment.

She did not know what to do; he was about to offer his hand to Trivelda, his future wife, and a hundred people stood between him and Lissar, her back to a pillar.

She could not speak, say, "I am with you." She could not rub the back of his neck as she had done once or twice during the longest of the puppy nights, when four o'clock in the morning went on for years and dawn never came; she could do nothing.

And so she curtseyed: her deepest, most royal curtsey, the curtsey a princess would give a prince, for when she had remembered who she was, with that knowledge came the memory of her court manners. She had not known that those memories had returned to her, nor, if she had, would she have guessed they would be of any use to her; had she known she might have wished to banish them, as one rejects tainted food once one has been sick. She curtseyed, had she known it, as beautifully as her mother might once have curtseyed, for all that Lissar had learned her court manners mostly as a mouse might, watching her glamorous mother and splendid father from her corner. And as she curtseyed she moved farther out into the room, fully away from the shadowing curtain; and the tiny gems on her dress and in her hair caught the light from the hundreds of candles set in the huge chandeliers, and she blazed up in that crowd as if she were the queen of them all.

Trivelda's back was to her, and so she did not know what had happened; but she felt that something had, felt the attention of the crowd falter and shift away from her: saw the prince look over her head and suddenly straighten and smile and look, for a moment, like a prince, instead of like an oaf in fancy dress. She was not pleased; more, she was jealous, that Ossin should look well for someone else. She stiffened, and drew herself up to her full, if diminutive, height, and prepared to turn around and see what or who was ruining her grand moment-and to do battle.