Deerskin

Ossin, who was well drilled in courtliness, for all that he had no gift for it, saw Trivelda stiffen, knew what it meant, and snapped his attention back to her at once.

Lissar rose from her curtsey in time to see what was happening between him and Trivelda; and so by the time Trivelda had graciously accepted his proffered hand, and moved surreptitiously forward and to one side so that she could see in the direction that the prince's defection had occurred, there was nothing to see. Lissar had resubmerged herself into the shadow of the crowd.

She had meant to return to her pillar, but the prince had not been the only person who noticed her curtsey; and she found that there were abruptly a number of persons who wished to speak to her, and several young men (and one or two old ones) who wished to invite her to dance with them.

She glanced down at her jewel-strewn skirts, rubbed one softgloved hand over them; no one need guess her current profession by her work-roughened hands tonight. "Thank you," she said to the smallest and shyest of the young men, who flushed scarlet in delight, and drew her forward to join the line that the prince and Trivelda led. The young man proved to be a very neat and precise dancer, but an utterly tongue-tied conversationalist, which suited Lissar perfectly. She had not danced since her old life; and the memories her body held, in order to use the knowledge of how to dance, how to curtsey, brought too much of the rest with it.

Her heart beat faster than the quick steps of the dance could explain, for she was fit enough to run for hours with her dogs; here she had to open her lips a little, to pant, like a dog in summer. But the young man held her delicately, politely at arm's length; and when she caught his eye he blushed again, and looked at her as adoringly as a fortnight-old puppy to whom she meant milk. She smiled at him, and he jerked his gaze down. To her gloved hands he muttered something.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I asked, what is your name?"

"Lissar," she said, without thinking; but she had spoken as softly as he had uttered his first question, and the musicians were playing vigorously, to be heard over any amount of foot-tapping, dress-rustling, and conversation, including the stifled grunts of those trodden on by inept partners. In his turn he now said: "I beg your pardon?"

"Deerskin," she said, firmly.

"Deerskin," he murmured. "Deerskin-it was a Deerskin who found the little boy from Willowwood."

"Yes," she said.

"Yes-you were she?" he said, flushing again.

"Yes," she said again.

They danced a few more measures in silence, and his voice sounded like a small boy's when he said: "My cousin is a friend of Pansy, whose son it was was lost.

Pansy believes this Deerskin is really the Moonwoman, come to earth again."

"I do not dance like a goddess, do I?" said Lissar gently. She took her hand out of his for a moment, and pulled her glove down her forearm. There were a series of eight small deep scratches, just above her wrist, in two sets of four. "One of the puppies from the litter I raised taught himself, when he was still small enough not to knock me down, to jump into my arms when I held them out and called his name.

Once he missed. I do not think Moonwoman's dogs would miss; nor would she willingly wear scars from so foolish a misadventure."

The young man was smiling over her shoulder, dreamily; but he said no more.

The dance came to an end; they parted, bowing to each other. As she rose from her curtsey he, obviously daring greatly, said, "Sh-she might, you know. To look ordinary. Human, you know." Then he bowed a second time, quickly, almost jerkily, the first graceless gesture she had seen from him, and walked quickly away.

THIRTY

SHE DANCED STEADILY ALL EVENING. ONCE OR TWICE HER

PARTNERS asked her if she would rather have a plate from the long tables of sumptuous food laid out at one end of the hall, but she declined; it would be harder not to talk, away from the noise and bustle of the dancing; she could not keep her mouth full all the time. Nor was she hungry; she was managing to keep her useful skills separate from her secret, but the secret was a weight on her spirit, and in the pit of her stomach, and she was not hungry; nor was she aware of growing tired.

She was too tight-stretched, alert to keep the old terror at bay, to keep herself from doing anything so appalling as blurting out her real name again; to keep her mind on what she was doing, dancing, and not making conversation. Some of her partners were more persistent than others. She made a mistake in choosing to dance with one old fellow, stiff and white-haired, thinking he would probably be deaf, and if inclined to talk, would want to talk exclusively about himself and, as she guessed from the metal he wore across his chest, his glorious career in the military.

But he surprised her; he was not in the least deaf, and very curious about her. "I have five daughters within, I would guess, five years on either side of your age, and I thought I knew every member of Cofta and Clem's court of their age and sex. You never came with Trivelda-you're not her type-so who are you?"

"I'm a kennel-girl who has slipped her leash for the evening." He laughed at this, as he was supposed to, but he did not let her off. And so he extracted her story from her, piece by piece, backwards to her appearance in King Goldhouse's receiving-hall the day after the prince's favorite bitch had died giving birth to her puppies. "And where did you come from before that?" the relentless old gentleman pursued.

"Wouldn't you rather tell me of your dangerous campaigns in the wild and exotic hills of somewhere or other?" she said, a little desperately.

He laughed again; it was impossible not to like him. "No. Campaigns are a great bore; they are mostly about either finding enough water for your company, or being up to your knees in mud and all the food's gone bad. Battles are blessedly brief; but you're sick with terror before, blind with panic during, and miserable with horror by the results, when you have to bury your friends, or listen to them scream. I'm glad to be retired. But you remind me of someone, and I'm trying to think of whom; I've done a lot of travelling in my life, and-"

She jerked herself free of his loose hold in an involuntary convulsion of fear. "My dear," he said, and they halted in the middle of the figure, whereupon four people immediately blundered into them. "Are you feeling ill?"

"No," she said breathlessly; and took his hand again, and composed herself to pick up the dance.

"I do not know what your secret is," said the old man after a moment; "I apologize for giving you pain. I have heard of Deerskin, and of what I have heard of her, and looking into your bright young face tonight, I can think no evil of her. If I remember who you remind me of, I will keep it to myself."

"Thank you," she said.

"My name is Stronghand," he said. "If you find yourself in need of a friend, my wife and I are very fond of young girls; come find us. We live just outside the city, on the road from the Bluevine Gate. The innkeeper at the Golden Orchid can tell you just where."

The dance ended then, and as she rose from her curtsey, he kissed her hand.

"Remember," he said, and then turned and left her.

She was standing looking after him when Lilac came up to her. "Come away quickly, before someone else grabs you-you've been on your feet all evening, I've been watching you. You're one of the brightest stars of the ball. Trivelda is going to send someone to spill something on you soon, to get you out of the way. But don't any of these great louts ever think you might want something to eat?"

She smiled at her friend. "Several of them have asked, but I preferred dancing to having to sit down and make conversation."

"If that isn't like you. Conversation is much easier than dancing-I think," she said, a little ruefully.

"Don't try and tell me you don't dance beautifully; I've been watching you too."

Lilac wrinkled her nose. "It depends completely on who I'm with. Ladoc, my friend's cousin, is fun; some of these fellows, well, one or two, my feet may never recover. Come and see the lovely food. I'm starving. And you don't have to make conversation with me if you don't want to."

" `Don't any of these great louts ever think you might want something to eat?' "

"This is the third time I've been down to the tables," said Lilac, handing her a plate. "The servers are beginning to recognize me. Here, this is particularly good,"

she said, thrusting her empty plate under the appropriate server's nose, and seizing Lissar's plate away from her again to proffer it too. "And this."

A little later they looked up when a pair of messenger-clad legs paused in front of them as they sat at a tiny table tucked in with other tiny tables behind the grand display of food. The messenger bowed first to Lilac and then, more deeply, to Lissar.

"The prince's compliments, and if my lady would permit this humble messenger to guide her to him for a brief moment of her time?"

Lissar rose at once. "I'll see you back on the dance floor," said Lilac, licking her fingers and trying not to look unduly curious. The messenger took her back across the long length of the dance floor, toward the far end, where the dais stood, bearing tall chairs for the king, queen, prince and princess of this country as well as the king, queen and princess who were their guests; the fact that this was a ball, and that none of them would sit in the chairs all evening, was beside the point. The latter king and queen were dowdy in comparison to their vivid daughter, but the king looked as if the court he found himself in did not live up to his opinion of his own dignity. He kept scowling at the chairs set out for his family, although they were quite as fine as the others. The queen looked like a frightened chambermaid expecting to be caught out wearing her mistress's clothes, which did not quite fit. She was small, like her daughter, but Trivelda's hauteur came obviously from her father.

Courtiers stood near the dais in groups so carefully posed Lissar found herself wondering if they had been set out that way, like flower arrangements. Perhaps there were marks on the floors, telling them where to put their feet. Trivelda's courtiers all seemed to be carrying-one each-a long-stemmed ariola in a vivid blue-green that set off, or collided with, the shade of the princess's dress. Cofta's courtiers, with the exception of the Curn of Dorl, seemed a poor lot by contrast, and they wandered about in an unmistakably individual fashion.

Trivelda, surrounded by her parents and courtiers, was delicately nibbling at various small dainties offered her from plates held by kneeling courtiers, whose other hands were occupied in grasping long-stemmed ariolas. The prince-my prince, Lissar found, to her dismay, herself thinking of him as-was standing with his back to this edifying spectacle, and his mother was whispering something, it looked rather forcefully, in his ear, which Lissar assumed was the cause of his looking increasingly sullen and stupid. Lissar wished the messenger would walk more slowly.

As the messenger stepped aside, the prince stepped forward. His mother, obviously caught mid-sentence, shut her lips together tightly, but Lissar thought she looked unhappy rather than angry, and the glance she turned on Lissar had no malice in it. Ossin bowed, and Lissar's knees bent in a curtsey before her brain told them to. She had barely straightened up when the prince snatched at her hands and danced away with her.

He was not a good dancer, but after a few turns through the figure he steadied, or relaxed, and Lissar began to think she had been initially mistaken, for he danced very ably, catching and turning her deftly, and she surprised herself by leaning into his hands trustingly instead of holding herself constantly alert as she had done with her other partners. She saw him smiling and smiled back.

"I am smiling in relief," he said, and he sounded just as he did when they had been scraping puppy dung off the floor together. "You have the knack for making your partner feel that he knows what he is doing. Which makes him rather more able to do it. Thank you. It has not been a good night thus far."

"You do yourself too little credit," said Lissar in what she realized was a courtly phrase; she knew exactly what he meant and was flattered but found herself shy of admitting it.

"Stop it," he said. "This is me, remember? We've been thrown up on by the same puppies."

She laughed. "I was thinking of cleaning up diarrhea, myself. Balls and sick puppies don't belong in the same world, somehow."

"Ah, you've noticed that, have you? I couldn't agree more, and I prefer the puppies."

"You have looked a bit like you'd be happier pulling a plough when I've seen you long enough to notice, this evening."

He sighed. "I swear, I was thinking about turning tail and running like a rabbit before hounds when I saw Trivelda advancing on me tonight. Your appearance saved me, I think."

Lissar saw a courtier carrying an ariola in one hand hurrying down the long hall again, toward the banquet tables. Another was returning, laden plate in one hand, flower in the other. She wondered if they were allowed to lay their flowers down long enough to make handling plates a little more feasible-or perhaps they held the stems between their teeth as they served? She wanted to say something to Ossin, but could think of nothing.

She became aware that the prince was dancing them firmly away from the central knot of the figure. "Come," he said suddenly, and seized her by the hand. They left the hall almost at a run, down a corridor, and then the prince checked and swerved, like a hound on a scent, threw open a door, and ushered her out onto a small balcony.

It was a beautiful night; after three days of clouds the weather had broken, and now the stars looked nearer than her sparkling skirts, and the Moon was near full.

The prince dropped her hand, leaned on the balustrade, and heaved a great sigh through his open mouth. "I feel like howling like a dog," he said, and then turned and sat on the railing, bracing his hands beside him, looking up at her.

Lissar felt a tiny tremor begin, very deep inside her, deep in her blood and brain, nothing to do with the chill in the air. "Deerskin-" he began.

"No," she whispered. Louder, she said, "We should go back to your party." The tremor grew; she began to feel it in her knees, her hands, she twisted her hands in her glittering skirts.

"Not just yet," said the prince. "Trivelda will feel that my absence is more than paid for by your absence-she likes being the center of attention, you know, and you haven't even got a lot of courtiers dressed up like unicorns or vases of flowers or something for a competition she can understand." He stood up;, stepped toward her, loomed over her. The Moon was behind him, and he looked huge; and for the moment she forgot the many hours they had spent together with the puppies, when he had never looked like he filled the sky.... She stepped back. Her trembling must be visible now, but it was dark, and he would not notice. If she spoke he would hear it in her voice. She tried to swallow, but her throat felt frozen, and she was sick at her stomach, sick with her own knowledge of her own life, sick at standing on the balcony with Ossin when the Moon shone on them.

"Will you marry me?"

There was thunder in her ears, and before her eyes were the walls of a small round room hung in a dark stained pink that had once been rose-colored, and the dull brutal red was mirrored in a gleaming red pool on the floor where a silver-fawn dog lay motionless; and there was a terrible weight against her own body, blocking her vision, looming over her, blotting out the stars through the open door, and then a pain, pain pain pain pain-Some things grew no less with time. Some things were absolutes. Some things could not be gotten over, gotten round, forgotten, forgiven, made peace with, released.

-she did not quite scream. "No!" she said. "No! I cannot."

The prince put his hand to his face for a moment, and dropped it. He was deep in his own fears; he did not see, in the darkness, either her trembling or the shadows in her black eyes; he heard the anguish in her voice, but misread it utterly. It did not surprise him that she could not love him.

She remained where she was, unable to move, unable with what felt like the same paralysis of the limbs and the will that had left her helpless on the night that her father had opened the garden door. But Ossin did not know this; and when she remained where she was, he let himself hope that this meant that she was willing to listen to him.

"I love you, you know," he said conversationally, after a little pause. Through her own fear she thought she heard a tremor in his voice, but she scorned it, telling herself it was her own ears' failure. "Trivelda would be ... in some ways the easier choice; even my poor mother, I think, would not say 'better,' she merely wants me to make up my mind to marry someone. I might, a few months ago, have let myself be talked into Trivelda; I have always known that I would marry some day, and I would like to have children.

"I was beginning to think perhaps there was something wrong with me, that I could not fall in love with any real woman, any woman other than the woman of the Moon, whom I had dreamed of when I was a child. I know what they call you behind your back, but I do not believe it. Moonwoman would not raise puppies the hard way, staying up all night, night after night, till she's grey and snarly with exhaustion, and being puked on, and cleaning up six puppies' worth of vile yellow diarrhea. I believe you're as human as I am, and I'm glad of that, because I love you, and if you really were Moonwoman I wouldn't have the nerve. I have found out that I can love-and I won't marry anyone else now that I know."

Lissar heard this as if from a great distance, though she felt the sweet breath of the prince's words kiss her cheek; but they and he were not enough, and her own heart broke, for she loved him too, and could not bear this with that other, terrible knowledge of what had happened to her, what made her forever unfit for human love. Her heart broke open with a cry she heard herself give voice to, and the tears poured down her face as hot as the river of hell. "Oh, I cannot, I cannot!" She turned her face up to take one long last look at him, and the Moonlight fell full on her. Wonderingly Ossin raised a hand to touch her wet face; but she turned and fled from him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIRTY-ONE

AT FIRST LISSAR MERELY RAN AWAY; AWAY FROM THE YELLOW

CITY, away from the prince whom she loved with both halves of her broken heart.

But in the very first days of her flight she was forced to recognize how much care and feeding seven dogs required. If she had not been in the grip of a fear much larger than her sense of responsibility toward her seven friends, she might have let the lesser fear of not being able to keep the puppies fed drive her back to the king's city again. But that was not to be thought of; and so she did not think it. She allowed herself half a moment to remember that she did owe Ossin a litter or three in payment, but there was no immediate answer to this, and so she set it aside, in relief and helplessness and sorrow and longing. Then she set her concentration on the problem of coping with the situation she was in.

After two days of too few rabbits, they had a piece of extraordinary luck: Ash and Ob pulled down a deer. Much of Ob's puppy pigheadedness was the boldness of a truly superior dog trying to figure out the structure of his world, and he worshipped the ground Ash and Lissar walked on. His adoration had the useful result of making him preternaturally quick to train (even if it also and equally meant that he had to be trained preternaturally quickly and forcefully); and all the puppies seemed to comprehend, after their first hungry night on the cold ground (and no prince and waggon to rescue them the next day), that something serious was happening, and that they had to stop fooling around and pay close attention.

Ash focussed and froze first on the leaf-stirring that wasn't the wind. Lissar noticed how high up the movement was happening, and felt her heart sink; she hoped it wasn't another iruku, another monster such as Ash and Blue and Bunt and Kestrel had flushed, almost to disaster. She hoped that Ash could tell what it was, and that the fact she looked eager meant that it wasn't an iruku. Lissar gathered the puppies together, and they began to circle upwind; as they approached the point where the animal would scent them, Ash struck off on her own, Ob and Ferntongue following at her heels. Lissar and the rest kept their line.

It was beautifully done. The deer broke cover, and Ash and the two puppies flanked it. Lissar was astonished all over again at how swift her lovely dogs were; and they tracked the deer, keeping pace with its enormous, fear-driven bounds, their ears flat to their heads, without making a sound. The deer, panicking, tried to swerve; Ob blocked it, and Ash, with a leap almost supernatural, sprang to grab its nose; the weight of the dog and the speed at which they were moving flipped the deer completely over. It landed with a neck-breaking crash, and did not again stir.

Ash got up, shook herself, looked over her shoulder to find Lissar's face, and dropped her lower jaw in a silent dog-laugh.

Everyone's bellies were full that night, and the next. Ash woke up snarling the second night, and whatever it was that had been thinking of trying to scavenge the deer carcass changed its mind, and thrashed invisibly away through the undergrowth again. Lissar threw a few more sticks on the fire and put her head back on Ash's flank. She could hear the last murmur of growl going on, deep in Ash's chest, even after Ash put her own head down.

It was the fifth night after they had fled the king's city, during which time Lissar had merely headed them all for the wildest country she could find the nearest to hand, that she heard, or felt, that inaudible hum for the second time; the same subliminal purr that had led her to the lost boy some weeks before. She felt like an iron filing lining up to an unsuspected magnet: she thrummed with seeking.

She put her head down on her knees and thought to ignore it; but it would not be ignored. Then she breathed a little sigh of something like relief, for it had been difficult, even over no more than five days, not to think about what she was doing, not to know that she had no idea what to do next, where to go. Five days not to think of Ossin. She stood up and stamped out their little fire; turned to orient herself to the line of the call, chirruped to her dogs, and set off.

This time it was only a lamb she found; but when she set it in the young shepherd's arms-for the call had merely realigned itself once she'd found the little creature, and told her where to take it the girl's eyes filled with tears. "Thank you,"

she said. "I am too young, and my dog is too old, but we are all there is, and we need our sheep."

A week later Lissar brought another little boy home to his parents; and four days after that-she was bending over an odd little carpet of intensely green plants bearing a riot of tiny leaves when her hands, without any orders from her, began gathering them, at the same time as she felt the now-familiar iron-filing sensation again. The plants' roots were all a single system, so they were easier to pull up and hold than they initially looked; she plucked about a third, and broke off the central root so that it would repopulate itself. When she came to a small cabin just outside the village she had returned the boy to a few nights previously, she tapped on the door.

A woman somewhere between young and old opened the door and looked unsurprised at Lissar and her following; and then looked with deep pleasure at the festoon of green over Lissar's left arm. "Do your dogs like bean-and-turnip soup?"

she said. "There is enough for all of you."

The prince's ball had been toward the end of the hunting season, the end of harvest, when the nights were growing discernibly longer, and the mornings slower to warm up. But the early weeks of the winter were far less arduous than the time Lissar and Ash had spent alone in the mountains. A large territory imperceptibly became theirs, and many villages came to know them, catching glimpses occasionally on Moonlit nights of seven long-legged dogs and one long-legged woman with her white dress kilted high over her thighs, running silently through the stubbly fields or, rarely, bolting down a brief stretch of road before disappearing. It was an interesting fact that no domestic animal protested their passing; no guardian dog barked, no anxious chicken squawked, no wary horse snorted: And Lissar came to welcome the sound that was not a sound, the iron-filing feeling, for this often earned her and her dogs hot meals of greater variety than they could otherwise catch, and many bams were permanently opened to them. Lissar saw no point in sleeping on the increasingly cold ground if she could help it; hay stacks were to be preferred. The puppies learned to climb barn-ladders, not without accidents, none severe.

Lissar now also had hearths to drag her proud company's kills to; they did not have to guard their trophies from other predators any more, and between their increasing skills as hunters, and Lissar's finding of missing people, creatures, and miscellaneous desirable items; they rarely went hungry. No one questioned her right to hunt wild game any more than they questioned her right to the dogs at her heels; any more than anyone had ever asked her about the origin of her white deerskin dress. Everyone called her Deerskin to her face, and she established a semi-permanent camp for herself and her seven dogs, in a hollow of a hill, not too far from the herbwoman's village.

She waited for news of Ossin's upcoming marriage, but she heard none. She wondered if she would hear it; but how could her new friends not tell her, when they told her so much else, about their cows and their cousins, their compost heaps and their crop rotations. About their babies, their sweethearts and-occasionally-about the yellow city. Ossin's name was mentioned once or twice, and Lissar believed that she was not seen to wince; but no one mentioned Trivelda. It was hard to know what the farm folk knew or guessed; that they knew she had lived at court, and that six of the dogs that followed her had originally belonged in the prince's kennels, she assumed; for the rest she did not guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIRTY-TWO

THE ROAD GREW STEEPER, AND THE GREY LIGHT BECAME

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

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

The sun showed but rarely through the clouds during their journey, and the snow fell, sometimes heavily, sometimes gently, but fall it did, and went on doing. The clouds looked low enough, sometimes, as if there were a roof of snow solid and tangible as any other roof, with the trees as poles holding it up.

It was on the ninth or eleventh day that they arrived; Lissar had lost track. The increasing depth of the snow worried her; even the dogs were floundering, and she had to trudge, step by heavy, plowing step. There would be little game for them up here, less still that they could catch in this footing; fleethounds were made for running fast over bare ground. She hoped she had brought enough supplies after all

... she hoped they would find the hut before the snow simply buried them. There were also two sores under the dogs' harness that she did not seem able to halt or ease, Fen's. shoulder and Ferntongue's ribs, no matter how she padded and rearranged the offending straps. The one thing she did not worry about was where they were going; asleep or awake, the direction was plain to her, as plain as a beacon across the grey snow; as bright as a Moon-track across black water.

The hut looked just as she'd left it in the spring: small and empty, shabby and welcoming. She had not permitted herself to worry that it would be occupied. The wood-pile looked untouched; or if someone had visited since she left, he or she had replaced anything that was burned. The roof was still a firm straight line, and the window was still closely shuttered. No smoke drifted out of the chimney. She would not have known what to do if someone had been there; she was almost dizzy, now, with the intensity of the invisible beacon which had brought her here.

She fought her way through a snowdrift up onto the narrow porch and lifted the latch; the door opened, and seven dogs and one human being, plus a great deal of snow, fell indoors.

There was barely enough floor space for all the dogs to lie down; even so there was a good bit of overlap, heads on others' flanks, tangles of eight and sometimes twelve long skinny legs; the entire room looked, Lissar thought, like a large version of the puppy-box that they'd used to carry the puppies outdoors when they were still quite small; she remembered how Ossin ... she stopped the thought.

By the time she had gone out to haul extra wood indoors the dogs had spread out so seamlessly that she had to dig under a dog with every step (frequently to the sound of aggrieved moans) to find a place to put her foot. Most were snoring by the time she got the fire lit; several of them could not even be awakened to get their packs pulled off, and she had to wrestle with the straps, lifting up bits of limp dog, to pull them free. There was this to be said of a dog-covered floor, came the thought in the back of Lissar's mind: she could not see the dark ugly stain on the floor near the door. She piled the bundles any way on the table, climbed back through the welter of bodies, and up onto the bed, which a still-wakeful Ash had been protecting from all marauders. Lissar stayed awake just long enough to hear Ash breathe a sigh as long as a winter stormwind, and to feel the dog's head drop into the valley between her ribs and pelvis.

She woke up at last because there seemed to be something preventing her from breathing. There were now four dogs on the bed, and one of them was lying across her face. She pushed the hairy body aside, recognized that it was Fen, and observed that it was morning. And, sleepily looking around the familiar room, she finally noticed the one change: her note of thanks was gone from the table.

The first weeks were simple if strenuous. She had no time to think, and wanted none; her days were full of fire-tending, and of hunting and cooking food. They had brought much food with them, but seven dogs eat an enormous amount, especially short-haired clogs in winter weather. What time was left was spent in grooming them, checking for hidden splinters in the foot-pads, possible sores in tender places; and relearning how to bathe herself out of a bucket. She did allow herself a moment or two to regret the bathhouse; generally she kept careful watch against any thought of Goldhouse's country, city, or son.

The winter before there had been only the two of them, she and Ash; the occasional rabbit or ootag sufficed, even if both Lissar's and Ash's ribs had showed through their skin by spring. Fleethounds were not meant to hunt in deep winter; they floundered and shivered in the snow, and their feet were cut painfully by ice crystals, and they could not range far from the hut. None of the puppies showed any inclination to grow a heavy, curly coat like Ash's; and Ash and Lissar could not hunt for them all alone. Lissar sometimes left the puppies in the hut and went out on snow-shoes; but her average was not as good as Ash's, and she worried about her expenditure of energy against the amount of food she managed to bring home. There were fewer cattails this year, and even the marshiest places were frozen solid.

Ash disappeared occasionally-as she had done the winter before, although that recollection made Lissar worry no less-for several hours at a time, simply not being there when Lissar led her half-frozen charges back again to the fireside. Ash never failed to bring something home from one of her expeditions; but even the fattest ootag, rendered thriftily into soup, would feed them all but once, and that leanly; and as the winter wore on, the ootags grew thinner too. The snow had grown so deep and the weather so bitter that Lissar feared that they would not reach the lowlands before they perished of the cold if they left the hut and risked it; and she wondered that she had been so determined to come here, wondered at the call, which had always brought her to finding something lost, that had brought her here. Had the call drowned out the sense that should have told her how better to prepare? Should she have assumed that this winter would be that much harder than last? On what grounds should she have made such a guess? Why had the call come at all?

She tried to comfort herself by thinking that she did not know how fierce the winter was in the farmlands; that it had begun easily meant nothing. Vaguely she remembered stories of being snowed in, mending harness, stitching elaborate pillows or wedding-dresses, whittling new pegs or pins or toys for children or grandchildren, going outdoors only long enough to feed the beasts. Were those stories of ordinary winter, or of extraordinary storms? She did not know. Nor, if she did climb down the mountains again, did she know where she might go; she could not spend all winter in anyone's barn. She could not think of returning to the yellow city ... and there her brain stalled, and threw her back once again to thinking of how to feed her own beasts on this mountaintop.

Some days the wind howled and the snow blew so that it was a struggle to go outdoors even long enough for necessary purposes. Lissar did not remember that there had been many days like that the winter before; nor had the snow against the wall of the hut facing the prevailing wind reached the eaves, as it had this year, and drifted over the roof till it melted in the warm circle the chimney made.

One afternoon when they had returned from a long, cold, fruitless hunt, and were all shoving at each other to get nearest the fire (there was a slight odor of singed hair), Ash suddenly left the rest of them and went to stand by the door. Several of the others turned to watch her, as they automatically watched their leader. Ob and Harefoot caught it, whatever it was; and then the rest of them did, and quickly there were seven dogs standing tensely facing the door.

There was no window in that wall, and neither Lissar's hearing nor smell was sensitive enough to pick up what the dogs were responding to. Ash rose to her hind legs and placed her forepaws, in perfect silence, against the door. The long slow exhalation of her breath carried with it the tiniest of whines; so faint was it that Lissar only knew it was there because she knew Ash. She made her way through the throng and set her hand on the latch. Ash composedly lifted her paws away from the door, balancing a moment on her hind feet as if going on two legs were as natural for her as it was for Lissar; and then she dropped to all fours again.

Lissar would have closed the door again if she could, but Ash was off at once, streaking through the gap before the door was fully open. "No!" Lissar cried; but Ash, always obedient, this time did not listen to her; silent but for the crisp sharp sound of her paws breaking through the snow between her great bounds, she ran for the enormous beast standing on the far side of the clearing the hut stood at the opposite edge of.

The puppies, alarmed and confused by Lissar's cry and Ash's extraordinary disobedience, and perhaps by the size of their would-be prey, hesitated, while Lissar, hardly knowing what she did, groped for the bag of throwing-stones that hung just inside the threshold, and then laid her hand as well on a long ash cudgel.

Then she started across the clearing herself, gracelessly crashing through the snow, listening to her own sobbing breath.

The old buck toro that paused at the edge of the trees and turned to face the dog that charged him, ears back and teeth exposed in a snarl, was as tall at the shoulder as Lissar stood; his antlers spread farther than the branches of a well-grown tree. He had not attained his considerable age by accident, and he did not turn and run when he saw Ash, nor even when he saw Lissar and six more tall dogs break after her. He turned instead toward the most immediate threat, lowered his head a little, and waited.

But Ash was no fool either, and had all the respect possible for the points of the great toro's horns. She sheered off at the last moment, dashing in for a glancing nip at the shoulder, and darting away again. Lissar gave some terrified recognition to the dangerous beauty of her fleethound even in snow to her shoulders.

It may yet be all right, she thought, floundering through the same snow. He will lumber off among the trees where we cannot possibly come at him: "Ash, it is not worth it!" she said aloud, but she had not enough breath to shout; we will all be very hungry by spring, but we are not starving yet, I will spend all my days on my snow-shoes after this, there will be enough rabbits- "Ash!" she said again.

But Ash merely ran round the toro, keeping him occupied, giving him no chance to retreat among the trees. She swept in once more, bit him on the flank; the hoof lashed out, but missed; a thin trickle of blood made its way through the thick hair.

This was not a proper hunt. A pack of fleethounds ran down their prey; at speed they made their killing leaps, and the prey's speed was used against it. A cornered beast was always dangerous, and in such situations the hunting-party or -master was expected to put an arrow or a spear where it would do the most good-and save the dogs.

Ash made her third leap, flashing past the antlers' guard and seizing the toro's nose. It was beautifully done; but the toro was standing still, braced, his feet spread against just such an eventuality; and he was very strong.

He roared with the pain in his nose, but he also snapped his neck up and back, barely staggering under the weight of the big dog. Ash hung on; but while she managed to twist aside as he tried to fling her up and over onto his sharp horns, as the force of his swing and her writhe aside brought her through the arc and back toward the earth again, he shifted his weight and struck out with one front foot.

It raked her down one side and across her belly; and the bright blood flowed.

This was no mere trickle, as on the taro's flank, but a great hot gush.

"Ash!" Lissar said again, but this time it was a groan. It had still been bare moments since Lissar had opened the door of the hut and Ash had bolted out; Lissar had not quite crossed the clearing, though she could smell the heavy rank odor of the toro-and now the sharp tang of fresh blood. Ash's blood.

"Help her, damn you!" Lissar screamed, and Ob charged by her, made his leap, and tore a ragged chunk out of the creature's neck; its blood now stained the snow as well, from its nose and flank and now running down its shoulder, and Ash's weight made the deadly antlers less of a threat; but Ash's blood ran the faster. The toro bellowed again and made to throw its head a second time; and Ash was built for running, not for gripping with her jaws, and her hold was slackening as her heart's blood pumped out through the gash in her belly. . . .

Lissar, scarcely thinking what she did, ducked under the highflung head, and the body of her dog; and as one foreleg lifted free of the snow as the creature swung its weight to its other side, Lissar took the ashwood cudgel in her hands and gave as violent a blow as she could, just below the knee of the weight-bearing leg. Vaguely she was aware that the thing had stumbled as the other dogs made their leaps; the toro kicked violently with a rear leg, and there was a yelp; Ash, silent, still hung on.

The leg Lissar struck broke with a loud crack, and the creature fell, full-length, in the snow. In a moment it was up again on three legs, bellowing now with rage as well as pain; but Ash lay in the snow. The toro turned on her as nearest, and would have savaged her with its antlers, but Lissar got there first, in spite of the snow, in spite of having to flee being crushed when the toro fell, in spite of how the snow held her as one's limbs are held in a nightmare; weeping, she brought her cudgel down across the creature's wounded nose, careless of the antlers, shielding her dog; and the toro shrieked, and fell to its knees as its broken leg failed to hold it. At that moment Ferntongue and then Harefoot, with two slashing strokes, hamstrung it, and it rolled, groaning, across the bloody snow, the knife-sharp hoofs still dangerous; Lissar leaped over, and buried her small hunting knife in the soft spot at the base of the jaw, where the head joins the neck; heedless, she grasped the base of one antler, to give herself purchase, and ripped; and the toro's blood fountained out, and it died.

THIRTY-THREE

THE BLOOD'S RUSH WAS STILL MEASURED BY THE RHYTHM OF A beating heart as Lissar turned to Ash. She sank down beside her, shivering uncontrollably with cold and shock. Ash's eye was half open, and her tongue trailed in the snow. But the eye opened a little farther as Lissar knelt beside her, and her ear tried to flatten in greeting.

She had fallen on her wounded side, so Lissar could see only the ugly end of it, curving under her belly. "Ash," she said. "Oh, Ash, I cannot bear it. . ." She thought she might kneel there in the snow till the end of time, but there was a questioning look in Ash's one visible eye, and so, still shuddering, Lissar reached out to stroke the sleek, shining fur on her throat, and down across her shoulder; and then she staggered to her own feet.

She went back to the hut, seized a blanket off the bed, and returned to the battlefield. As delicately as she could she rolled Ash onto the blanket; the dog made no sound, but she was limp in Lissar's hands, and Lissar was clumsy, for her eyes were blinded by tears.

Slowly she sledded her sad burden back across the snow to the hut, ignoring both the toro's corpse and the six other dogs, who, their heads and tails hanging, crept after her. She eased Ash up over the step and the threshold, and skated her across the floor to settle her, still on the now blood-sodden blanket, in front of the fire. It seemed an age since they had left the hut together, and that the fire was still burning high and the hut was warm surprised her. The puppies followed her in and lay down, anxiously, as soon as they were across the threshold, unhappily, submissively, and tightly together, no sprawling, no ease. Lissar had just the presence of mind to count that all six had been able to return without assistance, and then she shut the door.

And returned to Ash. The cut across her ribs was nasty, but not immediately dangerous, and the ribs appeared unbroken. But where the hoof had sunk into the soft belly.... Lissar, feeling sick, bent her head till her face nearly touched Ash's flank, and sniffed; there was no odor but blood, and a lingering rankness from the toro. Could such a blow have missed all the organs? For the first time Lissar felt the faintest stirring of hope.... Then she looked again at Ash's outflung head and the eye, glazing over with agony, and at all the blood ... at least she must stop the bleeding.

"Ash, I shall have to use needle and thread," Lissar said aloud; she barely recognized her own voice, for it sounded calm and reasonable, as if it belonged to someone who knew what to do and could do it. She took out the little roll of leather where she kept her few bits of sewing gear, which she had last used to make harnesses for the dogs for the trek up the mountain; and she threaded her needle with steady hands. Like her voice, they seemed to have no connection with the rest of her, for she was still having trouble remembering to breathe, and her knees were rubbery, and her thighs painful with cramp.

The bleeding, she thought, had slowed, which she feared might be a bad sign rather than a good one, but she knelt so that the fire might give her as much light as possible, said, "Ash, I am sorry," and set the needle into the flesh, a little below the last rib, where the wound went deep.

Ash's head came up off the blanket with the speed of a striking snake's, and there was white visible all the way around her dark eye; but her jaws clashed on empty air, for she had not aimed for Lissar, who was easily in her reach. Lissar clamped her own jaws together, drew the thread quickly through the first stitch, tied it and bit it off; and then repeated the procedure. Ash twitched and her sigh was a moan; six stitches Lissar made, and knew the wound needed more, but knew also that Ash was already at the end of her strength.

She poured a little water down Ash's throat, and believed that not all of it ran out again. Then she wiped her as clean as she could, and put more blankets over her, and sat at her head, her hand just behind Ash's ear, listening to her breathing, willing her to go on breathing....

Dark came, which she might not have cared for, except that the fire was dying, and Ash must be kept warm. The puppies followed her outdoors to relieve themselves while she carried wood; and she had regained enough of her awareness of the world to notice that two of them were limping, Harefoot badly, hopping on three legs. When they went indoors again, she finally remembered that she had a lamp to light, and by its glow she examined the puppies. Pur merely had a long shallow slash across one flank and upper thigh; Harefoot's leg was broken. She panted; anxious and in pain, while Lissar felt the break as delicately as she could, and tried to engage some emotion beyond numbness at the discovery that it was a simple break and that it should not be beyond her small knowledge, gained by assisting Jobe and Hela, to set it effectively.

She did so, her hands as little a part of the rest of her as they had been when she held the needle at Ash's belly; and at the end she said, "Harefoot, you're a good dog," and a little unexpected warmth crept out of its hiding place and moved into her voice. Harefoot looked pleased, and dared to put her head on Lissar's knee and look up at her adoringly; and all the other dogs were a little reassured and crept forward, away from the door, toward the fire. Ash still breathed; and Lissar, and six other dogs, lay down around her, to keep her warm, and to remind her of their presence, and of how much they needed her; Lissar blew out the lamp, to save her small store of fuel, and all but she fell asleep as dusk darkened to night.

The next few days were a nightmare version of the first days with the puppies, almost nine months ago. Lissar did not sleep; she dozed, sometimes, curled around her charge, achingly sensitive to any signal Ash might make. For while nine months before she had worked as hard as she knew how, and feared, every time she woke from an unscheduled nap, to find one of her small charges fallen into the sleep no one wakes from, it was not the same. If Ash died, a part of Lissar would die with her; a part she knew she could not spare.

She was bitterly lonely in the long watches of the night, listening to Ash's faint, rough, tumultuous breathing; for not only was Ash not there to comfort her, but she had lost Ossin as well, Ossin, who was so much of the reason why she had saved the puppies; so much of the reason why she had believed she would save the puppies. And now she found she could not stop herself holding a little aloof from them, because of the ghost of Ossin that lay between them. She was lonelier than she had ever been, because she now understood what loneliness was.

Lost him. Run away from him; fled him; threw him away.

Once she woke, not knowing she had slept, with Ash's head in her lap; it was her own voice that woke her, murmuring, "Not Ash too. Please-not Ash too."

She left the fireside only long enough to fetch more wood; six dogs followed her, two limping, which reminded her that her body had the same functions. Her body seemed an odd and distant stranger, a machine she rested in, and pushed levers and pulled handles or wires to make function, lost as she was in a haze of pain and fear and love and loss, where the promptings of her own bladder and bowels seemed like the voices of strangers. For the first time since she had awakened on the mountaintop, this mountaintop, after meeting the Lady, she did not greet her Moon-blood with gladness, did not welcome the red dreams the first night brought.

Her dreams were of blood already, and blood now to her was only about dying.

She hauled snow for water, which took more time than bringing in wood, since so much produced so little; and one morning, perhaps the second after Ash was wounded, she suddenly remembered the corpse of the toro, which they had killed at such cost. And at that she abruptly noticed she was hungry; that she had been hungry for a long time. The puppies had to be ravenous, and yet none of them had made any move toward the end of the rabbit-broth still simmering on the fire, which she poured drops of down Ash's throat as she could; nor had any of them made any move to investigate the dead toro when they followed her outdoors.

Suddenly, as she pried Ash's stiff jaws apart, the smell of the broth registered: food. There was little enough of it anyway; but it was as if it caught in her eyes and throat now, like smoke. She looked up, blinking, and found six pairs of eyes looking at her hopefully. Tenderly she laid Ash down and covered her closely with blankets.

Then she checked that her small knife was in its strap at her hip. She stared at the bigger kitchen knife and, after a moment's thought, picked up both the small hatchet and the bigger axe she used for wood, and went to the door. The puppies piled after her, the four sound ones giving space to Harefoot and Pur, although the latter's flank was almost healed already, thanks to the remains of the poultice Lissar had made for Ash.

The weather had remained unrelentingly cold; the carcass had not spoiled, although she suspected that, since she had not gutted it, she would find some spoilage inside-if she could get inside, for it was now frozen solid. Perhaps it had frozen quickly enough to leave little odor; for no scavengers had been attracted to it, and the snow around it bore only their own footprints. Lissar recognized immediately the blood-stained hollow where Ash had lain.

The puppies were all looking at her. She looked at the huge crumpled body, chose what might or might not be the likeliest spot, and raised her axe.

The resulting stew was not her best; it was, to her human taste, almost inedibly gamy, but the puppies ate it with alacrity and enthusiasm. So much enthusiasm that she had to tackle the gruesome carcass again almost immediately, although her wrists and shoulders still ached with hacking the first chunk free.

After eyeing the thing with loathing she spent some time chopping it free of its icy foundation; it was in a shaded spot till late afternoon where it lay, and the sun, as the season swung back toward spring, had some heat to it by midday. It might make the thing stink without making it any easier to cut; but it was worth the trial, or so her sore bones told her. Meanwhile it also gave her something besides Ash to think about.

Ash did not die, but Lissar could not convince herself that she grew any better either. Lissar tipped as much of the reeking broth down Ash's throat as she could, till Ash gave up even the pretense of swallowing; even at that Lissar wasn't sure, looking at the puddle on the floor, how much had gone down her at all. Ash's pulse was still thready and erratic, and she was hot to the touch, hotter than a dog's normally hotter-than-human body heat. She never slept nor awakened completely, although Lissar took some comfort in the fact that her eyes did open all the way occasionally, and when they rested on Lissar, they came into focus, if only briefly.

But she lay, almost motionless; always a clean dog, she now relieved herself as she needed to, with no attempt to raise herself out of the way before or after, as it she had no control, or as if she had given up. Lissar cleaned up after her without any thought of complaint; it was not the cleaning up that she minded, but what Ash's helplessness told her about Ash's condition. The only comfort Lissar had was that Ash's wound did not fester; it was even, slowly, closing over; it was not swollen, and it did not smell bad. Lissar kept it covered with poultices, which she changed frequently; the air of the hut was thick with the smell of illness, spoiled meat, urine, feces, and the cutting sharpness of healing herbs. But Lissar cared nothing about this either. Lissar only cared that Ash should live, and if she died, she did not care what she died of, and for the moment, dying was what she looked to be doing.

Lissar hauled the vast frozen dead beast into the middle of the snowy meadow with all the savagery of despair.

One night, having soaked more meat soft enough to skin, she was boiling the noisome stuff. She tried not to breathe at all though the puppies all sniffed the air with the appearance of pleasant anticipation. She sat with Ash's head in her lap, running her hand down the once-sleek jowl and throat, now harsh with dry, staring hair. Don't die, she thought. Don't die. There's already little enough of me; if you leave me, the piece of me you'll take with you might be the end of me, too.

She must have fallen asleep, and the fire begun to smoke, for the room became full of roiling grey, and then the grey began to separate itself into black and white, and the black and white began to shape itself into an outline, although within the outline the black and white continued to chase each other in a mesmerizing, indecipherable pattern, as if light and shadow fell on some swift-moving thing, like water or fire. And the Moonwoman said, "Ash is fighting her way back to you, my dear; I believe she will make it, because she believes it herself. She is an indomitable spirit, your dog, and she will not leave you so long as you hold her as you hold her now, begging her to stay. She will win this battle because she can conceive of no other outcome."

The Moonwoman's words seemed to fall, black and white, in Lissar's ears; she heard them as if they were spoken twice, as if they had two distinct meanings; and she recognized each of the meanings.

"Do not be too hard on yourself," said the Moonwoman, reading her mind, or the black and white shadows on her own face. "It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered; it just is, like sunlight or mountains. It is for human beings to see the shadows behind the light, and the light behind the shadows. It is, perhaps, why dogs have people, and people have dogs.

"But, my dear, my poor child, don't you understand yet that healing carries its own responsibilities? Your battle was from death to life no less than Ash's is now; would you deny it? But you have not accepted your own gift to yourself, your gift of your own life. Ash is looking forward to running through meadows again; can you not give yourself leave to run through meadows too?"

Lissar woke, finding herself crying, and finding Ash, rolled up on her belly from her side, where she had lain for so many hopeless days, feebly licking the hands where the tears fell.

PART THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

SPRING

BEGAN

TO

COME

QUICKLY

AFTER

THAT.

SOMETHING-several somethings-discovered the half-thawed remains of the toro one night; Lissar, who still slept lightly, woke up to hear a growling argument going on outdoors. The puppies were all awake, ears cocked, but none of them showed any desire to go to the door and ask to be let out. The next day, amid the bits of fresh fur and blood, Lissar dismembered what remained of their kill, and hung it from a few branches at the edge of the forest.

Pur's flank was healed; Harefoot's leg Lissar left in its splint perhaps longer than necessary, in fear of further accidents. When Harefoot ran, more so even than usual with fleethounds, it was as if some sixth or seventh sense took over, and she became nothing but the fact of running. Lissar's belief in her had come true for all to see when the kennel staff had set up an informal match-race between her and Whiplash, considered the fastest fleethound in the prince's kennels. And Harefoot, only seven months old, had won. Lissar remembered how the blood vessels had stood out in her neck and upon her skull, and how wild her eyes had looked, and how long it had taken her to settle down again-how slow she had been to respond to her own name-after this. She would not take care of herself--could not be trusted to take care of herself-so Lissar would take extra care of her. The leg was setting straight; but Lissar wondered if it would ever be quite as strong as it was before, if Harefoot might have lost that edge of swiftness she had been born with. She remembered Ossin's comment on racing: a waste of a good hunting dog, and she tried not to mourn; but she wondered how it would look to Harefoot.

This year there was a new urgency to her preparations to leave, to the impatience that spring infected her with. The year before she had known it was time to leave, time to do ... something; her pulse was springing like sap, and she could not be still.

But this year there was a strange, anxious kind of compulsion, an uncomfortable haste, nothing like the calm delight of the Lady's peace last year. Some of the discomfort too was because Ash was regaining her strength only slowly. Lissar wanted to believe that she was anxious about this only because she wished to be on her way; but she knew it was more that it troubled her to see Ash still so weak and slow and unlike herself. If Harefoot might have lost just the least fraction of her extraordinary speed to a broken leg, what debt might Ash have paid to recover from a mortal wound in the belly?

Days passed and became weeks. Lissar, half-mad now with restlessness, had even cleaned the eaves and patched the shutters, making do with what tools she had and what guesses she could make about a carpenter's skills. Her own slowness was perhaps a boon, for it gave her that much more occupation, doing things wrong before she got them somewhat right. As she had spent two winters in this small house, she thought, as she missed the shutter entirely on a misguided swing with her hammer and narrowly avoided receiving the shutter in her gut as a result, she perhaps owed it some outside work as well as inside. It was a pity, though, that mending roof-holes required more skill than scrubbing a floor.

Every sunny day Ash spent lying asleep, dead center in the meadow; the puppies played or slept or wandered. Lissar had salted the rest of the toro meat-the gamy flavor was somehow more bearable when it was so salty it made the back of her tongue hurt-so she did not take them hunting. They were all badly unfit after the long weeks' inactivity, and she did not want to distress Ash by leaving her behind, nor tax her by trying to bring her along.

The first wild greens appeared; with double handsful of the bitterest young herbs, the toro meat became almost palatable, although she noticed the puppies inexplicably preferred it plain.

The first day she caught an unwary rabbit with one of her throwing-stones, she permitted herself to have the lion's share of the sweet, fresh meat, which she ate outdoors, so that she did not have to be distracted by the smell of the puppies'

dinner.

All the dogs were shedding; when she brushed them, short-haired even as they were, the hair flew in clouds, and made everyone sneeze. This occupation was performed exclusively out-of-doors, and downwind of the hut. It took about a sennight for Lissar to realize one circumstance of one spring coat: Ash's long hair was falling out. It was hard to notice at first, because she was in such poor condition, and her fur stuck out or was matted in any and every direction; Lissar had sawn some of the worst knots off with her knife, so poor Ash already looked ragged.

But as the long fur came out in handsful the new, silky, gleaming coat beneath it was revealed ... as close and short and fine as any other fleethound's. The scar, still red, and crooked from too few stitches, glared angrily through; but Ash was recovering herself with her health, and when she stood to attention, her head high and her ears pricked, Lissar thought her as beautiful as any dog ever whelped. And, what pleased Lissar even more, as she began, hesitantly, in tiny spurts, to run and leap again, she ran sound on all four legs, and stretched and twisted and bounded like her old self.

They began sleeping outdoors as soon as the ground was dry enough not to soak through Lissar's leather cloak and a blanket om top-Ash must not take a chill. Lissar watched Ash's progress hungrily, still fearing some unknown complication, still in shock from having believed she might lose her, still not believing her luck and Ash's determination to stay alive, still reliving in nightmare the fateful, unknowing opening of the door, seeing Ash streaking across the snow toward the toro, ignoring Lissar's attempt to call her back-and knowing, as she had not known at the time, how it would end.

And hungrily too with a hunger to be gone from this place. It felt haunted now, haunted with two winters of old pain; that they had, she and Ash, been healed of their pain here as well seemed less strong a memory under the blue skies-and even the cold rains-of spring. Lissar built a fire-pit in the meadow-near the small hillock with the bare top, the hillock crowned by a hollow shaped like two commas curled together. There was no longer much need to go in the hut at all, although it was convenient for storage, and for when it rained; she had hauled the remains of the toro away some time since, and a good torrential rain two nights later had done the rest to eliminate the traces of its existence. It existed now only in Lissar's dreams.

But as spring deepened and the days grew longer and the sun brighter, Lissar began to have the odd sensation that the walls of the hut were becoming ... less solid. It was nothing so obvious as being able to see through them; only that the light indoors grew brighter, brighter than one small window and a door overhung by a double arm's length of porch roof could explain. Perhaps it was only that I am seeing things brighter now, she thought bemusedly.

She left the table, where she had been chopping that night's meat ration into smallish bits, to make it easier to divide fairly eight ways; she thought of dragging the table outdoors, since she still liked to use it, but decided that this was too silly, that furniture belonged indoors. But coming inside to use it made her skin prickle with the awareness that this was no longer home. She went to stand in the doorway, where Ash and Ob were playing as if they were both only a year old; Ash, in her eyes, glittered in the sunlight, and the corners of Lissar's mouth turned up unconsciously.

Lissar looked up at the roof, which appeared solid enough. l have no other explanation, she thought, so it might as well be that I am seeing my own life brighter.

She looked out at the dogs again. Ob was licking Ash's face, as he-and the other puppies-had done many times before. But this time looked different. Ash did not appear to be putting up with the clumsy ministrations of someone she knew meant well; she looked like she was enjoying it. And Ob did not look like a child pestering his nursemaid for attention; he was kissing her solemnly and tenderly, like a lover.

Lissar went back to the table.

When Ash flopped down and put her head in Lissar's lap after supper, Lissar bent over her, lifted one of her hind legs, and looked at the small pink rosebud that nestled between them. It was bigger and redder than usual. Lissar gently lay the leg back again. Ash rolled her eyes at her. "Should you be thinking about puppies with a mortal wound less than two months old in your side?" Ob chose this moment to come near and lie down protectively curled around Ash's other side. "But then, what have I to say about it anyway, yes?"

Ash raised her head long enough to bend her neck back at an entirely implausible angle and give Ob a reflective, upside-down lick, and then righted herself, and heaved her forequarters into Lissar's lap as well, munched on nothing once or twice in the comfortable way of dogs, and settled contentedly down for sleep.

When Lissar opened her eyes the next morning, the first shadows under dawn's first light were moving across the meadow. We leave tomorrow, said the little voice in Lissar's mind. Tomorrow. It fell silent, and Lissar lay, listening to Ob's intestinal mutterings under her ear, and thinking about it. They could sleep under the sky at some place an easy walk down the mountain from here as well as where they were; they would simply stop as soon as Ash got tired. Tomorrow.

Yes, yes, I hear you. Tomorrow. The season is well enough advanced that even if it rains it shouldn't be too cold; not with seven of us to keep her warm, and the leather is almost waterproof. And if she's about to be carrying puppies-or already is-the sooner the better.

Tomorrow.

The iron-filing feeling had never been so powerful.

There wasn't much to pack; little enough left to do. The remains of the herbs she had brought were the only perishables left, and they retained enough of their virtue to be worth saving. She had been glad enough of the medicinal ones, this grim winter.

She fished out a few dark wrinkled survivors from the root bin to take with her, and then wrapped most of the herbs and stowed them in the cupboard for any other traveller.

The extra tools would stay here; except perhaps the hatchet. She would take a couple of the extra blankets that she-and the dogs-had brought with them. She made a tidy bundle of the things that they would take and left it, with the dog harnesses, just inside the door; she would do the parcelling out the next day.

Tomorrow.

A fairly short search through the smaller, neighboring meadows netted her three rabbits, already plump from spring feeding; despite seven dogs in the immediate vicinity the small game at the top of this mountain had largely remained fatally tame.

Lissar would put some tiny young wild onions and the last of the potatoes in the stew tonight.

It was an unusually warm night; she left even the leather cloak rolled up inside the hut door. They sat and lay on the earth, grass tickling their chins and bellies, the occasional six-legged explorer marching gravely up a leg or flank. She thought the voice in her head might not let her sleep; even when it did not shape itself into a word it hummed through her muscles. But a strange, restful peace slipped down over her ... like-a freshly laundered nightgown from Hurra's hands so long ago. . .

she shivered at the memory, waiting for the panic to begin, waiting for that memory to leap forward . . . but it did not come. She remembered the softness and the sweet smell of the nightgowns she used to wear when her favorite bedtime story was the one of how her father courted the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, and the nightgown was still a pleasant memory, and she could further spare the knowledge of sorrow for what was to come to that little girl without spoiling the understanding of that earlier innocence and trust. And so she fell asleep, with dogs all around her, and a full Moon shining down upon the warm green meadow.

She woke up smiling, feeling as refreshed and strong as she ever had in her life, sat up, stretched, and looked around. As she moved, so too did the dogs.

The hut had vanished.

THIRTY-FIVE

THEIR SPEED DOWN THE MOUNTAIN WAS LESS HAMPERED BY

ASH'S weakness than Lissar had expected. She called a halt sometimes not because Ash looked tired but because Lissar felt she ought to be. It seemed as if spring were unrolling beneath their feet; as if, looking over their shoulders, they might see the last patches of snow tucked in shaded hollows, but if they looked to their vision's end before them, they would see summer flowers already in bloom.

Since Lissar's boots had disappeared with the hut and all their other gear, she was grateful there were no late blizzards; she was even more grateful that the game increased almost daily, till she could almost reach out and grab a rabbit or an ootag by the scruff of its neck any time she felt hungry. She and her seven dogs were coming down the mountain as bare of possessions as she and one dog had done a year before: she had her knife, tinder box, and pouch of throwing-stones.

But there was the urgency that she had not felt before. There was no thought of lingering this year, nor any thought of where they were going; she thought they all knew; they were going ... the word home kept rising in her heart and sitting on her tongue, and yet it was not her home and could not be, not since Ossin had said certain things to her on a balcony during a ball given to honor another woman, the woman he was expected to make his wife.

Perhaps she would return his six dogs-for all that he had told her they were hers; for all that she knew that they believed themselves to be hers. Seven was too many, if she were to go wandering. She and Ash could slip away alone one night. No, but there were Ash's puppies to consider, for puppies there would be; they would not be able to travel while the puppies were young. Then too, Ossin said he wished to have choice of any pups from the six dogs she had saved; and once he knew that Ash was who she was.... Lissar felt she owed him this thing-this one thing she could grant-and he would be doubly pleased with Ash's puppies sired by Ob. Perhaps she might then keep Ob, for Ash's company, two dogs would not be too many-although that would also result in more puppies.

As her thoughts wound in such circles, her feet carried her straight on, down and down, not much less rapidly than the snow-swollen streams she and the dogs ran beside, and camped near at night. The water's roar was no louder than the drumming of the blood inside her own veins. She slept less and less, and lay staring at the stars many nights, or listening to the rain drip off the leaves overhead, because she knew Ash would awaken and try to follow her if she moved. The night of the next full Moon she did not sleep at all, although there was nothing left to guard or disappear, except themselves; and the Moonwoman would not take her dogs away from her.

This year, when they struck the road for the first time, Lissar did not hesitate; and so they ran on, through the thinning trees, and out into the lowlands, where farmlands began emerging from the wild.

They struck the village where Barley and Ammy lived, and Lissar hesitated outside their door, anxious as she was to go on; and Ammy, as if she had been standing by the window waiting for their arrival, threw open the shutters and called Lissar's name-Deerskin.

She left the window then, and opened the door; and Lissar soberly lifted the gate-latch, and went up the little stone-flagged path. She noticed Ob looking wistfully at the chickens, though she knew he was too well-mannered to disturb them-at least so long as he was under her eye. Even young spring rabbit grows tedious at last.

"You are going to the yellow city, are you not?" said Ammy, as soon as they were within easy earshot, as if picking up a conversation they had begun last week, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to have Lissar standing in her dooryard again. "Even Barley and I thought of going, for the wedding will be very grand."

Lissar stood as if suddenly rooted to the scrubbed-smooth stone her feet rested on.

"Did you not know?" pursued Ammy. "Did you go up into the mountains again this winter?"

Lissar nodded dumbly.

"What a silly thing to do, child. Winter is long and lonely enough, even here, where we all know one another-and hard, too. You're as thin as you were last spring, although your dogs look better than you do. In the yellow city it is probably quite merry, even in the worst of winter, and you hardly know the season at all. Well, perhaps the wedding was not set up till after you left, for it was well into autumn when the news went out. But you'll want to go back now-for you had become great friends with our prince, had you not?"

This time Lissar shook her head, not so much to deny it, but not knowing whether she wished to acknowledge Ossin as a great friend or not. Would it be more or less possible now to remain in the prince's kennels with the prince married, to Trivelda, as she supposed? She did not know this either, only that her heart ached, and the words Ossin had last spoken to her pressed on her like stones. Why should the prince not be married? It was nothing to her, because she had made it be nothing.

No. It was not she who had made it nothing, but her father.

She turned away, but Ammy said, "Will you not stay? I know Barley would like to see you again too."

Lissar shook her head again, firmly this time, and spoke at last, "There are too many of us to house and feed this year-and I do not like how Ob and Pur eye your chickens. It has been a long winter-they may have forgotten their manners. We are better off away from farmland. Perhaps"-she hesitated-"we'll meet in the yellow city, when you come for the wedding."

Ammy was smiling at her. "You have been on your old mountain too long if you think anyone will be able to find anyone else in the crowds that the city will host for this wedding. But perhaps you will come back here for a little quiet space afterwards. I do not believe any dog that travels with you would stoop to eat a chicken if you told him nay.

"We are far enough out here you know that our countryside is not much hunted; you could provide us with an autumn's game and spend next winter here; we've missed having a hunting-master, there has been no one willing to settle in so dull a place since Barley and I were children. But I do not like seeing you look so thin and pale. Spend the winter here; I will teach you to spin. Our weaver is forever complaining that she has not enough work."

Lissar forgot the wedding for a moment, and smiled. "I thank you. I will remember it. For your barn is by far the most comfortable I have slept in." And my winter home has disappeared, she thought. My home. For the king's city is no home for me. Not now. Not ever. How could she have thought otherwise? "Perhaps you will see me again sooner than you think." She wished she could push the voice, the directional hum, away from her, as she might slap at a fly; for so long as it buzzed at her, she had to go to the yellow city whether she would or not. She would go, then, but she would also leave.

"Good!" said Ammy, and made no further move to stop them, but watched with her curiously bright eyes as they walked back up to the road again. Lissar felt Ammy's eyes as she dropped the latch back in place. She lifted a hand in greeting and farewell, and turned away; and she and the dogs picked up the slow, long-striding trot they used to cover distance.

There was more activity on the road this year; she heard the word "wedding"

once too often, and struck out across the fields, -her skein of pale and brindle-marked dogs stretching out behind her. This year she knew her way, for she had hunted all over this country, and need not keep to the road even for its direction; and the word she heard now, more than once, as they trotted through dawns and twilights, was "Moonwoman."

She did not herself understand the urgency; it was as if her feet hurt-not if she kept on for too long, but if she stopped. She kept one eye always on Ash, and half an eye on Harefoot, whose leg seemed perfectly sound no matter how she bolted ahead or circled around the rest of them. It became a habit, this watchfulness, like checking between the dogs' toes for incipient sores; like running her fingers down the long vivid scar on Ash's side and belly. But there was no heat, no swelling, no tenderness; Ash, Lissar thought, was amused, but she had never been averse to extra attention, and if Lissar's desire now was to stroke a perfectly healthy side several times a day, then that was all right with Ash. But as they passed through the last days in what had become not a journey to the city but a flight to the city, the dogs caught Lissar's restlessness, and seemed as little able as she to settle down to rest for more than an hour or two.

And so they came to a water-cistern at a crossroads after a night of no sleep, just as Ash and Lissar had done the year before, a crossroads at the outskirts of the city, not far from the city gates, where it had become inescapably evident that farms had given way to shops, warehouses, inns and barracks-the water-cistern where Lissar had met Lilac, leading two couple of the king's horses. And they stopped again to drink. Lissar was refreshing her face with handsful of the cold water when she heard,

"Moonwoman," but she paid it no heed, for she never paid that name any heed.

Till a hand gripped her elbow, spinning her around; and it was Lilac herself, and she threw her arms around Lissar. "I am so glad you have come back! I have missed you so much. No one would say where you had gone or why-why could not you have sent me just one word? -No, no, I will not scold you, I am too glad to see you, and Ossin was cross and gloomy and silent for weeks after you disappeared, so I knew you must have left, somehow, about him, which made your just vanishing like that a little more-oh, I don't know, acceptable, except that I did not accept it at all. . .

. I mean, I have spent so much time wondering what had become of you, but that's all ... I just told myself, well, that's the way you'd expect the Moonwoman to behave.

. . ." Lilac's voice suddenly went very high, and her voice broke on the last word.

Lissar found there were tears in her eyes. She blinked. Not knowing what else to say, how to explain, she struck on her usual protest, and said, "But I'm not the Moonwoman."

They had been standing there with their arms around each other, and Lissar's neck was wet with the shorter Lilac's tears. Lilac stirred at this, and backed half an arm's length away, bending back so she could look into Lissar's face. "Aren't you?" she said. She looked down at the dogs then, and Lissar could see her looking for the one shaggy one, and then anxiously counting, coming up with the right number, and then looking again. Ash turned toward her, her right side exposed, and Lilac's eyes widened. "Gods, what was that?"

"A rather large toro," said Lissar.

"A toro? You're mad. You don't tackle a full-grown toro alone with a few dogs."

"It wasn't my idea; it was Ash's; and she would not be called off. I might have found it under other circumstances reassuring that not all of Ash's ideas are good ones, but in this case . . ."

Lilac knelt by Ash's side, which was the signal for seven dogs to try to lick her face, and, unheedingly bumping dog noses away with her other hand, ran her fingers over the scar, just as Lissar herself so often did; Lissar could have sworn that when Ash raised her eyes to meet Lissar's her look was ironic. If a dog can have a sense of humor, as Ash manifestly did, could she not also have a sense of irony? Lissar knew that at heart she believed that a good dog was capable of almost anything: Ossin would understand because he agreed.

She thought of the days and nights when the puppies were only babies, and wished she had thought to ask if he believed a dog capable of irony, for she would not have another opportunity.

"I think you are lucky to be alive," said Lilac.

There was a little pause during which the friends thought of the many things they might say to each other and the many things they wished to say to each other. Lissar found that she wished so badly to tell Lilac everything-everything she knew, including that Ossin had said that he loved her and wanted her to be his wife, and everything she remembered, including the first winter she and Ash had spent alone on the mountain, and everything she ... could neither remember nor not remember, but only feel in her heart and bones and blood and the golden guarded space behind her navel, like how it was she came to leave her old life-that she could not speak at all. There was a noise in her ears not unlike the roaring of the demons at the gates of her own mind, before she had learned what monsters they guarded. The demons roared no longer, but she dared not tell her friend of the monsters; and the despair that rose in her then was the same that had driven her from Ossin last autumn, and her tears spilled over, and she stood in a silence she could not break, and thought, it is no use; I should not have come back. I should go, now, right away, away from here. What I owe Ossin does not matter, Ash's puppies do not matter; nothing matters so much as that I must take myself away from this place where I have friends who love me, because I cannot tell them who I really am.

Lilac, seeing this, thought only that she wept for Ash, for the memory of seeing her when the blow had just been dealt, when fear of her dying would have squeezed Lissar's heart to a stop; for she had some good guess, as a friend will, of what these two meant to each other, though she had no guess of why. And she knew too that Lissar could not speak, though she again guessed only that it was to do with Ash: and she cast around for something to break the silence. Anything would do. "What

... you must have had to sew it together. What did you use?"

"Flax thread," said Lissar. "It was ... awful. But she didn't mind when I pulled them out; O-Ossin," she said, stumbling over the name, "had told me that they don't hurt coming out, but I didn't believe it: I had been there when Jobe stitched up Genther's side, after he was struck by a boar." But her tears fell only faster.

"And her hair came out with the stitches," said Lilac, watching her friend's face worriedly, guessing now that there was some great trouble that was not healed like Ash's side. "An interesting side effect. She really is a fleethound now, you know.

She even looks like one of ours-of Ossin's. I see the ones that people from Fragge or Dula bring, fleethounds, and your Ash looks like she was bred here."

There was another pause, and Lissar's tears stopped falling. "Yes," she said at last. She opened her mouth to say more, but knew she could not, and closed it again.

Lilac smiled a little. "I've been sorry, occasionally, that your tongue doesn't run on wheels, as mine does. It gives me more room, of course, and I dislike anyone talking over me! But I would know your history several times over by now, if you were a talker, and I can listen, I just think silence is wasteful when there is someone to talk to. I guess. . ." She looked into Lissar's face and saw the unhealed trouble there, and realized that she believed her friend would tell her of it if she could; and wished there were some better way to show her sympathy than only in not pressing her about it.

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

Lissar found she still could not speak.

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

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

Lilac looked down. When she had stood up from examining Ash, the dogs had rearranged themselves around Lissar, as integral a part of her as the spokes of a wheel were to the hub, even if the hub remained unaware of it. "Of course you will,"

said Lilac; "and I will fly over the rooftops to get back to the stables with these abominable streamers that simply must be attached to the carriage trappings or the wedding can't possibly come off. If you'll wait a little, I'll come with you to the city; they've got every seamstress working on it, they should be done before midday. And stay with me if you'd ... rather not go back to the kennels."

Lissar found her voice at last. "I thank you. I-I don't know quite what I want to do. I hadn't thought that far ahead. Just-when I heard-"

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

"He?" said Lissar, slowly. "It's not Trivelda?"

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

"But . . ." faltered Lissar. "But I thought Ossin . . ."

"Ossin's not getting married," said Lilac, watching her closely. "Certainly not to Trivelda. He wasn't very nice to her at the ball, you know; went off in the middle of it and only came back at the very end with this really lame excuse about a sick dog.

You could see poor Clementina turning pale even from where I was standing; and Trivelda's father turning purple. I found out what he'd said later, about the dog, I mean; my friend Whiteoak was waiting on Clementina that night, and just then standing very near.

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

Lissar barely heard most of this. "Then who-?"

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

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

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

"I-I thought the heir was supposed to many first," said Lissar, wondering why she felt no relief that Ossin was not to many.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deerskin-are you all right?"

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

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

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

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

"Where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am not the Moonwoman."

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

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

THIRTY-SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why had he not called up his guards?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lissar knew she was shouting; only those few words made her throat sore and raw, and she felt almost as though they had been ripped out of her, as if it were not her tongue and vocal cords that gave them shape and sound. She held up her hands, fingers spread; but curled them into fists, and shook them at her father, and her sleeves fell backwards, leaving her arms bare. Her father stood, looking at her, motionless, but as he might look at a basilisk or an assassin. Her own flesh seemed to shimmer in her eyes; but the blood was pounding so in her head that it was hard to blink her vision clear of it. Every time she closed her eyes, for however brief a flicker of time, the sight of a small round pink-hung room flashed across her vision and dizzied her.

He knew what she was there for, but he did not see her, his daughter, and his eyes were blank, as unseeing as they had been the night he had come through the garden door and flung Ash against the wall so hard as to break her skull, and then raped his daughter, once, twice, three times, for the nights that she had locked her door against him, for he was her father and the king, and his will was law.

But his daughter had been dead for five years; he had mourned her all that time, and was here now only because his ministers demanded it. He did not care for Camilla or any other woman. He had ordered dresses for his daughter lovelier even than those her mother had worn: one the color of the sky, one brighter than the sun, one more radiant than the Moon. But she had never worn them, she who was more beautiful than all these together. Camilla was dull clay beside her. His daughter! He missed her still. He closed his blind eyes in memory and in pain.

Father! screamed the figure, only half visible through the brilliance of the white light that surrounded it, brighter than sun or Moon or noon sky; but then as its fists opened, everyone saw hands, ordinary human hands, and bare arms beneath them.

But there was blood running from the hollows of the cupped hands, as if the fingernails had gouged the flesh in some private agony; but there was too much blood for that, and it ran and ran down the bare white arms, and as the blood coursed down it put out the light around the figure, as water will put out a fire.

The mysterious wind died, and the company, silent with shock, now heard the terrifying soft sound of warm human blood dripping from outstretched arms and striking the floor, a sound as innocent as rainfall. Lilac heard that sound, and she slid off her perch at the edge of the cistern, and sat on the ground, drawing her knees to her chin, laying her face down upon them, and wrapping her arms around her head.

Open your eyes! said the bleeding woman, her voice like a wound itself. Open your eyes and look at me!

The foreign king opened his eyes and looked at her. Lissar staggered as from a blow, and pulled her arms back to herself again, sliding the red palms down her white hair, and then dropping her hands to her sides where her fingers touched Ash and Ob; and she could feel them growling. They gave her strength, that touch of warm dog against her fingertips, the reverberation of their growls; and she let her hands rest on them quietly, reminding herself of her dogs, reminding herself that she was alive, and here for a purpose.

Deerskin, breathed the company. The blazing figure had dwindled as its fire was put out, and they saw her at last. It is our Deerskin. What is she doing here? How can she be the foreign king's daughter? She is poor and barefoot, as she was when she first came here, a year ago, when our prince was kind to her, and gave her a place in his kennels, because she liked dogs.

But the ministers and the courtiers who had come with the foreign king staggered as Lissar had when her father's eyes opened. Lissar! they murmured. For the blood was running down the long white hair of this wild woman in her wild deerskin dress, and it darkened and spread like dye through cloth, till her hair took on the astonishing almost-black of her mother's, Lissla Lissar's mother's hair, mahogany-black, red-black, like the last, deepest drop of heart's blood, brought to light only by violent death. And they recognized the face, for it bore the same expression as it had when their king had declared that he would marry his daughter, eons ago, eons during which they had wrought mightily with their king, to get him to this place that he might honorably marry again at last, and get his country, and his ministers, a proper new heir. And with this thought they grew angry: they all thought Lissar had died. She was supposed to have died! Why must she ruin their plans thus again, this wild woman in her white dress, spoiling the marriage of their king, the marriage they had worked so hard to bring about.

Our Deerskin would not lie, murmured Goldhouse's court, much troubled. Our prince and his dogs love her. The Moonwoman is here to rescue us, murmured those who had followed her. Rescue us and our princess, as she has rescued our lost children.

It was only a young woman of slightly more than average height, although with astonishing red-black hair, who stood before them now in her blood-spattered white deerskin dress, bright blood also on the floor before her, and in her face a haggard weariness that belonged to someone much older. She dropped her eyes from the figures on the dais, and with her gaze her head dropped also, sagging forward on her neck as if she could keep it upright no longer. So she stood, gazing at the floor, as if at a loss; and she began to look out of place, among the richness of style and dress, furniture and ornament, around her; and the blasted doors behind her were an embarrassment, as if a careless servant had dropped a laden tray, making a mess on the fine carpet, and spraying the dinner guests with gravy and wine-dregs.

Thoughtfully she knelt, and touched her sullied hands to the red shining pool; thoughtfully she raised one finger and drew a red line down her cheek. The room was utterly silent; no rustle of satin nor tap of shod foot nor gasp of indrawn breath.

At her back Lissar felt the warmth and presence of her dogs; and Ash's whiskers brushed the back of her neck. "I remember," she said, in quite an ordinary voice, "I remember waking up, after you left me, the last night I spent under your roof. I thought I was dead, or dying, and I wanted to be dead."

She sprang to her feet. "I carried your child-my own father's child-five months for that night's work; and I almost died again when that poor dead thing was born of me.

I had forgotten how to take care of myself. I had forgotten almost everything but a madness I could not name; I often thought that I would choose to die than risk remembering what drove me to madness, for I believed the shame was mine. For you were king, and your will was law, and I was but a girl, or rather a woman, forced into my womanhood." She gripped her hands together, and they began to glow, as she had glittered in the eyes of the company when she first strode through the doors.

She stared at her glowing hands, and she felt her dogs pressing around her, offering her their courage, offering her their lives in any way she might ask of them.

In a new, hard voice, she said, "I was no child, for you and my mother gave me no childhood; and my maidenhood you tore from me, that I might never become a woman; and a woman I have not become, for I have been too afraid.

"But I return to you now all that you did give me: all the rage and the terror, the pain and the hatred that should have been love. The nightmares, and the waking dreams that are worse than nightmares because they are memories. These I return to you, for I want them no more, and I will bear them not one whit of my time on this earth more."

But she staggered again, and dropped to one knee, and loosed her hands from each other, and clasped her belly, and curled around it, and the glow curled around her, like a halo, or like the embracing arms of a beloved friend. "Ah, no!" she cried, in a voice like the sound of the executioner's axe; and Lilac huddled down farther by the cistern while hot tears ran from her eyes down her folded legs, digging her knees into her eyesockets as if to stop the tears, but they swelled and overflowed anyway, and ran down the insides of her thighs.

"No!" cried Lissar. "I cannot bear it again. I cannot!" And Ash turned, and sank her teeth into Lissar's shoulder, but only to bruise and startle; she did not break the skin, or perhaps the deerskin dress did not let her. Lissar's eyes flew open, and she gave one great cry, and a burst of blood flowed from between her legs, thick, dark blood, not bright blood as from a clean wound as had flowed from her hands. This was the secret female blood, heavy with mystery, and it mixed with the more innocent blood already shed; and the intermingled blood sank into the floor, leaving a pattern of arcs and spirals and long twisting curves that forever after seemed to move if any eye tried too long to trace them. In later years that bit of floor came to be declared an oracle, and persons who wished advice on some great matter came to look at it, and see where the pattern led them, and many came away comforted, or clearer in their minds, and able to make decisions that had seemed too hard for their strength. And the throne room became the oracle room, bare and plain, containing nothing but the glowing pattern on the floor, and the shadows of the stained glass, which moved less enigmatically.

"I give it back to you," said Lissar, panting, on her knees, marked with her own blood. "All-I give it all back to you." And suddenly she was again the blazing figure she had been when she stepped across the threshold into the throne room, but she was all the colors of fire now, no longer white but red and golden. She stepped up onto the dais.

But for some of those watching the woman made of flame was two women, and they were identical, except that they were inimical. Some who saw thought of Moonwoman, and how she is both black and white, but they rejected the image, for Moonwoman was still and always herself, and what they saw now was ... water and salt, wind and sand, fire and firewood-but which was the water and which the salt?

The watchers shivered, and wondered at what they saw, and wondered at themselves. Some of them remembered their own nightmares, and perhaps it was those who had nightmares to remember who saw the second woman: and they watched fearfully.

The two figures shimmered, red and golden, and there was no differentiating them, except that there were two; as if a mirror stood somewhere that no one could see, and none therefore knew which was the real woman and which the reflection.

But a change came, though the onlookers could not have said what the change was; only that the balance of their fear shifted, and they were suddenly afraid ... terrified

... panic-stricken at the thought that the one red-gold shape and not the other might be left when the mirror shattered, and only one remained.

If any of the watchers had looked further, they would also have seen that Ossin put out his hand toward one, toward one and not the other, though he was too far away to touch her. What those who watched did see was that one of the flame-women put out only one hand while the other reached out with both of hers; and in the moment before they touched the watchers saw that the beauty of the one who held out both her hands was the greater, but that the greater beauty was of the kind that stopped hearts and did not lift them or bring them joy. And it was she who was the more beautiful who suddenly was no longer there, and the flame-woman remaining opened and shut her single outstretched hand as if she could no longer remember what she was reaching for.

Deerskin, murmured the watchers who had seen the two women; we have our Deerskin. Their hearts lifted, in joy and not only in relief of terror.

And Lissar, dazed, knew that she had seen her mother, but did not remember how; and thought it was perhaps only a fragment of old nightmares. She shook her head; for she saw her father standing before her, but her vision was blurred and flickering, as if she saw him through a sheet of flame. Her father? Her mother? Her mother had been dead-dead-as dead as her daughter three nights after her seventeenth birthday; but no, her daughter had not died, but had lived . . . lived to see her mother again upon a mountaintop, a mountaintop covered with snow....

Nightmare. But nightmare was a word used to mean unimportant and not real; and she had seen her mother, then and now. Her hands trembled, with memory and with present pain: for both were burned, one as if it had been plunged in fire, or as if she had been hurled bodily into the fire but had miraculously escaped, all but her poor hand, which she had put out to save herself. The other felt burnt as if from a rope-as if a rope had been thrown, awkwardly and almost too late, a homely rope, meant not for such adventures but for the tethering of horses, the tying of ill-fitting doors shut or shaken-loose bits back on waggons.

Almost she had not noticed it, almost she had not recognized it; but she had grabbed it at the last, and her shoulder ached from the rough jerk, and her palm was lacerated with the coarse fibers of it. But her hands were only sore, and she was alive.

Alive: alive and here, not in her father's court, no longer on a mountain, but in the throne room of the Gold House, watched by the people who had taken her in, a year ago, taken her in only because she had asked it, asked for work to do and a place to stay. How dared she answer their generosity by destroying the triumphant marriage of their princess-was it not enough that she had destroyed her own place among them?

She blinked: for her mother's face briefly re-formed before her, swimming into existence from the dizzy golden-red blur before her eyes. But it was not her mother's face, but the face of the painting, the painting that had hung behind her father's throne since her mother had died. The painting was there before her, as beautiful and horrible as she remembered, as clear as though she could touch the painted canvas; she recoiled from the thought, recoiled from the painting, recoiled from her mother: No! she told it. No! And the golden-red blur thickened, but as she stared, wide-eyed, her mother's face began to blacken, her mother's eyes dimmed and became only cracked paint, and the smell of burning canvas was in her nostrils.

She blinked again: and knew where she was, and why, and that she came not to destroy Camilla's future but to save it. She saw who stood before her, and recognized him, and did not cringe, although she hated what must come next. And she strode forward onto the dais, and all cowered away from her, all but two.

Her father she seized, she knew not how, for she would not have touched his flesh willingly; nor could those looking on decipher how the flame licked at him; but a look of horror, of an understanding beyond the grasp of mortality, and beyond the profoundest guesses of the still living about the darkest pits of hell, ran fingers like claws over his face, and left a broken old man where a proud king had once stood.

The entire dais was lit as if by flame, and all those that stood by heard a roaring in their ears, as if the entire city was burning down around them. Almost they felt the heat of it, and the air seemed too hot to breathe, and struck harshly on their faces; and outside the throne room the people looked through the shattered doors as if down the red gullet of a Great Dragon.

When the fire released him, the foreign king would have fled, but his own ministers stood in his way, as they tried to press as far from this unknown figure of fire as they could: there had been something about Lissar, but this was not Lissar; this was-something beyond their ken. This was some outlandishness from a barbarian country steeped no doubt in witchcraft; it had been chosen merely because it was the nearest with a marriageable princess. This had been a mistake. It had nothing to do with them. They coughed, and their eyes burned, as if from standing too near a fire. When the dreadful being that stood too near them spoke, they heard the snarl of a crackling fire; but they feared to turn their backs on it to flee to a safer distance because of the seven vast lion-like creatures that stood around it, their jaws a little parted so the white teeth showed, their brilliant eyes fixing at once on any sudden movement. The ministers shuddered, and one of them wept, and so they barred their own king's way in their fear they would not accept as fear. Yet the king could not have fled as he wished even had the way been clear, for he was an old man now, and weak, and slow.

Ossin was the other figure who had stood firm at the coming of the fire. He was the only one of all in the room who had both seen what all the others had seen and yet equally still seen Lissar. He did not think the fire would burn him, or perhaps he did not care. "Deerskin," he said. "Lissar."

She turned to him, and tears of fire and blood were spilling down her cheeks, and her eyes, draining of their blackness, were fire-amber. "Lissar," he said, wonderingly; for now he saw what once had been the girl in the portrait, although the woman before him was much more than the poor, proud, though undeniably beautiful girl in the portrait gave any promise of becoming. "Lissar," he said, with love and sorrow, and reached fearlessly out to touch her burning face.

But she flinched away from his touch, as she had flinched away from him on a balcony half a year ago, and he saw the stricken look come into her clear amber eyes, followed by yearning and despair; and then she turned away from him, and sprang down from the dais, and ran to the broken doors; and the long ribbon of lion-dogs uncoiled itself and ran after her. The way opened for her, like a silvery line of Moonbeam; but behind her it closed in again, like shadows. But more solid than shadows, for when he reached after her, bodies blocked him, as there was a rush for the dais from his courtiers, to catch the foreign king as he fell.

She had a long start on him, for he would not force his way through the shocked, bewildered crowd at the risk of hurting anyone, and it was some minutes before he won his way to the gaping doors. And he knew how swiftly she could go. But he refused to lose her again, and he set his teeth, and thought, agonized and hopeful, that she must be weary to heart and bone; she could not go far without rest. Not even to escape him. When she had fled from him the night of the ball it had been too dark to see clearly; but today he had seen her face, lit by her own light, and he had seen the yearning and the stricken look. He would not let her escape, and he thought he understood now how he might hold her-or he knew how he might try, and then hope and agony blinded him. If he had not needed to pursue her at once, he would have killed her father with his bare hands, he who offered a prayer that his shaft or blade might fly straight to the heart of every beast he caught hunting, to spare it pain and fear, and thanked its spirit after its death for giving him meat for his people. He could have killed this other human being with his bare hands.

In the stir of people talking, of people discovering that they could still talk, and move, he could hear nothing of her soft-footed flight; but when he reached the door and said to Longsword, "Which way?" Longsword pointed without a word of query. Ossin ran on, aware of the slow heavy sound of his own footsteps. He thought he could guess that she would head out across the fields behind the kennels, through the little stand of wood beyond, and toward the crossroads where the Happy Man stood. It was a longer way out of the city's environs than through the Redvine Gate, but he believed that she would prefer the way that would give her bare earth under her feet, rather than the shorter way through the city streets.

He needed to catch her before she went beyond the crossroads, however, for the land began to turn emptier then, with farms biting chunks from the emptiness, but doing little to disturb the vast secrecy of the wilder hunting-lands; and for the first time he cursed his own and his people's fondness for the life his dogs were bred to, that wild land should lie so near the king's city.

He was running out of breath, and a fine fool he must look, every unaccustomed step jarring his body, used as it was to riding not running. He bolted down the back streets of his city, mostly deserted on account of the grand doings at the king's house, where the front courtyard and the wide street that led to it were jammed so close that no one could easily move from the tiny foot-sized space of land where each stood. He could hear the babble of the crowd, and fancied he felt the reverberation of so many hearts beating in the air, or in the ground under his running feet. He spun in his tracks at the sound of hoofbeats, and saw some small farmer, dressed carefully in his best clothes, dismounting from his young cob, and looking cautiously around him. "Sir!" cried the prince. "If I may borrow your horse!"

It did not occur to Ossin that one of his subjects might not recognize him, and fortunately this man had seen the prince at hunting more than once; though Ossin's court clothes-which in fact this particular prince spent most of his life avoiding-might well have suggested to this farmer that he would do best to say yes to this request, whether he recognized his supplicant or not. As Ossin swung into the saddle-damning those same court clothes for their awkwardness for running or riding-his mind was frantically trying to calculate if he saved more time in commandeering a farmer's idea of a riding horse, or if he would have done better to have taken the long detour to the royal stables for one of his own horses. How much longer was the longer way through the fields after all? Might he have done better to follow the way she would have gone and hoped to catch sight of her? He convinced the cob, who was young enough to have retained a sense of adventure, that, unlike its master, he really did want to gallop. The cob put its ears forward and galloped.

But there were still people and alleys and obstacles; he even lost his way, once, in the labyrinthine, ancient backside of the Gold House, by not paying enough attention to the immediate three-dimensional twists and turns before him; and that made him all the more frantic.

He changed his mind halfway and ducked out a small side-gate, down a lane, and into some of the waste land below the city walls that was left unused as a buffer between city and farm. His heart sank, for no matter how he strained his hunting vision, accustomed to sighting the smallest indicative shivers in grass and leaf, he saw no sign of Lissar. But he set out across the field as if the crossroads were his certain target. The cob, though rough-gaited, was sound, and willing, and kept a good pace, but with every stride Ossin cried out silently at the slowness of it, and thought longingly of Greywing, standing idle in her stall. And then the cluster of buildings that heralded the crossroads loomed up before him, and still no sign of Lissar or her seven dogs.

But instead there was a figure riding out in such a direction as obviously intending to meet with him; and as he drew up, resenting the pause but hoping for news, he recognized Lilac, who, as soon as she saw him draw rein, dismounted, and held out her own reins. Lilac had lost what little fear she had had of him as the prince and king's heir after seeing him once or twice in the early morning after a long night with Lissar's puppies, months ago; and they respected each other, cautiously, without thinking about it, because each knew the other stood as a good friend to Lissar.

"Take mine," she said now. "He is one of Skyracer's get, and runs in his stall if he is not given enough running outside it. Lissar went that way"-she said, and pointed, her hand a little unsteady, like her tongue on the new name-"but a few minutes ago. I lost her in the trees, but she cannot yet have gone far."

"My thanks," said Ossin, meaning it, accepting the reins she held out to him; she said no word further, but her face was a little less drawn than he felt his own to be.

He would have said one word more to comfort her, could he have thought of one.

But he could not, and he settled into the saddle and gave the horse his head. Trust Lilac to have persuaded Redthorn to let her take one of the most promising young horses in the king's stables on a page's errand. The colt seized the bit and flew.

And so he burst through the veil of trees into the first wide swathe of farmland, and there, at last, he saw what he sought; and he saw too that they were tired, weary nearly unto death, although he could not say for sure where this knowledge came from, for they were all still running, running as lightly as Moon on water.

But his heart was sick in him that she should run herself to death to escape him, for he was sure that she knew he would follow; and almost he took the bit from the colt and turned him away from their quarry. But he remembered the look on Lissar's face when she had turned away from him, and remembered too what else she ran from, what she had faced and broken by her own strength before the eyes of everyone in the throne room, and then he closed his legs around the colt's sides a little more firmly, and leaned a little lower over his flying mane. For he knew also that if he looked into Lissar's eyes now, now that the past had burned away, if he looked into those clear eyes and still saw a despair that could not be healed, he would return and kill her father; and he needed to know if he must do this or not.

The colt caught up with the dogs only a few steps before the first of the real woodlands began; the cob would never have got him there in time. But it abruptly occurred to Ossin that he did not know what to do now that he had come abreast of them. He could not hold them captive; they could, if they chose, duck around him and dodge into the cover of the trees after all; and he would not be able to follow them closely, a man on horseback, through the undergrowth. He could, he supposed, seize Lissar herself somehow.... But he would not. He hoped she would decide to stop of her own will. She did. She stopped like a branch breaking, and stood swaying; several of the dogs flopped down immediately and lay panting on their sides.

Ossin dismounted, pulled the reins over the colt's head and dropped them; he'd had enough of running for one morning, and would perhaps stay as he was trained.

"Lissar," said the prince.

"Go away," she said, between great mouthsful of air.

"No," he said. "Don't send me away. I let you leave me the first time because I thought that was what you wanted-that what you wanted didn't include me. But. . ."

"I do want you," she said, her voice still weak with running, and with what else had happened that day. And as she stood she began to tremble, and her teeth rattled together; and it was all Ossin could do to stand his ground, not to touch her. "I had forgotten that I have thought of you every hour since the night of the ball; I had convinced myself that I thought of you only every day. I remembered the truth of it when I saw you today, standing beside ... your sister." She was too tired not to speak the truth; having him before her, himself, the warm breathing reality of him, struck down her last weak defenses; she thought she had never been so tired, and yet the strength of her love for the man who stood before her was not a whit lessened by her body's exhaustion. Her voice had dwindled away to little more than a whisper. "But it does not matter. I am. . . not whole. I am no wife for you, Ossin."

"I don't care about-" he began; but she made an impatient gesture.

"I don't mean ... only that I have no maidenhead to offer a husband on our wedding night. I am hurt ... in ways you cannot see, and that I cannot explain, even to myself, but only know that they are there, and a part of me, as much as my hands and eyes and breath are a part of me."

Ossin looked at her, and felt the hope draining out of his heart, for the red and gold were gone from her. Even her yellow eyes were closed, and her face was as pale as chalk, and nearly as lifeless. Only her glinting dark hair held its color. "Then you do not love me?" he said in a voice small and sad.

Her eyes flew open and she looked at him as if he had insulted her. "Love you?

Of course I love you. Ask Lilac, or Hela or Jobe, or-or Longsword. Ask anyone I ever spoke your name to last summer."

"Then marry me," said Ossin. "For I love you, and I do not believe there is anything so wrong with you. You are fair in my eyes and you lie fair on my heart. I-I was there, this morning, when you when you showed the scars you wear, and I accept that you bear them, and will always bear them, as-as Ash bears hers," for even in his preoccupation he had seen and, unlike Lilac, recognized what he saw of Lissar's seventh hound.

"It is not like that," she whispered. "It is not like that."

"Is it not?" said Ossin. "How is it not?" And in his voice, strangely, was the sound of running water, and of bells.

There was a little pause, while they looked at each other, and Ossin knew that it could go either way. He understood that she did not believe that last summer was more important than the truth he had heard spoken at such cost only an hour ago; and he could think of nothing he might say to change her mind, if his love could not reach her, if she counted the love in her own heart as nothing.

And then Ash moved forward from Lissar's side, and leaned against Ossin's leg, and sighed. And they both looked down at her. Almost Ossin held his breath, afraid that this was the last stroke, the final fragment that would produce Lissar's decision, whole and implacable and-the wrong one, the one Ossin feared. And so he broke into speech, saying anything, wanting to prevent Lissar from putting that last piece into its place and presenting him with his fate. But his tongue betrayed him, betrayed the fact that he could not think of life without her, now that he had her again, now that he had caught her when she had run away-now that he had heard her say that she loved him. "This is the Ash I sent you when your mother died," he said, "and some day I want to hear why she grew a long coat, as none of my dogs has ever done and as I as their arrogant breeder am inclined to count an insult to my skill, and why she then lost it again, and what happened since I saw you last that left this mark in her side."

Lissar's eyes were fixed on her dog, who had left her to lean against her lover; but then she lifted her eyes and her gaze met Ossin's, and he saw the hot amber was a little cooled by green, and the green was very clear and calm. Her tone was wondering as she answered: "Lilac asked the same thing. It was a toro-a large toro-and I did not set them on it, for I have more sense; but Ash would not be called back. I do not know myself about her coat. She protected me by disguising herself-protecting me as she has always done." As she believes she is protecting me now, she thought, and guessed that Ossin heard these words too, though she did not say them aloud. "The night I ... ran away.... After my father left me, I waited only to die. And I only did not die because Ash lived, and because she wished me to live too." Will you desert me now, Ash, if I do not choose as you would have me choose, after all that has come before?

They both heard more unspoken words, this time Ossin's. What do you owe me, then, for Ash? Your life? What risk will you take for her risk? For me? But he heard her answers to the words he did not speak: It is not like that. It is not like that. You do not understand.

I do not have to understand, he said. I have seen the scars you carry, and I love you. If you and Ash cannot run quite so far as you used because of old wounds, then we will run less far together. "I was never a runner anyway," he murmured aloud, and Lissar stirred but made no answer.

Aloud he said: "There is another reason we should marry; for you are the only person I've ever known who loves dogs, these fleethounds, as much as I do; and therefore I suspect that I am the only person you have ever known who loves them as you do."

Lissar almost smiled, and a little color came back into her face, and her eyes were hazel now. "And I promised you puppies, didn't I? Ash is pregnant by Ob now, I believe."

"You did promise me puppies," said Ossin, trembling now himself, fighting to keep his words low and kind, as he would speak to a dog so badly frightened it might be savage in its fear; knowing that she wanted to come to him, not knowing if he could depend on that wanting, clamping his arms to his sides to prevent himself from seizing her to him as he wanted to do.

"Ossin," Lissar said, and sighed, and the sigh caught in her throat; and she held one hand out toward him, hesitantly, and he put his arms around her, gently. I cannot decide; she said but not aloud; and so I will let you-and Ash-and my heart decide for me. But I do not know if this is the right thing. She remembered the Moonwoman's words: Ash is looking forward to running through meadows again; can you not give yourself leave to run through meadows too? But she remembered also that Moonwoman had said, It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.

"It is not so easy as running and not running," she said, and found that she had spoken aloud; but she was in Ossin's arms as she said it, and knew that she would stay there-for now. And she promised, herself and Ossin, and Ash and the puppies, that she would try to stay there, for as long as the length of their lives; that she would put her strength now and hereafter toward staying and not fleeing. But I do not know how strong I am, she said. I cannot promise.

It is enough, said Ossin. For who can make such promises? No one of us is so whole that he can see the future.

Then she stepped toward him of her own volition, and put her own arms around him, and he heaved his own sigh, and bent his head, and kissed her, and she relaxed forward, against his breast. And the dogs closed around them, pressing up against their thighs, wagging their tails, rubbing their noses against the two figures who were holding each other so tightly that they seemed only one figure after all.