He talked more than she did, for she had only half a year’s experience available to her, and much of it was about not remembering what went before—about fearing to remember what went before; and the rest was not particularly interesting, about hauling water and chopping wood, and walking down a mountain. She did not mean to tell him this, that she did not remember what her life had been, but at four o’clock in the morning, when the world is full of magic, things may be safely said that may not be uttered at any other time, so long as the person who listens believes in the same kind of magic as the person who speaks. Ossin and Lissar did believe in the same kinds of magic, and she told him more than she knew herself, for she was inside her crippled memory, and he was outside.
But one thing she always remembered not to tell him was her name. Since she remembered so little else, and since she had a name—Deerskin—this created no suspicion in his mind; but she wondered at it herself, that she should be so sure she dared not tell him this one fact—perhaps the only other fact she was sure of beyond Ash’s name.
He in turn told her of his life in ordinary terms. There were no gaps in his memory, no secrets that he could remember nothing of but the fearful fact of their existence. He was the only son of his parents, who had been married four years before he was born; his sister was eight years younger. He could not remember a time when he had not spent most of his waking hours with dogs—except for the time he spent with horses—or a time in which he had not hated being dressed up in velvets and silk and plonked on a royal chair atop a royal dais, “like a statue on a pedestal, and about as useful, I often think. I think my brain stops as soon as brocade touches my skin.”
“You should replace your throne with a plain chair then,” said Lissar. “Or you could take one of the crates in the common-room with you.”
“Yes,” said Ossin, “one of the crates. And we could hire an artist to draw running dogs chasing each other all the way around it, as an indication of my state of mind.”
TWENTY-THREE
SPRING HAD PASSED AND THE WARMTH NOW WAS OF HIGH SUM-mer. When Lissar paused on the way to the bathhouse and lifted her face to the sky, the heat of the sun struck her like the warmth of the fire in the little hut had struck her last winter, as a life-giving force, as a bolt of energy that sank through her flesh to her bones. She took a deep breath, as if welcoming her life back; as if the six small furry life-motes in the kennels behind her were … not of no consequence, but possessed of perfect security.
It was a pleasant sensation; she stood there some minutes, eyes closed, drinking the sun through her pores; and then Hela’s voice at her shoulder, “There, you poor thing, you’ve fallen asleep on your feet.” Lissar hadn’t heard her approach. She opened her eyes and smiled.
Two days later she and Ossin took the pups outdoors for the first time. He carried the big wooden box that held all six of them, and she had occasion to observe that the bulk of his arms and shoulders, unlike that of his waistline, had nothing to do with how many sweet cakes he ate. She and Ash followed him, Lissar carrying blankets, as anxious as any nursemaid about her charges catching a chill.
The puppies tumbled out across the blankets. The bolder ones at once teetered out to the woolly edges and fell off, and began attacking blades of grass. They were adorable, they were alive, and she loved them; and she laughed out loud at their antics. Ossin turned to her, smiling. “I have never heard you laugh before.”
She was silent.
“It is a nice sound. I like it. Pardon me if I have embarrassed you.”
She shook her head; and at that moment Jobe came up to ask Ossin something, a huge, beautiful, silver-and-white beast pacing solemnly at his side. It and Ash threw measuring looks at each other, but both were too well-behaved to do any more: or simply too much on their dignity to initiate the first move. Lissar still had only the vaguest idea of the work that went on around her every day in the kennels; she heard dogs and people, the slap of leather and the jingle of metal rings, the shouts of gladness, command, correction—and frustration; smelled food cooking, and the aromas from the contents of the wheelbarrows the scrubbers carried out twice a day. The scrubbers were not lightly named; they did not merely clean, they scrubbed.
Lilac came to visit her occasionally, the first time the day after Lissar had gone to meet the king and queen in the receiving-hall. By the mysterious messenger service of a small community, word had reached her that evening of what had become of her foundling, and why Lissar had not returned as she had promised. “I knew you would land on your feet,” she said cheerfully in greeting.
Lissar, after one nearly sleepless night, and weeks of them to come, and six small dog-morsels threatening to die at any moment, was not so certain of Lilac’s estimation of her new position, and looked at her with some irony.
Lilac, who had dropped to her knees beside the puppies, did not see this. “They’re so tiny,” she whispered, as if speaking loudly might damage them. “I’m used to foals, who are born big enough that you know it if one stands on your foot.”
“I’m supposed to keep them alive,” Lissar said, as softly as Lilac.
“You will,” said Lilac, looking up, and for just one moment Lissar saw a flash of that look she saw in almost everyone’s face. Lilac’s eyes rested briefly on the white dress Lissar had not yet changed for kennel clothes; and Lissar wondered, suddenly, for the first time, why Lilac had spoken to her at the water trough, what seemed a lifetime ago already, and was yet less than three days.
The glimpse left her speechless. “You will,” said Lilac again, this time turning it into a croon to a puppy, who, waking up, began to crawl toward the large warm bulk near him, cheeping hopefully. This was the one Lissar would name Ob: he was growing adaptable already, and was realizing that more than one large warm bulk provided food.
As the pups grew and blossomed, the names she had at first almost casually chosen, as a way of keeping them sorted out, instead of calling them “white with brindle spot on left ear,” “small grey bitch,” or “big golden-fawn,” began to feel as if they belonged, that they did name; and she slipped, sometimes, and called them by their private names when someone else was near. At first it was only Lilac. Then, one day, Ossin.
“I—I am sorry, your greatness,” she said, catching herself too late. “They’re your pups; you have the naming of them. It is only that I—I am so accustomed to them.”
Ossin shook his head. “No; they are yours, as they would tell you if we asked them. I am sure you have chosen good names for them.” After a moment he added: “I am sure you are hearing their names aright.”
She knew that he did not mean that the pups belonged to her, but she was more relieved than she liked to admit that he would let her names for them stand; she feared a little her own tendency to think of names as safety-charms, helping to anchor them more securely to their small tender lives. And the names did fit them; not entirely unlike, she thought, she was “hearing” them, in the prince’s odd quaint phrase. “Thank you,” she said.
He was smiling, reading in her face that she was not taking him as seriously as he meant what he was saying. “I have wondered a little that you have not named them before; pups around here have names sometimes before their eyes are open—although I admit the ones like ‘Pigface’ and ‘Chaos’ are changed later on. And I think you’re imagining things about Harefoot, but that’s your privilege; a good bit of money—and favors—pass from hand to hand here on just such questions.
“Mind you,” he added, “the pups are yours, and if you win races with Harefoot the purses are yours, although I will think it a waste of a good hunting dog. But I shall want a litter or two out of the bitches, and some stud service from at least one of the dogs—Ob, isn’t it?—I have plans for that line, depending on how they grow up.”
If they grow up, she thought, but she did not say it aloud; she knew in her heart that she was no longer willing even to consider that she might lose so much as one of them, and she kept reminding her
self “if they grow up” as if the gods might be listening, and take pity on her humility, and let her keep them. “Of course, your greatness,” she said, humoring his teasing.
“And stop calling me ‘your greatness.’”
“I’m sorry, y—Ossin.”
“Thank you.”
A day or so later, watching puppies wading through a shallow platter of milk with a little cereal mixed in, and offering a dripping finger to the ones who were slow to catch on (this was becoming dangerous, or at least painful, as their first, needlelike teeth were sprouting), she heard a brief conversation between the prince and Jobe, standing outside the common-room door. This was at some little distance from the puppies’ pen, but conversations in the big central aisle carried.
“Tell them none of that litter is available.”
“But it looks like they’re all going to live,” Jobe said, obviously surprised. “You can always change your mind if something knocks most of them off after all.”
“You’re not listening,” said Ossin patiently. “Yes, they are all going to live, barring plague or famine. They are going to live. That’s not the issue. He can offer me half his kingdom and his daughter’s hand in marriage for all I care. None of Ilgi’s last litter is available. Offer him one of Milli’s; that line is just as strong, maybe stronger.”
There was a pause, while Jobe digested his master’s curious obstinacy—or was it sentimentality? Lissar wondered too. “I’ve heard the daughter isn’t much anyway,” said Jobe at last.
The prince’s splendid laughter rang out. “Just so,” he said. “She neither rides nor keeps hounds.”
When did I start finding his laughter splendid? Lissar thought, as her fingers were half-kneaded, half-punctured by little gums that were developing thorns.
When she went to the bathhouse now, upon her return the puppies all fell on her, wagging their long tails, clambering up her ankles, scaling her lap as soon as she knelt among them. Even Ash now lowered her nose to them and occasionally waved her tail laconically while they greeted her. Her lack of enthusiasm for them never cured them of greeting her eagerly. She would still spring up, dramatically shedding small bodies, if they tried to play with her when she lay down; but if one or three curled up for a nap between her forelegs or against her side, she permitted this. Lissar saw her lick them once or twice, absently, as if her mind were not on what she was doing; but then for all her reserve her restraint was also perfect, and she never, ever offered to bite or even looked like she was thinking about it, however tiresomely the puppies were behaving.
Lissar was deeply grateful for this; she could not exile her best friend for objecting to her new job. Perhaps Ash understood this. Perhaps she didn’t mind puppies so much, it was more that she didn’t know what to do with them.
The puppies grew older; now they looked like what they were, fleethounds, among the most beautiful creatures in the world; perhaps the most graceful even among all the sighthound breeds. Though they were puppies still, they lost the awkwardness, the loose-limbedness, of most puppies while they were still very young. They seemed to dance as they played with each other, they seemed to walk on the ground only because they chose to. When they flattened their ears and wagged their tails at her, it was like a gift.
She loved them all. She tried not to think about Ossin’s teasing about their being hers; she tried not to think of how they must leave her soon, or she them. She knew they would be old enough soon to need her no longer—indeed they no longer needed her now, but she supposed that the prince would let her remain with them to the end of their childhood, and she was glad of the reprieve: to enjoy them for a little while, after worrying about them for so long.
During the days now they wandered through the meadows beyond the kennels, she and Ash and a low silky pool of puppies that flowed and murmured around them. Even on most wet days they went out, for by the time the puppies were two months old, getting soaked to the skin was preferable to trying to cope with six young fleethounds’ pent-up energy indoors. Even worrying that they might catch cold was better than settling the civil wars that broke out if they stayed in their pen all day.
Lissar could by now leave them as she needed to, although the tumultuousness with which they greeted her reappearance was a discouragement to going away in the first place. She no longer slept every night in the pen; but then neither did they. Her room was up two flights of stairs, and even long-legged fleethound puppies need a little time to learn to climb (and, more important, descend) stairs; and she had assumed that as weaning progressed she ought to wean them of her presence as well. But the little bare room felt hollow, with just her and Ash in it, and it recalled strongly to her mind her lingering dislike of sleeping under roofs. She thought about the fact that the prince’s two favorite dogs went almost everywhere with him (they slept by the door of the puppies’ pen on the nights he spent there), and that Jobe and Hela and the others usually had a dog or three sleeping with them.
No one but Lissar had seven. She had crept up very late the first night out of the pen, puppies padding and tumbling and occasionally yelping behind her. She’d been practicing for this with some outside steps conveniently located for such a purpose. The puppies were ready—they were always ready—for anything that looked like a game; Climbing Stairs was fine with them. Harefoot was the cleverest at it straight away; she and Pur were the two tallest, but she carried her size the more easily. At first they only spent half the night upstairs; two flights were simply too many to have to go up and down more than once, and the puppies were learning that there was a difference between under-a-roof and out-of-doors in terms of where they were allowed to relieve themselves. Fleethounds were tidy dogs, and quick to catch on; but infant muscular control can do only so much. By the end of the first week of the new system, they were waking Lissar up at midnight, and going to stand by the pen door in an expectant manner; although Meadowsweet and Fen took turns needing to be carried upstairs, and occasionally Ferntongue forgot as well. But there were only one or two accidents on the bare, easily cleaned floor of the bedroom, neatly deposited in some corner, well away from the mattress Lissar had dragged off the bed so they could all sleep on it more comfortably.
Her puppies were sleeping through the night by the time they were three months old. “That’s extraordinary,” Hela said, when, at three and a half months, Lissar told her this. “That’s extraordinary,” was also what Hela had said the first time she saw the puppy waterfall pouring down the stairs.
“They’re extraordinary puppies,” said Lissar proudly, trying not to grin foolishly, at the same time reaching over to pry Fen’s teeth out of Pur’s rump. But she looked up, smiling, at Hela’s face, and there was that look again; the look at Lilac’s breakfast table, the look the kennel staff had given her the first evening in the common-room. The look that had become almost palpable the afternoon she had told the story of Ash and her escape from the dragon. She had only even told it accidentally, uneasy as she was in the common-room, and not accustomed to lingering there. She was there because Ossin was, and because he obviously assumed that she would stay—that she belonged there, as the rest of the kennel staff did.
“No one can outrun a dragon,” Jobe said.
“I know. We were lucky. It couldn’t have been very hungry, not to have chased us.” But she looked around at the faces looking back at her, and did not see “luck” reflected in their expressions; and she wished she had said nothing.
But Ossin smiled at her, meeting her eyes as the others had not, and said, “Yes, I remember once when Nob and Tolly and Reant, do you remember him? He ran afoul of that big iruku that long winter we had, when he was only four—we were out looking for the signs of a herd of bandeer that someone had brought word of, and we surprised a pair of dragons feeding on a dead one. They’re slower, of course, when they’re eating, and they never really believe that anything would dare chase them away from their prey, so they aren’t all that belligerent, just mean by nature—but we got out of
there in a hurry. I gave the order to scatter, so they’d have a harder time, I hoped, deciding whom to chase. I don’t know if that’s why they decided to leave us alone or not; the dead bandeer was bigger than any of us.”
TWENTY-FOUR
THERE WAS MUCH ACTIVITY IN THE KENNELS DURING HIGH SUMMER. From midsummer through the harvest was the hunting season; winter began early here, and the snow could be deep soon after harvest. Sometimes the last ricks and bales were raked up while the snow sifted down; sometimes the last hunts were cancelled and the hunters, royal and courtier or district nobility and vassal, helped their local farmers, the snow weighing on shoulders and clogging footsteps with perfect democratic indifference. As often as not the stooked fields were turned briefly into sharp white ranges of topographically implausible peaks and pinnacles before the farm waggons came along to unmake them gently into their component sheaves and bear them off to the barns.
The hunting-parties went out as late in the year as they could; while the season lasted—so long as the weather threatened neither blizzards nor heatstroke—Ossin rode out himself nearly every day. The inhabitants of the king’s court depended on the huntsfolk and their dogs to provide meat for the table. The court held no farmland of its own, and while the king could tax his farmers in meat, no king ever had. All the wild land, the unsettled land, belonged to the royal family, who leased it as they chose to smallholders, or awarded it to their favorites—or took it back from those who angered or betrayed them. Their own flocks were the wild beasts of the forests and hills; and wild game was considered finer meat, more savory and health-giving, than anything a farmer could raise. Rights and durations of royal land use leases were very carefully negotiated; if the land was to be cleared for agriculture, then cleared it must be; if it was to be kept wild for hunting, the king had the power to declare, each year, how much game could be taken on each leasehold (the position of royal warden, and advisor to the king on the delicate question of yearly bags, was much prized), and to name who led and maintained any local hunt. (In practice, however, the latter generations of Goldhouses were all good-natured, and almost always said “Yes” to any local nomination.) This also meant that if any aristocratic or royal tastes ran toward chicken or mutton, the noble bargainer was in an excellent position to make a trade.