she could not remember. Plants? Why would one pull the leaves off plants and put them in one's petticoat pocket? And what matter was it if a petticoat was fashionable or not? Why did it matter if her petticoat was fashionable?
But her mind began to shiver and pull away again, and by then her pockets were full. She made her slow, uncertain way to the open tower door.
The flannel's warmth, and the unexamined comfort of being clothed, and a plan, even so simple a plan as to walk through one door and then another door and then on somewhere else, cleared her head a little. She paused on the first threshold to take a deep breath; it hurt; but the strength it provided was greater than the pain, and she took a second breath. She opened both eyes, blinked, looked at the garden door, and willed her eyes to focus together.
For a tiny flicker of a moment, they did; and heartened by this, she took a step forward, outside; and the full strength of the wind struck her, and she stumbled; pain stabbed her hip. She took a step backwards, facing into the room she had just left, her hand on the doorframe to steady herself.
She saw several articles of clothing lying over the back of one of the chairs beside the table that bore the food. She fumbled through them, and drew out a long, heavy length of dark green stuff with a ... collar. She recognized the purpose of the narrow little roll of material in the wide sweep of the thing: a cloak. Awkwardly she hung it over her shoulders.
Then she stepped outdoors again, and followed in her dog's wake.
ELEVEN
SINCE SHE KNEW NEITHER FROM WHAT THEY FLED NOR WHERE
they were going, it was an odd and frustrating journey, and frequently a terrifying one. Two things lodged in her mind, and she allowed herself to be guided by them as she might have been guided by two fixed stars by which she could determine her bearings, and choose a line to take.
The first fixed point was: away. Away from where she had been when she was first recalled to herself by Ash's soft, frantic tongue. This first point she had mostly to leave to Ash, however; for she wandered in and out of full consciousness.
Occasionally she awoke lying on the ground, without any recollection of halting to rest; sometimes she merely awoke to the knowledge that her limping feet had gone on taking one slow step after another while her mind had been elsewhere.
Once she awoke like this standing in a stream from which Ash was drinking eagerly; and she was glad to bend cautiously down and do likewise. Sometimes she awoke to the realization that her eyes had set themselves upon a tree she was making her way toward; for she had found early on that this was the steadiest way for her to proceed, to sight at some distance some landmark and work her way toward it, and then, upon gaining it, choose another. Her balance and her vision were still too erratic to risk much looking around in the ordinary way of walking; and watching the jogging, swinging form of Ash was not to be considered.
Or at least she guessed that her landmark-by-landmark form of travel, like a messenger riding from one road-stone to the next, was not the usual method of the healthy. She was not sure of this as she was not sure of almost everything. Was she, then, not healthy? Her hip hurt her all the time. She knew she did not like this, and guessed that it should not be that way. But should both her eyes be able to focus on a single thing? Then why had she two eyes?
The one external fixed point in her universe was Ash, for all that she could only look at her directly when one or the other of them, and preferably both, was standing still. The one word she had said aloud since she had first opened her eyes in answer to Ash's calling her back, was Ash's name. She could not remember her own. She stopped trying, after a while, because it frightened her too much; both the trying to remember and the not remembering.
Most of what they saw was trees, and, fortunately, frequent streams. Sometimes there was a trail, perhaps a deer track; sometimes there wasn't; but luckily the woods were old and thick, and there was not too much low undergrowth to bar human passage, although Lissar had sometimes to duck under low limbs. This was lucky in another way, that the tree cover, even this late in the season, was heavy enough that rain did not often soak through. She was often thirsty but rarely hungry. She ate a bit of bread occasionally, when she thought of it, and fed a little to Ash, who ate it with a manner similar to her own: a sort of bemused dutifulness, nothing more.
Ash occasionally snapped up and swallowed leaves, grass, insects, and small scuttling creatures Lissar sometimes recognized as mice and sometimes recognized as not-mice and sometimes did not see at all. As Lissar watched, another memory tried to surface: edible plants.
She had learnt-not long ago, she thought, though she could not remember why she thought so-quite a bit about edible plants. Her good hand reached out, traced the shape of a leaf . . . something . . . she remembered. She pulled the leaf off and bit into it. Sharp; it made her eyes water. But she held it in her mouth a moment, and it began to taste good to her; it began to taste as if it would do her good.
She pulled a few more leaves off the tall bush and gave them to her other hand to hold. She had finally worked that arm through its sleeve; that had been one long evening's work. They did mostly halt-she remembered this from day to day, and it comforted her, this bit of continuity, this memory she could grasp any time she wished-when it grew too dark for her to see Ash easily, even glimmering as she did in shadow.
She stood, holding leaves in one hand, thinking about what to do next; and then she brushed the edge of her cloak back so that her hand could find her pocket, and she deposited the leaves there, with the last dry-but-sticky, unpleasantly homogenous bits of their food-store. The cloak got twisted a bit too far around her throat during this process, and she had to spend a little more time to tug it awkwardly back into place. Then she hastened, in a kind of limping scuttle, after Ash; though Ash had already noticed her absence, and had stopped to wait for her.
She had learnt to fasten the hook through its catch upon the cloak a little more securely; she unfastened it when Ash and she lay down to sleep together, so she could more easily spread it around them both. But her left arm was still difficult to move, and its range of motion was very small. Her hip hurt the worst, though she had grown somewhat accustomed even to this; her headache came and went, as did her dizzy spells. And her lapses of consciousness.
At some point she washed Ash's back, and the bump at the base of her skull, with a corner of her petticoat, as they stood in one of the frequent streams. Her own wounds had clotted and in some places her clothing was stuck to her skin; she did not think about it. When she needed to relieve herself she did it where she was, standing or squatting, wherever she happened to be, and when she was finished she moved on.
She noticed that the weather was growing colder. The ground, and worse, running water, when there were no stones for a bridge (and even when there were, rarely could she keep her balance for an entire crossing dry-footed), hurt her bare feet increasingly. She often left bloody footprints, and her limping grew so severe that sometimes her damaged hip could not bear it, and she had to stop, even when the sun was high.