"May the gods be listening," said Lilac, when she saw. "Testor, you pig, couldn't you have found her a pair of boots? Nobody should have to muck stalls barefoot."
"I never noticed," said Testor sheepishly.
Ash, released from the attic (or rather reawakened and hauled forth), made herself implausibly small and fitted under Lissar's chair at breakfast, although her waving tail, which uncurled itself as soon as Lissar began dropping toast and sausages under the table, made walking behind her treacherous. There were eighteen of them at the table, including the limping Jed; and Redthorn sat at the head.
Everyone wanted to know where Lissar and Ash had come from; but the questions evaporated so quickly when Lissar showed some distress that she guessed there must be other secrets among the company, and she felt hopeful that perhaps here they would let you become yourself in the present if you wished to leave your history behind. She felt the hope and wondered at it, because she knew it meant that she wished to find a place here in the yellow city, where she was uncomfortable walking the streets and alarmed by the number of people, wished to find a place so that she could stay. Stay for what purpose? Stay for how long?
Redthorn did ask her bluntly if she had any particular skills; but he looked at her kindly even when she said in a small voice that she did not. I can run thirty miles in a day and then thirty miles the day after that; I can hit a rabbit five times out of seven with a flung stone; I can survive a winter in a mountain hut; I can survive.... The thought faltered, and she looked down at her white deerskin dress, and rubbed her fingers across her lap. Her fingers, which had just introduced another sausage under her chair, left no grease-mark on the white surface.
She looked up sharply for no reason but that the movement might break the thread of her thoughts; and saw a dozen pairs of eyes instantly averted. The expressions on the faces varied, and she did not identify them all before courtesy blanked them out again. Curiosity she understood, and wariness, for the stranger in their midst and no mutual acquaintance to ease the introduction. She was startled by some of the other things she saw: wistfulness ... longing ... hope. A glimpse of some other story she saw in one pair of eyes; a story she did not know if she wished to know more of or not.
She moved her own eyes to look at Lilac, spearing a slab of bread with her thov, and Lilac glanced up at just that moment, meeting her eyes straightforwardly.
There was nothing in her gaze but herself; no shadows, nor shards of broken stories; nothing she wanted to make Lissar a part of; the smile that went with the look was similarly kind and plain and open. Lissar was Lissar-or rather she was Deerskin-Lilac was willing to wait on the rest. Lissar smiled back.
The consensus was that while Redthorn could find work for her, at least till Jed was active again, she should present herself to the court first. Everyone agreed that the prince would like Ash.
"It's, you know, polite," said Lilac. "I went myself, after about a sennight; I was just curious, if nothing else, there's a king and a queen and a prince and a princess a stone's throw away from you-a stone's throw if you don't mind braining a doorkeeper and breaking a few windows-it's a waste not to go look at 'em, you know? So I did. Got a real bad impression of the prince, though-I told you, he looks eight kinds of vegetable slouched down in some chair of state, covered with dog hair, he's always got a few of the dogs themselves with him and they look better than he does. I keep wondering what he must be like at formal banquets and so on; I know they have 'em. Cofta is easy-going but he still remembers he's a king. But that's no mind really. You'll end up liking him-Ossin-too after you've seen him coming in from running the young hounds for the first time, with burrs in his hair.
Clementina's the practical one-that's the queen-lots of people would rather go to her with their problems than the king because she understands things at once and starts thinking what to do about them. Cofta's dreamier, although his dreams are usually true."
"There's a saying," broke in Jed, "that Cofta can't see the trees for the forest, and Clem the forest for the trees."
"Camilla's the beauty," continued Lilac. "It's so unexpected that that family should produce a beauty-the Goldhouses have been squat and dreary-looking for centuries, you can see it in the portraits, and Clem's just another branch of the same family; she and Cofta are some kind of cousins-that they're all struck rather dumb by it. By Camilla: And she's so young that being beautiful absorbs her attention pretty thoroughly. She may grow up to be something; she may not. I don't think anyone knows if she's bright or stupid."
Breakfast was over by then, and Lilac and Lissar were leaning on a post outside the barn, and Lissar was watching out of the corner of her eye, while listening with most of her attention, the bustle of the morning's work at the king's stable. Jed paused beside them when he needed to rest his ankle. "She's probably not even beautiful, you know," he said. "It's just that she's a stunner next to the rest of them.
Besides, she's ours, so we like her," and he grinned. He was himself good-looking, and knew it.
"Except for that Dorl," said Lilac. "Since Camilla got old enough, he's started hanging around."
Lissar knew that while Redthorn might well find work for her, she did not belong at the stables. She knew little of horses, though this she might learn, and less, she thought, of getting along with other people; that she feared to learn, although she remembered the hope she felt at the idea of finding a place for herself in the yellow city, which was so very full of people. Choices were choices; that did not mean they were simple ones. But she had not liked the eyes around the breakfast-table.
So she borrowed a brush and comb, and took turns working on her own hair and Ash's. When either of them whined and ducked away too miserably she switched over to the other for a while. Finger-combing was frustrating and time-consuming and she had neglected both of them in the last weeks.
Cofta's general receiving was this afternoon; the sooner she got it over with the better. It would be another three days to wait if she missed today. There were voices in her head again, and not the quiet voice from the mountaintop. These voices were .
. . "The king was very handsome and grand, but the queen was the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms." It was a story she had heard somewhere, but she could not remember where; and trying to remember made her feel tired and weak and confused.
In her mind's eye she was wearing another white dress, not of deerskin, but of silk; and Ash was beside her, but the Ash she was remembering, as her fingers lost themselves in the long cool waves of the skirt, had short fine hair instead of thick curls. Ash? No, she did remember, Ash had grown her heavy coat this last winter, when they had been snowbound for so long. But Ash was not a young dog, a puppy reaching her adulthood and growing her adult coat; she could remember holding the puppy Ash had been in her arms for the first time, and she had been smaller then herself. She remembered the kind look of the man who handed the puppy to her; and she remembered there were a great many other people around....