Sound had meaning in the wild; as also did smell. She felt suffocated by the smells here, perfume and tobacco and too-rich food.
There was something else as well; with every breath and step she expected to see and hear ... something other than what she saw and heard; yet her expectation was always a little before or behind her thought, and she could never identify it. It made her feel off-balance, as if she were walking on the swaying limb of a tree instead of on solid earth. Just now, for example, as she stepped through the door, she lifted her eyes to see the portrait at the end of the long room ... and yet this was a square room, and there were no portraits; tapestries of hunting scenes hung on the walls, interspersed with sconces and niches. What portrait? And why was the absence of an imaginary portrait such a relief?
She did not know, and yet her eyes would not quite focus on what lay around her now, even as her mind could not quite bring into recognition what her eyes looked for.
She shook her head and moved cautiously to her left. The blaze of colors-the density of perfumes--0n her right told her that this was not where the common supplicants waited. There was quite a little group of the latter, smelling reassuringly human, and so she had some time to look around her before it was her turn to present herself to the king and his family.
She found them first. The royal family sat on a dais near the center of the room-a little nearer the back wall, where tall doors opened and closed beneath the sconces and between the tapestries, than to the single huge door by which she had entered. A series of tall chairs stood on the dais, but she could identify the king and queen by their attitude as well as by the fact of their chairs being the tallest and most central.
She identified the prince next, for his location at the king's right hand, and by the long narrow dog-face poking out from behind his chair. Without Lilac's description she might have guessed that the young man at the queen's left must he the prince, for he sat and looked about him in a more princely manner. Between the queen and the young man sat a young girl. Her cushioned chair was backless, and yet she sat straight and still and poised; and there was a golden circlet upon her head, which declared her the princess. The prince was bare-headed.
The receiving moved briskly. She believed that the king and queen did listen to each of their subjects, however humble both in appearance and in the tale each had to tell; even at this distance she could see the expressiveness of their faces, hear the responsive lone of their voices when they asked questions or made rulings. Mostly, she thought, the rulings were popular; most sets of shoulders on the people leaving the royal presence were square and relieved.
She wished the rumble of conversation around her would diminish that she might hear what was said around the dais. It was not that the voices of those she wanted to listen to were so far away or so soft; it was that she could not distinguish one voice from the next. She could only listen to all of them at once and therefore understand nothing. This was a knack, she thought, one that she had perhaps had in her old life; it would come back to her. Meanwhile she took in, without wanting to, the tale of the old woman behind her and her sickly only son, and the tale of the old woman with her, whose previous husband had come back from the dead, as she had supposed, and not to wish ill upon the living since it now seemed he was living, but she had liked him better dead, for he was a ne'er-do-well and her second husband suited her much better, and she wished to keep him. These voices fell the nearest upon her ear, and she could not turn her listening away from them.
Ash had stayed quietly at her side, pressed up against her, her wide brown eyes moving quickly, her fleethound's muscles vibrating faintly at all the tempting or dubious shadows and sudden bursts of motion; but she was no longer a puppy, and not only her own dignity but her person's demanded she stay where she was.
As the crowd before her thinned, Lissar could see the folk on the dais more clearly. She liked the queen's brightness of eye, the king's ready smile; she Jiked that bath of them were quietly dressed (not all of their court were so modest); she liked that they seemed to speak no more than was necessary. She liked that neither of them was handsome.
The young man to the queen's left was handsome. His hair was thick and curly, his eyes large and brilliant, his lashes long, his hands slender and gracefuclass="underline" Lissar could see the women, young and old, look at him when they went to address the king and queen; and they looked long and longingly. The young man looked back, smiling, without arrogance, but with a kind of selfconsciousness that Lissar did not like. He rarely spoke, and then only if the king or queen spoke to him first.
The princess was not beautiful in the common way, but she drew the eye and then held it. There was something about her, as if she were always poised on the brink of doing something surprising and wonderful; an air as if she too believed she were about to do something surprising and wonderful. Sitting so close to the beautiful young man neither put her out of her composure, nor put her in the shade of his more predictable beauty. She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.
The prince spoke as little as possible, and there were long pauses before his answers, if a question was addressed to him. But she noticed that everyone, including the king and queen, paid sharp attention when he did speak, and her impression was that his words on more than one occasion had significant influence on the outcome of the particular situation under discussion. This was, she thought, reassuring, as there was so little at all princely in his demeanor.
He was probably tall, though it was difficult to be sure, for he hung in his chair as if he rested on the middle of his spine instead of his pelvis; and he sprawled over one arm of the chair as well, his head negligently propped on one fist. His hair, though thick, was inclined to be lank, his eyes were a little too small, his nose a little too square, his chin a little too large-as was his waistline. His hands were big and broad, and either of his boots looked long enough for a yerig to den in. As she was thinking this, he uncrossed one leg from the other and stomped that foot on the floor; she startled, as if he had known what she was thinking, and her involuntary movement, for some reason, among all the gaudy motion of the court, caught his eye.
It was almost her turn; perhaps he had been looking her way already, searching longingly for the end of the queue, the end of this afternoon's work. He looked, and his gaze paused. She knew what he saw: a black-eyed, white-haired woman in a white deerskin dress; she was an exotic figure, enough taller than the average that she stood out even before the oddity of her clothing (and bare feet) might be remarked.
And she was growing accustomed to the way other people seemed to leave a little space around her; it was no different from her feeling separate from the rest of humanity, though she had no name for what the separation meant or was made of.