Ash left her dinner to inquire if she could help. "You're not built to be a draught animal," Lissar said, panting; "but then neither am I," she added thoughtfully, and looped a leash around Ash's shoulders, threw herself at the end of her two remaining leashes, and called her dog. Ash took a few moments to comprehend that she had been attached to this great jagged lump of flesh for a purpose. She wondered, briefly, if she should be offended; but Lissar herself was doing the same odd thing, and Ash scorned nothing her person accepted. So she pulled.
Lissar didn't know if it was Ash's strength or the moral support of company, but they got it to the edge of the trees, and then Lissar used Ash as part of a snub to hold the carcass in place as she slowly hauled it off the ground. This was easier to explain, for Ash knew the command Stand!, and when the weight began dragging her forward, No, stand! made her dig her feet in, hump her back, and try to act heavy. It was not done well, but it was done at last.
Then Lissar started a fire, rescued a bit of the heart and the liver, stuck them on the ends of two peeled sticks, and fell asleep before they finished cooking.
She woke up to the smell of meat burning, rescued it, and stood waving it back and forth till it was cool enough to eat. The dogs were asleep as well, sprawled anyhow from where the creature had died, and she'd performed the messy and disgusting business of gutting it, to where she stood by the fire she had started, a little distance from where the monster now hung dripping from its tree. She nibbled tentatively at the heart, thinking, if the story is true, then let me welcome this creature's strength and courage while I reject its hate and rage. The meat burned her tongue.
She was as tired as her dogs, but this was not the place to linger; there would be other meat-eaters coming to investigate, and to try how far from the ground the prize hung. Besides, she wanted water, both to drink and to wash the sticky reek away.
She chewed and swallowed, bit off another chunk; found that she was waking up against all probability; perhaps this was the fierceness of the creature's heart.
Ash, she said softly, and Ash was immediately and silently at her side (and cross that she had slept through an opportunity to beg for cooked meat). Ob, she said.
Meadowsweet, Harefoot, Fen. She whispered the puppies' names, wakened them with a touch on neck or flank; a few murmured a protest, but they rolled to their feet, stretched front and rear, shook their heads till their ears rattled against their skulls with a curiously metallic sound; then they came quietly. Dark eyes glinted in the Moonlight; black nostrils flared and tails lifted. Lissar had the sudden, eerie sense that they all knew where they were going-and that she knew best of all. Blue, she said. Kestrel. Bunt. But they were awake already, their training strong in them: go on till you drop.
She set out at an easy trot, for they had some distance to travel, and the puppies would tire soon again; but it was as if there were a scent in her own nostrils or a glittering trail laid out before her, the path of the Moon. It was like the directionless direction, the windless wind on her cheek, when she and Ash had come down from the mountains, only a few months before.
Fleethounds hunt silently; the only sound was the soft pad of many feet. Lissar kilted her dress up around her hips that she might run the more easily, and so they flowed across meadowland and poured through one of the slender outflung arms of the yellow city, almost a town of its own; and while it was late, it was not so late that there were no people drinking and eating and changing horses, mounting and dismounting, loading and unloading, at the crossroads inn, the Happy Man, that was the reason the city bulged out so in this direction. And so a number of people saw the tall, white-legged woman in her white dress surrounded by tall silver hounds run soundlessly past, and disappear again in the shadows beyond the road. Speech and motion stopped for a long moment; and then, as if at a sign, several low voices: Moonwoman, they muttered. It is the White Lady and her shadow hounds.
Lissar knew none of this; she was barely aware of the crossroads, the inn; what she saw and heard was in her mind, but it led her as strongly as any leash. And so it was that when midnight was long past and dawn not so far away, she and her dogs entered a little glade in a forest on a hill behind a village, and there, curled up asleep in a nest of old leaves, was the lost boy.
The glamour fell from her as soon as her worldly eyes touched him; the glittering Moon trail, the mind's inexplicable knowledge, evaporated as if it had never been.
The dogs crowded round her as she knelt by the boy, knowing still this much, that it was he whom she sought. He slept the sleep of exhaustion and despair, not knowing that he was near his own village, that his long miserable wandering had brought him back so near to home. She did not know if she should wake him, or curl up beside him and wait for dawn.
He shivered where he lay, a long shudder which shook the thin leaves, and then a quietness, followed by another fit of shivering. At least she and the dogs could keep him warm. She slipped her arms under him, and recognized her own exhaustion; the decision was no longer a choice, for the muscles of her arms and back, having carried half-grown puppies and wrestled a monster, would do no more that night. He nestled himself against her belly not unlike a larger, less leggy puppy, making little noises also not unlike a puppy's, and sighed, relaxing without ever waking up.
She slid down farther, not minding the knobbly roots of the tree, and felt the dogs bedding down around her, spinning in little circles and tucking their legs into their surprisingly small bundles, thrusting noses under paws and tails. Some large warm thing-or a series of smaller warm things-pressed up against her back; and then Ash bent over her and breathed on her face, and settled down, tucking her face between Lissar's head and shoulder, her long hair shadowing the boy's face, and one curl touching his ear.
Lissar never felt her leave; but it was one sharp, crisp bark from Ash, standing watch at dawn, that brought the prince and his company to the glade.
TWENTY-SIX
LISSAR HEARD THE PAUSE, AFTER THAT, WHEN ANYONE CALLED
HER by the name she had given first to Lilac, Deerskin; and she could no longer refuse to recognize the whispers: Moonwoman. It was Ossin she asked, finally, wanting to know the story that others had given her, but not liking to ask anyone she suspected of calling her so. Even Lilac, straightforward as ever in all other ways, had a new secret in her eyes when she looked at her friend. Lissar wished she did not have to ask him; but he was the only one who still named her Deerskin without an echo, who still met her eyes easily-as, it occurred to her, she met his. Even his kennel folk, who had learned not to call him "your greatness," never quite forgot that he was their prince. Lissar wondered at herself, for she was ... only an herbalist's apprentice.
"You don't have stories of the Moonwoman where you're from?" Ossin said in surprise. "She's one of our favorite legends. I was in love with her"-he was grooming Aster as he spoke; Aster was standing rigidly still in the ecstasy of the attention-"when I was a boy, her and her coursing hounds.