Deerskin by Robin McKinley
“Your aunt?” said Lissar. “It’s only Ash,” she added, as Ash did it again. “Do you mind it?” she said, not thinking that her maid would never tell her “no” but only in amazement that anyone might wish to reject Ash’s advances. Lissar forgot to wear her cynicism about court life all the time, and she saw everything Ash did through a haze of devotion. The maid was saved from having to frame any reply by Ash’s ceasing her attentions and climbing on the bed for a nap, having first scrabbled the coverlet into a twist to her shape and liking. The maid did not mind Ash licking the back of her neck—she’d grown up with dogs—but was braced against the possibility that her volunteering a comment might be counted too forward.
“Could I meet your aunt?” said Lissar, taking the maid’s breath away.
“You can do anything, splendor,” said the maid without irony, stating the truth as she saw it.
“Will you ask her to come to me, then?” said Lissar, equally without irony. She did know that she was asking something a little out of the way, but she did not know how the world looked to a young maid in a new job, especially a job involving royalty. The maid was silent for a moment, at the enormity of the breach of courtly order she was about to commit in response to this mildly spoken command, and wondered what Layith, who was mistress to all the maids, would say if she found out. “Yes, splendor,” she said, accepting her fate.
The maid, who was young and simple and came from a simple family, merely appeared one morning about a fortnight later with a small woman, wearing a great many shawls, at her side. This was Rinnol; and Rinnol was a gardener, an herbalist, a midwife. Rinnol had never been to court, nor wanted to, and was very cross with her younger sister’s girl, and inclined to refuse the summons. But Lissar’s maid, panic-stricken at what might happen to her if she did not fulfill the princess’s orders, talked her into it, she and her mother both, who thought that she had done a good thing for her daughter by sending her up to the palace.
So Rinnol came, prepared grudgingly to be polite but little else, for she had as little understanding of the breach of court etiquette as Lissar herself did. She found, to her surprise, a girl the age of her niece who was perfectly willing to get down on her knees and dig in the dirt with her fingers, despite the possibility of damp soft earthworms and small jointed things with many legs, and getting smudges on one’s face and clothing. So Rinnol began to teach the princess which green things were weeds to pull out and which were things to be kind to, and she taught her the names of many and the uses of some, returning to the palace every few days for another lesson, without any words of any such arrangement ever passing between herself and Lissar. After that first day she simply stumped in, up the grand sweep of low stairs from the grand smooth garden that lay on the other side of the wall, through the marble hallway, behind the statue with the homicidal draperies, and through to Lissar’s tower room; and the waiting-women learned to bear her indifference because they had to, although she was one more mark against the princess in their minds. But Rinnol had found that she enjoyed the lessons, for Lissar was a good pupil.
Lissar surprised herself in this, since she had been given so few lessons to learn in her life she did not know that she was quite able to learn, and was further surprised to find that she could like learning besides. Hurra had taught her her letters, but those lessons had been given her grudgingly, and that she learned them seemed almost cause for shame. She knew how to ride a horse, so long as the horse was reasonably cooperative, and how to curtsey, and how to dance, which she believed she disliked, for she had never danced with a friend. But these things had not engaged her. She was stiff with Rinnol at first, and Rinnol with her, and Rinnol was not a cheerful personality, as Viaka was. Viaka, after one or two meetings, avoided Rinnol; plantlore did not interest her, and Rinnol was herself so dour. But Rinnol, like many people who follow a vocation and know they do well by it, was won over by Lissar’s attention.
Their unlikely friendship blossomed to the point that Lissar visited her at home several times, in her little house an hour’s brisk walk from the palace; for the odd erratic attention that her father’s ministers paid her was such that she could absent herself even overnight occasionally with no one to tell her nay. There was indeed no one in a position to tell her anything but her father, and he seemed willing to let her avoid him, and live out her young girlhood with few adult restraints and admonitions.
Lissar then filled her days with Ash and Viaka and Rinnol, and they were enough. She bore with state dinners, and with the occasional attempts by some member or other of the court to cultivate her. The seasons passed, and she watched them with greater attention than she had before Rinnol had come into her life, and she found that everything in nature interested her, and that she was happy to spend entire days walking the wide lands beyond the court gardens with no companion but her dog. And almost she managed to convince herself that she took no thought for the future.
SIX
FOR LISSAR’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY THERE WAS TO BE A GRAND ball. Lissar did not know who made the decision; she was informed of it by one of the oldest and grandest court ladies, who occasionally embarrassed Lissar by trying, in her orotund and inflexible way, to mother her. Lissar received the news in silence and waited on events.
The portrait of the queen, which had hung in terrible splendor in the receiving-hall for the last year and a half, was to be moved, hung in the ballroom for this event. Its placement seemed to be the first and most important decision to be made, and everything else was arranged from that first priority. It was impossible to say whether the haunted portrait was assumed to be casting its blessing on its human child, or making sure that that child could never compete with its beauty; no one, afterwards, could remember where the initial idea of moving the portrait originated, although everyone vaguely, or hastily, guessed that it must have been upon the king’s orders. Because the curious thing was that it was not only Lissar who found the portrait’s magnificence oppressive, or eerie, or … no one was willing to pursue this thought because everyone insisted on grieving for the queen and loving her memory; but even the servants no longer went in the receiving-hall alone, when it was not in use, but always at least in pairs. No one ever remarked on this or made it difficult to accomplish; the feeling was too general. And so the beautiful queen stared down, glittering, and her people scuttled by her.
Lissar did not look forward to her birthday banquet and ball. There would be many foreign lords and princes there, as well as all the more local lords, and she knew she was now old enough to be auctioned off in marriage to the alliance best for her country. She knew because her waiting-women had kept her apprised of this, all through her seventeenth year, till the birthday at its climactic end began to look as dreadful as the thought of dancing, gracefully and gaily, before her mother’s portrait was. When she heard, not that the portrait was to be moved, because she was rarely told anything directly, but of the moving of it, it was like the last blow of a long and tiring joust; this one knocked her out of the saddle at last, and she lay on the ground gasping for her lost breath. She did not look forward to her inevitable marriage, but she thought of it in terms of being sent away from her father, and this she found hopeful. In the meanwhile there was the ball to be got through.
Another very great lady, and one that brooked no nonsense about motherliness, attended to the production of Lissar’s first real ball-gown. Everyone who might be expected to have the price of a ball-gown was invited to this royal birthday-party, and so the seamstresses and tailors had instantly been swamped; the very great lady, having been assigned this task a little late, merely plucked the seamstresses she wished to patronize from whatever other commitments they had (neither giving birth nor dying would have been sufficient excuse), as, perhaps, a farmwife might choose a chicken or two from the flock for the evening’s supper. The chicken does not argue.
Lissar’s gown was to have a vast skirt, and to be covered with so many tiny glinting stones as to be blinding to look up
The grand lady was not much given to thought, and this one thought she had about the resemblance between the late queen and her daughter became so unsettling, as she began to follow it to its logical conclusion, that she banished thought altogether (as she had banished acknowledging her faint uneasiness about the rather overwhelming portrait that had been moved to the ballroom), and began treating Lissar with a kind of impatient briskness, as if Lissar herself were an obstacle to be got round.
Lissar bore this without protest; she had found that she did not want to think about her prospective marriage after all, because it would take away Rinnol and Viaka and her garden. It did not occur to her that she might request Viaka, at least, to go with her as her companion; but it did not occur to her either that any husband she might have could object to Ash.
On the day of the ball Lissar’s hair was dressed very early, and then she was told to behave herself and not disturb any of the coils so delicately arranged, nor the golden filigree woven through it, to hold the fresh flowers that would be thrust among its tiny links at the very last moment that evening. Lissar felt as if she were carrying a castle on her head, and it made her scalp itch. Ash was put off by the perfumes of the hair oils, although nothing would keep Ash away from Lissar for long.
So Lissar took Viaka and went up the long stairs and down the long halls to visit Hurra, for Hurra liked to hear of grand doings at the palace, which would remind her of the grander doings in the queen’s day, which would then be her opportunity, eagerly seized, to retell these at length. Lissar could sit at her usual place next to the (closed) window, and not get herself or her hair into any impetuous draughts.
Hurra told the story of the first ball that the old king had given to honor his son’s new bride, and how lovely the bride had been; Hurra herself had been there, in one of the trains of one of the grand ladies. She lost herself in the telling, as she always did; but on some days her mad gaze softened and looked inward, and even Lissar could sit near her and be untroubled. When Hurra’s voice fell into silence, Lissar stood up and came to stand behind Viaka’s chair. Some shadow of her movement disturbed Hurra’s reverie, and she looked up, blinking through tears, at Lissar’s face.
A look of puzzlement passed over her face, and with it a look Lissar had not seen in two years: recognition. “Why, Lissla Lissar, child, is that you? You’re all grown up. How can I not have noticed? I almost didn’t recognize you, you have such a look of your mother. My dear, how much you do look like your mother!”
Lissar’s hands clamped down on the back of Viaka’s chair. “Thank you, Hurra,” she said in a voice she could barely hear through the ringing in her ears, “but you do me too much honor. It is the headdress merely.”
But Hurra shook her old head stubbornly, staring with bright, curiously fierce eyes at the young woman who had once been her charge. As Viaka stood up to join the princess in leave-taking, Hurra took a firmer grip on the young hands she held. “She looks like the queen! She does. Can’t you see it?” She gave Viaka’s hands a shake. “Look! Don’t you see it?”
Viaka turned awkwardly, her hands still imprisoned, to look over her shoulder at the princess; what she saw was the princess, looking white and frightened. Because she was the princess’s friend she said: “I see Lissar in a splendid headdress for her first ball.”
Hurra dropped her hands, and the bright fierce look faded from her face, and she began to work her empty hands in her lap, and to rock, and murmur, “the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms.”
Lissar, without another word, turned and fled, Ash, her ears flat with worry, crowding into her side. Viaka paused only long enough to pat the old woman’s hand and say, with the distinctness she reserved for her own old and wits’-wandering relatives, “Good-bye, Hurra, we’ll tell you all about the ball when we come next,” and then hurried after her friend.
“I don’t look like my mother,” said Lissar, as Viaka caught up with her. She stopped, whirled around, seized Viaka by the shoulders. “Do I?”
Viaka shook her head, not knowing what to say, for Hurra was right. But Lissar had none of the manner of her mother, as the very grand lady had already noted, none of the regal graciousness, the consciousness of her own perfection, which was why Viaka herself had not observed the growing resemblance; that, and the fact that the queen had been dead for two years and the memory of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms begins over time to adapt somewhat to the rememberer’s personal preferences in beauty.
Viaka went into the receiving-hall no oftener than Lissar did and so did not have her memory—or her awe—freshened by the scintillant example of the master painter’s art. She did remember that when she was younger, and her parents had a few times taken their flock of children to some grand event where the king and queen were present, Viaka had been more frightened than drawn by the king’s grandeur and the queen’s exquisiteness, which qualities seemed to stand out around them like a mist that it would be dangerous for more ordinary mortals to breathe. Viaka remembered one occasion vividly, when a very pretty young woman had collapsed, sobbing, at the queen’s feet, and Viaka had taken her breath in in a little jerk of fear when the queen bent down to the girl. She had been surprised, and then wondered at the strength of that surprise, both at the gentleness of the queen’s touch and at the look of passionate adoration on the girl’s face as she permitted herself to be lifted up.
All these thoughts went confusedly and fragmentarily through Viaka’s head; they produced no useful possibilities for soothing remarks. “Your—your hair is a little like,” stammered poor Viaka at last, quailing under the princess’s eyes. “It is only old Hurra, you know, and she is easily confused.”
“My hair is brown!” cried Lissar. “The queen’s hair was black!” Viaka said nothing, but the spell had been broken, and Lissar felt a little relieved; she dropped her hands from her friend’s shoulders and charged off down the hall, her skirts whipping around her, making Ash half-invisible amid them and, from the weight of her grandly arranged and decorated hair, holding her chin much higher than usual. Viaka had to look up at her, as she hurried beside her; Viaka had been the taller a year ago, but Lissar had grown.
Perhaps it was the unusual angle, or the unusual expression on Lissar’s face—unlike the very grand lady, Viaka knew Lissar’s face often bore high color and animation; but the very grand lady had never seen the princess playing with her dog. This was nothing like the beaming face she daily turned to Ash—and to Viaka; this was an obsessed intensity that—Viaka thought suddenly—made her indeed resemble the queen.
Lissar parted her lips a little and flared her nostrils, and Viaka remembered something her parents had said of the queen: “When she lets her lower lip drop a little, and her chin comes up and her nostrils flare—get out of the way! If she notices you, you’ll be sorry.”
“Lissar—” Viaka began, hesitatingly.
Lissar stopped. Viaka stumbled several more steps before she caught her balance to stop and
“Well, I am not my mother, of course,” she said. “Even if I am wearing too much hair and too many petticoats today. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” She ran a thoughtful finger down the delicate ridge in the center of Ash’s skull. “You know they’ve rehung the—the portrait”—Viaka did not have to ask what portrait—“in the ballroom, don’t you?” Viaka nodded. Lissar tried to laugh, and failed. “That should stop everyone from thinking I look like my mother. I’ll try to be grateful. Come, help me dress, will you?”
“Oh yes,” said Viaka, whose own toilette would be much simpler. “Yes, I would like to.”
“Thank you. You can protect me from Lady Undgersim,” Lissar said; Lady Undgersim was the very grand lady. “Shall we go to your rooms first, and get you in your dress: it will be practice for all the buttons and laces and nonsense on mine.”
Viaka laughed, for her own dress was very pretty, and both of them knew that Viaka did not envy Lissar her splendid dress nor the position that went with it. “Yes, let’s.”
SEVEN
THE PRINCESS’S FIRST BALL WAS AS GRAND AS ANY PROUD AND domineering lady could want. Lissar, watching from the corner of her eye, could see Lady Undgersim swell with gratified vanity at the immediate attention, the reverberent bustle involving many servants and lesser notables, that their entrance produced.