Ash was in her lap, eating one of the black ribbons on her dress. Ash did not fit in her lap very well, for already her length of leg spoke of the dog she would become; but she did not care about this, and neither did the princess. As one or another dangling leg began to drag the rest of the puppy floorward after it, the princess scooped it back into her lap, whereupon some other dog-end inevitably spilled off in some other direction. "Did you see him?" Lissar murmured. "He backed out of my presence-just as if I were . . ." She stopped. She had been going to say "as if I were my father," but she found that she did not want to align herself with her father about this or any other thing.
To distract herself, she concentrated on the silky fur along Ash's back. The ribbon on her dress was beginning to look rather the worse for wear. Lissar thought she should probably remove it from the puppy's joyful attentions. But she didn't.
She didn't care about mourning or about mourning clothes; all she cared about was Ash.
The chambers that the important minister arranged for her were very grand indeed. There were seven individual rooms opening off a great central room like a smaller version of the royal receiving hall; and not, to her startled eyes, enough smaller. Squarely in the center of the big room was a sculpture, that of a woman festooned with a great deal of tumultuous drapery, which appeared to be trying to strangle her. Lissar stopped dead in front of it, momentarily transfixed; and then the minister with the teeth appeared as if from nowhere, very pleased at the effect his chosen art object appeared to be making. The princess, who was growing accustomed to the surprising things her intuition told her since the first profound shock of knowing that she did not care about her mother's death, looked at him, knew what he was thinking, and let him go on thinking it.
Her bed-chamber was almost as large as the room with the alarming statue in it, and the bed itself was large enough for several princesses and a whole litter of long-legged puppies. She discarded it instantly, behind the unbroken calm of her expression, and explored further. In the last of her over-furnished rooms there was a large purple couch which Ash leaped on immediately, and rolled over, gaily, digging her shoulder and hipbone and long sharp spine into its cushions, leaving a mist of little silver-fawn dog hairs behind her. The princess, all of whose black clothing was now covered in little fawn-silver dog hairs, laughed.
To the right of the couch was a door; a rather plain door, after all the princess had recently seen, which she therefore opened hopefully. There was a key-hole in the door, and as she opened it, there was a clatter on the stone flags beyond, where the key, which had been left loosely in the far side of the door, fell out.
She picked it up without thinking, and pocketed it.
There was a flight of three shallow stone steps and then a little round room, and she realized she was standing at the bottom of one of the palace's many towers. The wall, immediately above the ceiling of this little room, began to flare out, to support a much vaster tower above; the walls of this little ground-level room were subsequently very thick.
There was another door, which she again opened. This time she looked for a key in the key-hole, but there was none; perhaps the key to the inner door opened both, for the shape of the lock looked the same. She did not greatly care, and did not pause to try the key she had picked up in this second lock. She stepped through the door and found herself in what once had been a garden, though it had obviously been left to go wild for some years. The official door to the out-of-doors, from a short but magnificent hall off the princess's receiving-room, and through which therefore she would have m take Ash several times a day, led into a formal courtyard with raked gravel paths and low pruned hedges; simple grass was not to be got at for some distance, grass being too ordinary for the feet of a princess who was abruptly being acknowledged as possessing the usual prerequisites of royal rank.
She had looked out over the clipped and regulated expanse and thought that this was not a great deal better than the four flights of stain she was seeking to escape.
And, standing on the wide shallow marble steps, she had wondered what the high wall to the left was, with ivy and clematis creeping up it so prettily; but she had not cared much, for she was already rejecting the minister's exotic suite in her mind.
When she had gone back indoors through the receiving-room, past the statue, she had begun, between the sixth and seventh rooms, to arrange what she would need to say to the minister to get what she wanted. That was before she found the tower room, and the wild garden.
But now she was changing her decision, standing on the other side of the high mysterious wall. Great ragged leaves on thick stalks stood shoulder-high on that side; yellow sunbursts of flowers erupted from them, and shorter spikes of pink and lavender flowers spilled out in front of them. A small graceful tree stood against the wall, over which rioted the ivy and clematis so tidily cut back on the other side. In the center she could see where paths had once been laid out, to demarcate, she thought, an herb garden; she could smell some of the herbs growing still, green and gentle or spicy and vivid, though she could not give names to them. One path looked as if it led to the small tree; perhaps there was a door in the wall there, buried under the tiny grasping hands of ivy and the small curling stems of clematis seeking purchase. The garden was walled all around; against the wall opposite the one she had seen from the other side a tangle of roses stood, leggy as fleethound puppies, sadly in need of some knowledgeable pruning.
Perhaps this was something she could learn: to prune roses, to recognize herbs from weeds and cultivate the one and pull up the other. Between the herb garden and the flower beds there was plenty of room for rolling and leaping and the chasing of balls, even for a dog as large and quick as Ash was becoming; Lissar wondered why such a lovely garden had been neglected for so long. But it did not matter.
For the moment she looked at the high wall around her garden with satisfaction; Ash was no more than half grown and already she could leap higher than Lissar's head. The little round room, for her, and the big walled garden, for Ash, made her new chambers perfect. The other rooms mattered little, but ... it would probably be wise not to ask that the statue be removed; she could learn to ignore it. And perhaps a few pillows could stun the purple of that couch.
The minister had been trying to break into her reflections for several minutes; she'd heard a grunt of suppressed protest when her hand had first touched the plain door next to the extravagant sofa. She turned to him gravely as Ash disappeared into the undergrowth, waving stems marking her passage. She was now willing to hear, and to pretend to listen, to what he might have to say, now that she had found what she was looking for.
"I am terribly sorry, princess," said the minister. "I wished you to see your new rooms at once, and so the work of preparation was not complete; the door to this place was to have been closed off."
"I am very glad it was not," said Lissar. "I will want the little round chamber set up as my bedroom, and this garden is perfect for Ash. It is for Ash that I wished to move to the ground floor, you understand," she explained, kindly, as he had obviously not taken this in the first time she spoke to him. "Ash is only a puppy, and it will make her training much easier."