There was a whole swarm of courtiers who came with the portrait, the whole country knew about it. We thought he must just be puffing out his importance. And now it's him going to marry our princess. I still can't remember his name. Oh, wait-his daughter's name was Lissla Lissar. Funny I remember that, but it's such a pretty name. Her mother had been called the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms and she supposedly took after her-I never saw the portrait. I've even heard a story that old Cofta paid court to the mother before he settled down with Clementina.
Deerskin-are you all right?"
Lissar seized the arm held out to her. "They-they aren't married yet?" Lissar shook her head, failing to clear it, although the directional hum was gone, vanished with Lilac's words. "I don't even know what your marriage rituals are."
"Noo, they're not married yet," said Lilac, looking worriedly into Lissar's face.
"But as good as, or nearly. They're taking their vows today, although the public show and the party for everyone who can walk, ride or crawl here is tomorrow-the one we can go to-the one the golden coach is for. They aren't really married till tomorrow. She sleeps alone with her ladies in the next room, one last time, tonight.
She only turned seventeen a few days ago-but she forbid any notice to be taken of it, saying it was her marriage that mattered. She's so young ... Deerskin, what is the matter?"
"Where?"
"Where do they take their vows? In the throne room. Not the receiving-room, where you went your first day. The throne room is behind it, smaller, and grand.
Very grand. It's not used much. Is it that you know something about him?"
Lissar's eyes slowly refocussed on her friend's face, but her own face felt stiff and expressionless. "Yes-I know something about him."
There was a tiny silence, a silence unlike any either of them had experienced before, as if the silence were a live thing, making space for itself, expanding, pushing the noise of the inn and the crossroads back, so that the two of them stood in another little world: a little world where it was known that this king was no fit husband for the young, kind, responsible princess Camilla. No fit husband for any woman.
"It is curious, I was so sure I would see you today, I kept looking out of the front window. I told myself I was just bored, that I was thinking of you because this is where we first met. But I was really expecting you. The ceremony will be read out at midday; you'll have to hurry. Do you want my horse?" Lilac's words dropped into the silence, echoing, almost, as if they stood in a chamber with thick bare walls.
Lissar shook her head. "No; the dogs and I will make our own way quicker; but I thank you."
Lilac smiled a little. "It's true, it would look odd, the Moonwoman on horseback; they'll make way for you more quickly, this way."
"I am not the Moonwoman."
"Perhaps you are not, after all; would the Moonwoman not know what she had come for? But then the stories never say that she always knows what she'll find; only that she arrives in time. Sometimes just in time."
Lissar was already gone; Lilac touched her cheek where her friend had kissed it, knowing that she had done so and yet not remembering its happening. She could not even see Lissar on the road ahead of her.
THIRTY-SIX
IT MUST HAVE BEEN TRUE, WHAT LILAC SAID, FOR LISSAR FOUND
nothing but empty road spinning out before her. She was dimly aware of people lining the narrow clear way, dimly aware of the noise of them, but she seemed to move in the little world of silence that had been born in her last words to Lilac, silence undisturbed by the quietness of her bare feet striking the ground, and the dogs' paws. For they ran swiftly, the last desperate effort before exhaustion; but that last effort was a great one, and so seven dogs and one Moonwoman fled, fleeter than any deer or hare, and the people rolled back before them like waves, parting before the prow of a ship running strongly before the wind.
It was a long way from the crossroads to the last innermost heart of Goldhouse's city, and the woman and the dogs were already tired, for they had come far in a very short time. Ash ran on one side of Lissar, Ob on the other, and the other five ran as close behind as the afterdeck rides behind the bow. The wind whistled out of their straining lungs, and flecks of foam speckled the dogs' sides, but there was no faltering; and the people who saw them go would tell the story later that they moved like Moonbeams. Some, even, in later years, would say that they glowed as the full Moon glows, or that mortal eyes saw through them, faintly, as Moonlight may penetrate a fog.
But Lissar knew none of this. What she knew was that she had to get to the throne room before Camilla's vows were uttered; somehow, that Camilla should merely be bodily rescued was not enough.
Those vows would be a stain on her spirit, and a restraint on her freely offering her pledge to some other, worthier husband; that Camilla should have that clean chance of that other husband seemed somehow of overwhelming importance to Lissar; that she was driven by her own memory of fleeing from Ossin on the night of the ball did not occur to her. But having lost her own innocence she knew the value of innocence, and of faith, and trust; and if she could spare another's loss she would.
What the people she passed saw was a look of such fear and rage and pain on the Moonwoman's face that they were moved by it, moved in sorrow and in wonder: sorrow for the mortal grief they saw and wonder that they saw it. For they were accustomed to the Moon going tranquilly about her business in the sky while they looked up at her and thought her beautiful and far away. They knew the new tales of the lost children, and the cool bright figure with her hounds who returned them, but the stories shook and shivered in their memories as they looked at her now among them, running the streets of their own city, and with such a look on her face. Their hearts smote them, for they had believed her greater than they. And some of these people fell in behind her and followed her to Goldhouse's threshold, hurrying as they could, with some sense that even the Moonwoman might like the presence of friends, mere slow mortals that they were.
"Tomorrow," said Longsword the doorkeeper, standing as if to bar the way.
"Today is for the family, and for the private words; tomorrow is the celebration for everyone, and we look forward to seeing you all." But Longsword was not a strong swordarm only, and he remembered Deerskin, and read her face as had the people who followed her now; and the official words died on his lips, which turned as pale as the Moon. "Deerskin," he said, in quite a different voice. "What ails-?"
"You must let me pass," said Lissar, as if Longsword's duty were not to bar those from the king's door that the king had decreed should be barred; as if she had the power to direct him. But he stood aside with no further question, and she ran by him, her dogs at her heels, having paused for less time than it takes to draw a breath on the doorstep.
She did not remember the way, but the urgency guided her as clearly as any beckoning finger; as clearly as she had ever known, in the last year, where to find a missing child, or a cabin on a mountaintop. She burst into the receiving-room, where a number of grandly dressed people waited to be the first to congratulate the newly married pair. Their natural impulse was to recoil from so abrupt and outlandish an intrusion as that of a barefoot woman in a rough plain white deerskin dress, her wild hair down her back, accompanied by seven tall dogs. What was Longsword doing?