Open your eyes! said the bleeding woman, her voice like a wound itself. Open your eyes and look at me!
The foreign king opened his eyes and looked at her. Lissar staggered as from a blow, and pulled her arms back to herself again, sliding the red palms down her white hair, and then dropping her hands to her sides where her fingers touched Ash and Ob; and she could feel them growling. They gave her strength, that touch of warm dog against her fingertips, the reverberation of their growls; and she let her hands rest on them quietly, reminding herself of her dogs, reminding herself that she was alive, and here for a purpose.
Deerskin, breathed the company. The blazing figure had dwindled as its fire was put out, and they saw her at last. It is our Deerskin. What is she doing here? How can she be the foreign king's daughter? She is poor and barefoot, as she was when she first came here, a year ago, when our prince was kind to her, and gave her a place in his kennels, because she liked dogs.
But the ministers and the courtiers who had come with the foreign king staggered as Lissar had when her father's eyes opened. Lissar! they murmured. For the blood was running down the long white hair of this wild woman in her wild deerskin dress, and it darkened and spread like dye through cloth, till her hair took on the astonishing almost-black of her mother's, Lissla Lissar's mother's hair, mahogany-black, red-black, like the last, deepest drop of heart's blood, brought to light only by violent death. And they recognized the face, for it bore the same expression as it had when their king had declared that he would marry his daughter, eons ago, eons during which they had wrought mightily with their king, to get him to this place that he might honorably marry again at last, and get his country, and his ministers, a proper new heir. And with this thought they grew angry: they all thought Lissar had died. She was supposed to have died! Why must she ruin their plans thus again, this wild woman in her white dress, spoiling the marriage of their king, the marriage they had worked so hard to bring about.
Our Deerskin would not lie, murmured Goldhouse's court, much troubled. Our prince and his dogs love her. The Moonwoman is here to rescue us, murmured those who had followed her. Rescue us and our princess, as she has rescued our lost children.
It was only a young woman of slightly more than average height, although with astonishing red-black hair, who stood before them now in her blood-spattered white deerskin dress, bright blood also on the floor before her, and in her face a haggard weariness that belonged to someone much older. She dropped her eyes from the figures on the dais, and with her gaze her head dropped also, sagging forward on her neck as if she could keep it upright no longer. So she stood, gazing at the floor, as if at a loss; and she began to look out of place, among the richness of style and dress, furniture and ornament, around her; and the blasted doors behind her were an embarrassment, as if a careless servant had dropped a laden tray, making a mess on the fine carpet, and spraying the dinner guests with gravy and wine-dregs.
Thoughtfully she knelt, and touched her sullied hands to the red shining pool; thoughtfully she raised one finger and drew a red line down her cheek. The room was utterly silent; no rustle of satin nor tap of shod foot nor gasp of indrawn breath.
At her back Lissar felt the warmth and presence of her dogs; and Ash's whiskers brushed the back of her neck. "I remember," she said, in quite an ordinary voice, "I remember waking up, after you left me, the last night I spent under your roof. I thought I was dead, or dying, and I wanted to be dead."
She sprang to her feet. "I carried your child-my own father's child-five months for that night's work; and I almost died again when that poor dead thing was born of me.
I had forgotten how to take care of myself. I had forgotten almost everything but a madness I could not name; I often thought that I would choose to die than risk remembering what drove me to madness, for I believed the shame was mine. For you were king, and your will was law, and I was but a girl, or rather a woman, forced into my womanhood." She gripped her hands together, and they began to glow, as she had glittered in the eyes of the company when she first strode through the doors.
She stared at her glowing hands, and she felt her dogs pressing around her, offering her their courage, offering her their lives in any way she might ask of them.
In a new, hard voice, she said, "I was no child, for you and my mother gave me no childhood; and my maidenhood you tore from me, that I might never become a woman; and a woman I have not become, for I have been too afraid.
"But I return to you now all that you did give me: all the rage and the terror, the pain and the hatred that should have been love. The nightmares, and the waking dreams that are worse than nightmares because they are memories. These I return to you, for I want them no more, and I will bear them not one whit of my time on this earth more."
But she staggered again, and dropped to one knee, and loosed her hands from each other, and clasped her belly, and curled around it, and the glow curled around her, like a halo, or like the embracing arms of a beloved friend. "Ah, no!" she cried, in a voice like the sound of the executioner's axe; and Lilac huddled down farther by the cistern while hot tears ran from her eyes down her folded legs, digging her knees into her eyesockets as if to stop the tears, but they swelled and overflowed anyway, and ran down the insides of her thighs.
"No!" cried Lissar. "I cannot bear it again. I cannot!" And Ash turned, and sank her teeth into Lissar's shoulder, but only to bruise and startle; she did not break the skin, or perhaps the deerskin dress did not let her. Lissar's eyes flew open, and she gave one great cry, and a burst of blood flowed from between her legs, thick, dark blood, not bright blood as from a clean wound as had flowed from her hands. This was the secret female blood, heavy with mystery, and it mixed with the more innocent blood already shed; and the intermingled blood sank into the floor, leaving a pattern of arcs and spirals and long twisting curves that forever after seemed to move if any eye tried too long to trace them. In later years that bit of floor came to be declared an oracle, and persons who wished advice on some great matter came to look at it, and see where the pattern led them, and many came away comforted, or clearer in their minds, and able to make decisions that had seemed too hard for their strength. And the throne room became the oracle room, bare and plain, containing nothing but the glowing pattern on the floor, and the shadows of the stained glass, which moved less enigmatically.
"I give it back to you," said Lissar, panting, on her knees, marked with her own blood. "All-I give it all back to you." And suddenly she was again the blazing figure she had been when she stepped across the threshold into the throne room, but she was all the colors of fire now, no longer white but red and golden. She stepped up onto the dais.