than the king because she understands things at once and starts thinking what to do about them. Cofta's dreamier, although his dreams are usually true.'
'There's a saying,' broke in Jed, 'that Cofta can't see the trees for the forest, and Clem the forest for the trees.'
'Camilla's the beauty,' continued Lilac. 'It's so unexpected that that family should produce a beauty-the Goldhouses have been squat and dreary-looking for centuries, you can see it in the portraits, and Clem's just another branch of the same family; she and Cofta are some kind of cousins-that they're all struck rather dumb by it. By Camilla: And she's so young that being beautiful absorbs her attention pretty thoroughly. She may grow up to be something; she may not. I don't think anyone knows if she's bright or stupid.'
Breakfast was over by then, and Lilac and Lissar were leaning on a post outside the barn, and Lissar was watching out of the corner of her eye, while listening with most of her attention, the bustle of the morning's work at the king's stable. Jed paused beside them when he needed to rest his ankle. 'She's probably not even beautiful, you know,' he said. 'It's just that she's a stunner next to the rest of them.
Besides, she's ours, so we like her,' and he grinned. He was himself good-looking, and knew it.
'Except for that Dorl,' said Lilac. 'Since Camilla got old enough, he's started hanging around.'
Lissar knew that while Redthorn might well find work for her, she did not belong at the stables. She knew little of horses, though this she might learn, and less, she thought, of getting along with other people; that she feared to learn, although she remembered the hope she felt at the idea of finding a place for herself in the yellow city, which was so very full of people. Choices were choices; that did not mean they were simple ones. But she had not liked the eyes around the breakfast-table.
So she borrowed a brush and comb, and took turns working on her own hair and Ash's. When either of them whined and ducked away too miserably she switched over to the other for a while. Finger-combing was frustrating and time-consuming and she had neglected both of them in the last weeks.
Cofta's general receiving was this afternoon; the sooner she got it over with the better. It would be another three days to wait if she missed today. There were voices in her head again, and not the quiet voice from the mountaintop. These voices were .
. . 'The king was very handsome and grand, but the queen was the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms.' It was a story she had heard somewhere, but she could not remember where; and trying to remember made her feel tired and weak and confused.
In her mind's eye she was wearing another white dress, not of deerskin, but of silk; and Ash was beside her, but the Ash she was remembering, as her fingers lost themselves in the long cool waves of the skirt, had short fine hair instead of thick curls. Ash? No, she did remember, Ash had grown her heavy coat this last winter, when they had been snowbound for so long. But Ash was not a young dog, a puppy reaching her adulthood and growing her adult coat; she could remember holding the puppy Ash had been in her arms for the first time, and she had been smaller then herself. She remembered the kind look of the man who handed the puppy to her; and she remembered there were a great many other people around....
Perhaps it was a market day, and she had come to town with Rinnol, to whom she had been apprenticed. She opened her hands, laying the brush down for a moment.
I give you the gift of time, the Lady said.
Her winter sickness had robbed her of so much. What did she even remember surely that she once had known how to do? Something to give her some direction to pursue, to seek, a door to open? What did she know how to do? Nothing. This morning she had discovered that while she understood the theory and purpose of stall-mucking, the pitchfork did not feel familiar in her hand, as the leather rein had.
But neither the familiarity nor the unfamiliarity led to anything more.
I give you the gift of time, the Lady said.
Even the memory of the Lady was fading, and Lissar thought perhaps she had been only a fever dream, the dream following the breaking of the fever, her own body telling her she would live. What was the gift of time worth?
As she stared at her hands she saw the white dress again, and there were bright, flickering lights around her, so many that they made her head swim, and the noise and perfumes of many splendidly dressed people....
No.
The thought ended, and all thoughts blanked out. She was sitting, feeling tired and weak and confused, in the small mattressfurnished end of a long attic room with a steeply pitched roof over one end of the king's stables. She had only the memory of a memory of when she had first held Ash in her arms, and the only white dress she remembered wearing was the one she wore now; and Rinnol was only a name, and she was not sure if she had been real.
A bad fever it was, it had killed ...
She could not remember what it had killed, nor did she understand why her lack of memory seemed more like a wall than an empty space.
But she remembered the touch of the Lady's fingers on her cheek, and the sound of her voice, bells and running water. She looked down at her lap, her anxious hands. And there was the deerskin dress. If the Lady had been a dream, then some dreams were true.
She picked up the hairbrush again. Ash, watching the brush, retired into the shadows of the opposite end of the room and tried to look like dust and old wooden beams.
NINETEEN
LILAC WENT WITH HER FAR ENOUGH TO ENSURE THAT SHE
WOULD not get lost. There was a stream of people, narrow but steady, going the same way they were. Lilac knew the doorkeepers and had a friendly word for each of them, accompanied by the same clear, straightforward look that had rescued Lissar that morning at breakfast-and, she thought, had first weighed and considered her at the water cistern.
'I'll leave you here,' Lilac said at last, at the end of one hall. 'You can't miss it from here. Straight through those silly-looking doors'-they were carved as if the open entry were a monster's roaring
