It was a portrait, indifferently executed, of a plump young woman in an unflattering dress of a peculiarly dismaying shade of puce. Perhaps the color was the painter's fault, and not the young woman's; but Lissar doubted that the flounces and ribbons were products of the painter's imagination. 'That's Trivelda,' said Ossin with something that sounded like satisfaction. 'Only one evening, you remember, eh?
Looks just like her. What do you think?'
Lissar hesitated and then said, 'She looks like someone who thinks hunting hounds are dirty and smell bad.'
'Exactly.' The prince sat down on the edge of the table, swinging one leg. She turned a little toward him. 'What are all these-portraits?'
The prince grimaced. 'Seven or eight or nine generations of courtly spouse-searches. Mostly it's just us royals-or at least nobles-very occasionally a commoner either strikingly wealthy or strikingly beautiful creeps in. There are a few of the little handsized ones of the impoverished but hopeful.'
'I don't think I understand.'
'Oh. Well. When you're a king or a queen and you have a son or a daughter you start wanting to marry off, you hire a tame portrait painter to produce some copies of your kid's likeness, preferably flattering, the number of copies depending on how eager or desperate you are, how much money you have to go with the package, and whether you can find a half-good painter with a lot of time to kill, and perhaps twelve or so children to support of his or her own. Then you fire off the copies to the likeliest courts with suitable-you hope suitable-unmarried offspring of the right gender.
'The one my father hired kept making my eyes bigger and my chin smaller-I'm sure from praiseworthy motives, but that kind of thing backfires, as soon as the poor girl-or her parents' emissary-gets here and takes a good look at me.
'No one has come up with a good way of disposing of these things once their purpose is accomplished-or in most cases failed. It seems discourteous just to chuck them in the fire. So they collect up here.' He lifted the corners of one or two and let them fall again with small brittle thumps. 'Occasionally one, of the painters turns out to be someone famous, and occasionally we get some collector wanting to look through what's in here, in hopes of finding a treasure. I don't think that's going to happen with Trivelda.'
Lissar was smiling as she looked up, turning, now facing the wall, noticing the deep stacks of paintings leaning against its foot, the sunlight bright on the portraits hanging above. Second from the right, some little distance from the door, now on her left, that they had come in by, was a portrait that now caught her attention.
A young woman stood, her body facing a little away from the painter, her face turned back toward the unknown hand holding the brush, almost full-face. Her long pale gold skirts, sewn all over with knots of satin and velvet rosebuds, fell into folds as perfect as marble carved to clothe the statue of a goddess. Her face was composed but a little distant, as if she were thinking of something else, or as if she kept herself carefully at some distance behind the face she showed the world. Her mahogany-black hair was pulled forward to fall over her right shoulder. She wore a small diadem with a point that arched low over her brow; a clear stone rested at the spot mystics called the third eye. Her own hazel-green eyes gleamed in the light the painter chose to cast across the canvas. Her left hand, elbow bent, rested on the head of a tall, silver-fawn dog, who looked warily out of the picture, wary in that it believed the girl needed guarding, and it would guard her if it could. Its gaze was much sharper and more present than the girl's.
It was Ash she recognized, not herself. This painter was a better craftsperson than whoever had painted poor Trivelda; Lissar could not decide her mind, during those first moments, floundering for intellectual details to keep the shock and terror at bay, if she would have recognized Ash anywhere, however bad the likeness, because she was Ash; or if it was the painter's cleverness in catching that wary look, a look Lissar had seen often in the last few months, as Ash stared at six eager, clumsy, curious puppies. It was only because she could not refuse to acknowledge Ash that she had to look into her own flat, painted eyes and aloof expression and say Yes, that was I.
Standing, for hours, it seemed, though she was allowed frequent rests; the young painter, very much on his mettle, anxious to please, too anxious to speak to the princess; the princess too unaccustomed to speaking to any stranger to initiate; court women and the occasional minister came and went, that the two of them were never alone together. It was the women, or the ministers, who decided when Lissar should step down and rest. She remembered those sittings-or standings; curious how her memory brought up something, carefully enclosed, that led nowhere, to stave off the worst of the recognition of her own past; she could remember nothing around those occasions of standing being painted. She remembered nothing of the decision to have it done; she had no memory of how many copies might have been made, who they might have been sent to; when all of this had been accomplished.... She remembered, looking into her poised, uninhabited face, the faint surprise she felt at the portrait's being commissioned at all. It seemed so unlike . . . unlike ... she couldn't remember. But she was so unused to strangers, and these portraits would be sent out into the world, to strangers; she was unused to strangers because ... it was not that she was shy, although she was, it was because ... she remembered the ministers coming in, to see how the work was progressing, the court ministers, her father's ministers....
King's daughter King's daughter King's daughter
The memory ended. Her legs were trembling. So were her hands, as she moved a stack of paintings and sat down, sideways, her body turned toward the painting, but both feet still firmly on the ground. But she turned her face back toward the window and raised her chin, closing her eyes, as if she were only enjoying the sunlight. 'Who is the girl in the golden dress, with the fleethound? The hound might be one of yours.' Her voice sounded odd, feverish, but she hoped it was only the banging of her heart in her own ears.
'That's Lissla Lissar,' said Ossin, easily, as if the name were no different from any other name: Ossin, Ob, Goldhouse, Lilac, Deerskin. 'And that is one of my dogs. Lissar's mother died when she was fifteen; I was seventeen, and still deeply romantic-those were the years I was dreaming of Moonwoman and, coincidentally, raising my first litters of first-class pups. I sent her one of my pups, the best of her litter; I thought it a fine generous gesture, worthy of the man Moonwoman could come to love. I named the pup Ash.' Ossin's gaze dropped to Ash, who had raised her own at the sound of her name. 'She was exactly the same silver-fawn color as yours-except, of course, she had short hair.'
He looked back up at Lissar. Lissar could see him thinking, rejecting what he thought even as he thought it. She tried to smile from her new, thin face at him; for the old Lissar had been rounder, and there were no lines in that Lissar's face. And she knew what he saw when he looked at her: a woman with prematurely white hair, from what unknown loss or sorrow; and with eyes black from secrets she herself could not look at.
But she closed her black eyes suddenly; for she remembered again what she had known all along, the life that went with the name she had retained. She remembered what she had, briefly, remembered on the mountaintop, before the Moonwoman had rescued her; that she was ... not an herbalist's apprentice, but a king's daughter, and the reiteration of king's daughter in her brain was battering
