There was more activity on the road this year; she heard the word 'wedding'
once too often, and struck out across the fields, -her skein of pale and brindle-marked dogs stretching out behind her. This year she knew her way, for she had hunted all over this country, and need not keep to the road even for its direction; and the word she heard now, more than once, as they trotted through dawns and twilights, was 'Moonwoman.'
She did not herself understand the urgency; it was as if her feet hurt-not if she kept on for too long, but if she stopped. She kept one eye always on Ash, and half an eye on Harefoot, whose leg seemed perfectly sound no matter how she bolted ahead or circled around the rest of them. It became a habit, this watchfulness, like checking between the dogs' toes for incipient sores; like running her fingers down the long vivid scar on Ash's side and belly. But there was no heat, no swelling, no tenderness; Ash, Lissar thought, was amused, but she had never been averse to extra attention, and if Lissar's desire now was to stroke a perfectly healthy side several times a day, then that was all right with Ash. But as they passed through the last days in what had become not a journey to the city but a flight to the city, the dogs caught Lissar's restlessness, and seemed as little able as she to settle down to rest for more than an hour or two.
And so they came to a water-cistern at a crossroads after a night of no sleep, just as Ash and Lissar had done the year before, a crossroads at the outskirts of the city, not far from the city gates, where it had become inescapably evident that farms had given way to shops, warehouses, inns and barracks-the water-cistern where Lissar had met Lilac, leading two couple of the king's horses. And they stopped again to drink. Lissar was refreshing her face with handsful of the cold water when she heard,
'Moonwoman,' but she paid it no heed, for she never paid that name any heed.
Till a hand gripped her elbow, spinning her around; and it was Lilac herself, and she threw her arms around Lissar. 'I am so glad you have come back! I have missed you so much. No one would say where you had gone or why-why could not you have sent me just one word? -No, no, I will not scold you, I am too glad to see you, and Ossin was cross and gloomy and silent for weeks after you disappeared, so I knew you must have left, somehow, about him, which made your just vanishing like that a little more-oh, I don't know, acceptable, except that I did not accept it at all. . .
. I mean, I have spent so much time wondering what had become of you, but that's all ... I just told myself, well, that's the way you'd expect the Moonwoman to behave.
. . .' Lilac's voice suddenly went very high, and her voice broke on the last word.
Lissar found there were tears in her eyes. She blinked. Not knowing what else to say, how to explain, she struck on her usual protest, and said, 'But I'm not the Moonwoman.'
They had been standing there with their arms around each other, and Lissar's neck was wet with the shorter Lilac's tears. Lilac stirred at this, and backed half an arm's length away, bending back so she could look into Lissar's face. 'Aren't you?' she said. She looked down at the dogs then, and Lissar could see her looking for the one shaggy one, and then anxiously counting, coming up with the right number, and then looking again. Ash turned toward her, her right side exposed, and Lilac's eyes widened. 'Gods, what was that?'
'A rather large toro,' said Lissar.
'A toro? You're mad. You don't tackle a full-grown toro alone with a few dogs.'
'It wasn't my idea; it was Ash's; and she would not be called off. I might have found it under other circumstances reassuring that not all of Ash's ideas are good ones, but in this case . . .'
Lilac knelt by Ash's side, which was the signal for seven dogs to try to lick her face, and, unheedingly bumping dog noses away with her other hand, ran her fingers over the scar, just as Lissar herself so often did; Lissar could have sworn that when Ash raised her eyes to meet Lissar's her look was ironic. If a dog can have a sense of humor, as Ash manifestly did, could she not also have a sense of irony? Lissar knew that at heart she believed that a good dog was capable of almost anything: Ossin would understand because he agreed.
She thought of the days and nights when the puppies were only babies, and wished she had thought to ask if he believed a dog capable of irony, for she would not have another opportunity.
'I think you are lucky to be alive,' said Lilac.
There was a little pause during which the friends thought of the many things they might say to each other and the many things they wished to say to each other. Lissar found that she wished so badly to tell Lilac everything-everything she knew, including that Ossin had said that he loved her and wanted her to be his wife, and everything she remembered, including the first winter she and Ash had spent alone on the mountain, and everything she ... could neither remember nor not remember, but only feel in her heart and bones and blood and the golden guarded space behind her navel, like how it was she came to leave her old life-that she could not speak at all. There was a noise in her ears not unlike the roaring of the demons at the gates of her own mind, before she had learned what monsters they guarded. The demons roared no longer, but she dared not tell her friend of the monsters; and the despair that rose in her then was the same that had driven her from Ossin last autumn, and her tears spilled over, and she stood in a silence she could not break, and thought, it is no use; I should not have come back. I should go, now, right away, away from here. What I owe Ossin does not matter, Ash's puppies do not matter; nothing matters so much as that I must take myself away from this place where I have friends who love me, because I cannot tell them who I really am.
Lilac, seeing this, thought only that she wept for Ash, for the memory of seeing her when the blow had just been dealt, when fear of her dying would have squeezed Lissar's heart to a stop; for she had some good guess, as a friend will, of what these two meant to each other, though she had no guess of why. And she knew too that Lissar could not speak, though she again guessed only that it was to do with Ash: and she cast around for something to break the silence. Anything would do. 'What
... you must have had to sew it together. What did you use?'
'Flax thread,' said Lissar. 'It was ... awful. But she didn't mind when I pulled them out; O-Ossin,' she said, stumbling over the name, 'had told me that they don't hurt coming out, but I didn't believe it: I had been there when Jobe stitched up Genther's side, after he was struck by a boar.' But her tears fell only faster.
'And her hair came out with the stitches,' said Lilac, watching her friend's face worriedly, guessing now that there was some great trouble that was not healed like Ash's side. 'An interesting side effect. She really is a fleethound now, you know.
She even looks like one of ours-of Ossin's. I see the ones that people from Fragge or Dula bring, fleethounds, and your Ash looks like she was bred here.'
