The City in the Lake Read online

  “Well, but a mirror can also be a door,” said Marcos. “But a door leading where?” He rubbed his chin again.

  “Or to what?” said the Bastard.

  “Or to whom?” added the mage. “Well, well . . . we shall have to ride out to this pool tomorrow, Jesse, at dawn, I suppose”—he looked mildly sorry for himself—“and take another look about. Never you mind,” he added when Jesse shook his head disconsolately. “We’ll find him. It’s the way things are: Princes get lost and are found. Cassiel will be fine, be sure of that. In the meantime”—he glanced at the Bastard—“the King is going to be a little upset.”

  The Bastard shrugged. “It’s the way things are.”

  Jesse said, “You’re not afraid of him at all, are you? How can you not be?”

  The Bastard paused. He said after a moment, “I know how to move through the tempest.” He eyed the younger man. “So would you, if you paid attention to anything but your friends and your gambling and your games. That’s why the King disturbs you: he reminds you of your father and you feel he disapproves of you.”

  “He does disapprove of me,” Jesse muttered. He got to his feet and lifted his chin arrogantly. “I’m going,” he stated, but waited despite himself for leave from the Bastard.

  The Bastard gave it with a slight tilt of his head. “At dawn, be at the Bridge of Glass.”

  The young man produced a jerky nod and was gone.

  “He’s afraid of you,” Marcos commented. Rising with a low grunt of effort, he poured himself another cup of wine.

  “Is he?”

  The mage gave him a look both penetrating and, in an odd way, amused.

  The Bastard shrugged minutely. “Should I speak to Trevennen?”

  “I shall.”

  “And Russe?”

  “—will, I am certain, search in her own way. Don’t disturb her.”

  The Bastard half smiled. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Have you any guesses yourself ?”

  The mage opened a thick hand, looking apologetic. “Not yet.”

  “Mmm. The City is the heart of the Kingdom, the King is the heart of the City . . . and my brother, Cassiel, is the King’s heart.” The Bastard spoke without bitterness: it was simply the truth. “If Cassiel turned into a bird with a cry that can pierce your heart, well, as you say, these things happen and we shall surely reclaim him in time. But if someone wished to strike at my father, then in this he has wielded a blade with a fine edge.”

  Marcos nodded. “And if someone wished to strike at the Kingdom, the same. I know.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t think it likely. The Kingdom generally protects itself adequately. No, I think Cassiel has simply got himself into a bit of difficulty. And I think we can assume that Cassiel, of all people, wherever he may be and whatever may have happened to him, will land on his feet.”

  Cassiel, wherever he had gone, might have done. But though the Bastard and the King and the mages of the City and all the men of the Kingdom searched for him for many weeks, no one found him.

  CHAPTER 2

  imou was a child of winter, which in the villages, where most children are born in the spring like lambs, was worthy of some slight notice. A winter child: in the villages the phrase might also mean a young one more solemn than most, just as an apple-blossom child is a merry, laughing child and a harvest child is practical and motherly. Timou was a winter child in both senses: serious and quiet even in her cradle, which was an exotic object carved of rosewood and inlaid with the paler woods of apple and thorn.

  Her father had brought the cradle from the City with her already nestled in it, a tiny infant carried through the depths of winter. “Imagine carrying a baby all the way from the City in that weather!” said the villagers. “Over the Lake and through the great forest!” Who knew where Kapoen had gotten a baby, or why he had brought it out of the City to the distant village? Mages, everyone knew, had whims. Nobody minded. The people of the village were proud of their mage and trusted him, even when he came back from a journey with an inexplicable baby.

  Every village has a midwife, of course, and usually the midwife is also a witch who can be relied upon for dependable charms to settle a colicky infant or cure milk sickness in a goat. If the village is fortunate, it may also have an apothecary, who, of course, is usually also a witch. Anyone can make willow-bark tea for a fever or elderberry syrup for a cough, but simply taking medicine from a jar marked with the apothecary seal makes it work better, as everyone knows. Timou’s village was unusual, because in addition to a midwife and an apothecary, it had Kapoen.

  The presence of a mage made the folk of the village feel secure and safe, even on the most violent storm-tossed summer nights when the blind Hunter loosed his hounds. Even on brisk autumn days, when the calm and generally prosaic woodlands surrounding the village might grow restless and begin to press against the pastures and fields. Even on winter dawns so cold and brittle that the very air might shatter from the light striking through it and let through glimpses of a sharper-edged and perilous brilliance. From all these mischances and dangers Kapoen protected the village, with a patient composure that itself lent an air of security to everything that he did.

  Kapoen was dark himself: dark of hair and eye and skin as well as mood. So probably, the village folk estimated, it was the fair, pale winter that had made so fair and pale a child. “The cold bleaches the color right out of the womb,” said the midwife wisely, helping Timou charm tangles and twigs out of her buttermilk-pale hair. Silky-fine, it was hard to keep in order.

  “I’d rather have dark hair,” Timou answered restlessly, her eyes on the gaggle of village children who were piling up great heaps of leaves and jumping in them, shrieking. Even her eyes were pale: a blue so light they were almost silver. The color frozen out of them, they said in the village. And yet somehow there is something of her father in her eyes, ah? A thought or a mood hidden there, not quite in sight for the rest of us. But the villagers did not mind. They were glad to have Kapoen in their village, and glad to have his daughter also, who with luck would become a mage like her father.

  “They get twigs in their hair, too,” the midwife pointed out. She charmed out the last twig and swept a brush through the resulting fall of clean hair.

  “Not like I do,” said Timou, which was true.

  The midwife gathered up Timou’s hair, twisted it into a knot, and bound it firmly with leather ties. “There,” she said. “That should last a little. I wonder if your mother had such fine hair.”

  “I didn’t have a mother,” Timou said, startled. She had known all her life that she did not have a mother as other children did, and that this lack was cause for pity from those who did. Thus she had spent her whole young life watching other girls’ mothers. She liked Taene’s mother best: a small kind woman, quick to laugh and to draw laughter from others, who always took care to draw her daughter’s friends into the closeness of her family. But it had never occurred to Timou that she might have once had a mother like that herself.

  “And your father made you out of silvered grasses and hoarfrost, ah?” said the midwife. “Very likely. No, I expect there was a woman. Isn’t there always, where there is a man and a mystery? A woman in the City, I expect, who captured your father’s heart for a day and a night and another day, and gave you life, and then gave you to your father . . . for whatever reason a woman might do such a thing.” If she guessed what that reason might be, she did not share her guess with Timou.

  Timou went and sat at the foot of the tall flat-topped stone at the edge of the village to think about this startling idea.

  Had a woman in the City caught her father’s heart for a day and a night and another day? Why? How? Timou was not exactly clear on what it might mean to capture someone’s heart, but she could not quite imagine anyone capturing her father’s. She could not imagine her father marrying a woman, sharing his house with a wife, speaking her name as, say, Taene’s father spoke the name of her mother.

 
Timou pictured a slender woman with white hair standing upon the arch of a shadowy bridge, holding out a baby in a rosewood cradle to Kapoen and then standing alone to watch him ride away. Timou could not clearly see the woman’s face, but somehow she thought the expression on it was calm: even when Timou tried, she could not quite picture any kind of extravagant grief. Was that how it had been: merely calm regret for the child given up? Why would a woman give up her child? What about a baby would make a mother give it away?

  There were no answers she could find in her own thoughts. But that was the day Timou understood that there might be questions.

  The girls found her then. Ness had realized she was not with the others and had sent Manet and Taene to find her. “Come on,” Taene begged, sweet and beguiling. “There are chestnuts to roast, and Sime’s mother is making butter candy.”

  Timou gazed at Taene. Sime’s mother was a round cheerful woman who, in addition to butter candy, made fruit pies that melted in the mouth and toffee that stuck wonderfully in the teeth. Her kitchen was always warm and filled with light and good cheer, and it was Sime’s mother who was the source of that warmth and bright cheer. Had Timou’s own mother been like Sime’s mother? Timou did not know. Her throat swelled suddenly with a startling sense of loss.

  “And Ness wants you to help pick the right leaves for the King’s Crown,” Manet put in when Taene paused, clearly not noticing anything unusual in the quality of Timou’s silence. Manet, the magistrate’s daughter, was always trying to push past Ness and lead the other girls. She said in a commanding tone, “You know we need you to ask the tree for acorns for the Crown, Timou. Come on!” It was always the girls of the village who made the King’s Crown in the autumn.

  “Come on, Timou, please?” added Taene, catching Timou’s hand.

  The questions did not go away, but Manet’s demanding tone and Taene’s pleading made them seem less important. Timou jumped to her feet. But the questions settled to the back of her mind, along with the sense of loss she had learned suddenly to feel, and after that neither quite left her. In the slow quiet days of winter, when the snow came deep upon the village and people stayed mostly to themselves, the questions came back to trouble her.

  Timou asked her father these questions one cold evening when they both sat by the fire after supper. She did not mean to ask him. Timou sat on a rug on the floor—her favorite rug, with a maze of red leaves that wove into the center of the rug and out again, if you knew how to trace the pattern with your finger just the right way. She was leaning her elbow on the hearth and looking into the fire, but she was not seeing the coals or the burning wood. She was seeing a stone bridge and a woman with frost-pale hair holding out a rosewood cradle. And a tall somber man with her father’s face, who reached out his hands to take it.

  “Timou?” asked her father, watching her, wondering what was behind her silence, and when Timou looked at him, she forgot to veil her thoughts. He saw the questions in her eyes.

  “Ah,” he said softly.

  Timou, since she was discovered anyway, asked him, “Is there always a woman, where there is a man and a mystery?”

  Her father sighed and looked away from her, into the fire. “Likely so. And where there is a baby, there is likely a woman.” He was not angry, but he had become serious. He added, speaking carefully and slowly, “Your mother was a beautiful woman, very fair, as you are, with winter-pale hair, as you have, but her eyes were dark as the winter sky.”

  It made Timou uncomfortable that her father should speak so carefully. She did not understand the shape of the secret she saw in his eyes. She asked tentatively, “Did she . . . did she die, then? Having me? Like Nod’s mother?” She held her breath waiting for his answer: she was suddenly certain he would say, Yes, your mother died as Nod’s mother died. No white-haired woman had given away her baby; there had only been the birthing struggle and then silence. That was why her father had brought her away from the City. . . .

  Her father moved a hand restlessly. But he said after a pause, “No. She did not die.”

  “Oh.” Timou was silent for a moment, reordering her thoughts once more. “Then . . . why did she give me away to you? Wasn’t she sorry to watch you take me away?” She wanted to ask, but was not brave enough, Were you glad to take me with you?

  The secrets in her father’s eyes moved and shifted like firelight, but did not take on any recognizable shape. His mouth thinned, not with anger, but with something even less familiar that Timou did not recognize. He said at last, “She could not keep you with her, and I . . . would not let her give you to anyone else.”

  Timou looked quickly into the fire so that the reflected light would hide the leap of her heart. When she thought she could keep her voice calm and the press of her questions secret in her eyes, she looked up and said, “Do you think she will ever—Do you think I will ever meet her?”

  There was an infinitesimal pause. Then her father said only, “I don’t know, Timou.”

  He spoke this time with a kind of restraint that made Timou wonder what he wasn’t saying. She thought it was important. She looked into the fire again, wondering what kinds of secrets might make her father sound that way. “Was she a mage, like you?”

  “She was a mage, of sorts. But not like me,” said her father, and stood up decisively to add another piece of wood to the fire. That was all he said, and Timou saw that he would not say anything else, so she did not ask. The questions, she understood, had not been answered, but they had been changed. But then her father began to ask her about the nature of fire, and Timou saw that she was expected to let the other questions wait.

  One year was very like the next in the village. The children wandered without really noticing into the adult world. Ness sometimes took the sheep out with her father and sometimes wove the wool into cloth with her mother. Manet, who had looked bored all through her childhood as her father tried to teach her the intricacies of law and justice, suddenly took an interest in the magistrate’s business and learned to write a clean record of his adjudication. Jenne, the miller’s daughter, kept the accounts at the mill. Taene spent her days helping her father, who was the apothecary, make decoctions and tinctures and herbal oils.

  And Timou learned to follow the stars as they moved through their measured courses in the sky, and listen to the dark wild power that rolled behind the thunder of the spring storms. Once or twice she tried to tell Ness or Taene about these things, as they told her about their days. She found the other girls listened with wide-eyed interest, but that they listened as though Timou were reciting poetry. The mention of storms frightened them. Not even Taene understood the beauty that Timou saw in the wild magic of the Kingdom.

  So one spring progressed much like any that had gone before. One year, when Timou was sixteen, Tair, Taene’s eldest brother, began to leave his work sometimes and go up beyond the hillside pastures. And sometimes Ness would leave her weaving to walk with him through the woods. Neither Tair’s father nor Ness’s mother seemed to mind; indeed, all the village watched the young couple with tolerant pleasure. Ness married Tair in the long slow days of full summer, first of them all to marry, as she had always been the first at everything. Her mother put Ness’s hand into Tair’s and then whispered something into her daughter’s ear that made Ness blush and laugh out loud.

  Ness’s mother kissed Tair maternally on the forehead—she was a tiny woman, and had to drag him down quite far to do so—and he gave her the single brass coin that a bridegroom gives the bride’s mother as a token to show that he can support her daughter. Whatever she said to him made him laugh as well and kiss her back, on the cheek as a son should.

  Timou, standing with her father at the edge of the village commons, wondered what it would be like to stand out in front of everyone with a young man by her side. Would she be as happy as Ness looked? She felt her father’s gaze fall on her and dropped her eyes. Then Manet caught Timou’s hand and dragged her forward with the other unmarried girls to tease Ness, and the mome
nt passed.

  In the fall, when chestnuts ripened and the air occasionally tasted of the coming frost, Jenne left the mill accounts to her three brothers and married the dyer’s son. The dyer built them a house next to his own. Dyes stained Jenne’s fingers in different colors, but she moved smiling through her days and did not seem to mind. Nod and Sime married after Jenne, and Sime’s mother, along with Nod’s sisters, baked hundreds of tiny iced cakes to give away at their wedding, each with a single rose petal hidden in its heart.

  Timou went to Jenne’s wedding, and Sime’s, and ate her share of the rose cakes. But she did not walk through the woods with any of the young men from the village. Sometimes a young man turned up again and then again in her way, finding chances to speak with her, assuring her that he saw only her face reflected in every drop of rain on leaf or flower. But Timou found that usually such young men did not really like to hear about the measures the stars traced in the heavens, or about the silence that lived at the heart of the fiercest storm. Even if a young man did not mind talk that turned toward mystery and magic, Kapoen’s quiet impassive gaze falling on him usually chilled his interest. One young man and then another decided instead to court girls who knew how to talk about ordinary things, and whose fathers were not so intimidating.

  Timou let them go with only the mildest regret. She learned instead to find the quiet air hiding behind the sharpest wind, to listen to the word whispered by each dying leaf as it fell, to send her mind through the rings of slow time that enclosed the heart of the old trees of the woodlands, to follow the brilliant flight of the falcon across the sky and the glitter of the minnows in the stream. She learned as well the limits of her own patience, and how to go beyond those limits so that she might come to the bright clean purity of knowledge and understanding.

  She did not learn the limits of her father’s patience. He would show Timou how to find the secret burgeoning heart of a dormant crocus, and how to wake it without harming the flower; and show her again when she found herself lost in the slow cold silence of the corm. And show her again after that, until she at last found the way to slide past the chill to the living kernel within. Then he would give her an approving little nod and move on to some other exercise of magecraft.