The City in the Lake (11 page)

“I know that,” Jonas protested mildly. He did. He had heard stories. He had always listened carefully, if a little skeptically; he had once been trained to be skeptical. But then he had met the Hunter and looked into his blind eyes. . . .

“Of course you do.” Raen looked at him, frowning. “Never leave the road, or you’ll wander in the forest far longer than you intended: there is no other way through that leads straight from the start of your journey to its end. Drink no water that does not flow across the road, eat nothing you did not bring with you, and be careful of anyone you meet under the great trees. You won’t meet any other travelers once you pass into the forest. No one ever does. So anyone you do meet belongs to the forest. Be brave, and kind and courteous to everyone, but be sparing of trust. Tell no lies and make no promises. Don’t tell anyone your name, especially if he asks.”

“I will remember,” Jonas promised soberly.

“Huh. So you had better. Don’t cut living wood—you know that, I suppose. Don’t pick the flowers, if you see any at this time of year—well, you know that, too. Be careful with any fires you make. Let me think.” The widow gazed dreamily at her kitchen fire. Jonas waited patiently.

“Ah,” she said after a while. “I remember one more thing. The man we traveled with, he went back to the City every year. I remember he told us, before he took us into the forest, that if you do get lost under the trees, you should not go into any house or tower or castle you find; but if you do, you should expect to pay a price to get out.”

“What price?” Jonas asked.

“I don’t know,” said Raen. “I never got lost under the trees. But whatever price is demanded, you had better be prepared to pay it honestly and willingly. Men—ah, and women, too—will go into the forest to find their hearts’ desires, but some that come out have lost more than they would have dreamed of paying. It’s a chancy place, that forest. Stay on the road, that’s my advice, and stay out of enchanted towers.”

“Believe me,” said Jonas fervently, “that is all my intention.”

Jonas went quickly, his long legs taking him through the woods and out of the woods, under the sky. He did not think he was at all likely to overtake Timou. But he nevertheless
felt
that he might, if he could go quickly enough. He would have welcomed the sight of her in the distance. He looked ahead eagerly, but he saw no one on the road in front of him. The road was deserted. This seemed strange to Jonas, who had traveled a great deal through other lands in his youth. He knew that one never goes for long on any road without encountering strangers, without passing houses and whole villages built along the road, without seeing granaries and pastures and somebody taking a wagonload of something from one place to another. This road seemed like it had been made for him alone. It made him walk all the more quickly, trying to put it behind him, to come to some more comfortable place where men lived.

He never did. He walked alone and slept under the sky alone—fair skies, always, with no hint of rain, but he feared each night and hated to watch the sun set. He found places off the road under trees at first, out of sight of the sky. When he came to the open country, it so horrified him that he could not rest, for all he told himself there was no reason for his dread. The road was clear enough, running like a broad silver stream under the passionless moon: Jonas walked by the moon’s pale light and lay down only when the sun was back in the sky. He did not dream, or if he did, he did not remember his dreams.

Jonas came to the great forest nine days after he had left the widow’s house. The forest, too, horrified him. He could feel its power and its age, like a pressure against his skin. When he visualized Timou walking, tiny and alone, between those great trees and into the green shadows, he could hardly bear it. It was impossible to know how he would have felt if he had come to this place with Timou, were he not haunted by dreams. He suspected he would have been awed. He hoped he would not have been appalled. Jonas made a fire there, at the entrance to the great forest, and rested beside it, but he could not sleep. He could hear the wind in the branches, though no breeze blew through the smoke of his fire. In the morning his eyes were gritty and his head felt stuffed with wool.

It was the memory of Timou’s voice saying,
If you are with me, I will also think about you
that drew him finally past the ancient sentinels and into the waiting green dimness. He could hear her quiet voice as though she were in front of him, looking at him with her eyes the color of the sky at the exact moment the gray dawn became the clear pale blue of a winter morning.

Jonas walked fast for a while . . . he did not know how long, because the green light hid the passage of time. He walked with his head bowed and his attention on the road. Great roots twisted across the path, dangerous for an unwary foot, but he was careful and never stumbled. Sometimes streams dashed across the road. When there were stepping-stones available, Jonas crossed the water on the rocks. When there were no steppingstones, he got his feet wet. He did not complain out loud, because he felt that his voice would echo too loudly in the great quiet under the trees. Though there was no one, it occurred to him eventually, to hear him. No one and nothing. No bird or squirrel, no whining insect. . . . Jonas walked even more quickly for a while, thinking about this, and about the way the forest itself seemed to watch him and press in on him. He always wanted to move more quickly when he was frightened. He was frightened now, and knew it, and set his teeth against it.

Well, he told himself, Timou was somewhere ahead, and he surely walked in her steps. The road did not branch, but ran straight on. A man must simply follow it, and it would lead him out of the forest as it had led him into it. . . .

After a while—Jonas did not know how long—he found he had grown weary. It was many days’ walk through the great forest, but even so Jonas was reluctant to stop. Hard as the forest pressed around him during the day, he knew it would press much harder at night. So he tried not to notice the fading of the light. But it faded anyway. He would not be able to walk at night under the trees, where true darkness would come with the passing of the day. So when the green light had turned dusky gray, he finally stopped and sat wearily down where he was, in the middle of the road. He heard a breeze in the leaves above, although there was no breeze near the ground. It was not a pleasant sort of sound, though there was no reason it should have disturbed him. He sighed. He wanted to say,
I am going as fast as I can. I will trouble you as little as I can.
But he did not want to offer his voice to the listening trees. He did not want to draw attention to himself at all. He had a blanket in his satchel, and bread and cheese for his supper, and a handful of dried apples. He thought about the sweetness of dried apples. It was a comforting, normal kind of thought.

He was just opening his satchel when he heard a long high wailing cry far above and far away. The wind carried it, but the sound he heard was not the wind.

Although Jonas knew he should be safe on the road, his fingers nevertheless froze on the satchel’s buckle. He sat very still, listening, wondering if Timou, somewhere in front of him, was hearing this same cry on the wind. It did not come again. But Jonas could not eat. He moved to the side of the road and put his back against a tree, because even a haunted tree for shelter from the sky was more appealing than no shelter at all, and stared into the growing dark, listening. He fell asleep like that, sitting up against the broad bole of a tree.

Sleeping, he dreamed he was asleep. He dreamed he woke to a wailing cry that pierced the air all around him. He dreamed he leapt to his feet and fled along the road, with that cry reverberating through the forest at his back. It was the kind of dream where you run and run and cannot bring yourself to look over your shoulder for fear of what you will see behind you.

He had lost the road, and ran through towering trees. At first branches slashed at him and he had to put his arms up to protect his face. Later the trees were tall and straight, with no branches near the ground. But it was darker in his dream, darker than night, darker than even a moonless night under the trees, and he ran into one great smooth bole after another, blundering and bruised, until he finally fell. Having once fallen, he could not get up and cowered, waiting for his pursuers to catch up with him and tear him apart. He waited in terror, and then the terror wore itself out and he found he was alone and it was perfectly quiet. And then he found he was awake.

All around him were great dark boles, rising straight and tall like pillars in some vast hall, not like trees at all. The moment he thought so, he saw that, indeed, he was surrounded by pillars and not by trees. He was not in a forest, but in some great hall or cavern. The ceiling, if there was a ceiling, was too far above to see. The floor was very smooth and flat, as the pillars were smooth and straight. It was very dark in this place, yet he found he could see a little, although it was not quite like sight. It was as though each pillar glimmered with its own darkness, a darkness like light, by which one could see. Or at least experience something like sight. The pillars cast shadows even darker than themselves that lay like chasms across the floor. There was no road or path anywhere. It was perfectly silent.

Jonas stood up stiffly. He did not know how much of his terror and flight had taken place in dream and how much had really happened, but he was as sore and bruised as if it had all been real. His face was scratched as though he had been running through a forest; his arms were bruised from blundering into hidden obstacles. He was desperately tired. His satchel was nowhere in sight. He had no blanket, no food, no water, and no idea whatever of which way he should go.

On the floor before him a great shadow stretched out and out. The realization that it was there crept over him slowly, and with it a dawning horror. It was not his shadow. It was blacker than any shadow he might have cast in any world, darker than the shadows cast by the pillars. It was like the shadow of a man, but crowned with a tangle of branches, or antlers.

Jonas turned slowly.

Before him stood the Hunter. The Hunter was tall, taller than any mortal man, tall enough that his crown surely brushed the ceiling of this great hall. Yet Jonas found he could look into his pitiless unhuman eyes. They were round and golden, even stranger than he recalled: the eyes of an owl; hard, merciless, unmoved by the terror of its prey. Even in this dark place where there seemed no light to cast them, the Hunter’s face was veiled by twisting shadows.

Jonas,
said the Hunter.
You are come into my country and my Kingdom. Surrender your name to me.

The Hunter’s voice was dark, if darkness could have a voice. It was not loud, but it filled the world. Behind the words, Jonas thought he could hear, distantly, the wild cry of a bird of prey. He shut his eyes. Then he opened them again. “Lord,” he said shakily, “Lord Hunter. You know my name already. You have spoken it.” His own words sounded . . . dim, to his ears. As though his voice had less strength in this place than it should.

Not of your giving. I heard it in the wind. I heard it behind the rain. I heard it in the grinding crash of breaking stones when Kanha fell. Your name is mine. Surrender it to me,
demanded the Hunter.

Jonas could not speak. He could not bring himself to refuse directly, yet he did not dare accede to the Hunter’s demand. He was frozen, irresolute, unable to move or think. Yet he found, to his astonishment and horror, that a slow, unwise sense of outrage was building somewhere behind his eyes. He set his teeth against it.

Jonas,
said the Hunter.
Surrender to me your hopes and your fears. All this I claim.

“You brought me here. You hunted me . . . you hunted me through my dreams, so that I would come here, to your empty Kingdom.” Jonas knew this was the truth. Anger warred with the terror. “You . . . you pursued Timou. To drive her . . . to what? Her
mother
? Why? Why did you listen for my name? Or hers? What possible use is either of us to you?”

The Hunter tilted his head; far above, his vast crown of antlers or branches cast a multitude of shadows that twisted and bent in strange directions. He regarded Jonas out of passionless golden eyes.
I know her mother. So will she. She will go to the hand of her mother. You will come to mine. Jonas. Give me your name. Give me your eyes. Give me your tongue. Give me your hands. Give me your heart.

“No,” said Jonas. “No. I don’t . . . I don’t understand you. But I will give you nothing.”

The unreadable owl’s eyes did not blink.
Nothing is what you will find here,
said the Hunter.
You will find nothing here, until you find me again. If you understand me then, then you shall pay my price.

And suddenly he was not there. He did not turn, or go. He was just gone. The darkness seemed thinner suddenly, as though relieved of the weight of the shadow the Hunter had cast.

Jonas got slowly to his feet. His hands were shaking. He was shivering all over. It was perfectly silent. There was no breath of air, of any living breeze. Around him a thousand featureless pillars gave no hint of any direction he should go.

C
HAPTER
7

he Palace?” The young man from the carriage was surprised. He turned to hail a cab, then turned back to examine Timou once more, a quick glance from “ head to toe that turned into a more serious scrutiny. She looked back a little warily.

“Well,” the young man said. “Well . . . um. If . . . they . . . expect you at the Palace, you won’t need my escort. Um . . .
does
he, that is, do they? Expect you? At the Palace?”

Timou’s bewilderment must have shown in her face, because a flush suddenly rose in the young man’s face and he said, “Never mind me. Look. Here’s a cab for you. Good . . . um, good luck at the Palace.”

“Thank you,” said Timou, baffled. She didn’t understand what she heard in the young man’s voice. A kind of wicked amusement, perhaps, as though he thought Timou had invited him to share a joke at someone else’s expense.

“I’m tempted to escort you for real.” The man sounded half stifled. “But better not, I suppose. All right. Up you go! Good luck!”

Timou, utterly mystified, nevertheless accepted his hand and clambered up to the high seat. The driver glanced back at her incuriously and lifted the reins. The horse started off with a jolt across the cobbles, and Timou braced herself on the hard seat and looked out the window.

At first she looked blindly, her thoughts turning curiously over the young man’s odd comments. But then the City pulled her, despite herself, out of her thoughts entirely. She had never seen, never imagined, any place like it, not even when she’d watched it approach as the carriage had crossed the Bridge.

All the streets of the City seemed to be cobbled, the cobbles rounded smooth by time. There were a great many streets, much wider than even the streets of the town in which Timou had spent the previous night and crowded with the most startling people. As Timou watched, a pair of women in amazingly intricate yellow gowns passed in an open carriage, their seats so high they were in no danger whatsoever of being splashed with mud. A boy clinging to the back of another carriage flung a coin to a man selling cakes right off a cart on the street. The man tossed a cake back to the boy, who caught it in one hand, clinging—rather precariously, it seemed to Timou—to the carriage with his other. The boy raised the cake in salute to the man, grinning. A flock of younger children ran by, brightly clad and noisy as finches.

Houses—or perhaps they were shops?—crowded along the streets, separated from the traffic and from one another by deep gutters. To enter them one must cross to their doors over little bridges of stone or wood. Buildings and bridges alike were made of the same creamy stone that all this City seemed made of, a stone the afternoon light turned to gold. Sometimes she could catch tantalizing glimpses through doors set ajar to draw in passersby; others were closed and private.

As the cab went on, the streets became still broader, the buildings grander, and people fewer. The street turned, and turned again, climbing a hill in slow stages. Then it turned once more and Timou saw at last the gates that led to the Palace. The gates were silver; they stood open; tigers lay along their tops, gazing outward with green eyes. Timou stared back at them, wondering what they might see in the winter-pale girl who passed between them. Had they seen her father, perhaps, pass through these gates before her? Their jeweled eyes kept their own counsel.

The cab took Timou right through the gates without pause, past a wide courtyard where a dozen boys led horses in and out of a vast stable, and right up to the graceful, many-towered Palace itself. The driver jumped down, handed Timou out, accepted payment—Timou was not certain afterward how much she had paid him—and jumped back on his high seat to turn his cab and head back into the City. Timou did not watch him go. She was looking at the Palace.

Flowers and leaves of stone spilled down the Palace walls, worn but still recognizable; stone roses climbed its towers, disguised sometimes by real roses that bore white flowers even this late in the season. The Palace doors were twice Timou’s height and delicately carved in shapes like the wind moving across water. They were guarded by two men in uniforms of gray and silver, with swords at their hips. The men looked at Timou with a stolid disinterest that made her hesitate, uncertain of how to proceed.

Then one moved forward a step. His eyes had narrowed. He said something to his fellow guardsman, too low for Timou to hear, and both men looked at her with a peculiarly intense speculation behind the professional neutrality of their eyes. “Yes?” the first man said, and added, “. . . my lady?”

Timou looked back at the guard, uneasy at the curiosity she saw behind his eyes. She said after a moment, “I would like to . . . to speak to the King’s elder son. If I may.”

“Would you?” said the guard. He looked at his fellow, his eyebrows raised.

The other guard shrugged, his mouth crooking, and said to Timou, “You, ah . . . My lady, we do not allow just any . . . person . . . to wander into the Palace and disturb, um, Lord Neill. Who is a busy man. But for you . . . Is he expecting you, then?” There was a peculiar emphasis to the way the guard asked this last question.

“I wouldn’t think so,” said Timou, her own brows rising.

“I’ll get the captain,” offered the second guard, with a sidelong look at the first. “And, ah, if you would care to follow me, my lady, I will show you to a room where you can wait more, um, comfortably.”

“Thank you,” said Timou, wondering, and followed the guard into the Palace. They passed only a handful of folk: a tall young man with a long lean face and fine clothing barely glanced at her, but a woman carrying a stack of towels looked curiously at Timou, then looked again. She bumped into the corner she was turning, and barely escaped scattering her towels down the hall. Timou stared after her.

“Here is the small parlor,” said the guard. “If you would wait here, please. I do not think it will be long. Um.”

“Thank you,” Timou said again, baffled, and watched him walk away. He cast a glance back over his shoulder and all but walked into a wall himself.

The parlor did not seem very small to her. It had cream-colored walls and rich dark furniture, most of the chairs drawn up close to a wide fireplace. There was a single picture on one wall, wider than Timou was tall, of the Lake on a stormy day: waves rose against the wooded shore and light lanced past torn clouds; rain fell slantingly into the gray water. Across one corner of the painting, the crumbling stone lilies of Tiger Bridge were visible, but the Bridge cast no reflection in the storm-tossed waters of the Lake.

Timou walked across the room and stood for a moment looking at the painting, trying to decide whether she liked it. Something about it disturbed her. But before she could decide what, the door behind her opened and she turned.

It was another guard who stood there, along with the man who had let her in . . . but older than the first, Timou saw, with an experienced, weary face. He had a badge at his shoulder. His eyes, pale blue, rested on Timou’s face with a strange expression. He said to the other guard, his tone wondering, “Does the Bastard, then, have a bastard?”

Timou’s brows lifted. It was clear what inference the man was making, but she could not fathom what made him think such a thing. She said courteously, “I beg your pardon?”

“Forgive me.” The man inclined his head a little, but his eyes, Timou saw, did not drop. “I am captain of the Palace Guard. My name is Galef. I will serve you if I can. Your name, then . . . my lady? Your business with, ah, Lord Neill?”

Timou folded her hands before her and looked back at the captain steadily. “My name is Timou. I am looking for my father, the mage Kapoen.”

“Your father?”

“So far as I know,” Timou said with deliberate calm, and saw a faint flush rise into the captain’s face.

“I will inform Lord Neill you are here, then. If you will wait. I think . . . I do not think it will be long.” The man gave another slight nod of his head and withdrew, taking the other guard with him. Timou could hear their voices in the hall; the younger man speaking excitedly and the captain answering in a stern tone.

Timou moved slowly across the room and sat down in one of the chairs by the fireplace. Thoughts tried to coalesce in the surface of her mind. She dismissed them: all the half-formed guesses, all the whispers of speculation and curiosity. The heart of magecraft was to be still and let the world unveil itself in its own time. She stilled her mind and waited.

The door to the room had been left open. Steps went by: light and not pausing, soft-soled shoes and the rustle of stiff skirts—a lady of the court, Timou surmised. More steps, a moment later: quick and firm, heels ringing on the stone floor: a man. The steps did not slow at her door. After that there was silence for a time. Finally there were more steps: more than one person this time. Timou rose to her feet and turned to face the door.

The first man through it came forward several paces and stopped, looking at her. There were others at his back; Timou barely saw them. All her attention was on the first.

He was tall. He wore black and violet: mourning dress. Against those colors, the paleness of his skin was stark. The lines of his face were harsh, his jaw angular: wolf-featured, they would have said of him in the village. His hair, nearly as white as hers, was drawn back into a single braid, the way she wore her own. His eyes were different: dark as the Hunter’s night, opaque, ungiving.

Timou drew a slow breath. She said nothing.

Of course this was Lord Neill, the Bastard, elder son of the King, and Timou felt now that she might easily believe any manner of rumor concerning him. He moved suddenly, crossing the room and putting a hand beneath her chin to lift her face. She met his dark eyes with her own pale ones, and wondered what he saw within them. Or what he might think he saw.

“How old are you?” Lord Neill asked abruptly. His tone was sharp, crisp; his voice was not deep, but neither was it light. It held confidence: the expectation of command.

“Seventeen. Almost eighteen.”

“Seventeen,” repeated Lord Neill. He lowered his hand and stepped back.

“Is it possible she is yours?” asked a man who had come in at his back. His tone caught Timou’s attention: academic, inquiring, as though he offered no judgment in either case but was merely interested. It was the tone in which a mage might ask such a question. He did not look like a mage to Timou: he was too heavy, too soft—too ready, judging by his face, to smile. But he was a mage. Timou did not know how she could tell, but she was certain. She saw him recognize this in her as well: his eyes widened suddenly.

Lord Neill had missed this moment of mutual recognition. He said absently, his eyes still on her face, “It would be barely possible.”

“My father’s name,” said Timou, watching the mage as well as the bastard elder prince, “is Kapoen. Or so he told me.”

“Kapoen.” Lord Neill glanced at the mage he had brought with him.

“He came to the City this spring,” Timou said.

The mage with Lord Neill pursed his lips and lifted wide shoulders. “If he did, child, he did not come openly. We did not see him here. We would have welcomed him if he had come to us.”

“He told me he would come here. Perhaps he did not come to you, but he was here.” She turned to Lord Neill. “He did not come to you or to your father?”

“What?” It was clear the lord had heard nothing they were saying. He said abruptly, “Did Kapoen ever tell you directly that he was your father?”

“Yes,” Timou said patiently. “We are alike, but not, I suppose, quite so alike as that, my lord. It is only the hair.”

The mage grinned, and the guard captain coughed.

“It’s not only the hair,” said Lord Neill, and took her suddenly by the arm. Timou let the man draw her with him. Everyone else, and there seemed something of a crowd, pressed aside out of their way—his way—and followed in their wake.

He did not lead her far; only to a room down the hall, a room cluttered with little tables and large armoires and intricately carved wardrobes. A huge mirror with a silver frame took up all one wall, and of course it was this that was Lord Neill’s aim: he brought Timou to stand with him before the great mirror. She looked into it and was silent.

Lord Neill was harsh-featured: the bones of his face were strong, too severe for beauty. In Timou they had been softened, but she could not deny that the lines were the same. They had the same mouth: thin-lipped but graceful. The same long slender nose and high cheekbones, though his were strong and hers gentle. The same pale winter-bleached skin. The same hair: frost for Timou, ash for the son of the King. Only, his eyes were dark, and hers light, all but colorless in this pale room. Drawn by some impulse, Timou reached slowly forward, her reflection in the mirror echoing her gesture, until they touched fingertips.

“So . . .,” began Lord Neill, but then did not complete what he had been going to say. He had paused, startled; Timou watched both their eyes widen in reflected startlement. In the mirror, hers were as dark as his. Darker. Dark as the night captured at the heart of the world. In the mirror, she smiled. Timou was not smiling. She tried to lift her hand away from the mirror, but another hand caught hers in a strong grip. She sent her mind into the mirror in swift defensive reflex, looking for glass that could be broken and for the world that should exist on its other side. But she found no fragile glass, only tilting sheets of light that gave way before her and closed again behind her and all around her, unbroken, unbreakable. There was no Lord Neill at her side, no crowd at her back, no mirror. There was only light, rising in angled sheets and planes all around her. Timou took a step and stopped. She stood still. She had no idea where she was.