The City in the Lake (24 page)

The court had been wary of Timou, seeing her mother’s face stamped so clearly in hers, and never mind that she plainly held the favor of their Prince. Now, however, Jesse and some of the other young men drifted toward the girl, as automatically as clouds follow the wind. Neill came down among them like a tiger among the sheep and sent the lot of them scattering away again in all directions with ruthless dispatch.

Timou watched him with a lifted brow and a wry look in her pale eyes. “Do I need protection?”

“They do,” Neill assured her gravely. “They will cast themselves at your feet and beg you to tread over them. You are lovely.” She was. The faint air of sadness she had carried with her back into the ordinary Kingdom from the City in the Lake only added to her beauty.

“She is,” agreed a familiar voice.

Neill turned to find Marcos standing attentively and hopefully at his elbow.

“She is wasted on a brother,” Marcos continued earnestly, and smiled at Timou. “You should adorn my arm, not Neill’s. I brought you a bribe.” With an expression of wistful optimism, he offered her a plate of cream-filled pastries. “This is the best kind, you know.”

“Marcos,” the girl murmured with the slightest inclination of her head and a smile that told Neill the mage was familiar and welcome company. “Thank you.” She accepted a pastry and asked in a perfectly conversational tone, “Is Trevennen still a tree?”

“I thought he would find his way out of that spell in hours,” Marcos confided with a pleased expression. “Days, at the most. He must have underestimated Russe very badly. So must I. I had no idea she could so thoroughly persuade a tree that it really is a tree. She has set the spell so deep by now that he may stand in our house for the next thousand years. We may have to rearrange the kitchen around him. It’s inconvenient,” he said solemnly, to a faint sound Neill made. “One has to make breakfast ducking under branches. And he sheds leaves into the porridge.”

The girl smiled—a smile with a hard edge to it. The idea of Trevennen being turned into a tree for a thousand years clearly pleased her. It certainly pleased Neill. He inquired, “But Russe could undo the spell if she wished? Cassiel may not be content to leave Trevennen standing for a thousand years, even as a tree.”

“Of course, if he wishes,” agreed Marcos. “At his pleasure. There does not appear to be any need to hurry.”

“It is a beautiful spell,” Timou said to Neill quite earnestly. She shaped a circle in the air. “It goes around and around, and every layer says,
This is a tree.
It’s very convincing. My . . . my father showed me how to listen to the voices of the trees, but he never showed me how to change myself into one.”

“Russe spent many seasons as a tree standing at the edge of the great forest when she was young,” Marcos told her. He eyed the girl speculatively. “She could teach you to do that, I am sure. sIf that is something you would like to learn.”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Eventually. But—”

“You are going home, of course,” Neill finished for her. “You are more than welcome to stay, if you wish.” A glance at Marcos caused the mage to second this with an emphatic nod. “But I can understand if you want distance. Or time.”

The girl shook her head. Light from lanterns and candles slid through her eyes, now pale blue, now almost green, now faintly lavender. There was in fact a kind of distance, an unbreakable calm, to her gaze that the crowds in this hall could not touch. sShe said softly, “I could love this City. I love it already. I would like to stay here in this Palace. Or go into the City and stay with the mages and learn from Russe. And from you,” she added to Marcos. “But, yes, I must go home. I promised everyone I would come back.”

“Make us the same promise,” suggested Neill. He touched her wrist lightly. “You will break a hundred hearts when you go. And,” he said softly, “I should be sorry to lose a sister so soon after gaining one.”

She bowed her head a little. “I told those I left behind that I would go to the City to find my father. I think in truth I came here to find my mother. But what I found was not what I had hoped to find.” Lifting her head, she met his eyes. “But I found a brother here I had not even known to look for. That makes me glad.”

Neill tried to produce a smile. After a moment he succeeded. “You must surely return to us.”

“I will try,” she answered, pale eyes meeting dark. He understood at that moment that she did not know whether she would be able to return, and guessed by that where she meant to go.

He said slowly, “I see, of course, that you must try.” He did not mean
try to come back,
and she knew that; she glanced down, recognizing, perhaps, that he had understood more than she had intended. He said, “I could come with you, you know. You need not go alone.”

Marcos said plaintively, “What are you two talking about?”

Timou did not even seem to hear the mage. She said quietly, “No, really. I think I do need to go alone. You see . . . you must see . . . it was I whom Jonas followed into the dark.” The calm in her pale eyes had become serious.

“An obligation you assuredly need not meet alone,” Neill said gently. “It’s one we all share.”

Delicate color rose into the girl’s face. “Oh, well . . . obligation would do for any of us, I am sure. But for me . . . it’s not merely obligation.”

“Ah,” Neill murmured. “I had not known.”

“Nor I. Until . . . well.” Timou bowed her head a little.

Neill said after a moment, “I would still be honored to accompany you, Timou.”

“To where?” Marcos inquired, eyebrows rising. He glanced from one of them to the other, uneasy at their serious tones.

Timou said, still to Neill, “I do not think your brother would thank you for making that offer . . . though I do.”

“You underestimate him. He would go with you himself. . . . In fact, I think it is better if he does not know where you intend to go. Much better. Much.” Neill’s skin prickled all the way down his spine to think of his young brother riding blithely along the road this girl meant to take.

“Where
does
she intend to go?” said Marcos again, and then at last, with sudden, dawning comprehension, “Oh . . .”

“Yes,” said Timou, still speaking only to Neill. She understood him perfectly. “That would not do. So I will go by myself.”

“And leave me wondering. That is unkind. I will come with you.”

“No,” the girl said patiently. At that moment, Neill reflected, she sounded very like a mage. “I will come back. In the spring, when the apples bloom. If I do not, then you will know I could not. All right?”

Neill hesitated.

“You certainly cannot ride off and lose yourself in the forest, Neill,” Marcos observed in a tone he made carefully neutral. “Or . . . wherever. Your brother would be extremely upset if . . . something happened to you. And he will need your help, you know, especially during the next year or so. He never paid enough attention to the nails and hammers of holding the rule. Not like you.”

This was undeniable. The pause lengthened. Before Neill could speak again, horns sang out, flinging a staccato flurry of notes across the hall. The court moved instantly, shifting expectantly into the ordained patterns of rank and precedence, and the moment was lost. Guardsmen took their appointed stations along both sides of the hall, swords drawn and held upright in salute. Galef stood at the foot of the dais, standing so that he could keep both the throne and anyone approaching it under his eye. He held his sword in both hands, its tip grounded against the stone of the floor, his face professionally blank.

Reserving all questions and remonstrations for a later moment, Neill moved toward the front of the hall, drawing Timou with him.

The horns called again, scattering mellow notes like drops of gold into the air, and Cassiel came in while the court called out in acclamation. He wore russet and dark green and gold; gold showed at his wrists and wound in narrow ribbons through the oak-dark braid of his hair. Traceries of gold and copper wound around the tops of his boots and across his broad belt. Buoyed up by the applause of the crowd, Prince Cassiel looked young and full of life, as though he had never been touched by grief or fear. He crossed the hall with a bounce in his step, leapt up onto the low dais that held the throne, and swung around to view the assembly, lifting his hands with a merry, conspiratorial gesture to still their acclaim.

Neill left his sister with a hasty touch on her hand and a word of reassurance and strode forward. Assuming the solemn mien appropriate to the moment, he went first to the Queen, where she stood in her place on the first step of the dais, just to the left of the throne. She held a velvet cushion in both hands, with the King’s circlet of golden leaves resting upon it. Neill met her eyes, inclining his head in sober salute. He was rewarded, as he lifted the circlet, by seeing her stiff smile become for an instant warm.

He bore the circlet to Cassiel. Then, as the nearest heir, he stepped up onto the dais and knelt before his brother, offering him the circlet of the King. Cassiel touched his hands first, looking seriously into his eyes, and then, smiling, took the circlet and placed it carefully on his own head. The horns sang for the third time, and the court cried out three times in acclamation. Beyond the hall, out in the City, Neill could hear that cry picked up and thrown onward by a thousand voices.

“Thank you,” Cassiel said—the words more seen and felt than heard, because the cry of acclaim was still echoing through the hall. He offered his hand to his brother. Neill bent his head to touch his lips to the back of Cassiel’s hand, first among the court to offer the kiss of fealty. Cassiel drew him to his feet and embraced him, but when Neill would have withdrawn to his accustomed place among the court, his brother prevented him. With a smiling gesture, Cassiel directed him instead to a place at the right hand of the throne: a place of signal honor that he, though never Neill, had often taken when their father occupied this throne.

Neill, eyes suddenly burning, took the few steps necessary and turned, standing beside the throne, to face the assembly. The court was quiet again; he wondered how many of them still suspected him, despite everything, of having deliberately struck down his father, or of having conspired with his foreign mother to do so. Fewer now, perhaps, after this extremely public gesture of trust and favor from his brother.

Following Neill, it was Timou, clearly briefed on her role, who walked forward with concentrated poise. Schooled—probably by the Queen—in appropriate behavior, Timou carefully mounted the three steps of the dais and sank down before the throne with a rustle of stiff skirts and an extremely endearing air of concentration. Cassiel gave her his hand, which she kissed; he raised her at once and came a step forward, turning her to stand with him, facing the court.

“Here is Timou, daughter of the mage Kapoen,” he said swiftly and clearly. His smile was pleased and slightly wicked, as it was when he planned mischief. “She is the sister of my brother, and so she is my sister, welcome in my family and my court.” Ignoring the burst of whispers down the hall, he drew her close, bent swiftly to kiss her brow in welcome and her cheek in affection. Rather than allowing her to retreat back into the hall, Cassiel then sent her with a gesture to stand next to Neill beside the throne.

“Smile,” Neill said to her in a low voice that would not carry. “Did he warn you he was going to do that?”

“No,” the girl whispered back, smiling obediently but not very freely.

“Now you will have to return,” he murmured, “or Cassiel will move all the court out to the villages until he finds you. He would do it, you know. He would probably enjoy it.”

“I know he would,” she whispered, but then they both had to be still again, facing soberly and correctly forward, waiting with strict patience for the whole of the court to file, one by one, before the throne to pledge their fealty to their new young King.

After the coronation, there was the procession through the City, with moonlight and round parchment-covered lamps to light the way, and the people of the City shouting Cassiel’s name and throwing grain before the hooves of his horse. The new King rode an oak-colored stallion, its black mane braided with strands of gold. The Queen rode at his back, her full skirts sweeping down across the shoulder of her bright chestnut horse, sapphires and pearls braided into its creamy mane. A black mare that matched Neill’s had been found for Timou, and they rode behind the Queen. Neill was astonished, as they rode through the streets, to hear his name among those cried by the people of the City; a few even shouted the girl’s name. The procession wound through all the wider streets of the City so that everyone who dwelled there could see and cheer for the new King, and everyone wanted to see him; the streets were thronged on both sides, and children ran along the rooftops, throwing down handfuls of grain and bright bits of ribbon.

After the procession it was back at last to the Palace, where dozens of musicians had taken up their stations so that the sunlight of the new morning seemed to strike music out of the very air. There was dancing, for anyone still with the energy, and more food had been laid out on the tables: complicated braided loaves, rounds of soft cheese, pastries filled with fruit and sticky with honey. Neill found his brother and a dozen women of the court waiting to sweep him into the dancing, and did not make it back to his own rooms and his own bed until late in the afternoon.

When he woke early the next morning, Timou had already gone.

“There’s no need to be disappointed about it. She said she intends to come back in the spring,” Cassiel told him cheerfully at a breakfast he invited Neill to share, and that he himself attacked with the energy of the young.

Neill made himself smile and agree. He said, after a moment, “If I may have your leave, I would like to go after her and be sure she comes safely to her home. She took no attendants, I am sure.”

“She wouldn’t have any. How did you know?” Cassiel was blithely unconcerned. “I’ll send a messenger if you like. You, however, I want by my side! Even if you swear to stay on the road and never look aside, crossing that forest is a chancy business. I know you could handle anything you found there,” he added earnestly, with a quick look at his brother’s face, “but you are my heir now, until I get another. We can’t have you turned for a year and a day into a jeweled sword that speaks in tongues, or whatever. Really, Neill. I am sorry. . . .”