The City in the Lake (26 page)

This was unexpected. Timou had thought persuading the Hunter to release his prey would be the difficult part. And yet—“Let him go,” she whispered, “and I will try.”

At once the shadow tore itself free from the man and took a step away. It gained solidity; darkness seemed to coalesce within it. Far above, the Hunter opened round yellow eyes.

Jonas sank to the floor without a sound; the silver knife stood in his chest. His hands went to it, but he could not touch it; his hands passed through the hilt as though it were made of mist. His eyes were open: human now, but blind with pain and shock.

Timou went forward hastily and knelt beside him. He saw her then, and tried to speak, but could not; she put her hand over his mouth to spare him the effort.

She moved to touch the silver knife; for her, it was real and solid. It was cold as ice. She drew it out of the wound and held it in her hands: her mother’s knife, made with ill intent to do murder. She put her mind into the weapon, shaped it with her mind; found spells of death and undoing woven into the silver, running down its edges, set into its point. She understood these spells: they were her mother’s spells, they shaped themselves to her blood and trembled in time to the beating of her heart. Understanding them, she took them apart.

Then, working as quickly as she could, she wove into the knife spells of life and healing. She sent the warmth of summer sliding down its edges; the sweet breeze that comes across a newplowed field she set into it; the taste of honey on warm bread; the laugh of a friend; the smile in her father’s eyes. The smile in the eyes of a lover. Then she drove the knife, warm and full of summer and life, into the heart of the man she supported.

Jonas cried out, his eyes widening, stunned. His hands went to his chest, and again he could not touch the knife. But this knife melted into his body and was taken up by his blood; it dissolved and was gone like the memory of summer, leaving healing behind it where it had struck. His hands moved, incredulously, across unbroken skin.

You are mine,
said the Hunter.
I do not release you.

Jonas flinched at the bodiless voice, breath coming in a sharp gasp of shock or pain or terror; his eyes when he looked up were wide, blind with memory or with the dark. No longer contained within the shadow of a man, the Hunter seemed now far more terrible. Timou looked up and up at the shadowed face with its pitiless eyes and its crown of twisting shadows, and found that, as the hare before the hounds, she could not move.

Then Jonas got to his feet, slowly, as though his own body was strange to him, as though he had to move each bone and muscle separately. But he went to the Hunter of his own volition and sank down to one knee. “Lord. I don’t ask to be released.”

The Hunter moved a hand, touched the man on the face; Jonas did not flinch now, but looked fearlessly—astonishing Timou—into the Hunter’s yellow eyes.
Always my Kingdom will lie a step before your foot,
said the Hunter.
Always you will see the shadow of my door lying in every shadow.

“After having once seen through your dark, Lord, I fear no shadow.”

Then, if you are able to find the way out of my Kingdom, I will open my hand.

“For both of us, Lord?” Jonas asked.

Yes.

“Then we will find the way,” Jonas said. He put his hand, for a moment, over the Hunter’s hand, where it still rested on his face. Both their hands fell away together, like a hand and its shadow, and Jonas stood up.

He looked at Timou, seeming uncertain—of her, she thought incredulously. He thought he had frightened her, or appalled her—she did not know what he feared. Nor did she know what he saw in her face, but his expression eased suddenly. He said, as though he could not quite believe this, “You came here, into the dark? For me?”

“You came here for me,” Timou answered. She held out her hands.

Jonas took them in his. His hands were much larger than hers; they made hers seem fragile. Timou had not remembered the broad strength of his hands. She liked them; she liked the way hers fit so neatly in his. Jonas moved his thumbs gently across her palms and looked into her face. He was not smiling; his expression was very serious.

Timou said, “I went to the City to find my father. And to find my mother. But what I found . . .”

“I know,” said Jonas.

Timou was silent. She did not know how to tell Jonas that finding her father’s body among the hard pure planes of light behind the mirror had shattered her; she did not know how to tell him what it had felt like to realize how much her father had always hidden from her. She could not explain how it had felt to find her mother, and then realize what she had found. Yet it seemed very important to her that he should understand all this.

“I know,” Jonas said again gently, looking into her eyes.

Timou closed her eyes for a moment. “My mother . . .”

“You didn’t lose her, you know. She was never there. Not the mother you should have had.”

“Yes,” Timou whispered.

“I wish I could have been with you. But it was a journey you had to make alone. Mine was like that, too,” Jonas said. He glanced to the side, where the Hunter stood silently watching them out of unreadable yellow eyes, and Timou felt the tremor that went through his body. But he said steadily, “There is a way out. A way back to the Kingdom of the living. This time, I hope, the journey will be one we can make together.”

“Yes,” Timou agreed fervently.

“The way is here.” He sounded certain. “Through a window. This window.” He drew Timou with him to the one at which he had been standing when she entered the tower. It looked out onto nothing but darkness. “I was watching you from here when you . . . The windows look out into other Kingdoms, but I cannot see them now. Can you?”

“No.” Timou could not imagine seeing anything from the windows of this tower but darkness.

“If we cast ourselves out into the dark, we will find, I think, only the dark. The Hunter can see out.” His voice lowered. “Your father helped me see out, the first time.”

“My—”

“He was here.” Jonas touched the sill, looked around as though expecting to see her father right there, close by his side. “Is here.”

“He is?” To her dismay, Timou felt her eyes fill with sudden tears; she blinked hard, but she could not blink the tears away. She rubbed her sleeve over her eyes.

“Timou.” Jonas took her hands in his once more. “Timou. Don’t cry.”

“I didn’t know—when I took out the knife—I didn’t know it was to send him
here
—”

“Timou. It isn’t the same, when you belong here. It isn’t like this.” Jonas glanced again at the silent Hunter, who stared impassively back, patient as the dark itself.

“It isn’t like this,” Jonas repeated, turning back to Timou. “When this is your Kingdom, you see it with different eyes. I have seen it like that, Timou!” His eyes on hers were blind with memory, trying to see past her and past the dark to remembered visions. “It is as though every bit of darkness has been transmuted. . . .”

“To light?”

“No—to beauty.” His grip tightened on her hands; his eyes on hers tried to share this vision with her. “I am not afraid to have this darkness lie before every step I take, because once I saw into darkness and it was glorious. Grieve for your father because you lost him, it’s right we should grieve for those we lose, but don’t grieve for him because he’s here, Timou!”

Timou found that she believed him. She wept, covering her face with her hands, leaning into his shoulder. Jonas held her, stroking her hair softly, waiting for the tears to pass. She fought them, feeling always at her back the ruthless patience of the Hunter.

Kapoen cannot help you this time,
the Hunter commented at last as Timou straightened painfully. He was speaking, it became clear, not to her but to Jonas.
When he was freed to come here, he came to me and I set him to help you. I needed you. You needed the shade of the mage. But he cannot help you this time. The way is here. You must find it.

“How, Lord?”

You must find it.

Jonas went to the window, running his hands across the sill, and gazed out into the dark. “Is this a way we can take, Lord? Without light, we cannot see.”

Timou thought she might make a light, or summon light . . . even the memory of light. But she knew that the darkness of this Kingdom would smother any light she might make or call. . . . She said aloud, “One point of light.”

Jonas shook his head, startled, looking now at her rather than at the motionless Hunter. “There is no light in this Kingdom.”

“Yes, there is,” she breathed. “One point of light in all this Kingdom. And I know where it is. I am carrying it myself.” In the pocket of her traveling dress she found the mirror that, so long ago, it seemed, she had filled with the light of the setting sun. It glowed in her palm, scattering glints of bright warmth into the dark, which drew back from it.

The Hunter moved away, turning his eyes from the delicate glow contained within the mirror. But though he had lifted an arm to shield his face, he did not seem offended. He only waited, expressionless and patient.

Timou gave the mirror to Jonas, and Jonas cast it through the window. Light spread out from it as it fell, far more light than such a small thing should have been able to contain: light fell across an infinite expanse of still water that cast it back like a mirror into the blue of the sky.

Jonas caught her hand, or she caught his, and they leapt together through the window, wide now as any door, and fell through light that grew warm and golden and ran against the shore like water . . . and then they came down together onto a wide expanse of sand beside the Lake. The air was still and warm; the summer sun stood above and poured down light as thick and warm as honey. Behind them, the City rose silent and still, golden, filled with truth and time.

Jonas staggered, his eyes blank with shock. He would have fallen, but Timou reached out quickly and caught him by the arm. She looked with quick concern for a wound that might have been left by her mother’s knife, or by hers. But there was no sign of injury. It was simply the contrast between the Kingdoms that had undone him. She helped him sit and sat down beside him. Heat struck upward from the sand.

Jonas bent forward and spread open hands to that warmth as a man might huddle over a fire against the cold of a winter night. Sense was coming back into his eyes. They were brown: the color of rich dark earth. Had she ever noticed the exact color of his eyes before? Timou thought it would be impossible now to forget the precise shade no matter how many miles or years might separate them.

“I thought I would never be warm again,” he said at last. “I learned not to mind cold . . . but I think I forgot that warmth even existed.” He straightened and leaned back, looking up with wonder at the creamy gold of the wall, and the towers visible beyond it. “This is the true City, of course. In the true Kingdom.” It was not quite a question. “I saw it . . . through
his
eyes.”

“They’re all true. But this is the one at the center,” said Timou. “It anchors the rest, but doesn’t rule them. As stillness anchors but does not conquer the storm. That’s not quite what my father taught me. Or maybe it’s what he meant to teach me, but I didn’t understand it. Then. I realized it . . . eventually.”

She did not know what Jonas heard in her voice, but he turned to her at once. “I’m sorry for your loss, Timou. Kapoen was not an easy man to know, but I know he was a good man. And he loved you.”

“I know.” She did; she had recognized the memory of love in the shock she’d felt at its absence within her mother’s eyes. This surety had become immeasurably important to her. But—“My father taught me that stillness is the heart of magecraft. And it is. Yet . . . I think he also used magecraft as an excuse to evade ties to life. I thought that kind of evasion, too, was the heart of magecraft.”

A faint smile had come into Jonas’s eyes. “No?”

“Stillness can lie at the center of your heart, even if your heart is filled by the storm. I don’t . . . I don’t know whether my father knew that. Or remembered it.”

“Perhaps he was afraid for you, if you learned it. Perhaps he hoped to shelter you from the peril of the storm.”

Timou bowed her head. “If he did, that was a mistake. Not . . . not the only one he made. And used you to redeem. I’m sorry for that.”

“He had a right,” Jonas said quietly. “Anyway, we must all redeem one another’s mistakes.”

“Yes. I learned that, too.”

Jonas gave her a little nod and got to his feet, brushing sand off his clothing. He turned to look back at the timeless City. “It’s beautiful, I don’t deny it,” he said. “But . . . I admit, I would rather have familiar lands about me, and my own home waiting for me when the sun goes down.” He gave Timou a sidelong glance, offering her a hand up. “Is that something you might manage, do you suppose?”

Timou found herself starting to smile. “From this City,” she said, “I think we might find that home is only a step away. Let me show you the paths of light.” And she took his hand and let Jonas lift her to her feet. Then she drew him with her through the bright mirror of the Lake: paths and planes of light tilted around them. Timou did not follow the light, but took them through it, and past it, faster and faster. They were running, running . . . through light and out of light, into snow, into a fine pure winter’s day. And then before them was the village, and friends crying out in surprise and running to meet them.

About the Author

Rachel Neumeier got the initial idea for
The City in the Lake
from a painting she bought several years ago called
Temple of the Reality,
by Anatoliy Leushin. She started writing fiction to relax when she was a graduate student; her only previous publications appear in journals such as the
American Journal of Botany.
Rachel now lives in rural Missouri with a large garden, small orchard, and gradually increasing number of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Rachel Neumeier

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neumeier, Rachel.
The city in the lake / by Rachel Neumeier. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A teenage girl who is learning to be a mage must save her mysterious, magical homeland, The Kingdom, from a powerful force that is trying to control it.
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.N4448Ci 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2008008941

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