The City in the Lake

by Rachel Neumeier

  So Timou learned how to catch fire and the memory of fire in glass, how to contain the quick fire in a coal and how to let it loose again, how to find the fire that waited to spring eagerly forth from the heart of dry wood. And how to try again and again to find such fire when at first she could see nothing but wood, trusting that, because her father said it was there, eventually she would find the heart of it that wanted to burn.

  Then she finally learned the way of it, and for a while she could hardly walk past a stack of dry firewood without flames bursting out of it. “Better than burning someone’s house,” Kapoen said, shaking his head, more disturbed at Timou’s tears than at the inadvertent fire. He patiently taught her to smother fire as well as call it, and how to keep from calling it in the first place, and how to be calm.

  “The heart of magecraft,” her father told her, “is to be still and let the world unveil itself in its own time. There is no need to force it. It is very difficult to force anything against its own nature. But it will offer itself to you if you are patient. Clarity—and control, and precision, and good judgment—come to the calm mind and the still heart.”

  He meant that none of those qualities could be expected from a mind disturbed by shock at an unexpected fire. But he also meant, Timou knew, that they could not be expected from a mind cluttered with the thousand small daily thoughts of the village. She flushed.

  Kapoen noticed, of course. He smiled his composed smile. “You are part of this village,” he told her. “And so you must be. But the heart of magecraft is stillness. Learn to be silent. Learn to love solitude.”

  “But—” said Timou.

  “Fire is part of the world,” her father said. “But stillness is stronger.”

  He meant more than fire. And more than stillness. Timou wanted to ask him about mages and love. Did my mother love me? she wanted to ask, but she did not dare. She knew that this question might come too close to asking Do you love me? And how could she ask that? She rose instead, abruptly, to go settle her heart by walking in the woods alone.

  The woods were not as solitary as Timou had expected, however, for when she came to the grove of nut trees above the village, she found Jonas there before her.

  Jonas was a long-legged man who had drifted into the village several years past and who had as yet shown no signs of either really settling down or of moving on. By no means old, he seemed somehow older than the young men of the village who were actually about his age.

  Jonas had a curious way of pausing in the midst of the most ordinary tasks and gazing, apparently bemused, at whatever he held in his broad competent hands, as though he had never seen anything more strange in his life than a hammer or hoe or hen’s egg. Thoughts moved behind his eyes that were not the familiar thoughts of the village. Timou had wondered about him; about what life he might have left behind to come to this small village. Sometimes when he spoke, she thought she heard behind his speech an echo of words he did not say—but he had never gone out of his way to speak to her.

  Jonas boarded with Raen, who was elderly and growing frail in these years. Raen’s husband had died many years ago, so Jonas helped her with the tasks that took male strength. The widow said he was polite and thoughtful, as so few boys were in these days. She said this most pointedly to her own sons, who all lived on their own farms a day’s walk or more from the village. They only laughed and invited Jonas to the inn for bitter ale when they came in from their farms.

  Jonas also helped the apothecary blend his elixirs. He was careful and methodical, and he could read a little, so he did not have to depend on the scents of the herbs to know what he was mixing. The apothecary liked him, too, and wanted him to settle down and get married, preferably to his Taene. Timou happened to know that Taene thought that every drop of dew reflected the face of Chais, who was the third son of a man who raised tall golden goats and black-faced sheep several miles from the village. Taene had not yet, however, mentioned Chais to the apothecary.

  But what Jonas might think of Taene, or of any girl in the village, was hard to say. Timou had always found his habit of keeping his distance and his own counsel restful, particularly during this year, when she had so often felt restless and uneasy herself.

  Jonas was whistling, swinging a widemouthed basket casually by its cord as he gathered nuts. But he saw at once that Timou did not want company and gave her a little nod of apology. “I’m sorry, Timou. I’ll go. I can gather nuts another time.”

  Timou, embarrassed at his ready deference, flushed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You needn’t—you walked all the way up here, and you were here first—”

  “An easy walk on a pretty day,” said Jonas with a casual, dismissive wave of his hand. “And it will be just as pretty a day tomorrow, I’m sure. I don’t mind.” He hesitated a moment, and then added, “But if you feel more inclined for company this evening, and if Kapoen lets you loose to join the dancing, you might think of me.”

  Timou had never noticed that Jonas was especially eager to lead girls out at the village dances. Startled, she asked, “Do you dance?”

  He smiled, a little tentatively. “Well, not often. But I do know how.”

  Timou thought Jonas would probably dance just as he hammered shingles on a roof or hoed in Raen’s garden: with a kind of preoccupied, faintly bemused competence. As though he surprised himself by dancing, as he surprised himself by hoeing weeds out of the parsnip rows. She found herself smiling at the image she’d created.

  Pleased, Jonas smiled more warmly himself. “I’ll see you there, perhaps,” he said offhandedly. He gave her another little nod and walked away, swinging the basket in a gentle arc at the end of its cord, whistling. It took a remarkably long time for Timou to remember that the name of the song he whistled was “Meeting by the Lake,” and that it was a love song.

  “Do you like him?” Taene asked wistfully, later, when Timou told her about meeting Jonas in the woods. Taene’s Chais did not get into the village very often in the evenings, even when there was dancing. Her father wanted her to dance with Jonas. “He’s like a brother,” Taene told Timou. “I like him—of course I do. But when he sees my face, it’s not rain either of us thinks of. But how can I tell my father that?”

  Timou nodded in sympathy. “I imagine he’ll discover it for himself, in time.”

  “You’re always so calm, Timou.”

  Timou looked at the other girl, surprised. If her father had been present, she knew he would not think she was especially calm. He would shake his head and ask her to make her heart still. She said after a moment, as her father had told her many times, “You live in the moment you have, Taene. The future will unfold as it will, and you have to be calm to watch it unfolding.”

  “Yes,” said Taene doubtfully, and went back to the original question. “But do you like Jonas at all?”

  Timou did not quite know. She thought he was interesting. Jonas was the only adult in the village who hadn’t lived in it her whole life, the only person whose eyes sometimes held echoes of memories that had nothing to do with familiar places. But she did not know whether she liked him, exactly. And she did not know how to say anything of this to Taene.

  But she went to the dancing that evening, and danced twice with Jonas. Then she left early, walking back to her home through the gathering dusk with a fat white candle to light her way. Jonas had given her the candle, but he hadn’t offered to walk her back to Kapoen’s house. He hadn’t paid her any extravagant compliments either, but he had said, “I’m glad you came, Timou,” in a way that sounded like he meant it.

  Timou was not certain she was glad she’d gone to the dancing. She felt unsettled, unmoored from the calm that her father had tried to teach her. She tried to recapture it by spending the rest of her night learning to hear the names of stars in the faint music of their glittering dance. Kapoen lifted a resigned eyebrow at the echoes of music and laughter, and the unsettled questions, in her mind. If he saw Jonas’s name behind her eyes, he did not mention
it. He merely taught her how to set her thoughts and memories and questions aside so she could hear the voices of the stars.

  The stars’ voices were clear and clean and remote. By dawn Timou had become so entranced by them that she had forgotten ordinary concerns; her father had to carry her to bed in the end because she could not bring herself to turn from the slow measures of their crystalline music. She did not think of Jonas again, or the ordinary life of the village, for days. When she did, it was with a kind of distant shock: it seemed strange to her that the music of the stars could exist alongside the music of the village dances. And it seemed unlikely, and perhaps not really desirable, that she should care for both.

  Nevertheless, Timou met Jonas twice more that winter at village dances. Taene came to her house and pulled her bodily out of doors once, laughing at Timou’s halfhearted protests. “You’ll wither away if you don’t get some air,” Taene told her. “It’s a beautiful night. Come on! Your father won’t mind if you leave your studies for one evening!”

  Jonas wandered by the dancing a little while after Taene and Timou arrived. He danced with Taene once and Timou twice. He certainly did not put himself constantly in Timou’s way, but Taene took a moment to whisper to Timou that somehow Jonas seldom appeared at a dance if she was not there. Timou did not know what she thought about this.

  But Timou had a great deal to think about besides Jonas. That was the winter she learned how to ask a falcon or a fox for its true name, and how to catch and hold the light of the sun or the moon in a mirror, and how to lay a path before her feet that would take her unfailingly home if she’d lost her way. She learned to stand beside her father and send trees that had begun to walk back to their long slow sleep, and she learned to read the advance of the Hunter’s imminent storms in the ragged movements of the clouds across the sky, and how to guide his storms safely around the village and its environs. And she learned that people were sometimes unwilling to ask a mage for what they truly desired, and so a mage had to uncover the meaning behind the words they spoke.

  But though she listened carefully all that winter to what her father said and did not say, she did not learn the name of her mother, or the reason her mother had given her up.

  In the depths of winter, on Timou’s seventeenth birthday, her father took her by the hand and led her to the great stone marker at the edge of the village. Kapoen gave her name to the stone and laid a coiled strand of her hair at its foot. Then he released her hand, symbolically releasing her into the world. “You are become beautiful,” he said softly. “May your beauty become light. May your light become joy. May your joy become wisdom. May your wisdom be beautiful.”

  He looked into Timou’s face. “You have learned no trade nor art but mine, and need not, if you choose to follow my path. Is this what you wish, my daughter?”

  “Yes,” Timou agreed. She knew this was what her father expected her to say, and besides, it was true. She found, meeting her father’s eyes, that she barely had to lift her head to do so. She had grown tall, and never noticed till now. The realization sent an odd feeling down the back of her neck. Time had passed, and she had not even thought to notice.

  CHAPTER 3

  pring came slowly the year Timou turned seventeen, as though the winter was reluctant to loose its hold on the land. But it came at last. The crocuses put out their fat white and purple flowers at the edge of the woods, and witch hazels unfurled their thin yellow petals, casting their scent generously across the woodlands. Birds sang in the branches, building their nests of grass and twigs and bits of lost wool from the first spring shearing.

  That spring Timou watched warmth creep into the heart of each crocus and wake it into bloom, watched the birds in the woods and fields, and spent hours turning the heavy pages of her father’s books. She loved these books, which her father had made available to her after her birthday. She had not even known he possessed them until he had opened a door in their house she’d never before noticed and shown her the room that had been hidden behind it, cluttered with tall shelves filled with books. Now she found she loved their heft in the hand, which so contrasted with the brittle fragility of their pages. She loved the graceful or angled or tightly looping scripts that filled those pages. Deciphering the bits of old strange languages absorbed her attention on those days that the early spring rains shut out the world. Some of the books were illuminated and scrolled with fine metals, some plain and old and smelling of dust and somehow of magic. And some were impossible to open unless one breathed over them the proper words of release. Now seriously entering into the study of magecraft, Timou began to learn to open even these.

  Occasionally her father gave Timou the word that would open one of his books, but more often he did not. She searched patiently for the words herself. Sometimes she discovered the key to one or another of the books when she found a word or a name or even an odd harsh syllable in an old story, or tucked into the middle of a bit of history, or hidden in her father’s eyes. She always felt a blaze of delight and expectation when a book fell open for the first time in her hands, revealing to her at last its wonders and mysteries.

  One evening, as the spring days lengthened and the crocuses and hyacinths gave way to the delicate grace of apple blossoms, she caught the whisper of an unfamiliar name in her father’s eyes when he glanced at her. She had been sitting, legs drawn up, on her favorite spiral-patterned rug by the fire, with her father’s oldest book in her lap, thinking of nothing in particular. It was a book she had not been able to open. Even though she could not open it, the book fascinated her because of its age and its whisper of power. She had not been able to find its key on this evening either and was sitting quietly, having given up the effort for the night. It might have been the quiet of her own mind that let her catch the glint of uncharacteristically unguarded memory when her father turned his head so that she, or the book, caught his eye.

  Timou blinked and looked into the fire, and her father did not, perhaps, realize what she had seen. What she had seen was a word, a name, one that she knew he had not meant to give her. And a little while later, when her father went quietly up the stairs to his room, leaving her by the fire, Timou bent over the heavy book she held and whispered to it, “Lelienne.” And the book opened in her hands, the pages falling gently to one side and the other, with firelight running across its creamy vellum and its glittering illuminations.

  The illuminations surrounded an image, made with silver and powdered opal, of a man with harsh features and stark white hair. Startled and excited, Timou bent forward over the book, tracing the difficult slanted writing with the tip of her finger as she silently sounded out the unfamiliar words. The language was one she did not know. The script seemed harsh to her, the unknown words potent in themselves. She did not try to speak them aloud, but let them whisper to her if they would.

  Deserisien. That was, she decided, probably the name of the mage pictured in these illuminations. She understood that he was, or had been, a mage. Or something like a mage. He had lived, she gathered, either long ago or far away, or perhaps both, in a brilliant, brutal, extraordinary Kingdom, a Kingdom where Kings were sacrificed as lightly as leaves in the fall, where mages ruled and practiced a strange dark sorcery of making and unmaking—she did not understand clearly all that the pictures showed, or what the inscriptions said. But she understood that the sorcerer Deserisien had gathered about himself a group of men and women almost as powerful as he. And she discovered, with a thin shock that was in an odd way not a shock at all, that one of the sorcerers smiling out of the illuminated pages was a woman who shared her face. She puzzled over the words on that page a long time, finding in it few answers and many questions.

  When Timou finally went up to her own bed, she took the book with her, laying it on a small table by her bedside. But in the morning the book was gone. Timou was startled by the quick resentment she felt; she tried to put it aside. But she did not know why her father had let the book come into her hand if he had not meant for her
to open it. She looked for it in the days that followed, but she did not find it. The memory of the white-haired woman who had smiled from its pages troubled her. The smile, she thought, had been like that strange dark Kingdom itself: subtle and cruel and beautiful.

  She did not ask her father about the book, or about the Kingdom it had described. But she wanted to. She wanted to ask him about the woman with a face that mirrored hers. She wanted to ask him whose name he had used to lock the book that held such power and strangeness within its pages. She wanted to shout, to demand answers to the questions she had always held, which had once more changed their shapes in her mind and her heart. It was hard to trust her father’s wisdom and his teaching, though she had seldom doubted either in her life. When her father turned his searching gaze to her, Timou looked away, not allowing him to see the questions that gathered in her eyes. He must have guessed at them. But still she did not ask, nor did her father offer answers.

  When she turned over in her mind the new-changed questions the book had raised, she did so uneasily. Without quite admitting that unease to herself, Timou ceased trying to open her father’s remaining locked volumes and turned her attention back to the quickening life of the spring. She went to Taene’s house and helped Taene grind powders for her father or roll out bread dough for her mother; she helped eat the sweet rolls, too. Taene’s mother, an ample woman with a plain round face that was usually good-humored, welcomed Timou, pressed hot sweet tea on her, and showed the girls how to make a complicated pastry with honey and early mint and dozens of layers of thin dough.