The City in the Lake

by Rachel Neumeier

  Sometimes Chais was there, too, trading goat’s milk and cheese for some of the apothecary’s syrups and simples. One afternoon he gave a fine soft scarf of lamb’s wool to Taene in exchange for a smile, carefully choosing a time when her father was out. Taene’s mother suggested, with a sidelong look at Chais, that Taene might go for her to the miller’s for flour, and perhaps Chais might go with her to carry it back, if he wasn’t in too much of a hurry. “It’s heavy to carry so far, and I’m afraid I can’t spare the cart,” she said with a wink for Timou, who had been helping her thin early peas and tie twine for them to climb up. “Timou can help me here, can’t you, love?”

  Timou was happy to help with the peas, but she did not know what she thought about Taene and Chais. She was happy for Taene, of course, but still she did not know what she thought. Or more, perhaps, how she felt. It seemed that everyone she knew, each of the girls with whom she’d grown up, was moving confidently into a new part of life from which Timou was somehow excluded. Ness and Jenne and Sime, and then Manet and now even Taene . . . Timou told herself she would rather follow the voices of trees and stars than that of any young man. Even though this was true, sometimes it rang a little hollow.

  The next day, Taene seemed distracted, quieter than usual, with a tendency to smile at odd moments. Timou hardly knew how to talk to her.

  Jonas also came that afternoon, to help the apothecary sort the powders left after the long winter and determine which would most urgently need to be replenished.

  “Moisture got into this hyssop—look.” The apothecary waved a box at Jonas. “It’s a pity; everybody’s got a cough in the spring. I could use twice as much as I have here, and now this is ruined.”

  Jonas took the box and gazed gravely into it. Then he dumped the powdered herb out onto a sheet of vellum and used the handle of one of the apothecary’s brushes to gently sweep some of the powder aside. “I think mostly the top was ruined,” he said. “Might this part still be good?”

  Timou looked over his shoulder. He was right: some of the hyssop still seemed good. She said to the apothecary, “My father probably has some hyssop. If there’s not enough, then I know he has some horehound.”

  “Thank you, dear, that’s good to know,” the apothecary said absently, leaning over from the other side of the table to stir the hyssop with one blunt-nailed finger. “You’re right, Jonas, some of this is salvageable. I don’t have another box—”

  “I’ll make you one tonight.” In the meantime, Jonas swept the remaining hyssop into a small bowl and set a plate over it.

  “Good,” the apothecary said approvingly to this offer, glancing at Taene to see if she’d noticed this evidence of industry and good nature. She hadn’t. She was across the kitchen at the other table, making Chais’s favorite butter candy and smiling to herself.

  “Fathers are sometimes blind,” Jonas said to Timou later. He was walking her part of the way back to her house. The furniture maker’s house, where he would collect some seasoned wood suitable for the apothecary’s box, was on the way. He gave her a sidelong look. “Kapoen wouldn’t for a moment miss the direction of his daughter’s glance.”

  Timou said, “You’re afraid of my father.” She meant this as an observation, not an accusation, and Jonas took it that way.

  He said equably, “He sees too much.”

  “It’s the nature of magecraft, to see into a thing’s heart. Or a man’s.”

  Jonas gave a little nod. “I don’t care for that in Kapoen. But somehow it doesn’t trouble me in you, Timou.”

  Timou didn’t know what to say to this.

  “You probably know that I’m starting to see your face in the raindrops,” said Jonas. He waved a hand at the sky, where a heavy overcast promised more spring rain on the way. “There’ve been enough chances for it lately.” His tone was light, but the glance he turned her way was not.

  Timou stopped in the road, turning to face him. “Jonas—”

  “You needn’t say anything. I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “I will be a mage,” Timou said as gently as she knew how.

  “Yes,” said Jonas, not understanding what she meant. “It seems a fine thing to be.”

  Timou just looked at him, not knowing how to explain the cool stillness that lay at the heart of a mage.

  “Timou—”

  “Jonas . . . I don’t think I’ll ever marry. I don’t think mages do.”

  Jonas opened his mouth, probably to protest that this could not be true. But then he paused, doubtless thinking, as Timou was, of her father’s untouchable calm. It was impossible to imagine Kapoen beset by passion or overwhelmed by longing. It was impossible to forget that he had not married Timou’s mother.

  Jonas bowed his head a little, his expression unreadable. He said after a moment, his tone still light, “Well. It seems a shame, if mages never marry. But you needn’t, I suppose, if you don’t care to.” He made a little gesture toward the furniture maker’s house. “I’ll leave you here, then. Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow at the apothecary’s house. I hope you won’t let the prospect keep you away; I promise I won’t trouble you.”

  It didn’t occur to Timou until she was all but home that in fact she did not feel calm. That Jonas had promised a thing he could not, after all, give her. Because she was troubled.

  Gradually, during these early spring days, the tension Timou thought had existed between herself and her father had eased away; she was not sure it had ever been there save in her own mind. She was certain Kapoen now saw the confusion Jonas had let into her heart, but if so, he did not speak of it directly. He only brought out a set of heavy leather-bound books that contained words written in gold ink in a narrow looping alphabet. He showed her how she could clear her mind and let the unfamiliar words speak to her. They told her tales out of the long reaches of history: tales of the young Kingdom and the first mages who found or created it and then wandered through it admiring its wonders and curiosities.

  Some of the stories were familiar to Timou, for her father had told them to her—it seemed to her she must have heard them first while still in her cradle, for she felt she had been born knowing them. Others were new. The golden writing drew her into the tales until it seemed to her she lived them herself: as though she had stood with the mage Irinore when he first saw the City in the Lake and built in echo the City at the heart of the Kingdom.

  These stories pulled her away from the daily life of the village and further into her own magecraft: she dreamed of forests and dragons and ruined towers hiding riddles at their hearts, and not of the village or of ordinary things. The bright brisk days lengthened and the oaks put out their first new leaves while Timou wandered among the ages of history. It almost began to seem to her that she might have imagined or dreamed the book that had shown her the mage Deserisien and the woman with Timou’s face but her own dark smile. There was no mention of either in the books she read now. Sometimes she still went to Taene’s house, and sometimes she encountered Jonas there. He gave no sign he thought more of her than of Taene; his smile at them each was the same, reserved and wry. Though Timou was glad of this, she found she was also somehow disappointed, as though she had wanted both—both the ordinary life he might have wanted to offer her and the life her father held out before her. Since she could not choose both and since this was hard to face, Timou found it easier to avoid Taene’s house.

  Then the first ewes dropped their lambs, and every one was born dead. And the goats their kids, the same. Even the sows, when they farrowed, which few did that year, produced small litters and weak piglets, and everyone knows that pigs are hard to touch with any spell or curse. By then Timou’s mind was entirely occupied by the new urgency to understand this common trouble.

  At first few people in the village understood that what afflicted their stock afflicted everyone’s. Then they all understood, and began to be afraid. The midwife made charm after charm for the ewes and the goats, the apothecary made infusions of partridgeberry and
milk thistle. But the animals continued to deliver stillborn young.

  The village magistrate was the one who came finally to Timou’s father. Timou let him in wordlessly and stepped around him to pull the door to when the magistrate left it a little ajar. She explained to the question in his gaze, “A door open is welcome, a door closed is denial, but a latch that does not quite catch is perilous,” and saw another kind of question grow behind his earnest eyes.

  Timou smiled and took the magistrate to the parlor and offered him tea, which he accepted a little warily, and went to fetch her father.

  “Now, Kapoen—” said the magistrate nervously when Timou’s father came into the parlor.

  “I am aware,” said Timou’s father. “The lambing.” He was frowning, an expression that made him look severe, although Timou knew he was only thoughtful.

  “Yes,” said the magistrate. “The lambing.”

  “It is not only the sheep,” said Timou’s father.

  “I know. The goats, the pigs—”

  “The eggs in the nest,” Timou said softly. “The foxes in the den.”

  “Oh,” said the magistrate faintly. He looked at Timou. “You are . . . you are growing up, aren’t you, Timou?”

  Kapoen gave his daughter a thoughtful smile, and the magistrate a thoughtful frown. “We are aware of the matter, Master Renn.”

  The magistrate twisted the tail of his coat between his fingers, quite unconsciously. “What are you . . . Are you doing something to make it . . . right, Kapoen? If there is . . . Is there something you can do to make it right?”

  “We are waiting,” said Timou’s father softly. “We are watching to see the shape of this curse, if curse there is; we are looking for the pattern that lies behind what happens and does not happen.”

  The magistrate blinked. “What does not happen?”

  “The trees have budded out,” Timou explained, and the magistrate’s eyes slid to her, surprised. She said, taking no notice of his surprise, “The spring breeze has warmed; the snow has melted; the flowers have come. But the squirrels in their nests have no blind young to nurse, and the owls hunt only for themselves and not for nestlings. The peas and radishes do not sprout. The early flowers set no seed.”

  “I see,” said the magistrate. Timou was not certain he did, but her father said, tranquil and calm, “When there is something we know to do, you may be sure we will do it,” and the magistrate seemed to find this reassuring. He finished his tea with evident relief and left quickly, not like a busy man, but like a man trying to look busy and not nervous. The magistrate had always been nervous of Timou’s father, who was dark and quiet and rarely explained what he was thinking. Now, Timou saw, he was nervous of her, too.

  Timou let him out and closed the door behind him, since he had not quite let the latch catch this time either. Then she went back to the parlor and looked with faint interest at the pattern the tea leaves had left in his cup. She said to her father, her eyes still on the leaves, “Ness is pregnant, you know.”

  “Yes,” agreed her father.

  “So you will put this right before she comes to her time?”

  “Be calm,” advised her father, and handed Timou a cup of tea out of the air. She took it after a moment, wrapping her fingers around the delicate cup, and breathed in the fragrant steam. It was valerian and mint, meant to soothe.

  “The disturbed mind perceives nothing,” said her father, and produced a cup of tea for himself. “In serenity one finds the order that lies behind what appears random, the pattern that lies behind what appears to lack pattern.”

  “Yes,” said Timou, and sipped the tea, tasting mint and honey.

  The midwife hovered over Ness like a hen with one chick, as they say in the villages; the apothecary gave her teas and syrups and bitter decoctions, and shook his head when he met the midwife’s eyes because they could both feel that nothing they did would help, that it was already too late—that nothing could be done to stop the gradual cooling of the life Ness carried.

  Timou’s father examined Ness only once, looking searchingly into her eyes and even more searchingly into her shadow. His dark patient eyes held regret. “There is nothing I can do,” he said at last. “The child you carry gives up its life with every passing moment. I can do many things, Ness, but I cannot turn away this quiet death.”

  Ness tried to speak and could not. The breath she drew turned to a sob, which she turned her face away to try to hide. Timou, watching silently, found tears rising in her own throat and blinked hard.

  Tair, standing behind Ness, put his hands protectively on her shoulders and asked helplessly, “Why is this happening?”

  “I do not know. I will find out.” Timou’s father stood up. He looked at the apothecary and at the midwife and at Ness’s mother, and last of all he looked at his daughter.

  Timou looked back, her face smooth, trying to conceal her grief behind the enduring calm her father had taught her. She could not quite manage this, and she thought she saw a faint disappointment in his eyes: extravagant sorrow was perilous to the mage, as any strong emotion was always perilous. Timou knew that. She glanced down.

  “I will find out,” her father said, more to Ness and her mother than to Timou, and touched Ness’s cheek with patient tenderness. “Many women have borne the pain you will bear. It is a hard journey, but you are not alone. Have courage in their company.” He bowed his head and began to withdraw, and Timou obediently with him.

  “Please,” said Ness, not weeping, in too much grief for tears. “Please. Timou—will you stay with me?”

  Her father turned his dark eyes to her, and so Timou did not weep. But she did go to Ness and take her cold hand in both of hers, and seat herself quietly on a stool by the woman’s side.

  So when her father left, and the midwife and the apothecary and Tair and even Ness’s mother all left, Timou stayed. Sime came in, and a little later Jenne, with Manet and Taene—all the women who had been girls together so few years past. They were all married now, except for Timou and Taene, for Manet had married an earnestly self-important young man named Pol in earliest spring before the trouble had begun. But none of them had a child. In this, as in everything, Ness would have been first.

  “Your mother told us we should come,” Jenne said to Ness simply, “so we came.”

  “Yes,” Ness said, and wept, suddenly and violently, covering her face with her hands. And they all wept with her. Even Timou. Whose heart was not calm or still at all.

  Ness had her baby in her proper season, with little difficulty. But like the lambs and the calves, the child was born dead. On the day after the birth, after the infant had been laid in its tiny grave, Timou’s father left the village.

  “Stay,” he bade Timou.

  Timou bowed her head. “Where will you go?” she asked.

  Her father regarded her from dark secret eyes. “To the City.”

  “Ah,” Timou said.

  “I see nothing clearly,” he added after a moment. “This is . . .” He paused, uncharacteristically, but then continued, “I think it is with the heart of the Kingdom that this trouble lies. As the heart goes, so goes the Kingdom, and I think perhaps the heart has been . . .”

  “Broken?” Timou hazarded in that lengthening pause.

  “Lost,” said her father gently. “And its future lost with it. Or . . .” Again, he did not complete the thought.

  Listening carefully, Timou believed she heard what her father had left unspoken. After a moment she said, “Or taken?”

  “Perhaps,” said her father, lifting his dark brows in faint surprise. At the question? Or at her, that she had asked it?

  Timou said slowly, “The heart of the King is the heart of the Kingdom. How might the King lose his heart? Or who might take it? And for what?”

  “All good questions, my daughter. But not the one question that is most important.”

  Timou thought them very important questions, but she tried obediently to think of another. “Where—”
she said at last, “—where is the King’s heart now, if it has been lost? Or stolen?”

  “Yes. And how can it be regained?” said her father.

  Timou did not answer. She knew that things lost—or taken—may not always be found.

  “You are on no account to follow me, Timou.”

  Timou thought about this. She asked, testing the shape of a half-perceived pattern, “When should I look for you to come back?”

  “Look for me by summer’s end, my daughter; but if I do not return, more than ever you must not follow me.” Her father paused and studied her. His face, usually serious, had become severe. He said, “You are young, my daughter. If I and the mages of the City cannot find what has been lost, do not try. Stay in the village and wait.”

  Timou listened carefully. “You believe there is danger,” she said softly. It was not quite a question. “From what?” She saw that he would not answer, and asked, “Shall I be blind?”

  “If you are, you will stay here, and wait for clear sight,” said her father, a little sharply, he who was seldom sharp with her. “You will wait for the pattern to make itself plain to you. To act blindly or in haste is dangerous.”

  That he thought there was peril in the City, Timou understood. But there was something else in his eyes beyond that, which Timou still could not see. A name? A thought? A suspicion? The words he was not saying crowded behind his eyes. She asked him, “Deserisien?” and saw his surprise.

  But he said only, “No. Not Deserisien.”

  Timou looked at him, into his face. Then she said reluctantly, “I will stay here. If I can.”

  For a moment she thought her father would speak more clearly, explain more plainly. But instead he only nodded and left her without speaking further. He went away down the road, walking quietly through the quiet warmth of the late spring. Behind him, Timou wandered consideringly into the kitchen to make tea and to think.

  The season passed into summer, and then into autumn, and he did not return.

  Timou watched the seasons’ slow changing, and waited patiently for her father’s return, or for the breaking of the curse that held new life in check, or at least for the growth of her own understanding. She waited in vain.