The City in the Lake

by Rachel Neumeier

  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.

  CHAPTER 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 al
ike 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.