The City in the Lake

by Rachel Neumeier

  Timou and Prince Cassiel walked through the City in the Lake slowly, side by side. Timou found this City disturbing despite its beauty. Cassiel loved it, with a deep unspoken love that she could hear in his voice when he drew her attention now and then to a finely carved balustrade or a particularly lovely screen made of delicately filigreed wood and ivory. She could see it in his eyes, which lingered like the eyes of a lover on the curve of stone that formed the flank of a tower or on the broad flat flagstone stair that led in a spiral down from their street to another at a lower level.

  Timou did not know which was more real and true: the busy City with its thousands of inhabitants, worn by time, or this one, new and fresh, held in a perfect eternal summer within the Lake. Cassiel had called this one the real City. Timou thought perhaps both were real: layers of reality lying across one another. But she knew she had liked the inhabited City far better.

  They walked toward the Palace. “It is at the heart of the City,” said Cassiel simply. Since she had no better ideas, Timou acceded to his desire and walked beside him up the winding street toward the Palace. When the street turned, they could see it before them, white and graceful, growing slowly nearer.

  Its gates stood wide open and welcoming, so that even the walls were made to seem welcoming as well, as though they hid secrets behind their sheer faces, but pleasant secrets that one would enjoy discovering.

  The Palace was set beyond the walls in the midst of green and growing gardens. Timou remembered only a little of what she had seen of the Palace in the ordinary living Kingdom, but this Palace was as fine and delicate as a spun-sugar confection. Its walls were carved in intricate relief, but here, unlike in the living City, the carvings were fresh and clean, untouched by time. Stone roses nodded heavily above the subtly carved doors; they seemed so real that Timou almost believed one might pluck them from their thorny stems. Living roses, pink and cream and palest gold, swept up a great expanse of wall to the left of the doors: they breathed a warm and heady perfume out upon the air.

  Prince Cassiel, moving as though in a dream, walked forward and laid a hand on the doors. Though they were tall and heavy, they swung smoothly back at his touch.

  Timou had never had a real chance to see the interior of the Palace in the living City. This Palace amazed her. It was rich, lavish, opulent, and entirely unpopulated. Hallways had vaulted ceilings twelve feet high and floors of polished marble; walls were hung with jewel-toned tapestries.

  Cassiel told her about the tapestries as they passed them, a few words about one or another. “This is the first King, laying the first stone on the shore of the Lake. This is my great-greatgreat-grandfather Casien, building the Bridge of Glass.” Timou nodded politely to each and wondered whether the Prince knew where he was going. He seemed to.

  Then Cassiel stopped in the middle of a word, turning.

  Timou turned as well, looking back the way they had come. “Someone is here,” she said nervously.

  She had not needed to say anything. Prince Cassiel, intent, shifted his weight. The sword he held, with its blade of light and its hilt of darkness, glimmered in his hand.

  The step that approached was firm. Decisive. Arrogant. It was a man’s step: boots rang on the stone. The man turned sharply into their hall and paused, head up, eyes hard with pride and anger. He was a big man, but that was not what gave the impression of sheer power that he brought with him: mere size was not enough to yield that sense of power. That radiated from him like heat. His face was broad, with rugged bones and a generous mouth. His hair, grizzled with silver, was cut very short, adding to the impression of uncompromising harshness. His eyes, the color of dark rich earth, passed over Timou as though she did not exist and fixed on Cassiel. Timou recognized him from a memory she had taken from Prince Cassiel.

  Cassiel, dropping his sword unheeded to the marble floor—when it struck the stone, it rang once like a bell and then was silent—took a single step toward his father, and halted.

  The King strode forward, gripped his son by both shoulders, and shook him, not very gently. “Where have you been?” he demanded in a gravelly voice that rose almost at once to a shout. “Where have you been?” He shook Cassiel a second time, harder, pulled him into a brief embrace, held him out again at arm’s length, and suddenly drew back one powerful arm and struck him across the face with the back of his fist. His voice rose again, beyond a shout, to a roar. “Thunder and ice, boy, how could you do that to me?”

  To Timou, this violent reunion was alarming. Yet Cassiel did not seem cowed or in any way tentative. Indeed, he was laughing, although there was blood on his mouth and a bruise rising already on his cheek. Seizing his father by both arms, he embraced him, and the King, blinking hard, returned the embrace with spine-cracking force of his own. Timou looked away, jealous of their joy despite herself.

  “Boy . . .,” the King said, not shouting now. His voice, even in lower tones, growled. “Boy . . .” He pushed Cassiel back again and examined him anxiously. “You fool. You young fool. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Prince, struggling, clearly, to keep his own voice from shaking. “Yes. Ah . . . you?”

  “Storms and cracking ice, you young cub, I wasn’t the one who rode off in the bright day and disappeared from all men’s sight. . . . Everyone searched. I searched. You were hidden even from me. You were nowhere. I searched for you in my dreams, boy, until I walked out of the ordinary Kingdom and into this eternal dream behind it to find you, and even here you were nowhere to be found. . . . Where were you?”

  “Trapped,” said the Prince simply, and looked at Timou. “Behind the mirror. Until I was found.”

  Once she was in the King’s eye, he gave her all his attention, overwhelmingly. Timou felt that, indeed, the weight of all the Kingdom was contained in that intense stare. She felt her own eyes go wide and still in response, ready, if the force of it grew to be more than she could bear, to flow away like water before that power.

  “Lelienne!” said the King, and then looked more closely, eyes narrowing. “No. Who?” And then, with sudden certainty, “Her daughter. Are you?”

  “I think I am,” agreed Timou. She found herself becoming quiet and tranquil, an involuntary response to the King’s violence and power.

  The King looked from her to his son and back again. Deep lines came into being on his face, beside his mouth. He looked older suddenly, and bitter. He said to Cassiel, harshly, “Lelienne trapped you. Did she?”

  “Yes,” the Prince said gently.

  “Yes.” The King took in what seemed gallons of air in one slow breath, and let it out as slowly. “And you?” he said to Timou. “You are a friend of my son’s? As well as a daughter of Lelienne’s?”

  “She found the way out,” said Cassiel.

  “A way out,” corrected Timou. “This aspect of the Kingdom is not what I meant to find. But it is what the Prince found. . . .”

  “This is the truest Kingdom,” the King said with a satisfied little nod, as though it pleased him that Cassiel had come here and not to the living City. Then his attention descended on Timou again, like a hammer. “Who was your father?”

  Timou stared at him, for the moment wordless.

  “You are frightening her,” said Cassiel mildly. “Her father was a mage. Kapoen. Lelienne killed him.”

  The King continued to stare at Timou. “Kapoen,” he rumbled. “A King and then a mage. That woman sets her sights high.”

  Timou swallowed, and managed to speak even under the weight of his regard. “I think I’m only beginning to understand what she wants. . . .”

  “Oh, I know what she wants,” the King said harshly. Turning on his heel, he made an impatient gesture for them to follow and strode away, moving with long decisive strides.

  CHAPTER 11

  he Bastard, some few days after the appearance of his mother, had gone to the heights of the tallest tower of the Palace to look out over the City. It spread down the island on all sides, with the Lake
spreading out beyond it as far as he could see. A haze was over the Lake today, so that there was only the faintest hint of the farther shore.

  The Bastard had gone to the tower to think. Its solitude allowed an illusion of privacy. He leaned his arms on the marble balustrade and stared down. The City sparkled below. It all looked, from this distance, very peaceful.

  Trevennen found him there, after some measureless interval of cold and silence. “Lord Neill,” said the mage courteously.

  The Bastard set his face in an expression of detachment and inclined his head in return. “Trevennen. Did you seek me?”

  “Yes,” said the mage. He leaned on the balustrade near the Bastard and looked out, as the Bastard was doing. “You must despise me.”

  The Bastard turned his head to meet the mage’s eyes. He replied, in a perfectly civil tone, “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  The mage sighed and looked down over the City. He said after a little while, “Lelienne is very powerful, and very wise. She gave you a heritage of great power.”

  “I had rather been the son of a laundry maid. I should prefer that heritage.”

  Trevennen smiled faintly, still gazing outward rather than at the Bastard. “I would not have thought you would be so quick to reject power. Whatever its source. You know as well as I that power exists to be used. Lelienne believes she can encompass the Kingdom entire, absorbing all its mystery and power for herself. She will find she is mistaken, in the end, but in the meantime, she brings with her into this Kingdom a great deal of power and knowledge we have never known.”

  “For your delectation, if not mine,” commented the Bastard.

  The mage shrugged. “In the end, the Kingdom will not be encompassed by any one woman, however powerful, and Lelienne will learn that and go, doing no permanent harm. While she is here, her power flows into the very air we breathe and enriches us all.”

  The Bastard did not comment on the mage’s confidence, which seemed to him badly misplaced. He said instead, “You speak very freely.”

  Trevennen turned and leaned back against the balustrade, elbows on the railing. “She cannot hear me at the moment. Nor you, my lord. Did you really cast your father into the City reflected in the Lake?”

  “I said so, did I not?”

  “So you did.”

  “What use does she mean to make of him? And of me? And of Cassiel?”

  The mage moved his shoulders slightly. He seemed to be thinking of other things, and answered in a somewhat abstracted tone, “Ask her.”

  The Bastard gave a short laugh. He wanted very badly to throw the mage from this high balustrade, except that, of course, doing so would not harm the mage, and might bring punishment, from his mother or possibly from Trevennen himself.

  “You will have the opportunity,” said the mage mildly. “She sent me to find you. She wishes you to attend her in her rooms.”

  “My father’s rooms,” corrected the Bastard. “Why now? For what purpose? Do you know? Or does she trouble to confide in you?”

  The mage knew. The Bastard saw it in his eyes, in his face, in the uncomfortable tilt of his head as he glanced away. His own eyes widened. He moved a step closer to Trevennen. “What does she intend?”

  “Her power waxes with the acknowledgment of the court and the City,” the mage said obliquely. “As men learn to fear her strength, she becomes stronger. It’s a very interesting phenomenon—”

  “She has become more and more powerful while we waited,” the Bastard said huskily. “She has been gaining the strength it will take to do whatever it is she intends to do. And you said nothing. You let this happen.”

  “You couldn’t have fought her even at the beginning,” the mage said in a surprisingly gentle tone. “She is a sorceress. She is very old and very powerful. She was one of Deserisien’s own acolytes, and she has his power. You could never have fought her.”

  “Could you?”

  “Fighting her is not precisely what I have in mind.”

  The Bastard considered this. He said softly, “I do not know anything of sorcery or magecraft or this Deserisien of whom you speak. But, Trevennen, I am beginning to think you know less than I.”

  The mage only shrugged. “I suggest you not keep her waiting, Neill.”

  The Bastard stood still for a moment, looking at him. Then he went, without a word, back into the tower and to the long spiral stairs that would lead down into the Palace proper.

  Lelienne was not surrounded by ladies and attendants, as Ellis would have been. She stood quite alone by the fire burning in the broad fireplace. The fire was of the black wood that grows in forests where the sun never reaches the earth. That wood made a fragrant smoke that left a bitter aftertaste in the back of the throat.

  The Bastard offered a respectful bow and waited.

  “Neill,” she said briskly, and dropped into a large chair drawn close to the fire. “Come here, by me.”

  Without a word he obeyed, standing by the hearth some few feet from her chair.

  “I need your father,” she said directly. “Time runs through my hands like sand. . . . Soon. Tonight. You will have to bring him back here for me.”

  The Bastard drew a breath, and let it out. He looked up, meeting her eyes, so like his own. “What is it you intend for him?” he asked her. It was a risk, he thought, to ask; she might be offended if she took his question as defiance. But he also thought she might answer; whether she would tell him the truth he could not guess, but perhaps he might learn something of her intentions from whatever answer she made.

  She did not smile, and for an instant he took that as a sign that she was not offended. Then she said, “My son, I want a coal of black wood from that fire. Get one for me. You will not need to use the tongs. Your hand will do.”

  The Bastard caught his breath. He said, “I do not mean to defy you. I will obey you. I would only like to know what you mean to do with him. And with me. And even with Cassiel. Whatever you intend, I know I cannot prevent you. I would only like to know. Is that so much to ask?”

  “My son,” said Lelienne, “you must learn not to question me.”

  He stood still. The fire drew his eyes. It was burning very nicely. The black wood made coals that were a darker, more sullen color than the brighter coals that would have been made by, say, burning apple wood or cedar. It was very easy to imagine what it would be like to thrust a hand into that fire, to take one of those glowering coals into his fingers; the Bastard found that sweat had sprung out on his face at the thought.

  He came a step forward, sinking to his knees at his mother’s feet, so close to the fire that he might reach out even from this spot to touch the coals. “Please,” he said, bowing his head. “No. I will not question you again. Trevennen advised me that I should ask you. I see now he mocked me.”

  “Trevennen,” said his mother. She leaned back in her chair, cupping her chin in one graceful hand and looking down at him. “Did he so advise you? Look at me, my son.”

  Lifting his head, he met her eyes. It took no effort at all to put fear in his face, in his mind. He tried very hard to put Trevennen there as well, although in fact he believed, on the strength of considerable recent evidence, that his mother could hear only what words were spoken aloud, and not those that existed in the privacy of a man’s thoughts.

  “Well,” she said, considering. “Very well, my son. Bring your father to me, here, now, and we shall say no more about your impudence.”

  The Bastard said carefully, “Please do not be angry. I would obey you if I could. I do not know what I did to set my father in that other Kingdom. I desired it and it came to pass, but I am not a mage and I do not know what I did or how to undo it. I would not know how even if you forced me to take every coal out of that fire with my bare hands. Please do not punish me for a failure I cannot help. I believe you know that I speak the truth.”

  What he believed was that if his mother could distinguish truth from deceit, she would make him take every coal out of the fire w
ith his bare hands. He held quite still, and waited.

  Lelienne frowned, but she did not instantly declare him false. She said instead, “Take a coal from the fire, and hold it in your hand.”

  The Bastard hesitated for one long, involuntary moment. Then, setting his teeth, he moved his hand toward the fire burning on the hearth. The heat of it, promising pain beyond measure, stopped him.

  Without expression, Lelienne lifted a small bell that rested on a table by her left hand and rang it. A servant came in at once in answer to that summons: an elderly man who had served in the Palace all the Bastard’s life and who had somehow been chosen to serve this new and most terrifying lady. Perhaps he had even volunteered: many men would show surprising courage in sudden adversity, even, unexpectedly, old men and servants. The man dared a quick covert glance at the Bastard where he knelt by the hearth, and then looked with wide eyes at Lelienne. She said, “Come here.”

  “No,” said the Bastard, pressed beyond fear of his own pain. “No.” Reaching down to the fire, he took a coal from the edge and held it in his hand. It was certainly not the largest nor the hottest coal in the fire. Nevertheless, the pain was immediate, astounding. Tears of agony sprang instantly to his eyes, and he set his teeth hard against a shaming cry, which in the end he could not entirely prevent. His hand shook with the effort it took not to let the thing fall.

  “Go,” said Lelienne to the servant, and to the Bastard, “Tell me about the night your father disappeared. What happened that night? How did it come about that you opened a way for him into this other City? How did he go there? Was this possible because he is King? Is it a distinct Kingdom, or another face of the same one? Do not,” she added coolly, “drop what you hold.”