The City in the Lake (25 page)

“I know,” Neill agreed reluctantly. “You’re right. All right. . . .” And because this was true, he allowed himself, in the end, to be resigned to the idea of a simple messenger.

But if the messenger did not find Timou safe in her village, or if she did not reappear in the City in the spring, he resolved silently, he would take any road necessary to find her.

C
HAPTER
16

imou, riding the black mare Cassiel had insisted she take, crossed Tiger Bridge at sunrise—a gray sort of sunrise, with snow just beginning to fall from a heavy sky. She found the road unrolling before her with unexpected cooperation. It brought her into the nearest town before noon. She was not tempted to halt for the day, although she paused at the inn to eat fresh bread and sharp cheese and to rest the mare.

She found the town smaller and plainer than she had recalled, and was wryly amused to find her expectations so easily altered by so brief an experience of the City. There was a new undercurrent in the town, however: a happiness that seemed to fall through the air along with the snow. Everyone knew that a great danger had been averted, that their own Prince had returned and been crowned. This was certainly reason for happiness and relief, but it seemed sad almost beyond bearing to Timou that the death of the old King cast so little shadow across the mood. Sadness seemed to have become a permanent companion for her since the City in the Lake. Timou rode with her head bowed under the weight of it. She did not know clearly whether the sadness she felt was for the dead King; or for her father, lost to deception and betrayal; or for the mother she had hoped to find but who had never truly existed; or for Jonas, taken into the dark; or even for herself.

From the town, she found it only half a day’s ride to travel all the way to the village by the near edge of the forest, so she came to it by dusk of that same day. The surprise of this shook her out of her dark mood, and she wondered that she had come so far and not even known how short the road had made itself for her.

Before her, on the other side of the village, the great forest stretched out, featureless in the deepening twilight. Snow lay lightly on the land and the village, but the forest itself was deep and black: no snow clung to the branches of its great trees. It was too dark for Timou to see whether the trees had lost their leaves at all or still dwelt in an endless summer—too dark for her to go at once into the forest.

At the inn, she gave the mare’s reins to a stable boy and went inside. She found as she entered a hesitation in the talk. Timou wondered what the people of the village saw in her face that made them stop in the midst of their conversations to look at her.

The inn was crowded, and very cheerful—fast as she had come, it was clear that news from the City had run before her. The innkeeper came forward after a moment to indicate a table—a private table, vacated rapidly and without argument by several young men at the innkeeper’s gesture; he did not suggest this time that she might share a table with others, and Timou was grateful. She wanted to be surrounded by the sounds of life, but was by no means certain she would be able to participate; since leaving the City she had felt set aside, distant, detached, as though life itself were something she observed but did not actually share.

“Beef roast, chicken pie, mutton stew,” offered the innkeeper, pulling a chair out from the table for her.

“Yes,” said Timou, not really hearing him, and he hesitated briefly and then went away again. When the hot food came, she ate it without knowing what it was.

Her sleep that night was restless, troubled by dreams of a woman who turned into a white falcon, tore apart her own nestlings, and flashed away through a lightning-struck sky, crying in a voice like the voice of a woman. She dreamed of a silver knife thrust into a great tree, blood running down fissures in its bark. She dreamed of a crystalline sword falling without a sound through the air high above the City, scattering light from its blade as it tumbled through the fine cold air.

Waking before dawn, she washed and dressed quietly, easing through the still-sleeping inn. She did not even think of the mare in the inn’s stable, but walked through the village in the pearly predawn light and on along the road that led into the great forest.

The sun, rising behind her, turned all the forest to fire and gold: autumn had caught up to the forest, but not winter. The snow stopped where the trees began. All their leaves were gold and flame-orange, and some had fallen, so that the forest was roofed and floored with gold and fire. The early light poured through the leaves and turned to gold; the very air tasted of gold. Timou walked between the sentinel trees that flanked the road and, turning immediately to the side, stepped off the path and walked in among the trees.

She was lost immediately. Trees closed in behind her, crowding between her and the path; if she turned back to find it, she knew, it would not be there. She went straight on, walking slowly at first and then more quickly. The trees became larger as she walked, older, more strange and contorted in their shapes; they remembered a thousand years and spoke of them in muted whispers she could not quite understand. She glimpsed a ruined tower in the distance, and thought she might be able to make out a dragon coiled among the scattered stones at its foot; she heard voices far away, and somewhere a scattering of harp notes. She was not interested in any of these things, and only went on through the golden light.

“In such a hurry,” said a voice she recognized, and she stopped and turned, without surprise, toward the speaker. The black serpent was coiled on a flat stone nestled among the roots of the trees. Light, warmed by its fall through flaming leaves, pooled in its slit-pupiled eyes until they swam with fire.

“I know you now,” Timou told it.

“I thought you would.”

“You are the soul of the Kingdom. You encircle the Kingdom. All the Kingdoms, as they lie layered one across another, different but always the same. You even existed in my mother’s maze of light. To you, every place is the same place. Every shape you take is really the same.” Timou paused, waiting for the serpent’s response.

“That maze was not Lelienne’s,” it said. It seemed amused—not, at least, offended. “Though perhaps she believed she possessed it.”

Timou gave a little nod. “And you are this forest. Aren’t you? You lie between the beginning and the end of every journey, and wait for every traveler. You are yourself the maze in which the traveler finds herself lost. That is why you know the way through all the mazes. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” said the serpent, and waited.

“How many Kingdoms are there?” Timou asked curiously.

“Oh,” said the serpent in its sweet smoky voice, “more than you have yet seen.”

“I want,” said Timou, “to see one more.” She was trembling with nervousness and determination.

“I could take you there, but you may find it less easy to return,” warned the serpent.

“I know.”

“And still you ask me for this?”

“Yes. I have to,” Timou explained, not very coherently.

“Give me your name.”

Timou gave her name to the forest.

The serpent changed before her eyes: it became huge, nebulous, as though it were made of smoke and shadow. Spines fell like the mane of a horse down its long neck, shining with a darkness of their own; spines frilled out around its flat head, rattling drily as it shifted position. Wings opened behind it, vast as the sky. Its eyes were made of darkness that looked into hers and knew her name; its breath was frost.

Around them the trees straightened and lengthened, their tops lost to sight in the dimness. The air chilled. Shadows reached out from each tree and then spread, outward and upward, engulfing the world. The rough ground smoothed out underfoot to make a surface as smooth as glass or ice. There was no light, and yet Timou could somehow see into the distance through the endless ranks of featureless pillars.

Timou said shakily, “This is still the forest? The Kingdom?”

“It is a forest. An aspect of the Kingdom,” answered the serpent. Its voice was a whisper of frost through the dark, and yet somehow it was the same voice.

Timou shivered, hearing it. She longed for the golden warmth of the forest she had left behind. “Is there no light here? No light anywhere?”

“There is only one point of light in all this Kingdom.”

Timou, trying incredulously to peer into the distance, could not imagine how even one spark of light could exist in this place. It seemed made entirely of the purest darkness. “If you had brought . . . my mother to this place, if she had seen you like this, she would have fled the Kingdom . . . all the Kingdoms . . . for whatever land she came from.”

“No,” said the serpent, cold as midwinter. “If that woman had seen this Kingdom, she would have desired its power, and, looking into its darkness, she might have come to understand it. Then the Hunter would have been forced to battle her here.”

“Couldn’t he have?”

“The dark is most powerful when it breaks into the light. As the light is most powerful when it strikes through the dark.”

“Oh.” Timou considered this. “You could not simply have bitten her head off yourself, I suppose.”

The immense serpent tilted its head, wings moving like a mist overhead, spines rattling together with a sound like wind through dry twigs. “No.”

Timou shook her head. “I don’t understand anything.”

“There are some things you understand,” answered the serpent, and poured itself suddenly through the cold darkness, marking a path for Timou through the endless pillars that had replaced the familiar trees. “Your way lies there.”

Timou could see it when she tried: a plain of ice, and a black tower set far out upon its infinite expanse. “Yes,” she breathed. “Thank you.”

“You may thank me,” said the serpent, “if you think you have reason to be grateful.” It melted like mist into the darkness.

It seemed a very long way across the ice, and yet it also seemed to Timou that she drew near to the tower with startling rapidity. She looked at it until she saw its jagged image behind her eyelids when she blinked. When she looked away, down at the ice, she found that faint uninterpretable images moved in the glassy surface under her feet. Engrossed, she paused to study them—then guessed that hours might have passed and tore her gaze away again, to find the black tower rearing suddenly close before her. It was made of ice, or black stone, or perhaps carved from the darkness itself; darkness poured from its tall narrow windows and from its open door. The open door was like an invitation: Timou did not know whether she should be glad or frightened to see it. She was both.

Walking slowly forward, Timou entered the tower.

She found herself in a small square chamber. A window pierced each wall, although the windows and the walls and the air within the tower and the views without each window were all made of varying shades and textures of darkness. It was hard to tell where one shape ended and the next began. Jonas stood in the chamber, gazing out one of the windows, with his back to her and his hands resting on the windowsill: him, Timou could see more clearly. Or at least perceive, according to whatever rules of perception governed in this dark Kingdom.

The Hunter’s shadow stood behind Jonas, taller than he—taller than the chamber seemed sensibly to allow, so tall it should have been impossible to see its face. And yet, when the shadow turned its head to look at her, Timou could see its face, flat and strangely featureless. Narrow branching patterns of darkness twisted across the ceiling, or the sky—it was hard to tell.

Jonas himself turned a heartbeat after the shadow. His face was empty of expression. His eyes were the yellow eyes of the Hunter.

“Lord Hunter,” Timou greeted him. Her voice shook, and her hands closed slowly into fists, but she did not back hastily out of the tower, which is what she wanted to do.

“I know you. You once gave me your name,” said Jonas in the Hunter’s passionless voice. “You may do so again.”

Timou shut her eyes and gave her name to the dark.

“Yes,” said the Hunter through Jonas’s mouth. “Why are you here, daughter of Lelienne?”

“To ask you—” It seemed the height of impudence, now that she was here; and yet why else had the Hunter continued, here in his own Kingdom, to wear the body of a mortal man like a cloak? “To ask you a question, and a favor, Lord.”

“What is the question?”

Timou hesitated, now that the moment was at hand, and asked almost reluctantly, “Lord, will you tell me, please, what happened to my mother?”

Jonas smiled, a predatory smile utterly unlike any expression she had ever seen on his mortal face. “She did not outrun the storm,” he said—the Hunter said. “My hounds pulled her down. She is now here, a shade among others in my Kingdom, no more nor less to me than any other.”

“Oh,” Timou breathed. “Good. Thank you.”

“And the favor?” Jonas, or the Hunter, pronounced the word with a slight ironic tone. His yellow eyes did not hold irony. They held nothing Timou could understand.

“If you would, Lord Hunter . . . would you please let me take the—the man within whose shadow you stand—back into . . . into the Kingdom of the living?”

“What I once have taken, I do not return.”

“No,” Timou answered. “But you might open your hand a little.”

“Yes,” the Hunter said restlessly. “I might do that.”

“Please, Lord.”

The shadow lifted a hand to touch its chest; Jonas echoed the gesture. “The sorceress’s knife is still here. If I withdraw from this man, he will die and become a shade here in my Kingdom. I have,” added the Hunter inexorably, “no power to heal.”