The City in the Lake (4 page)

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.

Sime had her child after Ness, as the season turned brisk and the days shortened. The baby would have been a harvest child, but she was born dead. Perfect and tiny and without a breath of life stirring in her. Sime touched the baby’s face tenderly and gave her to Nod to take out and bury in the place they had prepared. She did not weep. Nod wept enough for them both. His brothers and friends went with him to stand over the grave in silent mourning. The women did what they could for Sime, except for Ness, who could not bear to attend so sad a birth. Timou gave Sime betony tea to stop the bleeding, though there was not much of that, and Manet rubbed her hands and stayed with her when the others at length left her to rest.

“Why?” said the midwife to Timou wearily. She had wrapped the tiny infant in a cloth for Nod. It hurt her, as it hurt them all, when there was a death instead of a birth. But she felt it more sharply because she was a midwife. “Why should this have happened to the Kingdom?”

“I do not know,” said Timou.

“Where is your father?” asked the midwife.

“I do not know,” said Timou.

The midwife sighed, washed her hands in a basin, and dried them on another cloth. “You,” she said finally, “are going to have to go to the City.”

“I know,” said Timou. She left the midwife and walked away toward her father’s house at the edge of the village, her head bowed and her steps slow.

Taene’s mother caught up with her before she reached it, while she was still so lost in thought that she hardly noticed the woman’s hurried approach, and Timou looked up in surprise when she heard her name called out.

“Timou—oh, Timou,” said Taene’s mother hastily, reaching out to catch her arm, “have you seen Taene this evening? Was she with Sime?” She looked anxious.

Jonas had come with Taene’s mother, though Timou could not decide whether his frown also looked worried or merely mildly exasperated. She had seen him only occasionally through the long cheerless summer; she had spent most of her time with her father, trying to understand the curse that had fallen across the Kingdom, so they had not come together often. It had not been a summer for dancing. Now she found, with some distress, that he looked older, worn with the grief of the village. His eyes met hers and darkened with worry, as though he saw the same in her.