The City in the Lake (9 page)

Conversation quieted. The inn was crowded with folk at their dinners, but they were, Timou supposed, all people from this village, and so of course a stranger was interesting. She did not know what they saw. She felt weary to her bones and wished they would all go back to their own talk so she could be private in the spaces between their words.

The innkeeper came up while she stood there, before anyone could lose interest. After a swift summing look, he said kindly, “You’ll be wanting dinner, then? A private room for the night? We’ve several free.”

“Yes,” Timou said faintly, relieved that he was kind. “Please.”

The innkeeper guided her to a small table, occupied at the moment only by a pair of motherly older women. “We have duck tonight, brought in fresh this morning, and pigeon pie, and beef stew with parsnips.”

Timou, feeling that she could do with all of that, hesitated.

“The duck is good,” one of the women put in unexpectedly. Her face was broad and kindly; hair the color of wheat was bound firmly at the back of her head, but escaped wisps riffled out of the knot. Her wrists were thick, her hands broad; she looked strong, like a woman who had spent a competent lifetime lifting bales of hay or thumping bread dough down on a board. Empty bowls and plates in front of her and her friend testified to their enthusiasm for the food. “With plums and walnuts, my dear. Not but that all the food is good here. Tinnis has a fair hand with meat and pastry, but she’s best with game.”

The other woman did not speak at once, but leaned back in her chair, laced her fingers across her stomach, and smiled in a friendly way. There was a similarity in the women’s bones and the shape of their hands, and in the way they moved; Timou thought they might be sisters.

“The duck, then,” she decided.

“Surely, surely,” agreed the innkeeper. “It comes with bread and sugared squash.”

“Thank you.”

The innkeeper lingered. “Out of the forest, are you, then?”

Timou looked at him in surprise. “How could you tell?”

“You have the look of it in your eyes,” said the innkeeper, and bustled away to bring her food.

“Sort of green and shadowy,” commented the woman. “On your way to the City, then, ah?”

“Yes,” answered Timou, a little uncertainly. She had all but forgotten the City while walking through the forest. And she doubted suddenly whether she would find her father there; perhaps he had gone somewhere else. Again, more intensely even than during that lonely night in the forest, she wished she had let Jonas come with her: he would know how to speak to strangers, even to the people of the City. She felt obscurely that her present doubts would not have seemed so smothering if she only had familiar company to sit beside her instead of these strangers, no matter how friendly they might be.

Her stomach growled, unmindful of her doubts. The woman said cheerfully, “Oh, sit, sit, and tell us where you are from, my dear. It’s a hard journey you’ve had—though that’s always a hard journey, so they say.”

Timou put her knapsack on the floor by her feet and sat down, sighing. “How far is the City from here?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh, four or five days, mostly, if you’re on foot,” answered the woman, just as cheerfully as before. “Sometimes farther, occasionally nearer. You know how it is. Now, I’m Anith, and this is my cousin Ereth. I bake—better than the bread here, though Tinnis does well enough, I suppose. Ereth helps her husband with their farm.”

Timou gave her own name in return. It seemed strange and not entirely comfortable to have to do so. To speak to women she had not known all her life, to be unknown, so that no one looked at her and thought,
Ah, Kapoen’s daughter.

“Did you come through the forest all by yourself, then?” asked Ereth. She leaned forward confidingly. “I went into the forest once, just a step in. I barely went out of sight of the edge, and I stayed on the road. But when I turned around to come back out, it still took almost till dark.”

“It can be like that,” agreed Timou, and turned gratefully to help the innkeeper unload his tray on the table. There was, besides the duck and mashed golden squash and soft dark bread, a fresh little berry tart, still bubbling around the edges.

“It’ll still be hot for you when you’re ready for it, and this way you’re assured one,” explained the innkeeper. “They go quick on a chilly night like this.”

“Thank you,” Timou said, warmed by the man’s thoughtfulness. She tried the duck. It was excellent.

“I shouldn’t care to go through the forest alone,” Ereth said chattily. “Not all the way through. Did you stay on the road, then?”

Timou agreed that she had, mostly.

“I wouldn’t go off it for a moment,” Ereth said. “Weren’t you frightened?”

“Not . . . really,” Timou said slowly, thinking about it. “I liked it at first. Some of it at the end . . . I wasn’t frightened, exactly, but it was . . . disturbing.”

“I have no doubt,” Anith replied sympathetically. She said to her cousin, slyly, “
You
wouldn’t like it, I’m sure.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Ereth said comfortably. “Who knows what might happen? I have my heart’s desire right here, ah, and no need to go haring off into the forest after it.”

“I thought I might go, once. But, well, I never did.” Anith lifted a mug of the cider the two women had plainly been lingering over and cocked her head at Timou. “And did you find
your
heart’s desire, dear?”

Timou thought involuntarily of the serpent and tried not to flinch visibly. “I don’t think that was what I was looking for.”

“Ah, well, they say sometimes the forest will show you your heart when all you wanted was a handful of herbs for the soup. And they say sometimes you don’t recognize your heart when the forest shows it to you.” The woman sounded wistful, as though she would have liked to test these tales for herself. “Well,” she added in a stronger, more matter-of-fact tone, “but I suppose I found my life was good enough right here. Until this spring.”

“A grandchild?” Timou guessed.

“Should have been, should have been. Big and bonny, a boy it would have been, but, well, this spring . . .”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, so were we all, and so are we all,” said Anith. “They say the Prince went riding in just an ordinary little wood, not this great uncanny forest we have here, mind, but something got him and he’s lost.”

“Do they say what took him?”

“Ah, that they don’t, or at least everybody’s got her own story about it, you know. King’s men went through the countryside, even into the forest . . . mages searched in other ways.”

“But no one found him,” Timou finished softly.

Both women shook their heads. . . . There had apparently been a great frenzy of searching early, but this had tapered off as everyone lost hope. No one now, it seemed, really expected to find the lost Prince. At least not by searching.

Timou finished her food, said her farewells, and went up to the room the innkeeper showed her. There was a basin of warm water for a bath, not really adequate but far better than a cold stream in a forest. The bed had a good mattress and soft linen sheets. But even so, it took a long time for Timou to sleep. Her hand ached where the hatchling snake had bitten her. It did no good to look again at the unmarked skin and assure herself that the bite had only been a dream. She feared what she might dream, even now that she was out of the forest. But if she dreamed again that night, she did not know it.

In the morning Timou paid the innkeeper three pennies for the dinner and the room, and another for food to take with her on this last stage of her journey. A farmer gave her a seat on his wagon, refusing her offer of payment. “Though I’m not going all the way to the City, mind,” he warned her. “Only to town and back again. But you’re welcome to join me.”

So all that day Timou watched the countryside draw slowly past at the pace of the farmer’s pair of mules. It was not as fast as walking on her own legs would have been, but the wagon made a pleasant change. She let the farmer talk to her about the past year and all he had done and seen during it, for he was a garrulous man who welcomed a passenger who would ask the occasional question and otherwise listen to stories that had, Timou thought, probably been told and retold a hundred times.

There were many travelers on the road. There were pastures with cut hay standing in long stooks, and farms every mile or so, with cattle or goats or sheep. Barking dogs ran out into the road when they passed one farm or another, where the mules eyed them. The dogs stayed wisely out of reach of the mules’ hooves. One woman offered fresh milk and a loaf of bread for three of the parsnips the farmer was carrying, and the farmer gave her four with a wink because she was pretty.

The farmer slept under his wagon, and, it seemed, expected Timou to join him. Nor was he as kindly as she had thought him when she refused; she finally overcame her shock enough to draw fire out of the bed of his wagon. After that he believed her refusal. Timou smothered the fire again at once, but he was angry along with his alarm, for all he did not quite dare curse at her.

After that she was glad enough to walk on down the road until she eventually found a bed in a pile of hay in a field near the road. She thought she might dream of serpents, but she dreamed instead of the farmer, angry and fearful and wanting to know why she had accepted a seat in his wagon, ah, if she hadn’t wanted to pay for it? In its way this was just as disturbing, and she woke, cold and stiff, before dawn.

The town, when she finally reached it toward evening, was much bigger than the village had been. The streets were cobbled against mud, and many folk were abroad despite the lateness of the hour. They all moved purposefully, as though they knew precisely where they were going and for what. Timou looked at them with a new wariness, wondering which might hide unpleasant motives behind apparent kindness. None of them looked back at her with more than passing curiosity. Shops, some still open, offered a variety of goods for sale that startled the eye of a young woman who had never before found herself in a town: cloth and clothing; apothecary supplies and candles; glassware and porcelain; jars of jams and smoked meats.

Timou found an inn on the near side of the town. She hoped the farmer would not put up at this same inn, or that she would not see him if he did. She ate white-bean soup, which she was almost too tired to taste, and listened to the conversations of the men and women around her. The talk was mostly light and quick and animated. But underneath the lightness, Timou thought she could hear an undertone that was very different, of worry and grief that, for whatever reason, the folk here did not want to put into words.

She caught snatches, exchanges in low tones, not furtive so much as simply private, as though no one wanted to share their worries indiscriminately with the room . . . brief references to the missing Prince, and to the bastard—that would be the Prince’s elder half brother—the bastard who ruled now—
The bastard who ruled now?
Timou leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, listening both to the half-heard conversations and to the undercurrents of the things that were not said. If it was the bastard elder son who ruled, where was the King?

The King, she gathered eventually, was, like the Prince, missing . . . missing for a few days now. Opinions seemed divided: He had gone somewhere, perhaps even out of the Kingdom entirely, to search for the Prince. He was not really missing, but had shut himself up in the highest tower of the Palace and would see no one. The bastard had done away with both the Prince and his father. No, Lord Bastard had grown weary of the intransigence of his father and shut him up in the highest tower, but he had never moved against his brother; why, the two of them were friends, everyone knew that. No, no; it was the Queen whom the Bastard—by now Timou could hear the capital letter, the way the word was used like a name or a title—it was the Queen whom the Bastard had shut up in a tower, and the King was truly gone. . . .

Timou went slowly up to the private room the inn offered, wishing she knew more of the people who moved like old tales through these guesses. More of what the King was like, of what the Bastard was like. . . . She felt provincial and ignorant, and very tired. Too tired to think.

The hot soup had been welcome; the bath the inn offered was even more so, with abundant soft soap that came in a copper bowl and water so hot one could hardly step into it. Timou washed her hair three times, then braided it back neatly to keep it out of her face. For an extra penny, the inn offered laundry services. No charm against dirt could compete with a really good laundry: Timou gladly paid her penny and fell asleep before her clothing was returned, finding it neatly folded on a shelf just inside the door in the morning.

And finally, late in the afternoon of the next day—Timou had purchased a place in a coach, which had hard seats and jounced worse than the farmer’s wagon, but was much faster—she saw, for the first time, the City that rested at the heart of the Kingdom.

The City occupied, as she had known, an island that lay in the center of the Lake. Though she tried, Timou could not see the farther shore. All she could see was the City, gleaming golden cream in the late sun. A bridge carried the road forward over the Lake, dropping a pillar from time to time into the water for support. It looked improbably slender to span all the distance from this shore to the City.

Everyone leaned out the windows to look. “This is Tiger Bridge,” one woman said to Timou wisely. “Best be across well before dusk.”

“Oh?”

“They say the tigers come to life at night,” the woman explained.

“Oh.” Timou remembered that story. She asked curiously, “Do they?”

“Probably,” said a dark young man with unexpectedly pale hazel eyes. He smiled at Timou, rather experimentally, but she thought of the farmer and did not smile back. His tone grew more uncertain, but he went on, “In the City, many stories are true. But I believe myself that the tigers walk only in the other City.”

“You mean the City in the Lake?”

Encouraged by her question, the young man smiled at her again. “Yes—the one in the Lake. Watch for it when we are closer.”