The City in the Lake (19 page)

“How would you suggest I open such a path?” his mother asked him. She was unmoved by his agony, neither pleased nor regretful, as she never seemed moved by the pain or fear she caused. Her tone remained merely thoughtful.

“I don’t know.”

“Would Trevennen know?”

The Bastard tried to think what would be most useful for his mother to believe, but could think only of how badly he wanted her to turn her cold, inquiring attention toward the mage and away from himself. “Yes,” he said, voice husky, failing at the end of the word. He gathered his strength with an effort, looking for the last extremities of endurance. “Perhaps. Trevennen has—studied mirrors. The Lake is a mirror. Of sorts.” He tried to remember what else he had said about the Lake. He could not clearly remember.

“Well, I shall ask him,” said Lelienne. She held out her hand briskly. “Give me the coal.”

He could not believe he had heard her accurately, and for a moment only knelt where he was, swaying. Then he was afraid he had waited too long, and reached out quickly, clumsily, setting his teeth against the fresh pain of movement and supporting his burned hand with the other one. He had closed his hand into a fist at some time during the ordeal, and at first could not make his fingers open.

Impatiently his mother touched the back of his hand.

The pain was gone at once. Unbelieving, the Bastard opened his hand. The coal that fell into his mother’s palm was cold and dark. His hand was unmarked. There was no charred flesh. There was no injury at all. All that was left was the general weakness of pain endured and the memory of burning.

“You are my son,” Lelienne said mildly, to his astonished stare. “Your pain gives me no pleasure. Another time simply obey me at once, and there will be no need for punishment.”

The Bastard bowed his head and pushed himself back to kneeling with arms that trembled. He was afraid to speak, lest his mother hear something in his words or his tone that angered her. This was a new extremity of fear, and it shamed him, but even so he could not bring himself to speak.

His mother did not appear to apprehend any of his struggle. “You may go,” she said simply, dismissing him.

Only the thinnest remnants of pride prevented the Bastard from falling over himself to get to the door. He stood instead, making it to his feet with difficulty, and brought his eyes up with an immense effort to look her in the face. He did not know what his own face showed. He could see nothing in hers. He did not scramble for the door, but bowed, carefully, and backed away several steps before turning and setting his hand on the latch.

“Neill,” she said at that moment, and he could not keep from flinching. But he made himself turn slowly and stand straight to face her. Her eyes were dark, ageless, unreadable.

“You will join me for supper. At dusk. It is time, I think, for this play to be concluded. You will join me, my son.”

“Yes,” he said huskily. He would have agreed to anything. When she lifted a hand in renewed permission to depart, he moved the latch without turning his back on her and half fell through the door when it opened because he had not really expected it to yield to his hand. He would have fallen then, but Galef caught him.

After a moment this made the Bastard laugh. “You seem to make a habit of this,” he said to the guard captain, helplessly, gripping the other man’s arms as he tried to get his feet under him. He found, to his horror, his breath catching on a sob.

Galef jerked his head, dismissing another guardsman and several hovering servants, who faded instantly into the woodwork. The captain, though no taller than the Bastard, lifted him in his arms with a muted sound of effort.

“I can walk,” the Bastard protested, torn equally between laughter, tears, and outrage.

“Of course you can.” Galef moved rapidly. They met no one, by which the Bastard understood that the captain had sent a man ahead to clear the way.

“Galef,” the Bastard said through his teeth. “Put me down.”

The guard captain hesitated an instant and then stopped, letting the Bastard stand on his own, though with an arm ready to catch him again if his knees gave. For a moment the Bastard thought they might. Then he steadied.

“All right?” the captain asked.

“Yes,” agreed the Bastard, and took an experimental step.

Galef stayed close by his side, ready for a stumble or sudden collapse. He said, “Tipeu told me what she did to you.”

Tipeu was the old servant. The Bastard said harshly, “She meant to punish what she called impudence, but also to question me under the spur of pain.” He flinched from the memory, but the weakness was at last passing off. He added tardily, as his wits caught up with his mouth, “I suppose it might have been worse. At least I had nothing to conceal.” He saw suddenly that the captain had been taking him to his own rooms. He turned and made instead for the stairs that would take him out of the Palace entirely.

“Lord Neill!” snapped Galef, and put himself in his way. “If she calls for you?”

“She will not expect me until dusk.” And he added piously, “Of course I will be back by then. I must have air, and space. But I would not dare disobey my mother.”

Galef looked torn. “Nor would I. I am not to let you go about the City unescorted. . . .”

“Then you shall have to escort me,” said the Bastard, and took a step forward, forcing the captain to shift quickly out of the way.

The Bastard’s horse was a black mare, intelligent and quickfooted. The Bastard, one eye on the sinking sun, could hardly bring himself to wait for the mare to be saddled. When he at last lifted the reins, the mare instantly caught his mood, and leapt forward with a will.

Galef swung himself up on a big gray gelding and turned it round to follow. He shouted, “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular!” the Bastard shouted back, and sent his mare flying like an arrow down the hill from the Palace, straight for the shores of the Lake. The captain, whatever he surmised from this answer, asked nothing else, but simply followed.

The mages’ house was close by the Lake—close enough that the waters of the Lake lapped against the stones of its wall. The house was set off a little way on its own, outside the City proper, because mages need privacy and quiet. The house itself was low and almost plain, but the garden beside it contained herbs and flowers found nowhere else in the Kingdom. Even in this season a smoky, bitter aroma rose from the dried stalks of some herb when the Bastard’s cloak brushed it as he strode up the walk, Galef at his back. It might even, the Bastard thought with a kind of distant wry humor, have been aconite.

The captain’s eyes were wide, but he kept his mouth very carefully shut.

The door opened before they reached it.

“Come in,” Marcos said quietly. “You may speak freely. She cannot hear you here.”

“Your doing?”

The mage’s smile twisted. “Not mine. Would that it were.” Stepping back, Marcos glanced into the warm light within.

“I thought he said he couldn’t help you!” Galef, at the Bastard’s heels, murmured.

The Bastard glanced back at him. “What he said and what he meant were perhaps not entirely congruent.”

The captain laughed, a quick breath. “A lot of that going around, these days.”

The room they came into was a large kitchen, with three fireplaces and one iron stove. The heat in this room seemed to have body and presence, like a live thing. A huge wooden table, much scarred by time and cluttered now with papers, bits of rock and ribbon, spools of copper and gold wire, small unidentifiable bones, and the odd cup of cooling tea, took up nearly a third of the space. Pots and skillets and strings of onions hung from the ceiling. In all the clutter, it would have been easy to miss one narrow wooden chair drawn up close to the farthest fireplace, and the tiny figure tucked into it, except that the Bastard knew where to look.

He went forward at once and knelt quickly at her feet. “Russe.”

The woman he addressed was so small and fragile she might have been made of twigs and drying leaves rather than flesh and bone. Her hair was white and fine as dandelion silk. Her wizened face yet retained a fundamental elegance of angle and form, so that in a way she was beautiful still. The hand she lifted to touch the Bastard’s face was so frail he feared to take it in his, lest it break at his touch.

“Lord Bastard,” she said in a voice like wind through the reeds, so quiet he had to bend close to hear her. “You have met your mother, and she would own you.”

“You know what she intends?”

“Yes,” whispered the old, old woman. “She will use you and that child she bore to Kapoen to devour the magic and mystery of our Kingdom. All unknowing, she will take it also from the eternal Kingdom that casts ours as its shadow, and from the dark Kingdom that is in turn our shadow. We shall be left with nothing, exposed to the world in a barren, empty land. She is capable of it, I believe: Deserisien’s get, she is. I never liked her, but it took me a long time to understand why, and then I thought perhaps it would not matter. I never guessed she had also borne a child to a mage. I suppose Kapoen could not bring himself to tell me what he had done. No wonder he left the City . . . no wonder he put the great forest between himself and any memory of Lelienne. . . .”

“What shall we do?” Neill asked her, not at the moment willing to be distracted by these ruminations about the past.

“You must prevent her. You must find your father. If anyone can bend the power of the Kingdom toward this woman’s removal, it is the King. Above all she must not be allowed to strip the rule from him and settle it on you.”

“Yes. How shall I find him? She means to act soon. Tonight.” He leaned forward urgently. “There is no time left, Russe! If we are to prevent her, it must be now.”

Marcos came a step forward. “We think there may be a way,” he began.

“But it would be a shame to interfere when Lelienne is so close,” said another voice drily. Trevennen shaped himself out of a fall of light in the warm kitchen. “You left so precipitously, Lord Neill. I did wonder where you might be off to. I suspect Lelienne would also be interested to know where you went.” He glanced around curiously. “And that you have all lied to her from the very beginning.”

Galef laid a hand on his sword, but then, as the mage gave him a warning glance, stood still.

Marcos said sharply, “Trevennen, you fool. Do you belong to that woman so completely you will spy for her? Even now? Do you not know what she intends?”

The older mage studied the younger, head tilted a little to one side. “It’s very interesting, what she did to you. I expect that soon I, too, will be able to do that.”

“Well, not today,” whispered Russe.

Trevennen turned his head to meet her eyes. “You needn’t think—” he began, but got no further. Layers of wood closed over his face. His body lengthened and twisted, reaching upward; his arms stretched out and divided; leaves burst out of his fingers. A great tree filled the kitchen where he had stood, rooting itself into the earth right through the tiled floor, its branches passing through the ceiling to brush the sky.

Russe leaned her face against one thin hand and said in a voice husky with weariness, “Marcos.”

“Yes,” said the young mage. He crossed the room to embrace the frail woman gently, then straightened to look at the Bastard, who drew his attention from the tree growing through the kitchen and looked back wordlessly.

“There’s not much time,” Marcos said quietly. “Trevennen is really extraordinarily gifted with light and movement and fire, but he never understood the slow lives and circular memories of trees. But he will free himself eventually. And Lelienne may know already—if not precisely what happened to him, that something has. Or who has made it happen.”

“Russe surely cannot fight her?” The Bastard was appalled at the very thought of his mother coming into this warm and homey room, setting herself against the frail mage she would find here.

“Assuredly not for long,” Marcos answered crisply. “And we must be at Tiger Bridge by dusk. When will she miss you, can you guess?”

“Certainly by dusk.”

“Then there’s no time to stand about here,” said the mage. “Pity we can’t all move through light as easily as Trevennen.” He led the way out of the warm kitchen into the chillier light of the late winter afternoon.

Tiger Bridge was half a mile, perhaps, from the mages’ house, but the shoreline was a treacherous place to ride: invisible muddy sinkholes lay sometimes in places where the sand looked straight and level. They had therefore to turn back into the City and take the road that lay just within the wall, folding into the City from time to time where one building or another interfered with its passage, until it came at last to the carved Bridge. This was a ride of at least a mile. The Bastard cast one glance after another over his shoulder at the sinking sun and knew they would come to the Bridge certainly no earlier than dusk, if they beat the sun at all.

He had taken Marcos up behind him on his mare. Galef stayed at his side, silent and grim. None of them were inclined toward speech. Marcos at least might know whether Lelienne might hear them if they spoke; the Bastard had forgotten to ask him before they left the house, and it was now too late to ask safely.

Shadows lengthened across the streets. Traffic thinned, and some of the passersby recognized the Bastard’s ash-pale hair or his black mare and made way where they could. And how long, the Bastard wondered, if they whispered his name, would it take those whispers to creep back to his mother?

They came to the Bridge just as the sun touched the western edge of the Lake, sliding down from their horses under the surprised eyes of the odd late traveler. Marcos gripped the Bastard by the arm and shoved him around to face the sun. “It’s up to you to open the way,” he said urgently. “At dusk, when the Bridge might lead to either City . . . we must find your father, and you must open the way to go to him.”

“How?” the Bastard demanded. He seized Marcos by both arms and stared into the mage’s face, fighting dawning terror. “I trusted you to think of something useful, and all you thought of is to find my father in the other City?”