The City in the Lake (7 page)

This was not very useful. Nothing the mages had done in all this long year had been useful. The Bastard restrained himself, with difficulty, from saying so.

The Queen, on the Bastard’s orders, kept to her rooms. She saw no one, also on his orders, except her women. He had made no effort to order the women to keep silent, knowing he might as well command the stars not to sparkle at night. There was considerable sentiment in the Palace favoring the Queen. Many in the Palace and the City agreed with Ellis that the Bastard had in some mysterious manner disposed of both his half brother and his father in order to seize power.

If he had, it had worked. Whatever whispers ran like mice along the walls, the Bastard ruled the Palace and the City. Half the courtiers were his men . . . no one quite knew which half. The young men who had followed his brother did not meet his eyes. They said
Lord Neill
when they spoke to him and
Lord Bastard
when they spoke to one another, and they walked warily around him. The guard was his, through the guard captain. The Bastard did not touch the circlet of interlocking golden leaves worn only by the King, nor sit in his chair in the great hall. But he gathered power into his hands and held it firmly.

But though he held power, he did not hold life. The heart of the City and of the Kingdom was still missing. That, the Bastard could not restore. He could not find whatever way had led the Prince out of the Palace and the Kingdom. He could not find the way that had opened to take away the King.

On the sixth day, he went to see the Queen.

“Ellis,” he said, since they were alone. Even the Queen’s women had withdrawn into an adjoining room—with relief, because they did not know whether the Queen would shout and throw things, or if she did, at whom. And also because they were afraid of the Bastard, who was too quiet and too contained and whom the Queen did not trust.

The Queen looked at him steadily. She was clad in black and lavender, and wore a silver circlet set with amethysts in her black hair; the stones were almost exactly the color of her eyes. She occupied her heavy chair as though it were a throne.

The Bastard drew a lighter chair around and sat down in it, facing the Queen. He said, “Tell me of the King’s last night. He visited you in these chambers, but did not stay. He went to his own rooms and vanished from there, after pacing half the night. But did he speak to you that evening? Of what did he speak?”

The Queen had raised her fine narrow brows in an expression of astonishment. “What is this pretense, Neill? No one is here but me.”

“If you believe I am pretending, then humor my pretense,” suggested the Bastard patiently.

The Queen studied him. The assumed astonishment had fallen from her face like a mask, leaving behind an expression harder and colder and more difficult to read.

“Deny it,” she said. “Deny it to me.”

The Bastard, meeting her eyes, said directly, “Ellis, you have been mistaken. I do not censure you for thinking of me. But my hand is nowhere in this. I am in no way responsible for the disappearance of your son. I am in no way accountable for the disappearance of the King.”

“You hated him.”

The Bastard moved a hand slowly over the polished arm of the chair, which was carved in the likeness of a swan in flight. He traced the feathers of its wing, frowning, before he looked up at last to meet the hard stare of the Queen. He said slowly, “Ellis, you are mistaken again.”

“I am not mistaken! He never cared for you: he loved my son and not you, and you hated him—hated them both—and now they are both gone and you have everything—”

“Ellis,” the Bastard said. His quiet voice brought her to a halt. He said, still quietly, “I did not hate my father. Or Cassiel. I never knew until now that you hated me. It seems to me that the only one who hates in this family, Ellis, is you.”

The Queen did not answer. She stared at him, her eyes wide and a little shocked.

“I am not now, nor have I ever been, your enemy. You are unjust.” The Bastard rose and took a step toward her, leaning forward earnestly. “If it was not I, Ellis? What then?”

For a moment there was doubt in the Queen’s wide violet eyes. She was shaking, the Bastard saw. Then she moved, gripping the arms of her chair as though to rise, or as though to hold herself back from rising. She said, furiously but not loudly, “I am not unjust. I am not wrong. Get out. Get out. How dare you come here and lie to me about your innocence?”

The Bastard straightened. He said with amazement, “You blame yourself. You rail against me to defend yourself. Ellis, what have you done?”

The Queen picked up a heavy silver pitcher on a low table nearby and threw it with considerable force at the Bastard, who fended it off with a raised hand and backed away as water arced across the room. “Get out!” she shouted at him. “Get out!”—and left him to retreat in the most undignified manner imaginable, because he could not raise a hand against her.

“How can the Queen be guilty?” he asked the guard captain later, still consumed by that sense of astonishment. “How can the
Queen
be guilty?”

The guard captain, leaning against the back of a heavy chair because he would not sit in the Bastard’s presence, frowned. The mage Marcos settled comfortably in the depths of a huge softcushioned chair, answered instead. “I doubt she is guilty in quite that sense, Neill.”

They were all gathered in the Bastard’s personal apartments. The shutters of the sitting room were open, the late autumn sun lending the room a warmth and comfort that was at odds with the general mood, which was dark and rather grim.

Both the Bastard and the captain looked at Marcos. “How, then?” the captain asked.

The mage said obliquely, “A woman—or a man, for that matter—can feel guilt when no other would think to lay it at her feet.”

“What?” said the captain blankly.

“Oh, come, Galef. Suppose you went to some man’s house somewhere in the City, anyone’s house, and knocked on his door, and told him when he opened it,
I know what you did.
What would he think, this man, a man, we shall say, who has done nothing in particular to warrant your attention? How would he feel?”

“He would feel guilty,” acknowledged the captain. He looked thoughtful. “Hmmm.”

“I did not think to accuse the Queen until I saw that she accused herself,” argued the Bastard.

“Yes, and when you saw in her face that she accused herself, Neill, you with your discerning eyes, you frightened her. But I doubt that she accuses herself of direct guilt. No. Her son went out riding, and did not return. If she had kept him closer, would he not be safe? Her husband left her sitting alone in her private rooms and went to his, and vanished. Is she not at fault? If she had only loved them more, held them more tightly—”

The Bastard moved a hand. “Enough.”

“You see,” said Marcos comfortably.

“I see it could be true.”

“When the Prince is found, she will forgive herself, and thus you.”

“
If
he is found.” The Bastard shifted restlessly in his chair. “Where is he?”

“I have looked into the eyes of every falcon and every wolf and every stag from here to the very edges of the Kingdom,” the mage said drily, “but I have never yet found the Prince looking back at me. Trevennen has looked through every mirror and every window and every fall of light, from the first gray glimmer of dawn to the last soft moments of dusk, but he has found nothing. Russe has looked—”

“I know all this.”

“—through every dream and slow reverie of the great trees of the forest, and the little flickering half-felt dreams of the young trees of the hills, and she has found nothing.”

“He is outside the Kingdom,” Galef said abruptly.

Marcos looked at him in surprise. “Oh, I hardly think that is likely.”

“If the Prince were within the Kingdom,” said the captain doggedly, “then the heart of the Kingdom would not be lost. We would only not know where it was.
He
was. Is. If he were dead, the Kingdom would grieve, but it would recover and go on and find some other heart. So the Prince is not dead, but he is not within the Kingdom.”

The mage steepled his thick fingers and regarded the captain over them, narrow-eyed. “Hmm.”

The Bastard smiled slowly, and Marcos threw up his hands. “Well, all right, then. It’s possible. The reasoning is sound.”

“The City in the Lake,” the Bastard suggested.

“No. The City in the Lake . . . is in some ways the heart of the Kingdom itself. If the Prince were there, he would not be lost, as Galef so cogently put it. Even if no one knew he was there.”

“Then where?”

“I don’t quite know,” Marcos answered, and frowned. “It should not be possible to take the heart of the Kingdom out of the Kingdom.”

The Bastard, regarding him, said nothing, but forcefully.

“I know,” said the mage. “What
has
occurred is able to occur.”

“What will you do now?” the Bastard asked.

“What would you have me do that I have not already done?”

“Talk to Ellis.”

Marcos winced. “Have Trevennen talk to her. She doesn’t care for me. You know that.”

“Trevennen, then. You . . .” The Bastard paused, and finished gently, “Look somewhere you haven’t looked before. Somewhere both within the Kingdom and outside it. Somewhere outside the fall of light and the dream of trees. Find such a place and look there for the Prince.”

“All right,” said the mage glumly.

“And I?” asked Galef.

“You . . . listen to the City, and tell me what you hear. Every dream and every thought and every word spoken, whether in public or in confidence . . . Will you?”

The guard captain, who had stood at the Bastard’s back through the last few days and watched him gather into his hands all his father’s power, said noncommittally, “I will listen. And you?”

“I will think,” said the Bastard. “And wait for the pattern, whatever it may be, to reveal itself to me.” He glanced at Marcos sidelong. “Is that not what the mages say?”

C
HAPTER
5

he forest was enchanted, of course. All great forests are, in one way or another. But this forest was special. Despite the season, there were no hints of autumn in its deep green. The shadows the ancient trees cast were darker and more secretive than ordinary shadows under ordinary trees. This forest had depths no one had ever seen, mysteries no mage had ever encompassed. To pass through it safely, a traveler must keep to the road. Even then the journey through the forest’s dim reaches might take days or weeks, or even sometimes months, for the forest was not always the same size.

The road passed into the forest between two great trees that stood to either side of the road like gateposts. They were so large that it would have taken half a dozen men to wrap their arms about the trunk of either one; they had heavy knurled trunks and broad branches and dark green leaves that were silver underneath. They looked a thousand years old, and might have been older.

Timou made her evening fire by the side of the road just outside the entrance to the forest. She boiled water for tea and put sausages over the fire to cook. Then she sat cross-legged by the small homey light of her fire with her hands folded on her plain traveling skirt and gazed at the dim shade of the great forest. After a while she began to feel that there might be eyes looking back at her, although she saw nothing, even when she cleared her mind and let her own eyes go wide and dreaming.

Later, as the sun set, she sat on her folded blanket, sipping her tea and thinking of nothing in particular. When it seemed to her the right time to do so, she gathered a palmful of dust from the road and mixed it with a little water, forming it into a ball. This she set by the fire and left to harden. Then, taking her small mirror out of her pack, she angled it to catch the last molten rays of the sun and murmured over it the words of a charm so that it would remember light.

At last, spreading out her blanket, she lay down upon it and listened to the sounds the wind made: one sound as it whispered through the grasses in the open; another, more secretive, as it slipped through the leaves of the forest. It would be easy to hear voices in that sound: slow murmuring voices that spoke endlessly of dim green places that never felt the sun. Timou finally fell asleep still listening to the voices of the wind.

In the morning, after a breakfast of bread and cheese and more tea, Timou carefully smothered her fire with a thought and slung her knapsack over her shoulder. Then, at last, she walked into the shade.

The road narrowed at once to a mere path. There would not have been room on it for a cart. Great roots crossed and recrossed the path and great rocks lay tumbled and half buried everywhere among the roots, which made for uncomfortable footing. Timou wondered how wheeled traffic got through this forest. Perhaps if one came with carts or wagons, the road one found was wider and smoother? She thought she would someday find a carter who came this way and ask.

At the moment she had enough to do to keep her eyes on her own path. Even the light was chancy, for the branches wove together far overhead and no sunlight reached down to dapple the surface of the path. There was always the feeling that there might be something—the tumbled ruin of a forgotten castle or a long graceful dragon coiled around a towering tree—hidden less than a stone’s throw away, and one might walk past and never see it.

Timou found she loved it; loved the secretive shadows, the feeling of mysterious unbounded potential. There were surely strange dangers hidden in this forest, and yet she wanted to leave the path and weave her own way among the great trees. She lost her fears and her questions in the green shadows; she was captivated by the language the wind seemed to speak as it passed through the leaves in the deep heart of the forest. She wanted to wander forever through the magic the forest held. It might be perilous, but she knew it would also be beautiful beyond measure. Half a dozen times she paused, her hand caressing some great mossy bole, gazing into the green depths and wondering if perhaps she might go only a little way off the path. It took all the calm discipline she had learned from her father not to yield to this desire. She wished her father had brought her here himself. She wished there were no need for haste, no urgency, no duty to compel her onward.

Timou had stepped into the green twilight of the forest at dawn, but without the sun to watch in its travel across the sky it was hard to know how long she had walked. She went quickly and eagerly, curious to see around every curve, to peer down every slope. She did not pause for more than a moment to drink from a stream that poured itself out of the forest on one side of the path and disappeared into the forest again on the other. The water tasted of earth and green shade, but it did not try to change Timou into a stone or a shower of light when she drank it. She almost regretted that it didn’t; she would have liked to explore the spells of this forest.

When she became hungry, she took more of the hard bread out of her pack and ate it, walking. Perhaps it was noon, but the quality of light under the trees had not changed enough to judge. A wind she could not feel rustled the leaves so that she felt more strongly than ever that they spoke a language she might almost understand. There was no sign that any other traveler had ever walked this road; there was no hint that any ever would. It was as though Timou were the only traveler ever to step under the arch of the trees or dare the path through the forest. The only sound was the sigh of the leaves: there were no birds calling in the green heights, no squirrels, no deer that Timou saw. Not even midges humming in the shadows.

Quite abruptly, around a sharp turn, the path opened out into an unexpected glade in the forest. Ahead, light made its way through the forest canopy, as from a foreign country. The light lay warmly in the air, golden and heavy. There was a surprising glint of blue in that direction. Timou went forward readily, wondering what this could be.

The glade turned out to be smaller than Timou had thought: no farther across than she might have thrown a stone. It was carpeted with thick tufted grasses and blue star-shaped flowers that nodded on slender stems. The flowers echoed the blue of the sky, a blue tending toward soft dove-gray as the day was tending toward evening. Timou had not guessed it was so late.

There was a pool of water, small enough that Timou could nearly have leapt across it, in the center of the little meadow. The air was still, so quiet that the water was as flat and level as a sheet of glass. It cast back clear reflections of the sky overhead and of Timou’s own face when she leaned over it. She met her reflection’s eyes in its mirror, and it seemed to her for an instant that the reflection looked back at her with eyes that were not pale blue, but black as a moonless night.

Behind her, there was the sound of a soft step.

Timou turned quickly. Not ten steps away, a doe regarded her without apparent fear. It came another step closer, delicate and alert, huge ears turning to listen to sounds from the forest that Timou could not hear. It was the color of cream, of ivory—just a shade warmer than true white. Its eyes were blue. It walked past Timou, so closely she might have reached out a hand to touch it, and lowered its head to the pool to drink.

Then it flung its head up with every appearance of violent alarm and leapt away, disappearing into the forest with a thud of hooves and a swish of disturbed leaves.

Timou stared after it, troubled. She knew that the deer that had walked past her had had blue eyes. But she was almost certain that the deer that had leapt away from the pool had had eyes that were black.

In the pool rings spread slowly outward from where the deer had dipped its muzzle to the water. Timou backed away from the water. “What are you telling me?” she whispered, asking the forest. The forest seemed to listen, but it gave back no answer.

Timou had thought, coming into this meadow, that she might rest for the night under the open sky. But she found now that for the first time since entering the forest she was uneasy. The great trees crowding on either side of the path had seemed somehow companionable. But now the trees pressing close against the edges of this glade seemed strangely threatening. She did not after all want to linger in the late sun among the blue flowers. She walked across the meadow to its opposite side, where the path flowed once more between towering trees; she went into their shadows as though fleeing from a threatening storm into shelter.

She walked slowly after that, not thinking so much as waiting for thoughts to swim to the surface of her mind. She no longer knew whether she loved the forest or whether she was afraid of it—of what it might tell her, or show her. Perhaps both. When it was at last too dark to walk farther, Timou found a smooth place for her blanket and made a tiny fire so that she could have hot tea. She took her blanket out of the knapsack Jonas had given her and wrapped it slowly around herself, thinking of him for the first time since she had walked past the village marker and into solitude.

She had not missed him before; she had not missed anyone. But she wanted human company tonight, familiar voices to cushion her against the strangeness and silence of the great forest. She tried to remember why she’d refused Jonas’s company; hadn’t her reasons seemed good? Yes: she’d thought he would distract her, and she’d been afraid that there might be unseen, unknowable peril for a man lacking the training of a mage. At the moment neither reason seemed compelling. She felt now that she might be just as happy if she were never alone again, and that she would be glad of any distraction Jonas might have brought with him.

She missed her father, suddenly and intensely—more than she missed Jonas, more than she missed anyone. Kapoen would not be afraid or surprised by anything the forest had put in her way. He would understand everything. She imagined him sitting across from her, head bowed, firelight throwing shadows across his face. He would say something to her, something brief and wise that would make sense of the pool and the white deer and take away the lingering chill both had left with her.

But he was not with her. He had left her. He’d walked away without explaining anything. Timou blinked into the fire, holding back surprising tears that prickled suddenly at the backs of her eyes. Her father had not wanted her with him; he had left her behind—no doubt for very good reasons. Although, Timou thought now, a little more fiercely than was really comfortable, he might have explained to her what those
were.

In flight from her own thoughts, Timou curled into her blanket, leaned her back against the great bole of a tree, and let her mind slip through its deep quiet existence until she could forget that she was small and human, and dream with the tree its slow circular dreams.

The morning came slowly in the forest, filtering past layer upon layer of green leaves. Timou’s mouth felt dry and sticky. She was stiff from lying on the ground, and still half lost within the green memories of the tree. But she was much happier. She wanted tea, and she ardently desired a bath with hot water and soap, but the morning brought with it a welcome renewal of courage and curiosity. The desolation of the previous night seemed strange in the green light of the morning, like a feeling that had belonged to someone else, some other traveler lost in the forest, perhaps. Though she would still have welcomed company—though she still more than half wished she had let Jonas come with her—she could look forward again to continuing on her journey and seeing what it held. She laid a hand on the trunk of the tree that had dreamed with her, grateful for its solidity and calm.

She made tea, ate a mouthful of hard bread, and walked on into the forest.

That day was much like the one just past, except there was no clearing in the trees. Only silence and a wind that moved branches high above, and the continual feeling that strange and beautiful things lay just out of sight among the trees. Yet, though she saw no more deer, dappled or white, the strong urge to leave the path and walk away into the trees had gone. She kept willingly to the path, and although she still looked out into the depths of the forest, she was almost glad when she saw nothing there but more forest.

After that all the days seemed to blur into one, and all the nights the same. Solitude began to seem, not welcome as it had been at first, but at least natural. People did not belong in this forest; human voices would have echoed strangely among these ancient trees. Timou almost began to believe she would always be walking through this forest: that there was no farther side to the trees, and that this solitary journey was the natural condition of her life. Of a mage’s life. There were echoes in this forest, she thought, of the stillness her father had taught her. Then she realized that, no, the silence her father had taught her was the echo; this great silence was surely its source.
The heart of magecraft is stillness.
Yes, she thought.
This
stillness. She understood that now in a way she had not in the village. She began again to be glad to be alone.

Once in those days Timou thought she glimpsed a ruined tower. She did not leave the path, though she was curious whether she might find a dragon coiled about the base of the tower if she went to look. Once, at twilight, she was certain she heard the music of a harp somewhere very close to where she lay gazing into the glimmering coals of her little fire. The music was sad, desolate. It drew her: she wanted to rise and go to the musician; lay down her heart to salve the sorrow she heard. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees and listened for a long time to the harp, until finally it ceased. She dreamed that night of leaves moving without wind and an endless harping that wove through the rustle they made.