The City in the Lake (21 page)

“Then perhaps you should come to the forest as well,” Timou said, trying to think. “We might hide there, better than here.” She wondered what the forest would be like, here in this eternal aspect of the Kingdom.

But the King shook his head at this suggestion. “This is the heart of my strength, right here. And, yes, with Cassiel here the Kingdom is whole, and strong. I think we had better stay right here.”

“Oh, no,” Timou said, amazed that he didn’t understand what a terrible, dangerous idea this was. “We mustn’t stay here. Staying here is the worst thing we could do—”

“Why?” asked the King in a tone that suggested that he wasn’t offended, that he really wanted to know what she thought.

“You are the strength of the Kingdom, Your Majesty, but you are not its heart. Oh,” Timou cried in sudden impatience and fear, “if only I had seen the pattern she was making, before she trapped me behind her mirror. I should have seen it—the forest tried to tell me—” She stopped suddenly.

“The
forest
tried to tell . . .” Neill’s voice, rising in surprise, stopped abruptly as Timou’s had.

Timou made a faint sound, fascinated despite herself now that she knew whom she was looking at. She thought,
She does look like me. Except for her eyes. Even when I know it is her, it is like looking into a mirror. . . .

The King grated, “Cracking ice, boy, she did follow you here.”

“Both of us,” said Timou, faintly. “She followed both of us.”

“I assure you,” Neill breathed, “that was not my intent at all.” He had gone chalk-white. He had put a hand on the balustrade for support, and yet he had also shoved his younger brother back behind him. Cassiel was looking from Timou to her mother, as though searching for differences between them was the most important task in the world.

“How touching,” observed Lelienne. “A family reunion.” She stood in the doorway of the tower, smiling faintly. Her tone was amused. She looked as though she had just poured herself out of the moonlight. She wore a plain white gown. A single strand of black and white pearls dressed her hair. She came out onto the gallery, moving as though she could not imagine anyone or anything in this place offering her the slightest threat.

“It’s very interesting,” Lelienne commented sedately, gazing over the balustrade. “A Kingdom within a Kingdom . . . layers of truth and magic. Trevennen did not tell me about this.” Her eyes, like fragments of the night, went to the King. “Neither did you, Drustan.”

The King had not moved. He answered without blinking, “It isn’t what I’d consider pillow talk, love.”

“I think it would have made lovely pillow talk. You know, Drustan, if you continue with whatever it is that you are trying to do, I will crush your son’s heart. Your younger son’s, of course. I can do it.”

“She can,” said Neill sharply, warning.

Timou had not been aware that the King was trying to do anything, but she nevertheless was aware when he stopped trying to do it: it was like a loosening of the air all around them. He lowered his eyes, like a fencer lowering his blade. Then he lifted them again. They were hard as the heartwood of an oak. “You will kill him anyway, so that the Kingship will come to your son.”

Lelienne smiled. “Yes,” she said, “but when? Now, or in a little while? What are a few seconds worth to you, Drustan?”

Behind Neill, Cassiel caught his breath suddenly, his eyes widening. His brother, face blank, looking neither at his father nor at his mother, caught Cassiel as his legs gave.

The King, his face twisting, came forward at Lelienne like a bull charging. She stood still, smiling, and he crashed suddenly to a dead halt, as though he had run full tilt into a wall made of air and moonlight. The shock drove him to his knees, bellowing with rage.

Neill caught up his brother’s strange sword and threw it, with precise aim, at his mother. Lelienne did not even twitch her hand or glance at it, but it shattered in the air and rained like shards of glass to the stones of the gallery. There, it re-formed under the pressure of the moonlight and lay glimmering and still on the stones, utterly useless against her.

Timou became moonlight, and fled into the air. Her mother, forgetting both the King and Cassiel, turned immediately to follow that flight, her head tilting back as though she could track one gleaming fall of light through all the shadows. She could. She peeled Timou ruthlessly out of the light and forced her back into her own shape. Timou, finding herself again on the tower’s gallery, melted instantly into stone and hid herself in unending time and silence, where even her mother seemed to have difficulty finding her.

“Stop it,” said Lelienne, and turned all of Cassiel’s bones to fire.

He convulsed, the shock of agony too great even to permit him to scream. The sound he made instead was thin and bodiless, worse than a scream.

Neill shook his brother as if he could shake the fire out of him, shouting incoherently. The King cried out, as though giving voice himself to all of his son’s agony.

“Come
here,
” said Lelienne, and tapped her foot impatiently.

Timou pulled herself out of the stone, shaking.

“Don’t do that again,” her mother said, and, against the balustrade a dozen feet away, Cassiel got a hand under him and tried, dazedly, to stand. He was perfectly unhurt, but the memory of pain was stark in his face. He looked, in that moment, a good deal like his elder brother.

“Why my son?” asked the King huskily. “Why Cassiel? What has the boy ever done to offend you?”

“Nothing,” said Lelienne. “Except exist, a slight complication that will in the end prove, I expect, to be of no consequence. But you will all yield to me in order to defend him. So he is that much use to me. I thought he might be.” She fixed Timou in her regard, frowning thoughtfully. “Even you, strangely enough. Would you defend any chance-met stranger as eagerly? My own son, perhaps?”

Neill, standing by his brother, did not move. But his face went still.

“Whom would
you
defend?” Timou asked her. She had folded her hands tightly together to hide their shaking. She could hear when she spoke how disturbingly like her mother’s her own voice was. “Anyone? No one? You bear children in order to consume them. Because only your own are worth the trouble. I had been told that about you. What are you? Not a mage. I never understood what your kind were. Are.”

“Hardly mages,” said her mother. Her eyebrows had lifted. “But you, of course, are. Kapoen did well by you, my daughter. You have all the gifts I had hoped for; all the ability to see into the essence of things, and men. That will be a useful skill for me.”

Timou swallowed.

“I thought Kapoen might simply kill you,” added Lelienne conversationally. “That would have forced me to start again, and even Trevennen knew better by that time . . . but he couldn’t simply cut your throat, could he? Not Kapoen. He tangled you in the strange magic of this Kingdom instead, until all the threads I followed to find you ended in a snarl I could not track through. Did he love you?”

Timou closed her eyes, flinching from the pain of a thousand memories. “Yes,” she breathed, her voice shaking.

“He should have known better. He should have known that eventually you would ask the right questions and look into the right mirror. But he was a fool.” Lelienne ran her hands over her flawless hair, ending with a pleased pat at the strand of pearls.

“And your son was already in the right place,” rumbled the King. He was watching her closely, forceful eyes narrowed.

“I knew you would keep him close by you. Why not? Even when you got a true heir, I knew it would not be in you to cut the throat of any son I’d borne you. Even one for whom you never particularly cared.” Lelienne studied him. “I don’t understand that,” she added unnecessarily.

“I can see that,” said the King drily. “So. What now, love?”

“Now?” said Lelienne. She glanced around, gesturing lightly to take in all the view. “I am so glad my children led me to this place. There is a fascinating depth of power to the City here. I don’t believe I would have managed to absorb the magic of this Kingdom if I had not found this City. Now, of course, it should present no difficulty. I am correct in believing that this is in fact your Kingdom? Not merely the other?”

“Both,” said the King. “And a good thing, too.” He knelt and laid his hands flat on the stones of the gallery. Lelienne watched him, amused and interested, not at all concerned. She might have believed it was to her that the King knelt; Timou knew it was not. The King, his face intent, rose. Beneath his hands, out of the stones, out of the dark, he drew tigers. They flowed forward like water, muscles rippling under their tawny pelts, eyes green as the water of the Lake in the winter.

“Yes,” breathed Neill.

“I hardly think so,” said Lelienne, and turned the tigers to stone. They only shook themselves back out of rigidity and yawned at her, showing great teeth as long as a man’s thumb.

Lelienne backed up a step, speaking rapidly: her words, heavy and tangible, swept the tigers off the gallery. They did not fall, but only frayed into dusk and then pulled themselves back out of the night. One coughed, low and threatening. They both leapt, but Lelienne was not there: she re-formed herself out of air after they had passed. There was a narrow silver knife in her hand. She did not speak.

Timou caught her breath. From his place by the balustrade, Neill moved suddenly, and then stopped, uncertain. The tigers separated and stalked Lelienne, one from either side. The King himself did not look worried. He was, after all, twenty feet away, and twice her size. And the tigers were readying to spring.

None of them moved in time, or decisively enough—not even the tigers. Lelienne did not step forward and stab the King. Nor did she throw her little silver knife. But suddenly it was no longer in her hand. It stood in the King’s chest. In the pale light, the blood that welled slowly up around the blade looked black.

Even then the King did not seem afraid. He raised one hand to touch the knife’s hilt. He took a single step forward, firmly, as though he were too large a man to be even inconvenienced by a little knife like that one. His expression, angry, was only just beginning to show surprise. He took another step. When he crashed to his knees, it was all at once, with no warning whatever, and Timou thought she could feel the tower shake. Or the entire Kingdom, perhaps.

The tigers were gone, like smoke; shadows called from the night by the will of the King, they dissolved back into the night once the King had been struck down.

Of them all, it was Neill who was suddenly at his father’s side, supporting him, one hand going, appalled, to touch the welling blood.

“Cassiel,” whispered the King. Neill’s head went back slightly as though he had been struck, although his expression did not change. And then, in one last moment of lucid, unexpected kindness, the King moved his hand to touch his elder son’s arm and said, “Neill.”

He died. His body faded slowly into the dimness, dissipating into the night. Then, like the tigers, it was gone, leaving his ash-haired son kneeling on the gallery with his arms empty and a stunned expression in his black eyes.

“That’s one,” Lelienne said briskly. “Now, let’s see if the rest of this works properly.” The silver knife was back in her hand. She was looking at Cassiel. He did not even see her. He probably did not hear her. His attention was all for his brother, and for the place where their father had so briefly lain. He looked stricken.

Timou slid into light, glimmering down the edge of the silver knife in her mother’s hand. When Lelienne, startled, glanced down at the knife, Timou leapt as a flash of silver light at her mother’s eyes.

Timou had never tried to kill anyone before. It had never occurred to her that she might ever want to. She was amazed at the way the knowledge of how to do it came to her. She thought of her father, of the King, of Neill’s blank expression and Cassiel’s pain, and turned her mother’s eyes to ice, filled her throat with ice so that she could neither speak nor breathe, sent ice striking inward toward her heart.

Lelienne dropped the knife, which shredded into light and air rather than falling to the gallery floor. She seemed surprised at last.

Timou closed her attention, like cold blades of ice, around her mother’s heart.

Then the ice was gone. Timou stood shivering in the cold air, her own form momentarily unfamiliar. Lelienne coughed, spat blood, and shook herself all over, like a dog shaking off water after a swim. But what she shook away was discomfiture. She examined Timou curiously. “That was startling,” she commented.

Timou was not trying to be startling. She was trying to be effective. She slid once more away from her body, into shadow. She found there a different form to wear, one that seemed somehow familiar to her heart. As her mother sought her, she formed herself out of the shadows and stalked forward on massive velvet feet.

Lelienne looked surprised again, this time at the white tiger that leapt at her out of stone and shadow. It had a head broad as a man’s chest, feet round and wide as platters; stripes black as night ran across its face and down its sides. Its ivory claws struck for Lelienne’s throat and face. At the last instant, Lelienne threw up a hand, calling out strange words that, heavy and powerful, flung the tiger away and pinned it against the tower. She held the tiger there as she pulled Timou out of it; Timou found herself at last again in her own body, blinking dazed eyes that should have been slit-pupiled and able to see in the dark. For a moment she was unable to understand why she did not have a striped white pelt and daggered feet.

“That is enough,” said Lelienne, sounding more impatient than angry. “I see you are indeed a child of this Kingdom; good. But that is enough.”

Stone closed itself around Timou’s heart: she could not move. She could barely breathe. It felt to her that she had become stone, but it was not true stone that she might understand, to shape herself back out of it. It was
not
stone. But it was like that. She breathed; she moved. But she was trapped. She could no more change her shape than she could understand her mother’s heart.