The City in the Lake Read Online Free

Taene, catching Timou’s hand.
    The questions did not go away, but Manet’s demanding tone and Taene’s pleading made them seem less important. Timou jumped to her feet. But the questions settled to the back of her mind, along with the sense of loss she had learned suddenly to feel, and after that neither quite left her. In the slow quiet days of winter, when the snow came deep upon the village and people stayed mostly to themselves, the questions came back to trouble her.
    Timou asked her father these questions one cold evening when they both sat by the fire after supper. She did not mean to ask him. Timou sat on a rug on the floor—her favorite rug, with a maze of red leaves that wove into the center of the rug and out again, if you knew how to trace the pattern with your finger just the right way. She was leaning her elbow on the hearth and looking into the fire, but she was not seeing the coals or the burning wood. She was seeing a stone bridge and a woman with frost-pale hair holding out a rosewood cradle. And a tall somber man with her father’s face, who reached out his hands to take it.
    “Timou?” asked her father, watching her, wondering what was behind her silence, and when Timou looked at him, she forgot to veil her thoughts. He saw the questions in her eyes.
    “Ah,” he said softly.
    Timou, since she was discovered anyway, asked him, “Is there always a woman, where there is a man and a mystery?”
    Her father sighed and looked away from her, into the fire. “Likely so. And where there is a baby, there is likely a woman.” He was not angry, but he had become serious. He added, speaking carefully and slowly, “Your mother was a beautiful woman, very fair, as you are, with winter-pale hair, as you have, but her eyes were dark as the winter sky.”
    It made Timou uncomfortable that her father should speak so carefully. She did not understand the shape of the secret she saw in his eyes. She asked tentatively, “Did she . . . did she die, then? Having me? Like Nod’s mother?” She held her breath waiting for his answer: she was suddenly certain he would say,
Yes, your mother died as Nod’s mother died.
No white-haired woman had given away her baby; there had only been the birthing struggle and then silence. That was why her father had brought her away from the City. . . .
    Her father moved a hand restlessly. But he said after a pause, “No. She did not die.”
    “Oh.” Timou was silent for a moment, reordering her thoughts once more. “Then . . . why did she give me away to you? Wasn’t she sorry to watch you take me away?” She wanted to ask, but was not brave enough,
Were you glad to take me with you?
    The secrets in her father’s eyes moved and shifted like firelight, but did not take on any recognizable shape. His mouth thinned, not with anger, but with something even less familiar that Timou did not recognize. He said at last, “She could not keep you with her, and I . . . would not let her give you to anyone else.”
    Timou looked quickly into the fire so that the reflected light would hide the leap of her heart. When she thought she could keep her voice calm and the press of her questions secret in her eyes, she looked up and said, “Do you think she will ever—Do you think I will ever meet her?”
    There was an infinitesimal pause. Then her father said only, “I don’t know, Timou.”
    He spoke this time with a kind of restraint that made Timou wonder what he wasn’t saying. She thought it was important. She looked into the fire again, wondering what kinds of secrets might make her father sound that way. “Was she a mage, like you?”
    “She was a mage, of sorts. But not like me,” said her father, and stood up decisively to add another piece of wood to the fire. That was all he said, and Timou saw that he would not say anything else, so she did not ask. The questions, she understood, had not been answered, but they had been changed. But then her father began to ask her about