The City in the Lake Read Online Free Page A

the nature of fire, and Timou saw that she was expected to let the other questions wait.

    One year was very like the next in the village. The children wandered without really noticing into the adult world. Ness sometimes took the sheep out with her father and sometimes wove the wool into cloth with her mother. Manet, who had looked bored all through her childhood as her father tried to teach her the intricacies of law and justice, suddenly took an interest in the magistrate’s business and learned to write a clean record of his adjudication. Jenne, the miller’s daughter, kept the accounts at the mill. Taene spent her days helping her father, who was the apothecary, make decoctions and tinctures and herbal oils.
    And Timou learned to follow the stars as they moved through their measured courses in the sky, and listen to the dark wild power that rolled behind the thunder of the spring storms. Once or twice she tried to tell Ness or Taene about these things, as they told her about their days. She found the other girls listened with wide-eyed interest, but that they listened as though Timou were reciting poetry. The mention of storms frightened them. Not even Taene understood the beauty that Timou saw in the wild magic of the Kingdom.
    So one spring progressed much like any that had gone before. One year, when Timou was sixteen, Tair, Taene’s eldest brother, began to leave his work sometimes and go up beyond the hillside pastures. And sometimes Ness would leave her weaving to walk with him through the woods. Neither Tair’s father nor Ness’s mother seemed to mind; indeed, all the village watched the young couple with tolerant pleasure. Ness married Tair in the long slow days of full summer, first of them all to marry, as she had always been the first at everything. Her mother put Ness’s hand into Tair’s and then whispered something into her daughter’s ear that made Ness blush and laugh out loud.
    Ness’s mother kissed Tair maternally on the forehead—she was a tiny woman, and had to drag him down quite far to do so—and he gave her the single brass coin that a bridegroom gives the bride’s mother as a token to show that he can support her daughter. Whatever she said to him made him laugh as well and kiss her back, on the cheek as a son should.
    Timou, standing with her father at the edge of the village commons, wondered what it would be like to stand out in front of everyone with a young man by her side. Would she be as happy as Ness looked? She felt her father’s gaze fall on her and dropped her eyes. Then Manet caught Timou’s hand and dragged her forward with the other unmarried girls to tease Ness, and the moment passed.
    In the fall, when chestnuts ripened and the air occasionally tasted of the coming frost, Jenne left the mill accounts to her three brothers and married the dyer’s son. The dyer built them a house next to his own. Dyes stained Jenne’s fingers in different colors, but she moved smiling through her days and did not seem to mind. Nod and Sime married after Jenne, and Sime’s mother, along with Nod’s sisters, baked hundreds of tiny iced cakes to give away at their wedding, each with a single rose petal hidden in its heart.
    Timou went to Jenne’s wedding, and Sime’s, and ate her share of the rose cakes. But she did not walk through the woods with any of the young men from the village. Sometimes a young man turned up again and then again in her way, finding chances to speak with her, assuring her that he saw only
her
face reflected in every drop of rain on leaf or flower. But Timou found that usually such young men did not really like to hear about the measures the stars traced in the heavens, or about the silence that lived at the heart of the fiercest storm. Even if a young man did not mind talk that turned toward mystery and magic, Kapoen’s quiet impassive gaze falling on him usually chilled his interest. One young man and then another decided instead to court girls who knew how