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been enough chances for it lately.” His tone was light, but the glance he turned her way was not.
    Timou stopped in the road, turning to face him. “Jonas—”
    “You needn’t say anything. I’d rather you didn’t.”
    “I will be a mage,” Timou said as gently as she knew how.
    “Yes,” said Jonas, not understanding what she meant. “It seems a fine thing to be.”
    Timou just looked at him, not knowing how to explain the cool stillness that lay at the heart of a mage.
    “Timou—”
    “Jonas . . . I don’t think I’ll ever marry. I don’t think mages do.”
    Jonas opened his mouth, probably to protest that this could not be true. But then he paused, doubtless thinking, as Timou was, of her father’s untouchable calm. It was impossible to imagine Kapoen beset by passion or overwhelmed by longing. It was impossible to forget that he had not married Timou’s mother.
    Jonas bowed his head a little, his expression unreadable. He said after a moment, his tone still light, “Well. It seems a shame, if mages never marry. But you needn’t, I suppose, if you don’t care to.” He made a little gesture toward the furniture maker’s house. “I’ll leave you here, then. Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow at the apothecary’s house. I hope you won’t let the prospect keep you away; I promise I won’t trouble you.”
    It didn’t occur to Timou until she was all but home that in fact she did not feel calm. That Jonas had promised a thing he could not, after all, give her. Because she
was
troubled.

    Gradually, during these early spring days, the tension Timou thought had existed between herself and her father had eased away; she was not sure it had ever been there save in her own mind. She was certain Kapoen now saw the confusion Jonas had let into her heart, but if so, he did not speak of it directly. He only brought out a set of heavy leather-bound books that contained words written in gold ink in a narrow looping alphabet. He showed her how she could clear her mind and let the unfamiliar words speak to her. They told her tales out of the long reaches of history: tales of the young Kingdom and the first mages who found or created it and then wandered through it admiring its wonders and curiosities.
    Some of the stories were familiar to Timou, for her father had told them to her—it seemed to her she must have heard them first while still in her cradle, for she felt she had been born knowing them. Others were new. The golden writing drew her into the tales until it seemed to her she lived them herself: as though she had stood with the mage Irinore when he first saw the City in the Lake and built in echo the City at the heart of the Kingdom.
    These stories pulled her away from the daily life of the village and further into her own magecraft: she dreamed of forests and dragons and ruined towers hiding riddles at their hearts, and not of the village or of ordinary things. The bright brisk days lengthened and the oaks put out their first new leaves while Timou wandered among the ages of history. It almost began to seem to her that she might have imagined or dreamed the book that had shown her the mage Deserisien and the woman with Timou’s face but her own dark smile. There was no mention of either in the books she read now. Sometimes she still went to Taene’s house, and sometimes she encountered Jonas there. He gave no sign he thought more of her than of Taene; his smile at them each was the same, reserved and wry. Though Timou was glad of this, she found she was also somehow disappointed, as though she had wanted both—both the ordinary life he might have wanted to offer her and the life her father held out before her. Since she could not choose both and since this was hard to face, Timou found it easier to avoid Taene’s house.
    Then the first ewes dropped their lambs, and every one was born dead. And the goats their kids, the same. Even the sows, when they farrowed, which few did that year, produced small