Between the works-town of Dern and the reed-town of Sallow lies a lake split in two by an old set of gates — and the strip of bank where they stand belongs to neither side.

Tarn Sile has kept those gates since they were small enough to be lifted to the windlass. Every morning before first-light, Tarn scrubs the stone, winds the water through by a hand's breadth, and reads what no one else for two towns round can read: the true colour going down past the surface into the deep. It is a life lived in the in-between — the nobody of the nowhere ground, trusted by both towns precisely because they each believe, in secret, that the keeper is really theirs.

Then a child at the gap begins to read the water too. A famous reviver comes over the pass — and refuses to take a side, refuses even to say. And the old quarrel between Dern and Sallow tightens toward a breaking the gates were never built to hold.

When the bank finally strains past bearing, Tarn must decide whether to go on keeping the water in careful, separate halves — or open the gates, let the two become one, and read the whole of it aloud, in the open, for the first time in a life spent folding small.

A luminous, slow-burning standalone in the Orrowmere Story, The Lake That Belonged to No One is a fable about neutrality and belonging, about the courage it takes to be read whole — perfect for readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia A. McKillip, and Piranesi.

Read the first chapter

Chapter 1: The Gates Between

The gates were easiest to work before first-light, when there was no one on either bank to see them do it, and that was the hour Tarn Sile liked them best — the two waters lying quiet on their two sides of the old bank, the broad one to the west already going pale where the sky meant to come up, the narrow one to the east still black as a covered well, and between them, where the gates stood shut in the stone, the one thin bright seam where the two were let to touch. Tarn put a shoulder to the windlass and wound the near gate up by the season's measure, a hand's breadth and not a finger more, and the seam widened by that hand's breadth and went on about its quiet business — the broad water slipping through to the narrow the way it had done every first-light Tarn had been alive to wind it, without supposing it was doing anything that wanted thinking about, or once considering that the keeper who turned the windlass could read a thing no one else for two towns round could read.

The stone wanted scrubbing. The stone always wanted scrubbing — wherever the water lay against it day and night it furred over, a soft pale crust that came up faintly rough under the thumb, the same way the inside of a kettle goes furred and white when it is never quite let to cool. The works-folk over in Dern called it the fur and took it off where it would foul a channel, and the reed-folk over in Sallow paid it no mind at all, having no sunk stone to speak of and no patience for what they could not see; but the gates were neither town's, and the fur grew thick on them on both faces, and it had always fallen to whoever kept the gates to keep them clean. Tarn had scrubbed this same stone since they were small enough to be lifted to reach it, and their hands had gone the colour of the work in the doing — chapped across the knuckle, pale at the heel of the palm, so that in the grey before the light a stranger might not easily have said where the wet stone left off and the keeper began.

Brush to it, then, in the old order: the western face first, where the broad water lay, and the crust came away in soft flakes and went off down the current, and the stone beneath showed the colour it had worn all that season — a flat ochre-grey, the dull unbothered grey of a thing that has given up and not troubled anyone with the news. Then the eastern face, the Dern side, and the same brush, and the same flakes, and underneath the same grey, no better and no worse, as though the two waters could agree on nothing in the world but that. Tarn worked along the sill from the one face to the other and back, and said nothing about the colour, there being no one to say it to and nothing to be gained by it; for the proper answer to a gate-keeper with opinions about the colour of the fur was the same in Sallow as in Dern, which was a kind word and a change of the subject, and Tarn had learned the lesson young and learned it well.

The thumb went to the seam without being told to.

It always did — at the narrow live line in the middle of the gates where the two waters met and ran as one for the width of a hand, Tarn's thumb went to the water the way another body's eyes go to a fire, ahead of any thought, feeling for a thing they could not have named if a town had asked them to. Down it went, the cold of the broad water and the colder of the deep crossing under the ball of the thumb, and down further, the feel of it going on past where the eye said the bottom ought to be — a floor under the floor, a depth that opened out below the cleaned stone and kept opening, so that for as long as the thumb stayed in the seam there was no bottom to the lake at all, only down and further down and a colour rising up out of all that downness to meet the skin. Here, and only here, the fur on the stone had not gone grey. A thread of it, no wider than the seam itself, came up under the thumb a deep and living blue going over into violet at its heart, the true colour, the colour the whole of both banks ought to have worn and had not worn for longer than Tarn could remember. It was the one place in two towns where the water still said the thing a lake says when it is read whole and answered true.

Tarn's hand, coming off the water, went to their coat pocket and closed there a moment around a small cold thing worn smooth with carrying, the way a hand goes to a thing it has gone to ten thousand times and no longer notices the going. Then they took the hand out, empty, and wiped it on their thigh, and got on.

It was a thing nobody had taught them, the reading, and it was a thing nobody had ever asked them to do, and that suited Tarn entirely. A keeper could go a long way at the gates on a thing nobody had asked for, provided they kept it behind their teeth — and keeping things behind their teeth was the one craft Tarn had in better supply than any other, having had it drilled into them from a height since before they could properly walk the bank. There was a lamp burning low in the cottage window up the slope where the road met the water, which meant their mother was awake and not yet up, which meant the morning was still Tarn's own for a while; and the late half of that household, the Dern half, was in the ground these four winters and lived now only in the way the cottage had been built — on the one strip of bank that was neither town's, by two people no town would house under the one roof, who had settled on the seam because the seam was the only ground left to them and had become, between them, its keepers.

The bank itself was the whole of the trouble, and Tarn had stood on it so long they had nearly stopped seeing it for what it was. Generations back — past the oldest stone, past the reach of anyone's grandmother's grandmother — the people of the one lake had fallen out over how the water was to be read, and rather than go on quarrelling they had done a thing that seemed sensible at the time and had not seemed sensible since: they had thrown a bank across the water at its natural pinch, where the shores came near to meeting, and set gates in the bank, and given each half to the folk who liked that half best. The broad shallow western water, all sky and reed and open colour, had gone to the people who read a lake by its surface — by the colour that lay along the top of it and the way the sky sat in it — and they had become Sallow, and answered their water in the way of the far lakes Tarn had only heard of, with a painted board nailed up on a post by the landing where every barge would see it. The narrow deep eastern water, cold and spring-fed and dark, had gone to the people who read a lake by what lay under it — by the colour down in the deeps and the fur on the sunk stones — and they had become Dern, and answered their water with their hands, crouched at the cold edge with a palm flat to a wet stone and never a drop of paint to their names. And each town read true to the only water it had ever had, and so each town was certain in its bones that the other's reading was the counterfeit, the froth or the mud, the half that did not count.

The fur ran grey on both of them now. Tarn did not know why and had given up the asking of it, but the asking had a way of coming back at the seam, where the colour still rose true between the two dead banks like a single green shoot in a trodden yard, and a body who read the whole water all in one go, top to floor, the way Tarn read it without ever meaning to, might have got close to the answer if a body had been let to say such things aloud. A body had not. So Tarn scrubbed the sill, and stowed the brush in its bracket under the near post, and went up to the cottage to put the kettle on, and the asking went back behind the teeth where it lived.

By the time the light came up properly — grey first, then a thin and grudging gold over the eastern hills, the Dern hills — the quiet had gone out of the morning all at once and in good enough temper. A reed-boat was already coming down the broad shallows out of Sallow with a low flat shape to it and a single hand at the pole, and on the far narrow side a Dern figure had come down to the deep channel by the gates and crouched at the edge with the patience of a heron. Tarn knew them both by the way they moved before they were near enough to know by anything else. The reed-boat was Annet, who cut and traded the reed off the Sallow shallows and set her fish-traps in the slack water near the seam because the fish ran best there, or had used to; and the figure at the deep edge was Garrow, who minded the sunk channel-stones for Dern and came down most mornings to feel along the lip of the deep for whatever the night had fouled. They had known each other the whole of their lives. They were the better part of twenty yards apart across the seam and the bank. They would no more have called out across that water to one another than they would have set fire to their own roofs.

Annet brought her boat in along the Sallow side and made it fast to the near post, and looked at the seam, and looked at the grey fur on the western face of the gates that Tarn had just laid bare, and said, "It's worse, that. Tell me that's not worse than the turn of last season."

"It's not worse than the turn of last season," Tarn said, which was true, the season being only just turned, and was also not in the least what Annet had meant, and they both let it stand.

"My near traps come up half what they did." Annet wound a length of wet line round her fist and unwound it again, the way she did when she was working up to a thing. "And it's the draw doing it. The deep side's drawing harder than it ought, pulling the slack water cold, and the fish won't lie in cold slack, and you can tell the Dern man so from me." She did not look at Garrow when she said it, though he was well within the carry of her voice. "You can tell him to ease whatever he's got down there pulling at my reeds, before there's no reed worth cutting on this side of the bank at all."

Tarn took the words the few yards they were given to take them. This was the work, more than the windlass and the brush were the work — the carrying of a thing from the one bank to the other across a gap that was no wider than a thrown stone and might as well have been the breadth of the world. "Annet says the slack's running cold by her near traps," Tarn said to Garrow, crouched at his deep edge, "and wonders is there a stone shifted in the deep channel that might be drawing harder than it used."

Garrow did not look up from the water. He had his sleeve pushed past the elbow and his arm in the lake to the place where the cold bit, and he was feeling along something under the surface with the flats of two fingers, reading it the slow Dern way, by touch and by the colour he claimed to find down there that no Sallow eye had ever once made out. "Nothing's shifted," he said to the water. "Nothing's shifted in that channel since my father's time. You can tell her" — and here a faint dry weight came onto the her, the weight that Sallow and Dern alike put on the word the other when they would not say a neighbour's name — "you can tell her it's not the deep drawing her slack cold. It's that there's no body in her water to keep it warm. Her side's gone to froth and shallows and she's blaming honest stone for it. The grey's hers as much as ours, only she can't see grey, she can only see the top of the day."

It was, Tarn thought, nearly word for word what Annet had said of him, turned the other way about; and neither of them had the least idea they were saying the one thing; and there was no profit in all the wide wet world in pointing it out. Tarn went back across the gap with the message folded into something a person could be handed without flinching. "Garrow says nothing's shifted in the channel he can find," they told Annet, "and that the cold in the slack might be the season more than the draw — he'll go along the deep again and feel for anything new." The last of that was a gift and not a report, Garrow having promised no such thing; but he would, because he always did, and it cost Tarn nothing to lay it down soft, and it took the worst of the edge off Annet's mouth, which was the whole of the point.

"Season," Annet said, in the tone of a woman accepting a coin she suspects is short. "It's not the season. I've fished thirty turns of the season off this shallow and I know the difference between the season and a thing going wrong." She looked once, quickly, at the grey fur on the gates, and then away from it, the way a person looks away from a cough that has gone on too long in someone they are fond of. "But I'll set the far traps and leave the near ones lie a while. You're a good lad, Tarn. You always were the only one down here with any sense." She cast off, and poled out into the broadening light, and was gone up the shallows before Tarn could decide whether to mind being called a lad, which they did and did not, in roughly equal parts, and had long since stopped bothering to sort out.

Garrow stayed a while longer at his edge, feeling the deep, and then drew his arm out streaming and shook it and stood, his shoulders cracking. "She's not wrong that it's worse," he said, to Tarn now, or to the water, it was never quite possible to say which. "I'll give her that and you needn't carry it. The colour's down further than it was. I have to go arm-deep now to find it where I used to find it at the wrist, and it's a poor thin blue when I do, more grey than blue, like the lake's keeping it back from me." He looked at the gates, at the one bright thread in the seam, and for the space of a breath something passed over his face that Tarn knew very well, having worn it themselves at the sill not an hour since — the look of a person who has felt the edge of an answer and knows the answer is not theirs to be let to say. Then it went, and he was only a tired works-hand on a cold morning again. "Tell her far traps was sense," he said. "Don't tell her I said so." And he went back up the Dern bank the way he had come, and did not look at the seam again.

So that was both of them seen to, and both of them eased, and neither of them any nearer the other than the bank had left them; and Tarn stood at the gates between with the cleaned stone going dry in patches and the kettle long since boiled dry up the slope, no doubt, and felt the small patient wrongness sit where it always sat, low down and off to one side, a draught in a shut room. It did not care that Tarn could feel it and not name it. It had never cared. A body could carry such a thing a great distance, behind the teeth, and Tarn meant to carry it as far as the road that morning, because the road was waiting and the carter was not coming.

There was a letter to go up. There was nearly always a letter to go up — Sallow writing to the pitch-traders over the passes for a barrel of something, or Dern sending word after a load of iron that had not come, the two towns being as ready to write to the far side of the world as they were unable to call across twenty yards of their own water — and when the carter could not come round in time, as the carter could not that turn, the letter went up to the pass-road in the keeper's bag, to be handed on at the high waystation to whoever was coming down. The pass-road was the one part of the whole wet quarrelsome world that was Tarn's. It was not Sallow's and it was not Dern's; it climbed out of the seam and up between the hills to the high ground where the trade-roads ran, and a person walking it was, for that little while, the keeper of nothing and the relay of no one and simply a body on a road with the lake falling away behind them and the wider country opening up ahead, where there were folk, Tarn was told, who had only the one water and read it whole and thought nothing of it.

Tarn took the bag down off its peg by the cottage door, and looked in at the low lamp and the shape of their mother not yet stirred, and did not wake her, and slung the bag and went down past the gates to where the pass-road began. At the foot of it they stopped, the way they always stopped, and looked back at the seam.

It lay there bright between its two grey banks, the one live line in a dead water, the place where the lake still remembered out loud what it was — and not a soul in two towns knew it was there to be read, save the one body standing at the foot of the road with a bag on their shoulder and their hand, without their deciding it, gone again to the small cold smooth thing in their pocket. Tarn took the hand out, and turned, and started up the road, and said nothing at all; and behind them the seam ran on, blue going over into violet at its heart, telling the truth to no one, the way it had every morning of Tarn's life, and would tomorrow.