The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  Then there were books…At first, they were little more than a burden, a tedium forced on her by adults who valued odd things called “learning your letters” and “self-improvement.” The words she puzzled out in her chapbook were invariably dull and flat compared to the stories Nurse told her at bedtime or her own imaginings about the shining place. Lesson books, with their facts about the lengths of rivers and uses of plants, were little better. She would not mind being the person who measured the rivers—that might have been exciting. But the geography book did not touch on that. It was just fact after boring fact. “And what good are they?” she grumbled to her governess.

  “Men suffered a lot to find those things out,” the governess said. And made children suffer ever after, Aude thought. But she did not say it. The governess had the look on her face that suggested trouble. Nevertheless, the next day, the governess offered her a small book with a green cover in place of the schoolbook. “There. To show you how hard it was to find those things out.”

  It was called Some Memoirs on the Mapping of the Southern Plains, and the only pictures inside were a couple of faded maps. Aude stared at it with suspicion, certain of a trap. The author was one Colonel Lord J-A Saverell, which sounded all too like one of her uncle’s friends. “Read that and write an account of it,” said the governess, and she swept out of the room, doubtless to hobnob with the housekeeper in the warm staff sitting room. Left behind in the chilly nursery, Aude picked up the book and reluctantly turned to the first chapter. After a while, she got up and fetched the big dictionary from the governess’ desk. Then she went on reading.

  That night, it was she who told Nurse a story, about the colonel’s adventures with wild animals and raging rivers as he crossed the huge plains. The colonel had seen things even stranger than those in her nursery tales, although he had not seen the shining place—or not on that trip, anyway. The next morning, she composed a letter to the colonel, asking him if he had ever seen a place such as hers and, if not, requesting him to go on a new expedition to find it. The governess shook her head, and laughed. “Colonel Saverell is dead, child. He can’t go anywhere.”

  “Then I will,” Aude said, and stuck out her chin. “Next year. Or the one after.” She considered the governess, who was middle-aged and inclined to plumpness. “You can come, too, but there’ll be a lot of walking.”

  None of the books she read after that—and reading became one of her greatest pleasures—had much to add to her vision. But she hoped, all the same.

  When she was ten, her uncle summoned her to the library after nursery supper and showed her a drawer full of estate rolls and letters patent. “This is your inheritance.” On a map, he pointed out to her where her lands lay, the woods she owned, the rivers she controlled. He had grown shorter, somehow, and his voice quieter, but his hands were the same. She was more interested in the map than those hands by then, leaning over them in the hope of finding the shining place. She asked her uncle, “Where are there palaces with lots of arches?”

  He frowned. It was not the kind of thing she was supposed to be thinking about. He said, “A well-built house is far better than a palace. Silly, wasteful things. Not even the emperor lives in one now.”

  “Yes, Uncle.” It did not do to make him angry. “I was just wondering about…about what sort of places you find them in.”

  “Tarnaroq, I suppose. But they’re empty.”

  Tarnaroq was where the emperor lived. She had studied him with her governess. His courts and abandoned palaces did not sound anything like what she had seen that day in the shrubbery or later in her dreams.

  Her uncle was often away, and the governess allowed her free run of the library. By then she had transferred most of her hunt for knowledge to books. Her old hiding place in the shrubbery was too small for her now, and she no longer liked to get dirty. In the library, she had started with the shelves nearest the big window, where the books about animals and birds were kept. After that she began to work her way around the room case by case, taking down the most interesting-looking books from each. She was nearly eleven when she reached the case containing the religious books. Her family attended temple at festival times, of course, and she enjoyed the dancing and the special cakes afterward. Nurse had taught her the words to the simple rites, and, with the governess, she had studied the history of the temples. But apart from Cook, no one in the household was particularly religious. Aude was tempted, as a result, to skip those books entirely and move on to the next case, which looked more alluring. But something—some impulse to tidiness, perhaps—held her back, and she took a dark-covered book at random from the middle shelf. It was called The Marcellan Epitome, and it was printed in small dense type with no pictures. She would read one chapter and move on.

  She had heard of Marcellan, of course. He had written the first stories about the otherworld and its lords. The priest at the town temple called him the Pioneer, and Cook kept a little booklet of his tenets in her apron pocket. Marcellan had taught people to read and to work iron, to use the stars to navigate, and to build irrigation channels. “Although,” the governess said, “these days most people don’t think he did all those things. But he was a great scholar.”

  He had also written about the gods and their lives in the five massive books named for him. There was a set of those, bound in green leather and tooled in silver, in the library. They were almost too big and too heavy for Aude to lift. She did not think anyone ever read them, not even Cook. The dark book was a summary of those writings, its introduction told her, made by some retired priest “for the convenience of busy readers.” She took it to her favorite seat in the window and settled in with it, expecting to be bored.

  Her shining place was on the fifty-fourth page, described in six terse lines. The retired priest had preferred explanation to description. She bit her lip. She did not want to share her place with someone so dull. But on the next page he went on to explain how he knew. And it was not he who had seen it; it was Marcellan. She left the Epitome on the window seat and dragged a chair over to the case that held the books by Marcellan. Teetering and gasping, she tugged out the second volume and shuffled with it to the nearest table. Chapter Four, the retired priest had said. She turned the pages quickly and began to read. She read through nursery tea, ignoring Nurse’s protests, through one of the maids coming in to light candles, through the adult dinner bell, and almost through bedtime. Her place was real. Marcellan had been there and had seen the roses and the arches, the golden light and the beautiful dancers. He called it the Rice Palace, the home of the Grass King. He had found a doorway to it and had passed through it to visit the Rice Palace and write about it for Aude to read.

  Even the governess agreed that Marcellan had been a real person. And if he was real, then the places he wrote about must be real, too. “He found a doorway to the Rice Palace,” she told Nurse, over her hasty supper. “And I will, too.”

  Nurse smiled and stroked her hair. “Of course you will, lovey.” Aude looked at her sidelong. Nurse was not taking her seriously. The governess was no better. “Marcellan doesn’t mean he literally went to that place. It’s a metaphor. He’s talking about ways he thinks people might live.”

  “He doesn’t call it a metaphor,” Aude said, stubbornly. “He says it’s a well-ordered realm.”

  The governess smiled. “You’ll understand it better when you’re older.” That meant the adults were humoring her. Aude frowned. She wished Colonel Lord J-A Saverell were still alive. He would have understood, she was sure of it.

  At the end of lessons, she sneaked a sheet of paper from the stack on the governess’ desk and slid it up her sleeve. That night, after Nurse had tucked her in, she composed a letter to the royal army. Colonel Saverell had thought very highly of his army colleagues. There must be one of them who had the same adventurous spirit as he. She thought long and hard about who that might be before finally addressing her missive to “the Bravest Officer.” She saved up the sweet biscuits from her afternoon tea
to give to one of the stable boys to slip it into the satchel of letters her uncle dispatched every week to the Silver City.

  That night she had the dream again, for the first time in almost a year. Her memories had grown misty: a warm, comfortable blur of light and scent and beauty. This time…The light opened before her, but the air that blew behind it was cold, scented more with dust than roses. The dancers no longer smiled as they turned to face her. Their beautiful faces were set, severe and demanding. Winds tugged at her, seized her garments one by one—for in this dream she wore layers and layers of bright robes—dragging and buffeting her forward. A hand reached for her, long bony fingers clawing at her sleeves. Aude drew in a breath to cry out—and woke, shaking and chilled. The curtains of her bed hung open; she must have forgotten to draw them the night before. They stirred in the faint draft from her window, which stood ajar.

  She did not think she had opened it last night. Perhaps Nurse had come in to check on her and found the room too musty. She was eleven, too old to weep over a nightmare. She slipped out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the night sky was cloudy, both moons hidden. She pulled the window closed and turned the latch firmly, then drew the bed curtains tight. A dream, just a dream. Colonel Saverell would not be frightened by a dream. Nor would Marcellan. They were explorers and scholars. They would want to find out more. They would want to know.

  According to his book, Marcellan had entered the Rice Palace through a door in a place he referred to simply as the Stone House. Aude’s home was made of stone, and she spent many hours thereafter checking all its doors for hidden ways. She found empty rooms and irritated housemaids, dusty old furnishings and piles of linens, storerooms and tack rooms and rooms with no particular function; but she found nothing remotely like the place she had seen. She and Marcellan. Eventually, she came to understand that his Stone House must be a particular place, like the famous Rose Palace in the old capital, Merafi, or the Guild Hall that her uncle held in such irritation. She pored over her uncle’s maps, gratifying him with her apparent interest in the family holdings, but all the while looking for something that might resemble Marcellan’s Stone House. She asked the local priest, too, one afternoon when he came to take tea with her uncle. He smiled at her and shook his head. “It’s a mystery, child. You’ll understand it better when you’re older.”

  Before he said that, she had been considering telling him about her shining place and her dreams. She decided then and there never to do so. He was clearly the wrong kind of adult. Eleven was more than old enough in her opinion. It seemed more likely to her that the priest just did not know and was too embarrassed to admit it. She wrote another letter to the Bravest Officer, suggesting an expedition and listing her best ideas for where to begin. Her family’s lands were extensive, stretching far to the west and north of the Silver City. There were many places on her uncle’s maps that sounded intriguing. The Ocher Mountains. The Slow River. The Rice Steppe. She particularly favored the latter—the name itself was incentive enough. And that was where her family had come from, once, long ago. “Your distant grandfather was a farmer who bought his neighbors’ lands,” her uncle said. That was on her twelfth birthday, when he showed her the big account books that contained the family fortune and promised to teach her how to understand them.

  That was also the day he gave her the locket. It was small and round and silver, it sides fused closed by age, the decoration on its surface long worn to near invisibility by former owners. “It’s always been in the family,” her uncle said, “and now it’s yours. Look after it, now. There’s a story that goes with it. It’s part of your history.” He put it into her hand, and it tingled. She blinked, staring down at it, and for one brief moment it shone with a warm amber light. She closed her hand over it quickly, lest her uncle be alarmed and take it away again, but when she looked at him, he was already buried in his newspaper.

  The locket was special, as the shining place was special.

  Nurse fastened the locket for her, then told her the story that went with it as she ate her supper in the schoolroom that night, how Aude’s many, many times grandmother had sought out witches who cast a spell for her that brought her and her descendants luck. “Not that your uncle believes it,” Nurse added. “He’s a sensible man. He knows your family owes more to common sense and good business than witches. That’s the history your uncle wants you to know about.”

  The story made Aude shiver, a little. Witches sounded scary. But in the story, they lived in a house of stone, like the one Marcellan had written about. Nurse laughed when Aude asked if it was the same one. “It’s just a story, lovey. Now, go to sleep.” But lying in her bed, Aude turned the three things over and over in her mind. Her shining place and her locket and the Stone House. Witches and her clever ancestors. There was magic in her history, as well as good sense.

  It had never occurred to her before then that she too had a history. History was the emperor of Tarnaroq and his governor in the Silver City, the Yellow General and the two sieges of Valeranica, Marcellan’s books and the famous king Yestinn Allandur. When she ran her fingers over the surface of the locket, she could feel the remains of its decoration, but in the dim winter light she could make nothing out. The next day, at the suggestion of her governess, she made a rubbing of the surface with a sheet of white paper and a soft pencil. The result was a little like leaves or waves or birds. She went to the section of the library that held the family papers and began to read. Perhaps someone—some earlier daughter—had described the locket. She read about silk trading and the production of wax, about the proper maintenance of mines and their workers and the regulation of the salt trade. When she looked at the maps, she now knew which goods came from where, and how. But she never found anything more about the locket. Perhaps her ancestors had all been as boringly sensible as her uncle. If he had ever seen or dreamed about the shining place, he would probably have dismissed it as the product of indigestion.

  She was thirteen the winter of the letter. It was the first letter she had ever received in her own right (apart from the usual moralizing birthday message from the priest, which was sent care of one of the maids and did not really count). A footman brought it to the schoolroom on a silver tray and bowed as he presented it. “Your post, Mademoiselle.”

  Aude looked at the governess, who smiled. Stumbling, she said, “Th-Thank you,” and took the letter. Someone—it had to be her uncle—had opened it: The seal had been split, and the flap lay a little unevenly. It unfolded into a single sheet, with the crest of the royal army at the top. The writing was neat and square.

  Dear Mademoiselle Pèlerin des Puiz,

  We have received your letters to “the Bravest Officer,” asking that he follow in the estimable footsteps of the late Colonel Lord Saverell. This is a very exciting idea, and we thank you for putting it forward. Sadly, our regular duties prevent any of the officers who are currently in service from embarking on such a mission to locate the domains mentioned in the Books of Marcellan. Also, all our officers are very brave, so it would be very difficult to choose the bravest among them. Perhaps one day you could go on such an expedition yourself?

  Your respectful servant,

  Jehan Favre (Subaltern)

  2

  The Stone House

  THEY WERE NOT WITCHES. That detail came later, with all the trappings that distinguish folk tale from plain reality. They were neither witches nor prisoners—those who knew them would claim they were also not ladies. They were, in the beginning, simply exiles and doorkeepers, sent here as a punishment by the Grass King, the ruler of WorldBelow, whom they had served and betrayed. He might have chosen to kill them. That he merely chose to exile them to the human domain of WorldAbove was perhaps an indication of his fondness for them. They were twin sisters, long-bodied and lithe and, sadly, pungent. Even when they chose to take human form—and they did that rarely—they were not the kind of girls young men dreamed of rescuing. Mostly, they were not human at all. They were ferrets,
once favorites of the Grass King in his palace and now captives, bound by his will and their willfulness to the Stone House and its hidden gateway.

  It was not in the least romantic. There was a good deal more mopping than dark spell casting, “Although,” Julana said pensively, “we never did care for spells anyway.”

  “Wrong sort of paws,” said Yelena, “and spells aren’t good for eating.” It was the humans among whom they found themselves who labeled them witches. That was baffling, a little, but predictable. “Humans,” said Yelena wisely, “call everything not like themselves magic.”

  “Humans are stupid,” said Julana.

  “Except Marcellan.”

  “Marcellan’s special. Marcellan’s ours.”

  Marcellan had written about the Stone House, where they lived now, but the twins did not know that. Marcellan had come into the scented, silken Rice Palace where they lived then and had brought with him human ideas and human inventions, human beliefs and human expectations to set, catlike, among the startled servants of the Grass King. The twins knew courtiers and concubines, cooks and maids and clerks, each with his or her place, duties, sameness. Marcellan was not like that. He was not even like the Grass King. His scent was newness and adventure. The twins, pampered pets of the king, were drawn to him almost as strongly as they were drawn to fresh blood.