The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  A hand formed from the mist and closed around his. He started and pulled back, and it clung, cold and thin and sticky. Salt air wrapped him, making him cough. Supple fingers tightened on him, and he shivered, remembering all at once the dry dead thing in the Woven House. He tugged at his sword and found it held fast to its scabbard. He gasped, and the mist bound itself closer, flowing up his arm, slick and gelatinous. It reached his breast pocket, where the stone shard was tucked, and hesitated. He shuddered. The hand began to move again, reaching his shoulder and beginning to slither toward his throat. He twisted, turned his head away. The cool stickiness tickled at his nape, halted, then pushed. Off balance, he stumbled to his knees, and the salt cloud swept over him. He was blind and deaf, nose and mouth filled up with the sourness of citrus and brine. His skin stung. Was this what had happened to Aude? Was this how the twins’ Cadre trapped their prey? He shivered at the thought. Aude should not suffer. She was not built for it. He should be there to protect her. He fought to free himself, found his limbs sluggish and distant, as if they had begun to forget him.

  He did not want to die like this, not now, not here. Aude depended on him. He had to live, to find her. He was fading out, thinning as the moistness, the mistiness engulfed him. He could feel almost nothing save its foul clutch. Not the spongy moss beneath him, not the soft brush of old cotton from his shirtsleeves, not…

  Wait. Under a hand, there lingered still the dimmest taste of brass and steel. He focused on it, counting fingers, willing himself to awareness of what they held. The familiar ridge of his sword grip, fitted to his hand as it had been to his uncle’s before him. He could see it now, despite the mist, despite the fact that his eyes were bound: the dull gleam of the hilt, the strong bright gray of the blade, taken as booty from some long forgotten battle and brought home to be the portion of younger sons. To be his portion and the tool of his trade. He felt the fingers tighten and the warmth of steel run up his arm. He tugged again on it, and this time, it rattled free of its sheath.

  The mist parted around him as he tumbled backward flat onto the moss, sword held out before him. He lay for an instant, panting. Then he rolled to his knees. In front of him, at the foot of the stricken tree a white shape crouched, long arms around its head, legs pulled up, wrapped in a muslin winding sheet. He waited, sword at the ready, as it uncoiled, slowly, and, peeping between a visor of fingers, gazed at him.

  A young woman, white as bone and thin as the tree that held her, her eyes huge and colorless behind their shield, her hair a tangled skein of dirty pale gray. Her skin was milk-pale and shiny, the sickly color of southerners and the dead. Jehan shifted to a crouch, the sword held up in front of him, and demanded, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  Her empty eyes stared up at him, her tatty fingers twisting. “Who?” she echoed. “Woo. Hoo.”

  20

  Names

  HUMAN SHAPE WAS CLUMSY. Trying to rise, trying to learn the new long limbs, the twins tumbled into Marcellan’s desk. It toppled sideways, spilling papers and styluses across the floor. The inkstone hit the ground with a thump and rolled away under a chest. The cake of brownish ink bounced, split into powdery fragments. Marcellan, who had slept through their initial panic, woke with a start. He sat up, looking around him, and the twins froze. He stared at them in silence for long, long, moments.

  It was something they had not considered. What if he did not like the change? What if he was frightened? Yelena could not tell—blunt human senses gave her no clues. She knew her own alarm and Julana’s and nothing more. She did not know how to shape words with her new wide mouth. She clutched at Julana, wobbling beside her. Unsteady on her own feet, Julana staggered and they fell together in a tangle on the rug beside the loom.

  “Oh,” said Marcellan. He swung his legs to the floor and stood with an ease that was baffling. The twins had not thought of that, either, to watch how he moved, how he managed in such a long and awkward body. He came to kneel beside them. “I didn’t know you could do this.” They gaped at him. His voice was muffled, thinner than usual. Another failure of human senses. He went on, “Keep still—you’ve got your feet caught in the loom threads.” He lifted one of Julana’s feet, and she shivered. His skin was warm on hers. Carefully, he disentangled them from the wool and each other. Then he sat back. “There.” The twins looked at one another, each waiting for the other to move. Marcellan smiled. “It’s all right. I promise.”

  It did not feel all right. They were too long and big, too clumsy and cold, too cut off from everything. A bubble of panic rose in Julana’s throat, spilled out into a high thin keening. Tangled into her, Yelena shivered and shook. Marcellan reached out to them. “You’re safe. It’s safe.” His hands patted Julana’s hair, Yelena’s shoulder. “Hush, now. Safe.” His voice was strange and thin. They could not smell if he lied or not. Julana’s keening rose higher. Bootsteps sounded outside the courtyard wall; the gate squeaked on its hinges. Bannermen, coming to investigate. Yelena twisted against her sister, bit down with her strange new teeth. Julana whimpered and fell silent. Marcellan patted them again, then rose and went out into the courtyard. The twins pressed close together. They must not be caught, not now that they were so close to their goal. Outside, the bannermen’s voices were sharp, demanding explanations. Air Banner, edgy and defensive and suspicious, just like their leader, Sujien. Chill moisture broke out on Yelena’s new bald skin, and she started. Human shape was afraid. She could feel Julana’s fear, too, damp and shivering against her. She wrapped her long new forearms about her twin, inhaling as strongly as she could, trying to find their familiar common scent. Julana squeezed close. The short hair on her head carried a trace of their musk. Yelena pressed closer, breathed in and in, felt Julana’s breath come to match hers, pulled that known safe smell nearer and nearer and nearer, tingling over her skin, pulling her back into herself, shrinking her, warming her…

  Scent and sound and taste tumbled over them, knocked them apart. Yelena squirmed and felt short legs and long body respond. Her whiskers twitched, caught the chill breeze of the air bannermen’s discontent. She shook herself, felt her fur fall back into place. “We’re us,” she said, slowly.

  “Us again.” Julana was puffed out with the remains of her panic. She reeked of fear. “Bannermen won’t catch us.” She stopped. “Bannermen won’t find out.”

  “No…” Yelena could hear Marcellan returning. He must have convinced the bannermen after all. “But we have to try again. Have to warn him.”

  “Us again,” Julana repeated, and launched into a dance of delight, there under the loom, threatening to tangle herself in its threads.

  “We have to try again,” Yelena repeated.

  Julana charged her, knocking her over. “Later. Play now.”

  Yelena tried to fend her off. “Wait…”

  “Later,” Julana said, and bit her hard on the leg.

  It was a nuisance, being human, though they soon became adept at slipping in and out of that form. It was not, they learned, just the dull senses and stupid ungainly limbs. There was no fur; they shivered in the palace’s warm air, and Marcellan had to teach them about clothes. Clothes were bad. They tangled and tore and trapped, they caught on everything, and they felt wrong. “I won’t,” said Julana, mutinous.

  “Marcellan wants it,” Yelena said.

  There was moving. They tripped over and into things, and that hurt. And when they turned on their tormentors—the rug, the divan, the table—their teeth and claws were too blunt to do real harm. Marcellan smiled, and helped them up with soothing noises, before gathering together his spilled property. It was all highly unsatisfactory. And then there was speech. They were used to speaking with every part of themselves. These human forms did not bend or arch correctly. Their ears were stiff and barely mobile. They had no whiskers. The sounds that came from their huge new mouths made sense to neither them nor Marcellan. They could barely understand one another. “I thought human talk came with the shape,” Yelena mour
ned. “It does for the Cadre.”

  “Cadre cheat,” Julana said darkly.

  There was a whole new mountain of things they must learn before they could warn Marcellan. “Too much,” said Julana. “Takes too long. We should never have changed.”

  “What else can we do?” said Yelena. “Man can’t learn to be us. We have to study. Listen. Warn him.”

  “That sounds hard.” Julana was mutinous. “I don’t want to.”

  “Then Marcellan will be punished.” Yelena pointed with her nose at the growing mound of papers on the desk. “The Grass King won’t like what he’s doing.”

  “Paper doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to Marcellan. And to Liyan.”

  Julana began to groom herself, refusing to look at Yelena. The latter hesitated, then said, “Then I’ll learn without you.” A shudder ran through her. They were two. They had always been two. Yelena did not know if she knew how to be one. But if Julana would not try…

  Julana whipped round. “No! Two of us. Always two.” She nudged her twin. “I’ll learn. Both learn. For Marcellan.”

  “For Marcellan,” Yelena confirmed.

  They listened, in ferret and human form, practicing the sounds they heard and trying to make them make sense. Understanding was not the problem: It was the mechanics and the mapping. Marcellan grasped what they were trying almost at once, giving them the words for objects in the room, for foods, for colors, pronouncing them with slow care so that they could imitate how his mouth moved. Piece by piece, day by day, they grew easier with their second shape, more fluent in its ways.

  And then they had a new way to slip about the palace. Heads lowered, they could pass, just about, for part of the host of lower-grade servants who worked everywhere in the vastness of the Rice Palace. Hands could steal where paws had long proved inept, could carry objects six and seven times larger than teeth had ever managed. In all other ways, the twins soon decided, the form was inferior. But it gave them the one thing that they had wanted above all.

  They could talk to Marcellan. He taught them more and more words, one by one, until their heads seemed full of them, jostling. “So many,” Julana wondered.

  “Man shape needs them,” Yelena said. “No whiskers. No tails. Flat ears and stiff bodies.”

  “Poor men,” said Julana, and nuzzled her way into the crook of Marcellan’s arm.

  He petted them and fed them, let them distract him from his work of writing. He took time to teach them and watch them, turning down offers from bannermen and clerks to walk in the gardens or watch drills or dances.

  At the end of one day he bestowed on them something they had never before possessed: names.

  They had never had need of names before this. They were who they were, twins, fitch-women, sisters. They knew each other by scent, by taste, and it had never occurred to them that anyone else might want to distinguish between them. The Grass King knew them, perhaps; they did not know. To everyone else they were a two, a pair, a them. Even to themselves they had always been more we than I. They did not think of others in terms of names, for that matter. They made their distinctions by scent, by motion and shape and timbre of voice. Their world was layered, and names were but small things within it.

  They had, of course, observed, that human shape tended toward a love of labels. Courtiers and servants had names or, at least, labels. Nineteenth Undergroom. Lady of the Red-Beaded Sleeves. Overseer of Small Fruits. Clerk to the Chambers of the Lesser Concubines. Such labels held little meaning for the twins, save insofar as they dictated where a given individual might be expected to be found and what they might be doing. For themselves, they had neither specific place, nor specific duties. “We sleep and we run,” said Julana, “we inquire and we hide.”

  “We listen.”

  “We loiter.”

  “We taste and test.”

  “Gnaw and nibble.”

  “We steal. We borrow.”

  “We bite.”

  They were a scurry, an impulse, a flurry. They were the twinkle in the Grass King’s eye and the riffle in the arras, the shadow under the chest and the flash of teeth in the darkened corner, the scourge of the granary keepers and pantry masters. They were themselves, and that had always been sufficient.

  And yet…In their new flesh, their new form, they found themselves isolated, cut off from their subtle language of smell and twitch and texture. Man shape defined itself via sight and voice. In Marcellan’s mirror, they examined their new bodies, the scrawny limbs and sallow skins, the dense brushy hair and feral eyes. Julana bared her square new teeth at herself and spat. “Not sharp. Not scary.” She turned to her sister and saw her concern reflected back at her. Saw, not scented. She said, “Clumsy. Limited.” They did not look like the courtiers with their loam-warm complexions and lush shining hair. They did not look like the bannermen, compact and active and tinged by the elements of their banners. They did not look like the Grass King, who was square and strong, his skin like the richest earth, his eyes full of the age of stone. They were raw and angular and new. Side by side, gazing into the mirror, they were identical and yet different, themselves translated. “Yelena,” said Marcellan, from behind them, “and Julana.”

  They turned to look at him, black eyes meeting his, furrows forming between their strong identical brows. He said, “There are two of you, like the moons. You belong together; you each define the other, like Mothmoon and Handmoon.”

  The twins barely knew the moons, though they had seen them remote in the night sky when they had traveled with the Grass King to WorldAbove. The moons’ light did not filter through into WorldBelow. They belonged to another sphere, to WorldOver and the Emperor of Air. Yelena said, “Not moons. Moons don’t belong to the Grass King.”

  “No,” Marcellan said.

  “We are not like moons,” Julana said.

  “No,” said Marcellan again, “and yes.” The twins put their heads to one side, watching him. He continued, “You are not like the moons. You are small and dark, you live in earth. But there are two of you, like the moons. You are more than you seem. You are something I don’t know.”

  The twins did not understand. They stared at him. Julana’s fingers curled and uncurled. Yelena gnawed on her underlip. Marcellan said, “There are men in my world who study the moons, watch them. And they say that the moons have two sides, the one we can see and another, a hidden one, and that each side needs the other. They call those sides the yelen and the julan, the seen and the unseen. Two moons, two sides, always together. Like you two.”

  The twins looked at one another. Two. Two of them. Two natures. Two sides. Slowly, Yelena nodded. “Yelena,” she said, tasting the name. It fit her tongue, rolling smooth and clean across it.

  Her sister hesitated. The words caught at her, prickled her skin, ruffling its fine dark hairs. Her tongue felt heavy and strange as she tried out the shape. “Julana.” It was thick and rich, rounded. Her hand folded into Yelena’s, seeking comfort and found her twin steady and calm. Julana straightened, smiled. “Julana.”

  21

  The Courtyard of the Cadre

  “THIS IS NOT YOUR PLACE, HUMAN THING.”

  Aude released the door handle and turned. The knife was solid and reassuring at her waist. She lifted her chin and said, “I don’t care to be addressed that way. I thought I’d told you.”

  “I’m not concerned with your preferences.” Sujien stood maybe three feet away, unveiled, hand on his sword hilt. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth set.

  “Well, I am.” She had a door at her back, the warrior statues to either side. If he chose to come at her, she could duck behind them. If she could open the door…He had reach and doubtless many years of experience. She would not dwell on that. It would not help. She said, “My rooms are boring. I decided to explore.”

  “That isn’t your right.”

  “Your colleagues didn’t seem to think so.” It was not perhaps the truth. It would do. If the Cadre began to disagree, that coul
d be turned to her advantage. “They were perfectly happy for me to leave my courtyard.”

  “It is not,” said Sujien, “your courtyard.”

  “Ah, yes. Your Concubine’s Courtyard.” Aude made herself smile at him, as she would at a social nuisance. He bared his teeth at her. “I imagine she was allowed out. I thought I’d emulate her.”

  He released his sword hilt and made a grab for her. She sidestepped into the space behind one of the statues and drew her knife. If she could keep him close, if she kept to this cramped area, his sword would be too long, too clumsy. She said, “Perhaps you’d like to show me around. Liyan gave me a tour of his workshop.”

  A tic twitched in Sujien’s cheek. His hands balled. Aude swallowed and tightened her hold on her knife. He said, “Liyan is insane.”

  He might be right about that. She could not imagine it would help her to agree with him. Instead she said, “So it isn’t insane to keep trying to kill someone?”

  His face worked. Then, abruptly, he folded his arms and stepped back. “I’m not trying to kill you.”