The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  JEHAN KEPT A TIGHT HOLD ON HIS SWORD. Eyes fixed on the ragged young woman, he rose. She cringed away from him, winding her thin limbs closer, pressing back against the bole of the dead tree. He drew in one long, slow breath. The air still tasted sour, brine and lemon. What was this place? The twins had said there were no guardians in this forest, and yet…The woman did not look strong.

  The dry shambling thing that haunted the Woven House had not looked strong, either. This new creature had appeared out of cloying mist and danger. He had no reason not to distrust her. The forest was silent around them. Filaments of mist coiled here and there around the pillars forming the stone aisle. He was a stranger. This was not his land, not his world at all. He began to back away, slowly, still watching the woman, and she stared back at him with her white eyes. Underfoot, crystal fragments cracked. She started and from her throat came a noise like a crying child.

  It was a trap, a trick. She was no more human that the dead thing or the twins or the flying armored creatures on the beach. His purpose here was to find Aude and bring her back safely. This woman, whatever she was, was no business of his. He straightened his shoulders. Around them, the forest stirred, some faint breath of wind setting crystal leaves ringing and shivering. The woman wailed again, and one of her thin hands reached out toward him.

  He stopped, cursing. This could do him no good. He said, “Look, what is all this?”

  Her hand dropped back, and she fell silent, rocking back and forth against her dead tree. He said, “What are you doing here?” Her eyes held his, huge and colorless. He said, “I don’t know anything about this place. I can’t help you, you know.” He sighed. “You can’t even talk to me, can you?”

  Her mouth opened, worked. Her tongue was thin and pale, running over her lips. He shivered. Another thin wail came from her, a choking gasp. And then, as her lips struggled, a sound. “Wuh…” This time, it did not sound like an echo, a copy of his words. He waited, holding firm to his sword. His uncle, who had gone to sea as a young man, used to tell tales of sea-wraiths, pale hungry things that sucked the life from men. He had learned, these last few days, to be less quick to discard such stories. If the sea could birth its monsters, why not a wood or a mist?

  “Wuh…” The woman gasped, her face straining. “Wah…”

  Was she trying to repeat the syllables she had first uttered? Or was she trying to talk to him. Distrustfully, he said, “Do you want something?”

  Again, her hand reached out to him. He said, “I can’t help you.”

  A single tear welled from her left eye and rolled down her cheek. She stopped it with a fingertip and brought it to her mouth, licking at it far longer than was needed. Her lips were dry and cracked. He hesitated. Then he said, “Water, is that it? You want water?”

  Her eyes widened; this time both of her hands reached out to him. She did not look like that desiccated nightmare from the Woven House. She looked like nothing he had ever seen before. From habit, he had hooked the small canteen to his belt before he set out into the forest. He could afford to offer it to her; the river, though low, was enough to replenish it several times over. And yet…The desiccated thing would have ripped him apart for water, he was sure. Ripped, and then sucked his flesh and bones for such moisture as they held. He had no evidence to suggest that this woman was any less dangerous.

  Aude would let her drink. The thought rose unbidden. Aude was here somewhere in this crazy place. He had to hope that her captors would feed her and give her water. Aude would have helped this woman, regardless of the risk. Aude wanted to help everyone.

  He was not Aude. He had never liked to take easy risks. His upbringing had taught him neither trust of strangers nor the expectation of good treatment from everyone he met. The woman crouched before him, hands begging. He bit his lip and sheathed his sword. Then he unhooked the canteen. He did not want to give it to her, nor did he wish to touch her. He cast about him for a solution. Leaf fragments, long and friable and thin; pebbles; the flaking side of the nearest standing stone; the bole of the dead tree. A branch leaned out from that to the right; about a third of the way along, a smaller branch had broken off from where it had reached upward. The junction remained, a shallow hollow in the gleaming mica. Carefully, he circled the trunk, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on the young woman, until he stood on the opposite side from her. She twisted to watch him, still holding up her hands. He opened the canteen and poured a thin trickle of water into the dip.

  She sprang, fingers clawing, mouth agape around white sharp teeth. Jehan scrambled backward, hand grabbing for the hilt of his sword. It resisted, catching in the scabbard, and he cursed himself for his sympathy. The woman’s nails scraped the crystal surface of the dead tree, sinking in, and he shuddered. Her mouth closed on the dip, cheeks hollowing with the force of her sucking. The trunk shuddered. Jehan got a proper grip at last on the sword and drew it. The point shook a little, betraying his hand. In his other hand, the canteen sloshed.

  The young woman raised her head. Her lips had smoothed out; her eyes taken on the faintest hint of green. She was looking at the canteen. He took another step backward.

  She swallowed and her mouth worked. Then she said, “Puh…puhleese…more.” Her voice was thin, a thread of sound like the distant dripping of a leaking tin cistern. He held on to his sword and asked, “Who are you?”

  She gave a low keening sigh. “Please…. Wuh …wuh-ter.”

  If so little could make this much change in her…Nerves prickled all along his spine, counseling flight. He knew nothing of this place, only that it was alien to him and that its denizens had stolen Aude. He said, “Why should I help you?”

  Another tear made its way down her cheek; again she trapped and drank it. He asked, “How do I know you won’t harm me?”

  Her eyes widened, and her gaze flickered from the canteen up to his face. Then she straightened. Standing, she was much the same height as Aude. She brought one of her long hands to her breast and dipped her head, then held the same hand out to him. He had seen similar gestures on the streets of the Brass City from urchins seeking scraps and copper coins, from itinerant street vendors seeking mercy from the watch, from hopeless day laborers after too few jobs. I promise I’ll be grateful. I promise I’ll be good. It was a debased army salute, one of his colleagues had once told him. Years ago, before their royal line died out, the bodyguards of the northern kingdom of Lunedith had saluted their lord much in that fashion. Even now, the handful of Lunedithin in the elite units of the Silver City were said to offer the same gesture.

  He had never understood why the street people of the Brass City would adopt such a custom, unless in mockery. But Lunedithin customs are older than ours, his fellow officer had said. Perhaps it’s an old folk custom. Jehan had laughed at that. He could not imagine the grasping restless people of the Brass City having any time at all for old ways. But now, he wondered. According to Marcellan’s book, this place was older than any of the kingdoms and provinces he knew of. Perhaps its customs were the template of those that survived in his world.

  Perhaps the young woman had made the gesture at random. He had no way of knowing. Her eyes were still fixed on his face, wide and pleading. Sword held out in front of him, he stepped forward. She made no move. Another step and the tip hovered at her throat. Still she stayed where she was. He raised the canteen and poured her another measure of water, then stepped back again. She lowered her head to the water and drank, this time with the considered care of a cat. When she looked up again, her skin was smooth and her eyes a clear gray-green. She said, “Th…thank you.”

  He said again, “Who are you?” and two lines formed between her thin arched brows. “Do you have a name?”

  She shook her head. Her milky hair shifted on her narrow shoulders, shimmering with a faint pearlescence. She said, “Don’t…don’t know.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Again, that shake: I don’t know. Through her ragged winding sheet, her skin glea
med with the same light as her hair. He had never seen anyone so pale, not even the haughty Tarnaroqi merchant princes who docked their ships at the central docks and rode through the Brass City on their way to rich lodgings in the Silver City high above. White flesh, white hair, pale color-washed eyes and that dewy shine, for all the world like the skinned fish on their marble slabs in the fish market. She made him think of the corpses that the Watch sometimes had to haul from the river or the docks. If ferrets could become women or women ferrets, if inhuman warriors could steal Aude into their underworld, stones sail atop moss, and trees grow out of crystal, then might not the shadows of the drowned come to life down here in the sepia light and the strangeness?

  He had read a tale once, as a child, of a young man who dared break into the lands of the Masters of Darkness to retrieve his mother, snatched from him by death, and found her no more than a whisper amid the leaves of the great forest, the Dead Wood, that made up that realm.

  The dead did not necessarily lie silent. He had been forced to learn that in the Woven House. If this woman, this creature was dead…He had no etiquette for this situation. She wanted something, just as the twins wanted him to read their book, as Aude had wanted him to explain the Brass City, to escort her on her endless journey.

  He said, “There’s a river, if you need more water. I…I have things to do.”

  She rocked her head slowly from side to side, as if it were too heavy for her neck. Her gaze still held him even as she moved. Then it shifted slowly down to the sword. She reached out a hand. He said, “That’s sharp.”

  She ignored him. Her fingers brushed the edge of the blade, then slid down the flat. “Cold.” She smiled, wide mouthed. “Fire first. Then cold.” Her hand closed around it.

  Jehan said, “Don’t,” but it was too late. Pale thick fluid dripped from her palm as she uncurled it and drew it back to her.

  She cupped her hand, still smiling, drew it to her mouth. The thin tongue lapped at the cut. He shivered, despite himself. He said, “I have to go now.” He should tell her the direction to the river.

  That would encourage her to follow him or, worse, open up the possibility that he show her the way. He should never have yielded to his curiosity. He should have stayed in his camp with the twins and sensible, solid Clairet. He began to move away, sword still directed at her, walking on a diagonal, one step back, one a little to the side, so that he might watch her as he retreated, yet have some sense of where he was headed. She lifted her face from her wound and watched him, unmoving. He reached the nearest of the standing stones and passed into its shadow. He could pass between it and its neighbor and make his way outside the stone aisle back through the forest to the camp. The young woman could find her own way.

  All around him, the leaves rustled and shifted, striking their cold, sharp notes. The forest was black and chill and bleak. He began to turn toward it, lowering his sword as he did so. From the aisle behind him came a low noise, more a breath than a sigh.

  He stopped. Think, Jehan. What are you doing? This was not his place. He knew next to nothing of its rules, its dangers. Back in the Brass City, where he had known something about both, he had been unable to abandon Aude to her own folly of exploration. Aude would expect him to help this woman thing, whatever or whoever she was. Stepping back into the aisle, he said, “You’d better come, then.”

  She had once more folded up against the dead tree. Now she raised her head and stared at him. The sword was still in his hand, hanging down. Shaking his head, he sheathed it. “Come.” Eyes fixed on him, she pulled herself upright, her limbs spindling and shaking under the tattered sheet. She tugged it closer to herself, wrapping her thin arms across her chest. Her steps were awkward and wobbly. He bit his lip. He did not want to have to touch her. The leaf shards would surely gnaw her feet to the bone. He had nothing with which he could bind them, and scraps from her sheet would shred within a few yards. He hesitated, then came back to her and took her arm.

  It was searing cold, and tough as an old willow root, with the slippery texture of fish skin. Up close, she smelled of brine and stale water. He coughed, turning his face away. She leaned into him, and her chill crawled into him, coiling around the tendons of his hand and wrist, slithering upward into his elbow, numbing as it went.

  He pulled away with an oath. His hand was blue. He stared at her, and she leaned toward him, mouth open. Her breath brushed him, cold as her flesh, sour as slops.

  She smiled again. “Warm…”

  His right hand was too numb to grasp the sword. He did not trust himself to wield it properly with his left. He stepped away again and said, “Stay there.” One-handed, he tugged off his jacket, thrust it at her. “Here. It’s warm.”

  She snatched it from him, burying her face in it, inhaling deeply. Inhaling him…Too late to worry over that, now; if scent was a key, then she now had knowledge of him. His arm ached, and he cradled it against his chest. Rocking, swaying, she began to pull on his jacket. Her sheet dropped as she did so. Her body was translucent white, skeletal. He looked down, discomfited.

  The trees rattled, shivered, rang. A breeze—the same one that had drawn him here?—brushed by him, stirring his hair. He looked up to find that the young woman had wrapped her sheet round her lower half. She stroked the fabric of the jacket, running those bony fingers over the sleeves, the buttons, the pockets. She slid her hands into those, rocking, examining what she found there—a scarf, a spare button—then dropping them to the ground. Eyes still fixed on her, Jehan gathered them up. She pulled out one last item and stopped. A shard of rock, dull against the crystal of the forest. The shard he had picked up in the Stone House. Her mouth twitched, and she gasped, lips widening slowly into the ghost of a smile. She closed her hand—it was the wounded one—around it, and pressed it close to her.

  That made no sense. It was a chip of stone, nothing more. Jehan said, “If you like the stone, you can keep it.” She tucked it away inside the jacket somewhere.

  He had already spent too long here. Keeping a good two paces away from her, he said, “Come,” and began to walk back along the stone aisle. The breeze wrapped him, harrying his footsteps, urging him back, away from the stones. The young woman followed him, swaying and stumbling on the fringe of his vision. He hesitated, then once again put out his hand to her, cupping her elbow through the fabric of the jacket. Cold seeped through it, mild enough to be borne. Pace by pace, guided by the wind, they tracked back down the aisle, past the flaking pillars with their worn sigils. Two, five, seven. As they drew level with the eighth, she stumbled. He grabbed at her, but she slipped from his grasp, toppling toward the pillar. She flung her hands out to ward it from her, palms forward. She landed on her knees, hard, and knelt there, head low.

  “Are you all right?” Jehan stopped beside her. From under her matted hair came a low gasping. She held a hand up. Its palm had been torn ragged by the stone pillar. Her pale blood seeped, muddled with grit and crystal scraps. That kind of wound was quick to fester. He had left his flask of spirits back at the camp. He unhooked the canteen and crouched down beside her. “Hold it steady.” Carefully, he poured a thin trickle of water over the injury. She pulled back, drawing the hand to her lips, and he seized it. Cold bit anew into his already numb fingers—he was hard-put not to cry out. Through his teeth, he said, “Keep still.” Gripping her, riding the pain, he poured more water, tilted her hand to empty it, poured and tilted again. Setting the canteen down at his feet, he tugged his scarf out of a pocket. It was hardly clean, but it must do until he had access to better. He bound it around her palm, releasing her wrist so he could tie it off. His fingers fumbled the knot; in the end, he could use his left hand only to hold the makeshift bandage in place as he tied it with his right. He said, “There,” and paused to recap the canteen.

  She lunged at him, her hands clawing, hooking, her body pressing into his, knocking him off balance. He fell sideways, the young woman on top of him. The canteen teetered, rocked, and toppled, water flo
oding out into the cracked and flaked leaf fragments, trickling between them to pool in the dip surrounding the stone pillar. The woman’s wailing grew louder. Pinned, scoured by her bony cold, Jehan struggled to free himself, feeling his skin turn to ice at her closeness. He rolled, succeeding in getting his knees under him, used his spine to push upward. She dug her nails in. He twisted, struck out with an elbow and felt pain jar through him as he in turn struck the pillar.

  It moved.

  He scrambled forward, dragging her with him. He could hear the pillar rocking in its hollow. Grind, scrape, scrape, grind. He twisted, striking out again with his arm, and this time she let go. She dropped away from him and lay curled and whimpering. His back and left side burned with cold—he could barely feel his left arm at all. Here and there, blood seeped through his shirt, abraded by her nails or by the fragments of sharp leaves that littered the ground.

  He rolled to a crouch. The stone pillar continued to rock; scrape, grind, grind. The wind grew stronger, whipping his hair to stinging strips, grabbing at his shirtsleeves, making a wild cloud of the young woman’s matted locks. All around them, the trees were speaking, I walked all night for her…He owed it to me…Where is it? Where? Where? Their voices were thin and sharp and greedy. Arms wrapped over her head, the woman keened. Ours, said the trees, mine, they owed me, they owed me. They own me.

  The stone pillar began to topple. Jehan grabbed at the woman, forgetting the danger of that, and pulled her backward. She shrieked, fought him. He said, “Move!” Somehow, he heaved her to her knees and hauled them both away, farther down the aisle. The stone rocked, wider and wider, and fell with a great slam of splintering rock. He flung himself flat, dragging the woman with him, as mica shards shattered outward, slashing garments, tearing flesh. The trees roared. Mine. Mine. Mine. The woman wailed, coiling herself tighter and tighter. Breathless, he got himself once more to his knees, half blinded by wind and crystal dust. The air buffeted him, making it hard for him to keep his balance. The stone lay where it had fallen, glistening faintly in the low yellow light. Water—the spilled water from his lost canteen—ran over its surface, picking out the markings. A sheaf of wheat, the round smooth shape of a gourd, a spray of trefoil leaves. How, said the watchful voice in the back of his mind, did the water get there? It was spilled at the base. And when the stone fell, it crushed the canteen beneath it. Nothing in this place made sense, nothing behaved as he might have expected. Well, then, said that same calm voice, better to expect nothing. Except, perhaps, surprises.