The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  It was not a life he wanted. It was the life he had, and he must deal with it. He clambered to his feet and bent over the young woman. “We have to move. Come on.” She lay where she was, curled and sobbing. Teeth set, he took hold of her shoulders, shook her. “Come on!” His hands stung as her chill bit into his new grazes. She pulled away, knotting herself ever tighter. He got his hands under her arms and heaved again. She was a dead weight, wrapped in her terror. He hauled and dragged, tugged and pulled till his arms screamed at him, until at last he had her upright, knees bent, sagging against him. Her head lolled on his chest; her whimpers came in cold bursts. The wind banged and buffeted them, pushed at his legs and back and shoulders, trying to topple him, trying to blind him with scouring dust. He might as well have been back on the dry, endless plain. Step by step, he fought his way forward, out of the aisle and into the whispering forest. The young woman stumbled against him, barely walking. Where she touched him, his body flinched, slowly numbing. Well, in the long run, that will hurt less, observed his inner voice. Assuming, of course, that numbed limbs would continue to obey him. He pushed the thought down and concentrated on walking. Another step brought them to a gap between two of the standing stones. They were dim, harsh shapes through the dirty air, blocky and solid. As they staggered between them, the woman cried out and dropped from his grasp.

  He turned. She lay where she had fallen, shivering. All around her feet and ankles were thick bands of crystal, as if the leaf fragments had somehow braided themselves into shackles or long hungry fingers. Her skin wept, thick colorless drops trickling over the crystal, dripping to the ground. The stones to either side began to groan and shift. The place would hold her, would imprison her, keep her for its own whatever he did.

  Deep inside him, something snapped. He was wind battered and grit scoured. He had been dragged hither and thither by beings who never stopped to explain themselves, ordered and bullied and ignored and taken for granted. Nothing listened to him. Even the ground fought him. It was enough and more than enough. He would be heard, he would win for once. This woman was a stranger to him, but he chose—he chose—not to abandon her. She would escape this place because he willed it so. He yelled, tipping his head back, up at that star-dotted sepia sky and pulled his sword from its sheath at his side.

  Wind fists pummeled him, wind fingers tried to snatch the sword away. He gripped it two-handed and swung at the first of the crystal bonds. Steel rang on stone, setting the nearby trees to a piercing echo. Mica shackles shattered in a burst of little knives. The young woman cringed, covering her head once again with her arms. Jehan brought the blade down a second time and broke the other shackle. The stones to either side groaned more loudly. Hanging onto the sword in his left hand, he seized the young woman’s left arm, fingers tight around her, and pulled with all the strength he could muster. She squealed as fragments of broken leaf sliced her flanks and legs, then began, at last, to help him. Struggling to her knees, she crawled toward him. Her skin was slick under his palm, pink streaks beginning to slip down it. He was bleeding, he realized, from all those tiny crystal cuts. As she moved, pieces of leaf, fragments of stone piled themselves toward her, building into new chains. He swung at them with the sword, felt them chip and break and scatter. The young woman managed to get her feet under her and leaped. Startled, he stepped back, releasing her. She cannoned into him, and they staggered backward, crunching over more leaves, into the bole of the nearest tree.

  All around them, silence fell. Winded, he stood there for several moments, feeling the trunk smooth and strong behind him. He ached all over; his many small grazes complained. His mouth and nose were full of grit, sour and clogging. He could hear nothing save his breath, fast and ragged, and the pounding of his heart. The young woman sagged against him, limp and light, no longer feeling so very cold. His sword was reassuringly solid in his hand. He asked, “What was all that? What happened?” He could make no sense of it at all, other than that the stones had fought to hold them. And that the long, silent aisle was dangerous.

  The young woman made no response. He looked over her head at the stone aisle. It stood motionless and still and calm, stretching away to right and left. Only the toppled stone at its left-hand end bore mute witness to what had just passed. He shook his head. No point asking the woman if such things were commonplace here. He said instead, “We should go.” With his empty hand, still faintly numb from her earlier burning chill, he pushed her away, gently. She made a noise of protest.

  He said, “I can’t carry you. Or drag you. You have to stand.”

  Another protest. Then, awkwardly, she uncoiled away from him, supporting herself with one hand against the tree bole. Above their heads, the leaves stirred and hissed.

  What if the trees proved as keen to seize her as the aisle? The broken remnants of their leaves had clung to her tightly enough. Jehan swallowed. He could not fight a whole forest. He doubted that, burdened with this clinging girl, he could run through it to safety. Always assuming, of course, that safety was anywhere to be found. Overhead, the leaves struck against one another and whispered: The spring was bitter. I should have tried harder to reach the other bank. I’m thirsty. I’m so very thirsty… And, softest of all, no more than the memory of a sigh, water…

  Water. Everywhere he went, it came back to that, to water and its lack. The steppe and its death by drought. The seeping walls of the long passage down to the cave of the moss sea. The river, retreating from the depth and width of its bed. The young woman beside him, begging for a drink. The stones that clung to her. He considered her, lank hair and dull skin. This was something to do with her, in some way. Was she just another victim, like that shambling, dried husk of a man back in the Woven House? Or was she more than that, as the dual-formed twins were somehow more? She sagged against the tree, light eyes half closed, head hanging. Did she know? There was no way of telling. Her wits seemed as shriveled as her frame.

  He could not abandon her, whatever and whoever she was. He had come in search of her—of her white glinting shape glimpsed through trees. Had she been following them, somehow, only to become ensnared by the stones in their aisle? Or—at the thought, he took an involuntary step backward—had she always been part of their trap? If so, it had been a badly designed one, more anxious to retain the bait than the prey.

  The fact was that he had rescued her when he might have run. He pushed his hair back from his face and once more took hold of her elbow. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going.”

  He had not thought to mark his passage through the trees, guided as he was by the breeze. When they came level with the end of the aisle, he remembered that. The river and the camp must lie roughly ahead of them, but he could not be certain in this wood that looked so endlessly the same. Not clever, Jehan. Although how one might cut markers into the trunks of stone trees he did not know. The woods and hills of his childhood had been nothing like this. Well, he must do his best. He was pretty sure that the river lay in the direction they were headed, more or less. If he could find that, then he could work his way up and down its bank until he located the campsite. He kept on walking, steering the woman beside him, steadying her when she stumbled, trying to avoid the deepest drifts of crystal leaves for the sake of her bare feet. When they rejoined the others, perhaps he could make some kind of footwear for her from his quilted outer coat. Or she might ride Clairet. She was light enough, that was certain. It was slow going, and he could not be sure that they were not turning aside. All around them, the trees stirred as they passed, murmuring their words of water: He said he held the rights all the way from the Old Mill to the thunderstone, but that stream was mine, was mine. I am Dowi Artovan, and I shaped the first stones for the bridge at Hoarfast. I didn’t spill a drop, not one. The voices slid down his spine, made needle-prickles across his skin, even where it was chill and aching from contact with his companion. So many voices. So many…what? Lives? He could put places, sometimes, to the names, the accents. Many more spoke in tongues he
could not understand or had never heard before. He kept count, in that same back room of his mind where his sense dwelled. That was Tarnaroqui, and so was that; and that one Lunedithin, but I don’t know that one at all. If the young woman heard—or if she was disturbed by the whispers—she gave no outward sign. But as they drew farther from the aisle, her steps grew steadier, and her head lifted. More and more, she did not need his arm. He drew it back against his side. It ached dully, not numb anymore, but still complaining. He pressed it to him, trying to warm it. He did not want to put his sword away; an examination of any damage must wait until they had found the twins and the river. The white woman walked beside him, her steps small and careful over the leaf shards.

  He had not thought to keep track of how long he had walked before he came to the aisle. He had, therefore, no way to know how long they must walk to find their way back. It would, he reasoned, be likely to be slower with two, especially as she had at first been so hesitant. But they had not been walking for what seemed like many minutes when she stopped. He halted beside her. “What is it?” She made no sound in answer. Raising the sword, he looked around them cautiously. Trees and more trees. She tilted her head this way and that, as if she listened and then, without warning, began to run. He said, “Hey!” She paid no heed, head down, crunching the leaf mulch underfoot as she sprinted. He said, “Wait!” and then, as she continued in her dash, swore and jogged after her. Tree limbs whipped into his face, stinging, and he cursed again. She was as bad as Aude, throwing herself into the unknown without a backward glance. She was gaining pace; he had to speed up to keep her in sight. His right foot hooked under a tree root, and he went sprawling.

  He lay for a moment, face mashed into the ground, more outraged than winded. This whole cursed place—this whole experience, from Aude in the Brass City to the dust storms to the demands of the twins to this very moment—seemed designed to humiliate and frustrate him. He would take no more of it, he would…What? asked that calm voice at the back of his head. Scream and shout? Cut down one of the crystal trees with his sword? And what good would any of that do him?

  Precisely none. He pushed himself upright. His grazes had acquired new grazes from his fall; one sleeve of his shirt was ripped from wrist to elbow. He took one short, harsh breath and stood. He had let go of his sword when he fell; now he retrieved it from a few feet away and slid it back into its scabbard. A sword would do little good against stone things, anyway. He could see no sign of the white young woman. All around him, the trees were silent. He dusted himself off and began trudging forward.

  It was no more than five minutes later that he heard the faintest sound of water. He hesitated, listening. Yes, there it was, the swift light voice of the river, twining through its bed of pebbles and sand. That must have been what the woman had heard, also, before she set off into the wood. He quickened his pace. The river meant the camp, somewhere, and the camp meant whatever solidity he possessed in this place. As he moved, a soft tendril of cool air brushed him, bringing with it the scent of water. His breeze. Almost, he laughed out loud as it wended across his cheeks. Water, yes, and something else…Pony. The strong warm smell of thick hair and pony breath. He put a hand up, felt the breeze twist around it, wrapping his fingers. Softly, he said, “Thank you,” and he did not feel foolish for saying it. His steps lengthened as the sounds, the scents, grew stronger. From somewhere ahead and slightly to his right, a pony whickered.

  Clairet. Jehan began to run. This time, the tree boughs presented no barriers to his passing. Perhaps they were glad that he left. Their leaves sang quietly with his breeze, no words now, only sweet, plangent notes. The ground began to slope and then, around the next tree, there was the river and the camp and the jumble of his possessions. Clairet lifted her head and whickered again in greeting. The twins, both in ferret form, crouched on the bank, back fur sharp and bristling. His jacket and the woman’s sheet lay in a heap nearby. Beyond them, in the water, on the bed of the river, the white young woman lay naked, motionless just beneath the surface.

  24

  The Voice of the Hours

  IN HIS WORKSHOP, Liyan spoke metal to his will, carved wood, pored over diagrams and notes, and lured butterfly Tsai to aid him. Every evening, he came to the Courtyard of the Fallows and sat with Marcellan poring over diagrams, scrawling notes, asking questions. He began to bring objects with him: cogs and fine chains, flat disks of traced metal and man shaped toys the size of the twins. He spoke of cogs and gears, ratchets and stops, armillary rings and jacks. The words bounced and jounced and bothered the twins, making no sense, trailing danger. They hovered just out of his sight, never quite mustering the courage to bite or scratch or steal. When he left, they chewed his papers and patted his creations into corners. But Marcellan only laughed. They tipped ink and gnawed on pens, ripped and tore and mauled. Marcellan simply shut the more delicate items out of their reach and petted them. He did not understand. They could not find a way to make him understand. Everything felt wrong, and yet no one but the twins seemed to sense that.

  “Perhaps,” said Yelena, drooping, “Tsai will get tired of helping.”

  There was some hope of that. Tsai’s attention was easy to capture but hard to hold. “Perhaps,” said Julana, “that means it will be all right.”

  “Perhaps.” But Yelena could not convince herself. Liyan’s clock made her fur edgy, quivered at her, nagged through her sleep. It did not suit her. The twins were not built for worry. They did not know how to deal with it. The world around them felt out of balance. “The Grass King will notice,” Yelena fretted, “how can he not?” There were new smells in the Courtyard of the Fallows, strange acrid things that did not belong to WorldBelow, smells that echoed what Liyan did in his workshop. Around the door into the room where Marcellan worked and slept, shapes like those he wrote wound themselves into the décor of leaves. “Not right,” Yelena said, and shivered. “Those don’t belong.”

  Julana sniffed them. “Smell like plaster. Like the Rice Palace.”

  Had the markings always been there? The twins could not remember. But still the clock haunted them, climbed into their dreams, disturbed their play. “We should ask,” Julana said. “Ask Shirai.”

  “The Grass King loves Shirai,” Yelena said. “More than Liyan or Qiaqia or Sujien. Shirai would tell the Grass King everything, and the Grass King would listen. He might be angry. Angry with Marcellan.”

  Julana, in turn, shivered. She said, “Perhaps Liyan will get bored.” But she did not believe it. Liyan did not let go once he desired something. Qiaqia was tangible evidence of that. The twins grew thin and nervy, fur dulled, jumping at shadows. They refused to accompany Marcellan on his daily trips to Liyan’s workshop, choosing instead to lurk in the shadows beneath its walls. Nor would they take on their new human forms in order to talk to him. Marcellan sought to coax them with ever-better morsels, and they turned their backs and hid under the cupboards or up on the eaves. The cooks and butlers and granary masters smiled behind their hands and hoped for easier times ahead. Day after day, the clepsydra took shape, and the Grass King did nothing. “Maybe,” Julana said, at last, “it’s all right after all. Maybe the Grass King approves.”

  “But does he know?” worried Yelena. “Does he know about the clock?”

  “He must,” Julana said. “He always knows. Shirai knows. So the Grass King must know.” She jumped up onto the top of a chest. “Air smells good. No stinging. No bad noises. Ground is steady. Grass King is happy.”

  Yelena leaped up to join her. It was night; on his divan, Marcellan slept. Yellow twilight filtered in through the long windows, made swirling trefoil patterns across the floor. Yelena gazed up at the stars and the clear sky. Perhaps, after all, it was all right. She said, “We should check. We should listen.”

  “And leave our man?” The twins had stayed close to him for more days than they could think how to count.

  Yelena looked over at him. “One of us should stay. Watch.”

  Julana st
arted. The twins were never apart. They did not know how to do such a thing. It should not be thinkable. And yet…She asked, “Can we?” She did not know how to say it. “Can we be, if not two?”

  “I think so.” Yelena considered. “Sometimes you sleep and I don’t. I sleep and you don’t. But we’re still us. Still real.”

  “Sleeping isn’t apart.” Julana could not hold on to the thoughts. Was one twin, a lone twin, still a twin? If Yelena was not there, could she remain Julana? Or would she become something, someone else? There were no other twins, no other them that they knew of. If they were apart, would other twins be made somewhere to replace them? She said, “Can’t…”

  “You stay,” Yelena said. “I’ll go. Find out about the Grass King. About danger.”

  The halls were quiet, yet, scurrying through the shadows at the bottom of the walls, Yelena was rank with fear. Easier by far to think of being alone, to talk of it, than to do it. Without Julana, she was naked. Her fur bristled around her, alert for any danger. Coming to a junction, she hung back. How could she cross, without Julana to watch out for her, to guard the places at her sides? All around her was still, empty; from behind curtained doorways came the deep tides of sleep. The scent of difference that shadowed Marcellan’s courtyard was present here, too, a faint trace of gall and oil. Shivering, Yelena launched herself into the shadowless center of the corridor and fled at her fastest pace toward her goal. The breeze blew a dried leaf toward her from a hidden garden, and she jumped sideways. A servant snored and shifted in his sleep, and she flattened herself to the ground. This must be done. They had decided—two of them had decided. The man might be in danger. They had to know.