The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  She began to laugh, choked on a sob, and buried her face in his chest.

  34

  Broken Toys

  HIS JUDGMENT DELIVERED, the Grass King’s anger faded. The Rice Palace returned to its old, old ways, minus the twins, minus the disruptions of Marcellan.

  In Liyan’s courtyard, the clepsydra stood squat and silent. At its base, the reservoir stagnated; the channel that fed it began to clog, day by day, with leaves and silt. Nothing Liyan did could mend it, though he took apart the gear chains, replaced cogs, refined and oiled and rebalanced the inner works. Its silence covered the Rice Palace, as heavy now as the gongs and bells of the clock had briefly been. The courtiers and servants, clerks and scribes and officers were listless, going about their duties with heavy eyes and blank faces. Nothing was as it had been before the Grass King’s anger and his new proclamations. The ice was gone; the staff were once more at their posts. But everything was different, duller. Across the painted walls, through the weave of the tapestries and the threads of embroidered robes, strange marks spread, in black and red, crossing and overlaying, crowding and shadowing the pictures of birds and fruits, grains and animals.

  Tsai drifted from room to room, greeting no one, her long hair hanging dull and lank. She no longer went to the Grass King’s chambers, nor did she attend to her banner. They mirrored her, wandering here and there with empty eyes and neglecting their duties. All across the palace, the fountains fell silent. The Air Banner twitched and paced, deserting their posts to hunt in remote corners, to patrol neglected roofs and forgotten storerooms. Liyan’s Fire Banner retreated to the armories, running their hands over blades and shields, then letting them fall as the metal resisted their touch. The Earth Banner held to their routine, but their tread was dulled, their gazes glazed and careless. Only the Darkness Banner was as before, silent and aloof in their shadows and nooks.

  “This is all your doing,” Sujien raged, pacing the Courtyard of the Cadre and glaring at Liyan. “You meddled. You had to experiment. And look what it accomplished. Everything is out of balance. Human ideas infect us. Tsai is fading. The Grass King should have punished you.”

  “You broke my clock.” There was equal anger in Liyan’s voice. “All was well before that.”

  “I didn’t touch your clock. But it was damaging Tsai.”

  “Tsai is crazy. She’s always been crazy.”

  “She’s one of us.”

  “She chose to help me.”

  It was the same argument, over and over, acted out each evening when the Cadre—the functional Cadre—gathered in their rooms, never resolved, never quite coming to blows, never, either, coming up with any solution. Night after night Sujien stormed into his private quarters muttering, and Liyan retreated to his workshop to worry over the components of his clock. Shirai spoke to each of them separately, garnering complaints and conditional promises. Qiaqia kept her own counsel, drilling with her banner or walking for hours through the back corridors of the palace. In his throne room, the Grass King heard petitioners, read reports, spoke with his councillors and wives. Tsai’s name was not spoken to him, nor did her wanderings take her into his path.

  Marcellan’s courtyard lay empty and silent. He was gone, swept away by the Grass King’s magic. Perhaps Shirai, out of everyone, knew what had became of him, but it was never spoken of.

  In their new quarters in the Stone House, the twins fretted and snarled, bickered and slept and plotted. Human settlements grew up nearby, telling tales of the witches who wove curses and magics in their midst. The twins ignored or taunted them as the whim took them, although they had found that they could go no more than a few feet from the Stone House itself. “Snakes and mice in the grasses,” mourned Julana, watching from the windows. “Meat to steal from kitchens. Grains to chew.” Sometimes the more anxious of the humans brought offerings to lay on the step of the house. The twins ate as much as was edible and played with the rest. It was a dull life compared with what they had known in the Rice Palace.

  Dull, that was, until the day the woman came up the path to their prison with her determination and her request. Until they bargained away a piece of the house and a vial of the River Lefmay’s waters for a copy of Marcellan’s book.

  The changes were slow at first: a lowering of the water level in a well, a small reduction in the yield of a field. In his tent, the son born to the woman flourished, and wealth poured into his hands. The rains came later than they should, but the river flowed as it always had, and his paddies were fertile. In WorldBelow, the oranges grew smaller, their taste souring. The inhabitants of the remoter parts dallied over their duties, spent more time standing in contemplation of the soil or the stones or the sky.

  In the palace, limbs grew heavy. Tsai no longer left her rooms. Her banner dispersed. No one was certain anymore how many they were or what they did. On the steppe, the grandsons and great-grandsons of the woman bought horses and silks, gold jewelry and porcelain. Their lands expanded as they bought or appropriated those of their neighbors. The grandsons’ grandsons moved away, built themselves fine dwellings in the closest towns. With each passing generation, the family fortunes grew.

  With each generation, the steppe grew drier, and the river shrank. And in the Rice Palace, servants and courtiers returned slowly to stone.

  35

  Time Turned Backward

  IN THE EMPTY WATER CHANNEL that should feed the clepsydra, the woman thing lay, freed from her blanket, her long pale hair spread all around her. Her eyes were open, staring palely up at the twilight over head. Swallowing, Aude unhooked the earrings from her ears and knelt. She did not want to touch this bony twisted thing. It felt wrong, somehow. It might burn her. It might harm the life that grew with her. She looked up at Shirai, who had led them here. She said, “I don’t think…”

  He took them from her, his palm warm and firm. “She isn’t yours. You have no burden.” She could not help glancing at Sujien at that, but he said nothing, staring at the ground. Shirai bent and dropped the earrings. “They’re just things. They mean nothing.”

  “I wish,” Aude said, tartly, “you’d mentioned that earlier. She climbed to her feet. “It would have made me a lot safer.”

  “Forgive me,” Shirai said. “I had other concerns.”

  She could think of no response to that. She went to join Jehan where he sat on the steps of the workshop. The front of the clock hung open; from within came the sounds of making. Liyan stood atop a tall ladder, seemingly unaware of the drop down to the stone flags, unmaking and remaking his work piece by piece. The bees hummed around him, darting in and out of the clock’s innards. Aude slid her hand into Jehan’s and leaned against him. She still could not believe it, not quite, that he was here, solid and dogged and real. She said, softly, “It’s like the Brass City. You followed me. You always follow me.”

  “What else can I do?” His grip tightened. “I seem to have been born to protect you.”

  The twins, both now in human shape and dressed in bright clashing garments several sizes too big, reclined on the steps on the other side of him. They had wanted to help—or to investigate, Aude wasn’t sure—dropping into their ferret shape and scrambling for the ladder. Shirai had forbidden it; now they sulked, glaring at everyone equally and muttering. A few bees accompanied them. They had brought Jehan here, somehow, from the steppe. They had something to do with her wealth, her ancestors, in some remote and trackless past. Bad witch bargain. She reached for her locket and remembered that it was gone, lost in the ruins of the Woven House.

  Sujien paced the courtyard. His throat had healed, but he had not troubled to change his tunic, and it was stained and stiff with his blood. At the end of each pass, he turned sharply and marched back. He would not look at her, at Jehan, at any of them, save for one long vicious glare at Qiaqia as they left the audience chamber.

  Qiaqia sat at the base of the clock, in its shadow, unbraiding her long black hair. Wisps of darkness fell from it, slid away to vanish into the sto
nes of the outer wall. Aude could not look at her for long.

  Shirai had led them back to this courtyard from the audience chamber to find Liyan waiting for them in his workshop, hovering over the wrapped shape of Tsai.

  “The clock must be mended,” Shirai had said.

  “I’ve tried. I can’t. I don’t remember…”

  “It must be mended. Your teacher will help you.” At that, the bees had crowded round Liyan. Aude could make no sense of that. Hours had passed since then. Shirai had fetched food and drink and had offered Jehan a bed, a bath. He had chosen to remain here and wait, never more than half a pace from Aude’s side.

  He did not trust the Cadre, Aude thought. No more did she. They were not, after all, human.

  Liyan came down the ladder, climbing quickly and one-handed. At the foot, he turned and shook his head. He held something in his left hand. The bees trailed him. He said, “It should work. There’s nothing wrong. Except…” and he opened his hand, holding it out. Aude leaned forward to see. He held a lump of dull, fractured gray stone. “This came from WorldAbove, with the captive. He gave it to me. It should keep the balance. But it won’t. It doesn’t hear me. Look.” He closed his hand again. His fingers grew bright, threads and drips of fire seeping between them. Yet, when he opened it again, the stone was unchanged. He said, “It doesn’t even heat. I didn’t see it before.” His frown deepened. “Why didn’t I see it?”

  Qiaqia rose in one fluid movement. From the neck of her dress, she took something small and held it out to Liyan. Aude could not see what it was. But Liyan’s eyes widened, and he took a step back. “I took it,” Qiaqia said, “the day the Grass King learned of your printing activities. I touched your clock and killed its heart. And then…” and she dropped what she held to the ground. It was a chip of the same stone. “I threw a shadow on you, Mo-Liyan.”

  “Because of Tsai?” There was more hope than conviction in Sujien’s voice.

  Qiaqia ignored him. “Because I wanted to be free.”

  Liyan threw the stone against the wall. It bounced and rolled away into a corner. “Then the clock can’t be mended.” He turned his back on Qiaqia. “It’s broken. That’s all.” His face was bleak, bleaker even than when Aude had first encountered him in his dusty workshop. She swallowed and clutched Jehan’s hand all the more tightly.

  Sujien cursed. He swerved from his course across the yard, hands raised toward Qiaqia. “You did this? You sacrificed Tsai and the palace and…and everything because you wanted to leave?” She said nothing. He stopped a scant handful of inches away from her. “You could simply have petitioned the Grass King.”

  “And Liyan would have presented a petition against me.” Qiaqia’s voice was calm. “He chose me. He brought me here and asked the Grass King for me. But I was never asked. I was just another dead human.”

  “Love!” And Sujien threw his hands up. “Human feelings. Human wishes. And all of it trouble.” He spun, pointing at the twins. “Those two, contaminated by the captive, meddling in human affairs because of him. Him,” and the finger now indicated Jehan, “thrusting his way here where he doesn’t belong to fetch my prey. And the first one, the captive, with his love of knowledge.”

  “The Grass King,” said Shirai, softly, “with his love for Tsai. For you and all of us, Jien-kai. We cannot escape it. Human words have touched us. Their words and ideas touch us all the time.”

  “Not me,” said Sujien, but his eyes turned to Tsai’s remains, and he dropped his arms. He shook his head. “Now what do we do?”

  “Can’t you make a new one?” Aude asked. She took her hand from Jehan’s and rose. “Not a new clock, but a new…whatever that thing was?” She walked down the steps into the center of the yard. “I mean, I don’t know a lot about clocks, but at home, if one breaks, the clock man can make new pieces for it.”

  “Can you take out your heart and put in another?” Liyan said. He had sunk down at the foot of the clock and sat there, eyes downcast. “The pieces have to belong.”

  “But can’t you make them belong? You made it in the first place.”

  To his feet, Liyan said, “I used the stone Marcellan gave me at the core. I cloaked it with jet. Because…” His voice trailed off.

  “Because Marcellan brought the idea with him, and Qiaqia matters to you. I get that,” Aude said. “So find something else that symbolizes the idea and also matters.”

  “Or is connected.” Jehan came to stand beside her. He reached inside his shirt and unhooked something, then fished in his pocket and drew out something else as well. “You keep saying this whole mess is connected to Aude and her family. Well, here’s something else connected to her. Maybe that will balance everything out.” He held out a bumpy fragment of stone and a small gold object.

  Her locket. The locket she had been given by her uncle, had worn every day thereafter until she lost it at the Woven House. Her locket and something else. She looked up at him in surprise, and he smiled. He said, “The rock comes from the Stone House, where Marcellan entered this world. And the locket…Aude tells me it symbolizes her family’s claim to their oldest lands. You could try them, at least.”

  Liyan shook his head. “It isn’t simple like that. It…”

  “You can try.” Jehan pushed the locket and the stone into his hand.

  Liyan sat in silence for long moments. Then he lifted the locket and opened the catch. A small twist of cloth fell out. He unwrapped it and looked up. “Old…old stone dust? Stone dust from the same place as these other stones. And something…” And against all Aude’s expectations, against everything she imagined, he began to laugh. He stood, still laughing, leaning on his clock. “Stone and scent. Those two.” And he nodded toward the twins. “That’s not possible. Humans are so careless…” He looked back at Aude. “The stone of the Stone House. They must have given this away to some human or other, with their meddling.” He stopped laughing, and his face grew sober. “It might work. The dust and the new piece together might rebalance the clock.”

  “Then try it,” said Jehan.

  Liyan began to climb the ladder. Halfway, he stopped, said, “What about Tsai?”

  “The clock stole parts of her.” Shirai said. “Make it give them back.”

  At the center of the clock, time hangs trapped and still, caught by one moment of despair. As Liyan’s hands touch this chain and that, shape cogs and warm levers, it begins, slowly, to loosen. Under his fingers, the locket softens, melts back into the stone dust it contains. He rolls it flat, wraps it around the stone chip from Jehan’s pocket. The end of a fine chain touches it, heats and melds. He breathes on it, once, and it becomes part of the whole.

  With gentle fingers, he sets it to count the seconds, backward, against the course of the moons. For a moment, the clock is still. Then it shudders, shivers, and limps into life. Cogs turn; gears count down; jacks tell out their duties in reverse.

  And down below, in the courtyard, water flows from the clock back into its reservoirs and scoops. It flows outward, through the channels and drains and conduits, throughout the length and breadth of the Rice Palace.

  At the foot of the clock, in her sky-roofed crypt, Tsai stirs. Her flesh thickens and swells, her hair darkens to blues and greens and grays. Her hands lift, making patterns in the water. Her eyes turn blue. She sits, shakes droplets from her hair, and laughs.

  She says, in the voice of the fountains, “I’ve had such funny dreams.”

  And finally, after they had checked on Clairet and found her bandaged and eating happily, there was a room and solitude. Not the room where the Cadre had first imprisoned her and not Tsai’s rich quarters, but a room Aude had not seen before. It occupied the south wing of a small courtyard in the lee of the Grass King’s own residence. The courtyard itself was filled with slender birch trees, their white branches already showing hints of green. Shirai had escorted her and Jehan there, brought them trays of bread and fruit and cheese, a deep pitcher of cool white wine and another of water. “The bath
ing chamber is in the adjacent west wing, and there’s fresh clothing in the press,” he said, and he bowed and took his leave.

  Aude took Jehan’s face in both her hands and looked at him. His face was dirt and sweat-smeared. His clothes were a disgrace. She bit her lip, hard, and said, “I knew. I always knew you’d come for me. My bravest officer. You wouldn’t let me be lost. I knew you’d find me.”

  “I knew I’d find you in trouble.” But he smiled at her as he spoke, and his arms closed about her. “I must smell horrible.”

  “Like a sewer.” Resting her forehead against his shoulder, she breathed in deeply that odor of sweat and fear. “Worse.”

  “And you smell like a bathhouse. Not a respectable one, either.”

  She looked up. “Do I want to know how you know about those?”

  “No.”

  “Was it…?” She wasn’t sure how to ask. “Was it hard, getting here?”

  A shiver of laughter ran through him. He said, “I’ve seen worse.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, well, after that inn we stayed at the first time we made port…” But there was a note of restraint beneath the laughter. She stepped back, releasing him and looked him in the eye.

  She said, “Tell me.”

  “I don’t…It wasn’t like normal things. The twins wouldn’t explain, and the house opened up under us, and then there were giant beetles…It sounds crazy.”

  “Not to me.”

  He put his head to one side, considering her. “No, I suppose not. It was all upside down. Stone boats, a moss sea. Trees made of crystal.” He shivered again, but this was not mirth. “They talked. Dead people talked through them, and I kept listening for you. And then…” Another shiver. “There was her. Tsai.”