Lords of Grass and Thunder (28 page)

He croaked a greeting and bobbed his head in a way that neither submitted to her dominance nor demanded that she submit to his.
Very nicely done,
she thought, and he was looking into her glamour eyes, not down into her true face. She answered the bobbing of his head and, since she had opened the negotiations, began with an explanation that she hoped would make her offer palatable to the toads.

“As you can see, I share a common soul with the toad people.” Great Sun had chased Little Sun nearly to the end of the sky. The air grew cooler, the signal for the mosquitoes and flies to make their presence felt. Eluneke smelled them on the air and realized she was hungry. As she spoke, it seemed natural to flick out her tongue and snap a fly out of the air. Almost before she knew what she had done the thing was sliding down her gullet.

“So I see,” King Toad agreed, with—if such were possible—a smirk upon his lipless mouth. He followed her lead, snatching up insects on his sticky tongue and swallowing with a great show of exercising his throat.

The two sides of Eluneke’s nature strove for control. She allowed none of that to show in the way she dipped and nodded at the king of toads, however. She had just made a claim to a relationship and proved it with her dinner. Now was not the time to let her human taste exert itself. “As I was saying,” she continued when she had regained her composure, “I am a shaman among the humans. My totem spirit is in the toad family.

“It is the practice of our craft to secure the skins of the totem animal to our sacred robes and by their presence assume their character. The shaman Bolghai wears the pelts of stoats about his neck and lines his burrow with them. Toragana bears within her the spirit of a raven. Though she has collected most of her costume from the fallen feathers of birds in flight, she has taken the lives of that people at need for the more limited requirements of her headdress and her tent.”

“And you wish to take the lives of the toads for this purpose—” The king of the toads puffed himself up, his poison glands swelling threateningly.

Eluneke’s toad nature lacked the instinct to spit venom at her foes. She held herself erect against the threat but had no way to counter it. The human prince, however, had kept his promise to guard her. From above, as if the gods of the heavens had set their protection on her, the point of an arrow appeared. It came to rest on the head of the king of toads.

“You may kill her,” Prince Tayy conceded levelly. “But it will be your dying act.”

“You heard me refuse that option,” Eluneke reminded him, “I am trying to find my way to the best solution for both of us. Right now, we are facing the worst.”

“I see your point,” King Toad agreed. “It’s poking me in the head. Call off your male, please.”

“I can’t. He doesn’t speak toad. You will have to show him it is safe to unbend his bow.”

“All right.” King Toad flopped down into a submissive pose. “Can you send him away now?”

Eluneke didn’t know why, but she had the sense that King Toad was laughing at her in spite of the danger he faced at the prince’s hand. She took two short steps back and forward again, settled her leaf-colored arms in a toad shrug. “I will certainly do that as soon as I return to my mortal form. We’ll all be safest if we finish quickly, I think.”

“Very well.” The king of the toads relaxed over his arms, eyeing Eluneke with a baleful gleam. “State your case.”

“The toads will agree to attend me in their baskets as needed for healing the sick, or for easing the way for the dead. In return, I will allow each the freedom to leave when the need has passed, and I vow to harm no living toad to make my shaman’s robes.”

“You’re talking about a serious inconvenience to the toad people, for no return other than your promise not to commit mortal crimes against them,” King Toad pointed out. “It doesn’t exactly work as a long-term arrangement.”

Eluneke had to agree the king of the toads had a point. The empty skins of a shaman’s totem animal didn’t complain about the hours. A powerful shaman might fill the dead husks with his or her own presence, so that the robes of office bore the stamp of the one who wore it into the next generation. But if she didn’t kill the toads—

“How do the toad people feel about their dead?”

“Glad not to be among them,” King Toad responded. Then he seemed to catch her meaning. "There is a place where my people go when they know they are dying. The branches of the trees hang low and golden drops of sunlight dapple the leaves. It is a sacred place of peaceful endings. But once the spirit has passed, a toad has no use for what is left behind.

“There are no heaps of bones and skin,” he warned her. “Few enough of our number make it to the final home and few remain there long when dead—nature turns us all back into dirt soon enough.”

“I understand.” Eluneke bobbed her head in a human nod that she realized belatedly made an offer she hadn’t intended in toad language. “If you show me this place, I can slowly begin to gather the hides I need for my robes.”

King Toad pretended not to notice the awkward suggestion about fathering her tadpoles. “Promise only to pin the dead out of sight of the living and I will do so,” he agreed. “Now, how do you plan to return to your human form without startling that young male into putting an arrow through my head?”

“I think you ought to back away first, so he doesn’t think you are a threat.”

The toad moved away in a submissive posture, but with an ironic gleam in his eye. “Come alone at this time tomorrow and I will show you what you want. But leave your male at home. And if you should like a toad husband . . .”

King Toad’s intentions were lost in the croaking of his kind. Eluneke stood next to the prince and gave him a triumphant smile. “We have a deal.”

Chapter Eighteen

“
W
HAT DID HE SAY?” Prince Tayy had seen many wonders in his travels. A galley slave who turned into a dragon and a boy who turned into a roebuck, then a king, and then a god came immediately to mind. So he controlled his instinctive jump back when Eluneke stood before him as a girl again. He didn’t make a habit of kissing toads and the great desire to kiss her that he’d felt when he first stumbled into the dell was considerably dampened. An edge of curiosity remained, however; it seemed he had an affinity for magical creatures, including the shamaness in training. He wondered about his children if such beings were his fate.

“King Toad has agreed to our bargain for the time being.” She dusted her hands on the sides of her dress, looking as disconcerted as he felt himself, which raised the prince’s confidence. She was no more accustomed to making treaties with her totem animal than he was to watching her do it. He thought he ought to say something useful, but an explosion of feathery flight brought both their heads up, searching out the sudden threat. Just a bird. Her eyes narrowing with a tension he recognized, Eluneke followed its skittery flight into the higher trees.

“I’m fine!” she shouted after it. “You can go home now!

“My teacher, Toragana,” she apologized, rolling her eyes. “Checking up on me. I’d have been a lot less nervous if I’d known she was keeping watch, but the danger is over now. I don’t know why she hasn’t gone home.”

The dogs seemed to agree with her, adding their own baying commentary on the matter of privacy and spying shamanesses. The bird merely pranced on her branch, settled on the other side of a knot, and groomed under her wing until some more interesting scent caught the fickle attention of the hounds, who abandoned their prince and the threat of the raven to mill about among the trees. Searching with a hunter’s eye the area around the tree where the shamaness perched, he found her answer in a flash of blue just visible through the spiny fingers of a spruce tree. “Someone is up there,” he said.

“An enemy?”

“No, an ally, I suspect. Your teacher would show more agitation if you were in danger.”

“Or you,” Eluneke agreed in principle. “The dogs don’t seem upset either.” She leaned closer to him, hoping perhaps to gain a clearer angle to their observer. “Who is it, can you tell?”

Tayy couldn’t see that much himself. He knew he ought to tell her that, but when she stood with her hair so close to his mouth and his nose he found it difficult to remember she had so recently been a toad. Would she let him touch the sleek strands hiding the side of her face like a curtain? Not with an audience that included her teacher, surely. His hand had started its own journey of exploration when the dogs raised a cry and bounded from the woods behind him. He turned quickly, reaching for his bow.

“They’re over here, by the river!” Qutula stepped from among the trees, brotherly exasperation fixed in the vee of his brows and the downturn of his mouth, which he caused to twitch as if a smirk were trying to escape. “Would you call off your dogs? We’ve been looking all over for you.”

The blood rose dark in the prince’s cheeks, but he called his dogs to him and settled them with a hand at their necks. “Has something happened?”

“Only that you disappeared without your guardsmen this morning and no one has seen you since. The gur-khan is beside himself with worry and here you are propped up against a tree with a strange woman falling into your arms.”

As Qutula spoke, the young warriors who made up the prince’s personal guard gathered behind him, their approach ghostly silent on the rain-softened ground. His own followers Duwa and Mangkut came first, with others who counted themselves Durluken. The prince’s Nirun came after; they did not stop with Qutula but formed up like the dogs around their own master.

Jumal was gone and no longer a threat, thank the spirits. Altan, who lacked the other’s intelligence and skill, remained with a handful of young hopefuls of no importance who gathered at the heir’s side for politics rather than love.

Once over the shock of the interruption, the girl showed no surprise at his mention of the gur-khan. Prince Tayy had been about to kiss her when he’d broken in on their little tryst. She’d been about to let him, if Qutula was any judge of women. His own lover sometimes gave him cause to doubt that, but he had this one figured out well enough. She wouldn’t say no to a royal ride, he thought, as long as she held a prince’s reins. The idiot had given her his true name.

Mergen was right to be worried. The girl was a nobody; he could tell that from the poor and threadbare quality of the clothes she wore, bad enough even if she weren’t an apprentice shaman. As for Tayyichiut the hero, his abject guilt in the face of his cousin’s gentle chiding made him look more like a repentant pup than a doughty warrior.

If he’d come alone, Qutula could have apologized for interrupting the tryst and left the girl to set her talons in tight. See then who would be heir, with Prince Tayyichiut making alliances in disastrously wrong tents. But he had witnesses for whom he must act the dutiful servant of the gur-khan’s wishes.

“Sorry,” he said and smiled contritely at the prince, that much at least. “I didn’t realize you were busy. But the gur-khan really is getting worried. He’ll want to see you with his own eyes before he’ll believe you haven’t drowned yourself in the river, or that your horse hasn’t broken a leg in a rabbit hole and fallen on top of you.”

“I’m the one who should apologize. We were talking, and I completely forgot.” Tayy held out his hand to the girl, but his guardsmen had surrounded him, effectively separating them.

“Go, then, before he sends his own guard to find you.”

Altan gave a dramatic shudder. “Qutula’s right,” he said. “I don’t want to be dragged home by my father in front of the whole camp.” Jochi, his father, had taken Yesugei’s place as general of the gur-khan’s armies and captain of his private guard.

The younger guardsmen all laughed in sympathy for their companion. Most of them had a parent or older brother in the gur-khan’s service and none wanted to be dragged home like an unblooded boy by their elders. The prince conceded with chagrin when Qutula motioned the Nirun to take him home. He allowed no expression of triumph to show on his features as they quickly obeyed him. They all knew he carried out Mergen-Gur-Khan’s instructions, but still Qutula felt his power among them grow. Soon they would take it for granted that he was the greater of the two. When the prince met his all-too-timely end, they would look to Qutula to lead them.

“I’ll make sure the lady gets home safely,” he managed a courtly bow almost hiding the contempt in his eyes.

The prince didn’t notice, though his “lady” gave an indignant snort. “I can find my own way, thank you.”

“Please—” the prince turned back. He reached hesitantly for her hand and Qutula saw the doubt cross his eyes as he aborted the gesture before she could refuse him. “I have to go now. Will I see you again?”

“Of course!”

“When?”

Qutula had expected her to smile seductively as he had seen his mother do to entice her lovers. Instead she frowned as if she didn’t see him clearly, though he had gone only a few paces into the trees with his Nirun. “I don’t know. I have to think—”

“What have I done?” The prince would have returned to her side, but Altan took him by the shoulder and whispered in his ear, a reminder, no doubt, that the gur-khan awaited him.