The Grass King’s Concubine (19 page)

“Drink.” She released the pitcher, leaving it to stand before him.

His fingers closed around the handle, drew it to him. There was no cup. The water inside was cloudy: dust speckles floated on its surface. He forced his eyes away, looked back at the woman thing. “My wife…”

“Drink first. Explanations second.”

The ferret stretched, showing its pink moist tongue. He could feel the moisture from the surface of the jug teasing at his fingers. Water. Clairet had not raised her head from the hay. A leather bucket stood beside the hay. Water enough for him and the pony…The woman did not look thirsty. She had water in sufficient amount not to be troubled. She claimed that Aude was not dead.

He could not afford to trust her. The water was dirty, might be contaminated. The woman thing was hardly sane. The water smelled so good. He lifted the pitcher in both hands and drank. Sour, earth tainted. He had never tasted anything sweeter. The woman thing watched him, pointed face quivering with approval. He wanted to drink the jug dry and demand more. Hard knowledge held him back. He drank slowly and set the pitcher down three-quarters full. Then he straightened and rested his hands on the tabletop.

He said, “Tell me who you are and where I am.”

The woman thing held out a hand. The ferret licked it, then ran up her arm to sit on her shoulder. Both stared at him with their small sharp eyes. There was a moment’s stillness, counterpointed only by the slow
munch-munch
from the pony in the corner. Then she nodded. “Sense now. Better.” The ferret shifted, whiskers sweeping forward. The woman thing continued, “This is the Stone House. Opening. Gateway. And we are its keepers.”

“Why should I believe you?” Thirst tamed a little, he had room now for other feelings. For anger. He inhaled, sought to ignore it. “My wife. You said she was alive. Do you have her?”

“Alive, yes. But not here.” The ferret pressed itself against the woman thing’s cheek. “We told you.”

He took another sip of water.
Be calm, Jehan. Calm helps. Calm leads to sense.
The woman was mad, but she
knew about Aude. Claimed to know. Meaning…what? That Aude was, in fact here? That the woman was connected to the captors, whoever they were? He looked around him. A house of stone, solid and cool and silent. Several doors led out of the kitchen. Aude could be behind any of them. He wanted to believe she was alive and near him. He wanted very much not to be alone. The filthy floor was a jumble of prints, pony and ferret and human. A stop-start smudge told where the woman must have dragged him from the entry door to the pantry. He peered into the gloom for further traces. He said, “Why should I believe you? Why should I believe any of this?”

“We called you. Gave you water.” She had said that before.

“The pony smelled the water and brought me here.”

“We called the water.”

He had no answer for that. He stared around him once again, hoping for a clue. That book—it was old. The lettering on the spine and cover was archaic, the binding crumbling. These days, copies of the
Books of Marcellan
were bound small and tight, pocket-sized volumes printed on translucent thin paper and covered in supple black leather. A book like that one was as old as the scrolls in the Woven House. Older, perhaps. He did not think anyone made such intricate tooled bindings nowadays.
The Stone House. Opening. Gateway
. His education had been light as to matters of religion. That was Aude’s domain, part of her obsession with her history. The book’s cover was little help, worn as it was. About the lettering the leather had been tooled in a pattern that might be meant to suggest birds.

Birds. His hand went to his throat. He had left his inner scarf, gray and black, patterned with birds escaping into flight, tied to the remains of the Woven House. An Eschappé scarf. Aude had had one, too. He had seen no trace of it—of any scrap of it—in the remains of the Woven House, though he might have expected to find it tangled up with the locket. Like him, she had worn it as an inner scarf. It might have blown away, lost now far out on the steppe.
He frowned, putting together his last image of her. Scraps of garments caught on bamboo poles, tangled with the wreckage. Nothing reminiscent of her scarf. Nothing reminiscent of her inner robes mixed with that pitiful pile of flesh and bone, apart from the locket.

It was pitiful enough in itself, this shred of a hope. It was all he had. He said, “How do I know you don’t have her here?”

The woman thing was silent for long moments. The ferret nosed at her ear, and she nodded, slowly. “You can look.” And then, “My sister thinks you’re very stupid.”

Her sister? She had spoken several times of “we.” That only made it more likely that she did have Aude hidden somewhere, guarded by this sister. He took another sip of water, then placed the jug back onto the table. He rose. The woman said, “You can look by yourself. We like to be with our book. And there’s nothing here to find.” On her shoulder, the ferret chattered.

Their gazes, bright and sharp, followed him across the kitchen to the first door.

Room led into room, each dim and still and moribund with neglect. Up stairs and along corridors, he found only dust and darkness. The ferret musk hung over everything, and here and there animal tracks skittered and nosed. There were no human prints save his own. His footfalls scarcely grazed the surface of the silence. He climbed to the topmost room and found boards and dirt and ferret tracks on the floor and the windowsill. The latter was cracked and scarred, as if someone had pried away a piece of it at some point. Resting his hands on it for a moment, he stared out at the dusty cold steppe beyond. Desiccation and desolation as far as he could see. Under his hand, a fragment of the sill shifted; he closed his fingers about it, felt its hard edges bite into his palm. This was real; this was now. He slipped the fragment into his pocket as he turned to go, as if its hardness might keep him focused, keep him sane in all this strangeness. The house was empty, save for the woman and her pet, his pony and himself. Nowhere amid the dust
and the fragments of furniture could he find any sign of Aude.

Cadre took her. Cadre have her.
He could wring no sense out of that. Aude had spoken of a Stone House. The broken shards of her scrolls had spoken of one also, the house he had glimpsed from the dry watercourse. This house.
Bad witch bargain.
He did not know why that phrase came back to his mind now. He stood at the window, staring out through its filthy surface. Somewhere out there in the blur lay the husk of the river, the remnants of the Woven House. If Aude was out there somewhere, captured by these Cadre, he had scant hope of finding her. The frozen earth held no tracks. The endless plain would lead him astray.

If there were such things as witches, the woman downstairs was as close to one as he had ever seen. She offered him a hope built on nonsense. It was perhaps marginally better than no hope at all.

He could make it do. He would have to. He had only two choices, after all: hunt for Aude or abandon her as lost and hope to make it back to civilization. The woman at least offered him water.

He was not ready to give up, not yet. Aude would not give up, were their positions reversed. Aude gave up on nothing, pursued her goals to their ends, however unlikely or unpopular. He had promised her.

He would try the absurd, if that was what was required to find Aude. He headed downstairs, boots heavy on the stone treads. In the kitchen, the pony stood half dozing, leaning on the wall. The pitcher was still on the table. Two lithe brown bodies curled around it, noses touching, whiskers jumbled. The woman’s ragged chemise lay in a heap beside them. Jehan halted, looked around.

There was a thump, a slop of water, a smash of pottery. Moisture ran from the tabletop, pooled on the dirty floor, mixed with shards of earthenware. On the top of the table, two women crouched, arms entwined, both narrow and dark-haired, both pointed of face and sharp of teeth. They were both naked.

“You spilled it,” said one, shaking her free hand. “Wet.”

“You pushed,” said the other. “It was my turn to be human.”

Jehan stopped where he stood. In his pocket, his fingers curled again about the stone chip. He could hear Clairet’s breathing close by, soft and calm. Dead things that walked. Animals that became human—human shaped. He had walked into myth, as if he were a man from an old fable.
Except that doesn’t happen,
one part of his brain said.
It explains the woman’s nails. Nails like claws,
said another. He bit his lip, straightened his shoulders and asked, “What are you?”

“Guardians,” said one. He could not tell if it was the woman thing he had spoken to before. They were identical.

“Ourselves,” said the other.

“Fitches. Ferrets.”

“Watchers.”

“Twins.”

“We make the Grass King smile.”

“We hunt.”

“We bite.”

“We keep this place.”

“We keep our book.”

“Marcellan’s book.”

“Grass King has Marcellan.”

“We want him back.”

“Grass King has your woman.”

“You read. We go.” The words tumbled, each twin overlapping the other. As they spoke, they turned and shifted, arms about one another, heads tilting, rocking to and fro. It made him dizzy.

He retreated to the corner, rested a hand on Clairet’s neck. Warm flesh, thick hair, normal, comforting in the midst of this chaos. He said, “You…You change shape. You can turn into animals.”

One of the women spat. “Who wants to be human?”

“Our shape is quick.”

“Our shape is sharp.”

“Swift and clever.”

“Strong.”

“Good for hunting.”

“Good for watching.”

“Better than human. Blunt teeth and blind eyes.”

“Deaf ears. Can’t smell. Can’t hide. Only blunder and break things.”

“Not human. Fitch-women. Marcellan chose us. Grass King owns us.”

“Put us here to watch, to wait, to hold the way.”

He could not follow. Fingers knotting into Clairet’s mane, he asked, “What do you want with me?”

“Read.”

He shook his head. The other woman frowned at him. “Read the book.”

“Marcellan’s book.”

“Stupid human.”

He looked across at the book with its old binding. It was the only thing in this house for which he had any context. According to the priests, long ago, before kingdoms and empires, engines and factories, Marcellan had wandered the lands, writing down what he learned and what he saw, so that peoples of one place might know about peoples of another. It was a story, no more. And yet…
Marcellan shared out knowledge. He did not lock it in his coffers to his sole benefit.
He had read that in one of the pamphlets that came out of the Brass City. Printers and bookbinders revered Marcellan as the first of their kind. The devout revered his writings, clustering in temples to chant prayers and invocations. Jehan’s own grandmother had read a portion of the
Epitome
every morning when she woke. Aude looked to his writings as a guide of some kind, a map to some mystery she longed to uncover. The pamphleteers were divided, some hailing him as the champion of equality, some dismissing him as a
comforting fiction. Most people had no opinion either way. Books of mystery and old tales were for children and widows, the elderly and the weak.

Shapeshifters, bannermen, gates to another world. Every part of it was out of a story. And now he was in it, too. He had been in it since that day in the factory when Aude had intervened on the shop floor. Or before that. Perhaps since the day he had found and answered her letter about expeditions to other worlds. He walked back across to the table and sat down, as far as possible from the women and the water slick. The women watched him closely, limbs entangled. He said, “All right, I’ll read. But you have to get dressed.”

“Fur is easier.”

He considered that. “Will you understand the words then?”

“Of course.”

He would not understand them. That might be no bad thing. On the other hand…He said, “I have questions.”

The women exchanged glances. One of them leaned forward to lick her twin on the cheek. And then…He could not follow. A swirling, as flesh and air were stirred by an unseen hand. Fur and skin, a blur of limb and whisker, and then a ferret crouched beside the book. Beside it—her—the remaining woman shrugged into the tunic. She looked exactly as she had when he first saw her. He did not know if that meant she
was
the same. He said, “Who are you?”

“We told you.”

“Yes, but…Do you have names?”

Another exchange of glances. “Names are nothing. Smell reveals.”

All he could smell was the overwhelming odor of ferret. If there were subtleties within it, he could not make them out. He said, “They help me.” And then, “I’m Jehan Favre.”

She shrugged. “Yelena.” Her hand sank into her sister’s fur. “Julana. Marcellan said.”

“Yelena.” He reached out for the book. The ferret arched its back, hair bristling. The woman—Yelena—hissed at it. Under his fingers, the cover felt dry and friable. He would need more water if he were to read this thing. Assuming that he could. It was old enough that it could fall apart. The spilled water could not have done it any good, either. He said, “Is there any more to drink? I’ll need it to read.” Yelena slithered off the table and padded over to a door. A draft of damp billowed across the room as she opened it: moss and wet stone. A well, perhaps. Clairet lifted her head. After a minute or two, Yelena reappeared, holding a bowl. “No more jugs.” Water slopped over the edges as she set it down.