The Grass King’s Concubine (37 page)

He walked into the aisle. On either side, stones flanked him, gray and rough skinned, more like the fabric of the Stone House than the shining sharp trees. Time and wind had abraded their surfaces into the semblance of whorls and coils. Their shadows fell across him from either side.
Not possible
, said the chill voice in the back of his head. And then,
If anything here can be said to be possible.
It seemed to him that they watched him from their many flaking cracks and splits. They stood perhaps as high as his waist.
Old,
said the voice.
Older than the trees. Older than the Stone House. Old like the sky and the cavern walls
. He did not know how he knew that, unless it was some primitive memory encoded in his bones. He walked on, and the stones paced him, like the columns in the Bell Temple in the Brass City or the wood pillars of the barracks’ mess hall.
Stone House, stone boat, stone aisle…
What was it the twins had said lay under the Grass King’s dominion?
Stone and growth, earth and grass and grain, trees and blossom
. Well, and he had some of that here, if one might count trees of crystal. The farther he walked into the aisle, the quieter everything became, until he stood at last in silence before the tree. It rose to perhaps four feet above his head, stark and black, and the gauze wisp twitched around it, twisting first this way then that, fluttering. He put out his hand—the left one: The right rested still on his sword.

A hand formed from the mist and closed around his. He started and pulled back, and it clung, cold and thin and sticky. Salt air wrapped him, making him cough. Supple fingers tightened on him, and he shivered, remembering all at once the dry dead thing in the Woven House. He tugged at his sword and found it held fast to its scabbard. He gasped, and the mist bound itself closer, flowing up his arm, slick and gelatinous. It reached his breast pocket, where the stone shard was tucked, and hesitated. He shuddered. The hand began to move again, reaching his shoulder and beginning to slither toward his throat. He twisted, turned his head away. The cool stickiness tickled at his nape, halted,
then pushed. Off balance, he stumbled to his knees, and the salt cloud swept over him. He was blind and deaf, nose and mouth filled up with the sourness of citrus and brine. His skin stung. Was this what had happened to Aude? Was this how the twins’ Cadre trapped their prey? He shivered at the thought. Aude should not suffer. She was not built for it. He should be there to protect her. He fought to free himself, found his limbs sluggish and distant, as if they had begun to forget him.

He did not want to die like this, not now, not here. Aude depended on him. He had to live, to find her. He was fading out, thinning as the moistness, the mistiness engulfed him. He could feel almost nothing save its foul clutch. Not the spongy moss beneath him, not the soft brush of old cotton from his shirtsleeves, not…

Wait. Under a hand, there lingered still the dimmest taste of brass and steel. He focused on it, counting fingers, willing himself to awareness of what they held. The familiar ridge of his sword grip, fitted to his hand as it had been to his uncle’s before him. He could see it now, despite the mist, despite the fact that his eyes were bound: the dull gleam of the hilt, the strong bright gray of the blade, taken as booty from some long forgotten battle and brought home to be the portion of younger sons. To be his portion and the tool of his trade. He felt the fingers tighten and the warmth of steel run up his arm. He tugged again on it, and this time, it rattled free of its sheath.

The mist parted around him as he tumbled backward flat onto the moss, sword held out before him. He lay for an instant, panting. Then he rolled to his knees. In front of him, at the foot of the stricken tree a white shape crouched, long arms around its head, legs pulled up, wrapped in a muslin winding sheet. He waited, sword at the ready, as it uncoiled, slowly, and, peeping between a visor of fingers, gazed at him.

A young woman, white as bone and thin as the tree that held her, her eyes huge and colorless behind their shield, her hair a tangled skein of dirty pale gray. Her skin was
milk-pale and shiny, the sickly color of southerners and the dead. Jehan shifted to a crouch, the sword held up in front of him, and demanded, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Her empty eyes stared up at him, her tatty fingers twisting. “Who?” she echoed. “Woo. Hoo.”

Names

H
UMAN SHAPE WAS CLUMSY. Trying to rise, trying to learn the new long limbs, the twins tumbled into Marcellan’s desk. It toppled sideways, spilling papers and styluses across the floor. The inkstone hit the ground with a thump and rolled away under a chest. The cake of brownish ink bounced, split into powdery fragments. Marcellan, who had slept through their initial panic, woke with a start. He sat up, looking around him, and the twins froze. He stared at them in silence for long, long, moments.

It was something they had not considered. What if he did not like the change? What if he was frightened? Yelena could not tell—blunt human senses gave her no clues. She knew her own alarm and Julana’s and nothing more. She did not know how to shape words with her new wide mouth. She clutched at Julana, wobbling beside her. Unsteady on her own feet, Julana staggered and they fell together in a tangle on the rug beside the loom.

“Oh,” said Marcellan. He swung his legs to the floor and stood with an ease that was baffling. The twins had not thought of that, either, to watch how he moved, how he managed in such a long and awkward body. He came to kneel beside them. “I didn’t know you could do this.” They gaped at him. His voice was muffled, thinner than usual. Another failure of human senses. He went on, “Keep still—you’ve got your feet caught in the loom threads.” He lifted
one of Julana’s feet, and she shivered. His skin was warm on hers. Carefully, he disentangled them from the wool and each other. Then he sat back. “There.” The twins looked at one another, each waiting for the other to move. Marcellan smiled. “It’s all right. I promise.”

It did not feel all right. They were too long and big, too clumsy and cold, too cut off from everything. A bubble of panic rose in Julana’s throat, spilled out into a high thin keening. Tangled into her, Yelena shivered and shook. Marcellan reached out to them. “You’re safe. It’s safe.” His hands patted Julana’s hair, Yelena’s shoulder. “Hush, now. Safe.” His voice was strange and thin. They could not smell if he lied or not. Julana’s keening rose higher. Bootsteps sounded outside the courtyard wall; the gate squeaked on its hinges. Bannermen, coming to investigate. Yelena twisted against her sister, bit down with her strange new teeth. Julana whimpered and fell silent. Marcellan patted them again, then rose and went out into the courtyard. The twins pressed close together. They must not be caught, not now that they were so close to their goal. Outside, the bannermen’s voices were sharp, demanding explanations. Air Banner, edgy and defensive and suspicious, just like their leader, Sujien. Chill moisture broke out on Yelena’s new bald skin, and she started. Human shape was afraid. She could feel Julana’s fear, too, damp and shivering against her. She wrapped her long new forearms about her twin, inhaling as strongly as she could, trying to find their familiar common scent. Julana squeezed close. The short hair on her head carried a trace of their musk. Yelena pressed closer, breathed in and in, felt Julana’s breath come to match hers, pulled that known safe smell nearer and nearer and nearer, tingling over her skin, pulling her back into herself, shrinking her, warming her…

Scent and sound and taste tumbled over them, knocked them apart. Yelena squirmed and felt short legs and long body respond. Her whiskers twitched, caught the chill breeze of the air bannermen’s discontent. She shook herself, felt her fur fall back into place. “We’re us,” she said, slowly.

“Us again.” Julana was puffed out with the remains of her panic. She reeked of fear. “Bannermen won’t catch us.” She stopped. “Bannermen won’t find out.”

“No…” Yelena could hear Marcellan returning. He must have convinced the bannermen after all. “But we have to try again. Have to warn him.”

“Us again,” Julana repeated, and launched into a dance of delight, there under the loom, threatening to tangle herself in its threads.

“We have to try again,” Yelena repeated.

Julana charged her, knocking her over. “Later. Play now.”

Yelena tried to fend her off. “Wait…”

“Later,” Julana said, and bit her hard on the leg.

It was a nuisance, being human, though they soon became adept at slipping in and out of that form. It was not, they learned, just the dull senses and stupid ungainly limbs. There was no fur; they shivered in the palace’s warm air, and Marcellan had to teach them about clothes. Clothes were bad. They tangled and tore and trapped, they caught on everything, and they felt wrong. “I won’t,” said Julana, mutinous.

“Marcellan wants it,” Yelena said.

There was moving. They tripped over and into things, and that hurt. And when they turned on their tormentors—the rug, the divan, the table—their teeth and claws were too blunt to do real harm. Marcellan smiled, and helped them up with soothing noises, before gathering together his spilled property. It was all highly unsatisfactory. And then there was speech. They were used to speaking with every part of themselves. These human forms did not bend or arch correctly. Their ears were stiff and barely mobile. They had no whiskers. The sounds that came from their huge new mouths made sense to neither them nor Marcellan. They could barely understand one another. “I thought human talk came with the shape,” Yelena mourned. “It does for the Cadre.”

“Cadre cheat,” Julana said darkly.

There was a whole new mountain of things they must learn before they could warn Marcellan. “Too much,” said Julana. “Takes too long. We should never have changed.”

“What else can we do?” said Yelena. “Man can’t learn to be us. We have to study. Listen. Warn him.”

“That sounds hard.” Julana was mutinous. “I don’t want to.”

“Then Marcellan will be punished.” Yelena pointed with her nose at the growing mound of papers on the desk. “The Grass King won’t like what he’s doing.”

“Paper doesn’t matter.”

“It does to Marcellan. And to Liyan.”

Julana began to groom herself, refusing to look at Yelena. The latter hesitated, then said, “Then I’ll learn without you.” A shudder ran through her. They were two. They had always been two. Yelena did not know if she knew how to be one. But if Julana would not try…

Julana whipped round. “No! Two of us. Always two.” She nudged her twin. “I’ll learn. Both learn. For Marcellan.”

“For Marcellan,” Yelena confirmed.

They listened, in ferret and human form, practicing the sounds they heard and trying to make them make sense. Understanding was not the problem: It was the mechanics and the mapping. Marcellan grasped what they were trying almost at once, giving them the words for objects in the room, for foods, for colors, pronouncing them with slow care so that they could imitate how his mouth moved. Piece by piece, day by day, they grew easier with their second shape, more fluent in its ways.

And then they had a new way to slip about the palace. Heads lowered, they could pass, just about, for part of the host of lower-grade servants who worked everywhere in the vastness of the Rice Palace. Hands could steal where paws had long proved inept, could carry objects six and seven times larger than teeth had ever managed. In all
other ways, the twins soon decided, the form was inferior. But it gave them the one thing that they had wanted above all.