The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  The Stone House stood to one side of an old crossroads and on a rise so slight that it tended to vanish at close quarters. It was true that the house was imposing. At least, it stood out. The scattered human farmers lived in low-roofed slat-sided houses built of split wood and dried mud and woven bamboo, raised above the unreliable rice paddies on uncertain legs. When the river flooded, which was incalculable, or the rain lingered, which it could do for weeks, the water caused the weaker huts to wobble and waver and sometimes float away entirely, to be washed up uselessly on some mud bank or worn stump of rock. At the Stone House, despite the rise, the water tended to get inside and make smelly puddles, hence the need for mopping. Life was not romantic, but neither was it dangerous, which was why the twins had found themselves here. What it was, by and large, was damp and close and monotonous. “Not a normal punishment,” mourned Julana. “A normal punishment might have been amusing.”

  “To be punished normally,” said Yelena, “we should have done something more ordinary.”

  “We gnawed our way out of the pocket of the Seventeenth Prince and made a hole in his trousers,” said Julana. “And the Grass King laughed and made us pick up every grain of wheat from all twelve granaries with our teeth overnight.”

  “They expected us to chew,” said Yelena. “Chewing is what we’re known for. It made punishing us easy, that time.”

  “That was an ordinary crime,” Julana said. “Not like claiming a mortal. No one ever thought we’d do that.”

  “Claiming Marcellan.” Yelena said. “Making him ours. Letting him change us. That was embarrassing. We aren’t supposed to be embarrassing.”

  “It isn’t a normal punishment,” said Julana, mutinous. “It’s boring.”

  Though they kept the Stone House, they did not precisely live there. Rather, they infested it. It made feeding easier and greatly reduced the need for dusting. It also provided a splendid excuse for biting anyone who tried to visit. In their true, ferret shape, they had silky dark fur and shiny dark eyes and teeth that were strong and sharp and yellow. Most humans who ventured close enough to the Stone House to catch a glimpse of them looked quickly away. The sillier ones sometimes shrieked or hid behind their veils. “Although I like it best when they faint,” said Julana.

  “And if they do,” said Yelena, “we bite them.”

  “We bite them hard,” said Julana. “It discourages visitors.” Rare indeed were the humans whose curiosity persisted once blood had been drawn. Rarer still were those willing and able to dig in and try to outwait the sisters’ patience. It did not do, the twins felt, to become too familiar with the neighbors. But even so, every little while, someone came who wanted more than a glimpse of fur, a nip of teeth, and a long damp wait on the muddy doorstep.

  The woman who came trudging up the dirt road from the nearest hamlet that Midsummer Day was one of those rare ones. Her robes—good silk and well dyed—were splashed with mud and torn here and there on twigs and stones. Her hands were soiled, too, and bleeding. Her veil hung awry, soaked with sweat and showing more than was meet of her thin face. She looked young and tired and foolish, yet for all that she sank down on the step cross-legged and tugged off her shoes. “We’ll have to bite this one,” Yelena said, peering through a crack at the base of the door. “She doesn’t look like the fainting kind.” The woman pulled a foot into her lap and began to rub it. “We’ll have to bite several times. She looks determined.”

  “I like biting,” said Julana.

  It was a matter of a moment for them both to be outside; a quick skitter of sharp claws, a twist, a wriggle, and two lithe fast bodies shot from under the step, straight in front of the visitor. She did not shriek. She did not even start. Two pointed noses twitched, two sets of small ears pulled back, then Julana rose up onto her hindquarters to stare. The woman looked down at her, smooth-browed above the tattered veil. Julana dropped back to all fours, gathered her haunches beneath her, and leaped. There was a puff of mud, a flap of fabric, a short cry. The woman drew back on the step, sucking on a finger under her veil. Around it, she said “Nasty dirty little creatures.”

  “Dirty herself,” said Julana, hopping back down to rejoin her sister. “You should taste her. Stale.”

  Yelena sniffed at her, whiskers twitching. “She’s different,” she said. “She smells strange.”

  Julana twisted, reaching back to groom a ruffled spot. Muffled in fur, she said, “That explains the taste.”

  “Hush,” said Yelena.

  The woman took the finger from her mouth, examined it. Then she said, rather calmly, “You can bite all you like. I’m not leaving until I see your mistresses.”

  “Strange and crazy,” said Julana.

  “I know there are witches here,” the woman continued. “Everyone says so. And I intend to see them.”

  “She thinks we’re familiars,” Yelena said, wondering.

  Looking round from her grooming, Julana showed fangs. “We are,” she said. “But not the way she means it. You bite her this time.”

  “Witches,” Yelena repeated. Something new lit in her dark eyes. “We could be witches. If we wanted.”

  “The Grass King won’t like it.” Julana said, happily. “But I do.”

  “Me too,” said Yelena.

  The woman went back to rubbing her foot. Without looking up, she said, “Chitter as much as you want. I know how to wait.” She glanced up, briefly. “Or do you want another taste of me?” She thrust the soiled foot at the twins. “Go ahead.”

  “She’s nasty,” Yelena, fastidious, recoiled. “She isn’t deserving.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Julana tugged one last clump of fur into place. “We’re not about that.”

  “We might do more.” Yelena was thoughtful. “We could make her help us get Marcellan back.”

  “How?” Julana asked. And then, as her twin simply blinked at her, “Well, can I be the witch?”

  “You’ll forget your whiskers. Or you’ll squeak or bite her.”

  “Marcellan likes that.”

  “She isn’t Marcellan.”

  The twins fell silent, considering their visitor. She ignored them, starting work on her second foot. She might have been any one of the hundred hundred humans who toiled and died in the long shadow of the Stone House. They were all the same, with their ephemeral silly wants and needs. Only Marcellan had been different. Only Marcellan had come to them. “I’ll be the witch,” Yelena said. “Let’s go back inside.”

  Changing was easy; the twins had practiced it long and hard. A sneeze would take longer. Humanwise, Yelena was sharp and angular, pungent as acid. Her hair grew dense and short in a bushy black cap; under heavy brows her eyes were deep-set in shadowed sockets, brightly brown. Her teeth were still sharp and shiny. “But,” said Julana, as Yelena pulled upright, “we should make her wait longer. She said that she wanted to.”

  “It’s good to be dignified,” Yelena said. “Dignified people don’t fuss.”

  Julana tipped her head upward to stare at her sister. “She’ll expect clothes. Humans are silly.”

  “We’ll find some. We had some.”

  “Itchy.”

  “You don’t have to wear them.”

  Perhaps Yelena looked odd when at last she wrenched open the door. The issue did not arise. (“As if,” said Julana, “what a human thought mattered.”) The long shirt she wore was yellowed with age and frayed at the hem. It had belonged to Marcellan once, before the twins stole it to add to their nest. Yelena reached down to scoop up Julana and settle her on her shoulder. Then she stood back from the doorway in the dank stone shadow.

  Aside from dust and dried old mud, there was little of remark inside the first room of the Stone House. A rough-hewn trestle, piled with dirty earthenware, stood crookedly across it, accompanied by a few three-legged stools. Two doors to further rooms hung ajar; in the back a narrow stone stairway headed upward into darkness. The house smelled of damp and cobwebs and the twins’ warm musk. It was unlike any hut in
the village, even any of the big houses of the one nearby town. It was unlike anywhere a local human might want to live at all. But then again, no local woman would stand barefaced and barelegged to admit a stranger. The twins had never been good at remembering such things. They just didn’t see how it mattered.

  The veiled woman turned her head, then rose. Her eyes offered nothing as she stepped over the threshold and seated herself, unasked, on a stool. Her straight back was no more revealing than her eyes. “Much she should sneer at,” said Julana. “At least it’s dry in here.”

  “For now,” said Yelena. Her voice, in human form, was thin and sharp. The woman looked at her, brows drawing in.

  “Don’t explain,” said Julana. “I want us to worry her.”

  “Hush,” said Yelena.

  “I’m not a fool,” the woman said. “I know you can talk with your vermin.”

  “Vermin yourself,” said Julana.

  “I want something from you,” the woman went on. “I didn’t come all the way out here to look at you or to gossip.” Yelena said nothing, staring at the stranger. The woman said, finally, “I want you to give me a boy child.”

  “We don’t keep human children,” said Julana, indignant. “I ought to have bitten her harder.” And then, “Don’t answer her. Make her work.” Yelena let the silence lengthen, until the woman looked down and shuffled her bare feet on the cold floor. Gray light filtered in through the still-open door, coating the floor with murky shadows. On Yelena’s shoulder, Julana preened her whiskers, one by careful one.

  At last, the woman gave in. “I’m the headman’s favorite. But he had a wife before me, and she gave him a daughter, the old sow. Now she wants him to get rid of me, says I make them unlucky, that she’ll get a son once I’m gone. So I have to have one first. She’s just another mudfoot; she isn’t even young. But I have proper blood; my grandmam lay with a northern soldier and got my da that way. He came from money, and he left her with gold to care for my da.” She looked up again, and her eyes had turned sly. “I still have a piece of it. I could give it to you, for a boy child.”

  “We don’t like gold,” Yelena said in her thin high voice. “It isn’t useful to us.”

  “We like rabbits,” said Julana. “Or a nest of young rats.”

  “I can get you silks,” the woman said. “Wine from the North. I can see that the headman protects you.”

  “We don’t like silk and wine,” Yelena said. “We don’t need protection.” She hesitated. “You have to do better than that.” She reached up, ran a finger along Julana’s spine. “You have to offer something we want.”

  The woman lifted her chin. “I can have men come. They’ll burn down your house.”

  “The Stone House won’t burn.”

  “But I need this child.” The woman’s voice turned pleading as her arrogance began to crack.

  Yelena walked slowly up to the table. He face was feral in the dim light. The woman curled back on the stool, shoulders hunching under her veils. Coolly Yelena said, “A big magic, to make children. The land doesn’t like it. You have to steal the goodness from the earth. You have to give us something that makes the change stick. Something written down.”

  “I can’t write,” the woman said.

  “Bring us a book,” Yelena said.

  On her shoulder, Julana quivered. “One of Marcellan’s books.”

  “We want,” said Yelena, “the book called The Fivefold Domains. Get us that, and you get a son.”

  The woman rose, pulled her robes tight. She looked neither right nor left as she walked out of the house and into the rain. She said nothing. On the doorstep, she hesitated, but she neither looked back nor spat on the ground. “And now?” said Julana.

  “She’ll bring the book,” Yelena said. “We’ll read it, and the way will open again.”

  “We can’t read,” said Julana.

  “She’ll bring the book,” Yelena repeated, “and someone else will come to read it. You’ll see.”

  3

  The Brass City

  THE YEAR AUDE TURNED SEVENTEEN, her uncle moved the entire household from the country to the Silver City. She had learned, by then, that a name was just a name; the streets and houses she saw from the windows of her carriage did not shine, nor were they made of any precious metal. They were precious enough, for all that, the streets wide and well kept, their pavements lying smooth and clean, the houses large and elegant behind their high walls and wrought-iron gates. Gentlemen hastened by, mounted on high-stepping horses or driving finely dressed ladies in curricles. Servants in crisp liveries hustled from place to place, eyes fixed on the ground. For all of her life, Aude had known where she belonged, known that she was, for the most part, approved and appreciated. Now, in the eyes of the Silver City nobles, she discovered for the first time that she was not, after all, good enough. The gentlemen smiled at the sight of the old-fashioned coach; the ladies tittered. Aude herself was hidden behind the window shutter, yet she felt she had already been judged and found wanting.

  Her uncle’s house lay at the far end of one of the quieter boulevards. This was one of the finest districts of the Silver City. To the north lay the parklands surrounding the palace of the regent. To the west, beyond the paths and lawns and trees of her family’s grounds, stood more dwellings of the aristocracy. To the east, a road swept past, carrying the gentry toward the fashionable shopping districts. To the south…To the south, the trees had been permitted to grow tall, the shrubs dense. Beyond them was a high wrought-iron fence with spikes along its crown, then a wilderness, and, beyond that, a cliff. Long ago, a river had birthed that cliff, and then a plain, and last of all, on that plain, a village. The village had grown rich from the river and gathered more people, becoming a port, a town, a city. Its buildings marched back and back until they met the cliff, and its streets grew danker and narrower, and its people more varied. Wealth learned to sneer at need and need to prey upon wealth, until one by one the richest left to seek space and light and sweeter air on the heights of the cliff. Their houses were white or palest gray, embellished, cherished, indulged. The bright quarter, men called it—the jewel box, the Silver City. At its foot, the old dwellings crouched in a mantle of yellow fog, hidden from the view of their former owners on the heights.

  Aude owned factories and tenements down under that miasma. She had seen the neat rows of figures submitted to her uncle’s man of business by their overseers. She was not, she learned, expected to see the factories themselves. “We’re not here for you to dirty yourself poking about in weaving sheds and foundries,” her uncle said, when she asked him over breakfast on the first day in the new house. “We’re here for you to meet the people who matter in your husband’s world.”

  She did not have a husband. Not yet, anyway. But she did not say that. Her uncle was never at his most approachable in the mornings. She added a spoonful of plum preserves to her plate and said, “It’ll be interesting to meet new people.”

  Nurse had been left behind in the country. A smart lady’s maid had been engaged to attend to Aude now. She was thin and sour-mouthed; she tugged at Aude’s hair when she combed it out on the first night, and she sniffed at the plain wool gown her new charge wore. “She looks,” Aude said to the governess, who had been allowed to come, “like a lemon. An old one that Cook had lost at the back of the larder.”

  “Hush,” the governess said. “She’s probably very kind.”

  Aude doubted that. Her new maid—her name was Ketty, but Aude could never think of her that way—continued to pull her hair and lace her garments too tight, and she never, ever smiled, not even when the most fashionable modiste in all the city came to measure Aude for her new wardrobe. There was a dancing master, too, and a lady of uncertain age and origin who gave instruction in the holding of fans and the placing of flowers. It was amusing for perhaps the first two weeks, but Aude soon tired of the new activities. “There’s no point to them,” she complained to the governess.

  “It’s what
’s expected of a lady.” The governess shook her head. “Your husband wants an accomplished woman as a wife.”

  Back at home, there had always been books to take refuge in. But the library in the smart new house was little more than a pretty room. Its neatly made shelves held a scattering of recent bestsellers, a set of respectable religious books, the last two or three issues of the fashionable (and acceptable) journals, a handful of educational works, and little else. “I can’t manage with just these,” Aude wailed to her uncle.

  “It won’t do to get a reputation as bookish,” her uncle said. But he permitted her to take the carriage the short distance to the bookseller who traded alongside the other upper-class Silver City shops, so long as the sour-lemon maid accompanied her. She could have walked there in the time it took to harness the horses, but her uncle would not hear of that. In the Silver City, it seemed, there were times and places for walking, and the public streets were not included among them. At first the shops, with their well-washed plate-glass windows and polish-scented interiors, intrigued her. It was a novelty to choose the fabrics and styles of her gowns, to try on pretty hats and scarves, to toy with charming trifles like fans and card cases and reticules. But the pleasure did not last long, and she could not bring herself to need more and more trinkets. The young women she met at parties seemed happy enough to talk of nothing but fashion. Aude could not be. She had hoped, in the early days, that she would find friends who shared her interest in reading and study, in exploration and land management. But if any of these other girls cared for such things, they did not mention it at social gatherings. The talk was always of this style or that trend. Books were valued only if fashionable. Scholarship was not mentioned at all. Once or twice, in the early days, Aude made the mistake of mentioning a work of geography or history. The smiles half-hidden behind fans taught her not to speak of such things again.

  The men who called on her uncle spoke of more interesting things—trade routes and regulations, innovations in techniques for weaving, travel, and the politics of the empire. But while she was permitted to listen, her uncle frowned if she looked as though she might speak. A woman of the Silver City, it seemed, thought of nothing but how she looked until she wed and of gossip and children thereafter. She learned to smile at morning callers and to hold her tongue about her own interests.