The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  At least her uncle allowed her to send for such books as she wanted from the library at home, and, when they had no company, he let her look over the ledgers from the family holdings. “They’ll be yours, by and by, and they’ll do better if you understand them.”

  At the end of her second month in the Silver City, she was woken once again by her dream. Long thin fingers snatched at her, dug into her flesh, pinched and tugged and pulled at her, cold as winter iron. Her lungs felt clogged, her eyes thick with grit and dust. She awoke slick with sweat and coughing, nose and mouth full of a thick, yeasty smell. Outside, an unseasonal wind yammered at her window, thumping at the heavy shutters. She lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark.

  There were priests in the Silver City, as there were everywhere else. She had attended a number of ceremonies at the fashionable New Temple, where the ladies and gentlemen of the court gathered to show off their finery and watch each other for mockable foibles. It was not fashionable to be religious or even to appear to be so. She discovered that the first time she mentioned something she had read in The Shorter Book of Marcellan. Her interlocutor raised a fan and tittered. Only the old and the odd attended temple functions, save at the largest festivals, and even then the highest born held private celebrations in gardens or great halls. It was fashionable to be shallow and silly and pointless.

  On the other hand, a temple was one of the few places a young woman might go alone—or, rather, accompanied only by a maid—without incurring sanction in the Silver City. The New Temple was preferred by most of her new acquaintances, but Aude preferred a smaller one that stood on the east edge of the royal park. She was expected to take her carriage to the park gate, but from there it was a pretty walk, and a quiet one, curving away from the fashionable aisles. With Ketty at her side, she took to visiting it once or twice a week, lighting incense to the carved statues of the gods or studying the murals that depicted their residences. They did not look much like the descriptions in Marcellan’s books. The gods wore the garb of the previous century, dwelled in mansions more like the regent’s huge ugly residence than the courtyards and arcades of the books. Of her shining place.

  The priest who tended this temple was young, watching her with hooded eyes as she bowed to the statues. He did not know the origins of the paintings, when she asked him. “I suppose one of my predecessors chose the artist, Mademoiselle.”

  “I don’t think…” Aude said, and stopped. In the Silver City, it might be unwise to speak even to a priest of such matters. She bit her lip. “According to Marcellan, the gods live differently from us.”

  “Differently now, certainly,” the priest said. “How could Marcellan know how we live now? He could talk of the gods only in the terms he understood.”

  “Then they change, as we do?” The frescoes in the New Temple showed deities in the images of modern fashion. It was one of the reasons she did not like it. At least the pictures here had some distance to them.

  “Of course,” the priest said. “How could they not? As our knowledge, our skill, our society grows and develops, do we not grow ever closer to them, reflect them better?”

  Aude was not sure about that. It did not ring true. Marcellan had written of shared knowledge, of exploration and learning for its own sake. The priest moved closer to her. “It takes a special soul to understand the gods.” He reached for her hand. “Like yours, Mademoiselle. You are sensitive to such things, I can tell.” He smelled of cologne and hair oil. He made to lift her hand to his lips. “Sensitive and beautiful.”

  Aude pulled her hand away. “I…I have to go.”

  Perhaps she was sensitive, to have seen the shining place. Sensitive, or overly imaginative. Whichever it was, she did not think that was what the priest meant. She hurried away, and she did not go back.

  She had lived in the Silver City for almost a third of a year before her future husband troubled himself to call. Not that she noticed his neglect. Most of the time she forgot his existence altogether. He was a scrawny young man with rounded shoulders and an unhealthy sallow tint to his complexion. He sat in the parlor ignoring the cup of chocolate brought for him by a footman and talking to Aude’s uncle about desultory matters. Aude herself he paid no heed to at all, apart from the customary bow and a swift—and critical—raking with his eyes up and down her person. Aude did not like him. Neither did her uncle, if his muttered “Ignoramus” as the door closed behind the visitor was any guide. But he would not meet her eyes, and at dinner that evening he talked only of the advantages Aude would enjoy once she was married.

  That was late summer. As the season turned into autumn, the houses around them began to fill as the nobility returned from their estates. A trickle of cards and envelopes began to arrive again, inviting her to promenades in the royal park or to concerts in private residences. Once more, she must smile to hide boredom, match her stride to the slow shuffle of the elite, answer foolish empty questions with equally foolish, empty answers.

  She had thought that leaving her home in the country would be the first step on her voyage to finding her shining place. But the Silver City, for all the promise of its name, seemed farther than ever from that. It was bound on every front by rules and customs and expectations, each more constricting than the last. The only freedom came in the hours she still spent in the schoolroom. Colonel Saverell would not think much of her, allowing her world to be bound to social mores and books.

  “I want to go home,” Aude mourned to the governess. “I want to have more things to do.” At home, there were tinctures and preserves to be made in the stillroom, planting to discuss and oversee, accounts to be studied, stock to be examined and admired. Here in the Silver City, ladies did not even work their own seat covers or hangings. Such work was contracted out to seamstresses hidden below the yellow fog in the Brass City.

  Aude had brought Colonel Saverell’s books with her from the country, but after the first month or so, they collected dust on a shelf in her room, a short line of reproach and disappointment. There was no space in the Silver City for daydreams. There was no space for adventurers. Day by day, she bowed her head to that and felt herself shrink to fit the new boundaries. If her shining place beckoned her now, it would find her sadly wanting. No wonder it had turned, slowly, into a nightmare.

  Two weeks before her eighteenth birthday, her uncle informed her that the governess was to be dismissed. “You’re old enough now not to need her. It’s time to concentrate on your social duties.”

  Tears burned in her eyes; anger shook her with the force of a childhood tantrum. Without answering, she fled from the parlor to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  Shaken, one of the colonel’s books fell from the shelf with a crash. A leaf of white paper floated from it, landing facedown on the rug. Words stared up at her.

  …all our officers are very brave, so it would be very difficult to choose the bravest among them. Perhaps one day you could go on such an expedition yourself?

  Your respectful servant,

  Jehan Favre.

  Jehan Favre was a sensible man who knew his own limits. Or so he had always told himself. His family was minor gentry—little more than farmers, really—and long accustomed to cutting their cloth to their measure. His father’s interests began and ended with the local price of wheat and fodder, wine and mutton, goose fat and shoe leather. He had walked the bounds of his small estate once a quarter with grim determination, measuring hedges and testing boundary stones for solidity. During drier summers, he and his neighbors indulged in low-key bickering over the water use of the miller and of the largest lord. Crops and weather, poaching and the derelictions of laborers: these had been the topics dominating the family dinner table and the gossip in the inn on market day. The concerns of cities and courts had belonged to another world, the realm of mythical creatures called hierarchs and nobles and kings. An eldest son could expect to live his father’s life, tending herds and grain and guarding precious borders. A younger son might look to
marry a local heiress or to dispense rural law in the local court, or, like Jehan, take up a junior commission in one of the lower-ranked regiments. Such men died far from home and were mourned months later when the news finally filtered through or, rarely, they drifted home in later life to prop up inn counters and inhabit cramped garret rooms and get underfoot come harvest time. A good younger son made his own way and retired—if he must—at his own expense. The grooves of that pattern were worn so well that Jehan had sometimes wondered if they could carry a man through all of his life without him ever needing to think at all. From all over the lands ruled from the Silver City, thousands of younger sons made their way to barracks and ports to follow yet another set of age-hallowed traditions. He had done so himself, and he found it bearable, if not exhilarating. One did as was expected and that was that. He had served his first three years, from sixteen to eighteen, in the garrison town closest to his father’s holding, escorting judges and keeping the peace at markets and horse fairs. For the three years after that, he had been stationed on the border, watching dull tracts of hillside for nonexistent invaders and checking the safe-conducts of merchants and minor officials.

  Nothing he had seen and done in his early years had prepared him for the Brass City. He had arrived one chill spring dawn, bumped and battered and sleepless from six days by post-carriage and cart and foot. The carrier had spilled the passengers, cold and dazed, into the chaos of Counting-House Square, to stand baffled and blinking in the maze of coaches and pony traps, fumes and horseshit, street vendors and clerks and labor marshals. Market cries vied for attention with the rattle of wheels over cobbles, the clang of temple bells and the stern low bass of the East Quarter Foundry engines. The air reeked with sulfur and sewage and rot. Jehan had stumbled into the crowd, kit bag over his shoulder, one hand pressed to his mouth and nose, bewildered under the assault, and promptly lost himself in the back streets and his purse to a pickpocket. “I’ve seen worse,” said his new captain when, at last, exhausted and reeling, Jehan presented himself at barracks. “At least you’ve still got your boots.” It had been months before he could sleep properly, ears bludgeoned hourly by bells, factory whistles, and the numb gray grind of machinery.

  There was no official welcome. The army had its uses for him and handed him his duties, neatly printed in sharp black letters on medium-grade rag-pulp paper. His colleagues appraised him, nodded, and treated him at first neither better nor worse than any of the other young country officers who filled the lower ranks and sat, all elbows and embarrassment, in the drafty corners and at the worst tables in the mess. The Brass City did not love, nor was it lovable. At first, it frightened him, with its noise and dirt and relentless ragged poverty. He shuddered from its odors, its sounds, its rough hands and foul mouths. He wondered at the longer-serving officers, who came and went without any seeming awareness of the midden that surrounded them. “You’ll learn,” said the captain. “There are far worse things here than the grime.” The idea had appalled him. Yet less than a fortnight later, the heavy steam boiler that powered the looms of the Short Gutter Street cloth mill burst, spraying the workers with boiling water and white-hot shrapnel. Friends and family members crowded in to find their kin. The army’s job was not to assist them but to stand guard lest any desperate hand help itself to a bolt of almost-good cotton, a set of tools, enough splintered wood for a week’s fire, a handful of metal fragments to sell as scrap. The Brass City stank and screamed and polluted and cared nothing for anyone. You did not speak to your neighbor, lest he take advantage, steal your food, sell your children, seduce your spouse. Guildmasters and businessmen eyed one another suspiciously from their large houses, biting coins before accepting them. Foremen took everything they could, expected bribes and handed out work to favorites. On factory floors, in the dockyards and mill yards, warehouses and tenements, shops and cabarets and hovels, in every street and gutter, men cheated and stole and killed for half a brass sous or a mouthful of bread. Assigned as a subaltern to the most junior captain, Jehan’s duties were a mixture of boredom—answering letters, copying lists of orders and rules—and alarm, patrolling the docks and markets, finding and destroying illegal printing presses, breaking up mobs and arresting troublemakers. He grew accustomed to offhand treatment in the mess and being spat at or cursed in the streets. The City Guard were there to keep the city dwellers under control, and that was all. There was nothing bold or honorable about that service.

  He never got used to the poverty that haunted the back streets and gutters and workers’ districts, nor to the hunger and despair he saw in the faces of women and children. One day he found himself pocketing a handful of pamphlets seized from an underground press and reading them by the light of his tallow candle. It did not seem so huge a crime, to want a living wage and enough to eat.

  The mill owners and ironmasters thought differently. And they paid his wages. It was not his place to criticize, only to obey and to uphold the way things were. It was not his place to question. But late at night he sometimes wondered where the honor was in what he did.

  The City Guard was not supposed to think about honor. That was for the elite units who served in the Silver City. On the whole, the City Guard dealt only with the poor, the powerless, the unimportant. Escort duties were the exception. Though most of the important civic officers and merchants had their own armed and trained bodyguards and visiting nobles were usually attended by a unit of the elite Silver City Regiment, the Guard occasionally found themselves called upon to shepherd visiting country gentry or merchants from other cities. From the moment he received the orders to escort a Silver City lord and his niece to the oldest temples and a business, Jehan suspected a problem. Either this lord had offended someone better born or more influential than he, or he had something to hide. Presenting himself at the Silver Road Gate on a bright autumn morning, Jehan was alert for trouble.

  The lord hid himself away in an old-fashioned dark carriage, conveying his directions via the coachman on the box. The crest painted on the carriage doors was small, marked with a single bar. His name, according to Jehan’s orders, was Monsieur Pèlerin des Puiz, which rang faint bells in Jehan’s memory, though he could not recall anything specific. A recent elevation to the nobility, most probably, and lifted thence by money, not blood. Jehan’s small troop cleared the way through the crowded streets, ignoring the hoots and insults of hawkers and apprentices. The lord kept his window shutters down as the small cavalcade rattled and pushed its way toward the Temple of the Flame, on the edge of the jewelers’ district.

  That was one of the quieter parts of the city. Its artisans, by and large, made enough to get by and guarded places in their workshops jealously. As the press and mill that surrounded the gate subsided, a hand tugged up one of the shutters on the carriage, and a face looked out. Sandy skin and dark eyes: steppe blood there, more evidence of the mercantile origins of the family. Jehan’s own hands, resting on the neck of his mare, were two shades darker. The face—it was a young woman, presumably the niece—looked about eagerly, drinking in shop fronts and vendors, workers under their awnings and apprentices hurrying on errands. Someone spoke to her from within; she pulled her head back in, then reemerged with a veil drawn over her face. Country gentry, then, little different from his own family.

  Except, of course, for degrees of wealth and depth of blood. Jehan’s elder brother would have insisted on both of those. Four years in the Brass City had convinced Jehan that wealth was the only difference that really counted. That was the opinion of the Flame priests, too, judging by the way they hastened out of their precincts to greet the visitors. The lord and his niece, trailed by a disapproving maid, were whisked inside by the head priest. Handing the reins of his horse to the senior of his men, Jehan followed them as they made their tour of court and hearth, shrine and hall and visitors’ rooms. The head priest talked; the lord listened and made measured, conventional responses. Several times the niece looked as though she had something to add; each time, her uncle l
ooked at her, and she subsided. As they left—having made a significant donation—she looked back over her shoulder at the hearth, and something in her expression spoke of disappointment or regret. It was much the same at the next temple and the next. She was searching for something, this girl, searching and not finding it. Well, if she was religious, she would learn soon enough that in the two cities the gods neither listened nor cared.

  Their last stop was at a mill on the left bank of the river. Jehan expected the women to remain in the carriage after it parked in the forecourt: Such places were men’s business. But the niece was the first to step down from the carriage, ignoring the hand offered her by the coachman. The uncle followed, leaving the maid behind.

  A middle-aged man bustled out of the main door, trying to smile through a face filled with worry. The manager, no doubt. He bowed to the lord and made as if he would kiss the niece’s hand. She looked startled, then held it out awkwardly.

  “Sir, Mademoiselle, welcome…” His voice was thin and dusty. “We are delighted, of course, though I regret…I mean, with more warning, we…The books are laid out in my office, if you…”

  “My niece was curious about the work you do here,” the lord said. “You can send the books at the usual time.”

  “Ah, yes.” Some of the worry faded from the manager’s face, to be replaced by bafflement. “Of course, it’s an honor to show Mademoiselle, although the workshop is rather, erm, dusty.”

  “I don’t mind dust,” the niece said. Under the veil, Jehan could see the line of her jaw, set firm. “We have enough mud at home. Dust won’t bother me.”