The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  “I don’t see why you need to know.”

  “You think this is my fault.” She waved a hand at the room. “You think I’m stealing your water, hurting her somehow. Of course I need to know.”

  He sighed. Then he said, “Tsai is Tsai. She follows her nature.”

  “And that is?”

  “Water.” He turned, met her gaze. With a hand, he gestured at the pool. “Like that. It feeds, it flows, it changes. It’s not my domain.”

  She stared into the pool. It was deeper and wider than the one in the Concubine’s rooms. A ledge ran around its inner circumference, forming a curving bench. There were no faucets; instead, water swirled through it from low-level pipes. It was carved from a single great slab of dark stone, flecked with points of iridescence. The water glimmered and shivered, refracting light, never still. She dipped a finger into it, found it warm. She said, “What heats it?”

  His lips twitched. “There are fires in the earth. Shirai helps. Sometimes Liyan.”

  “It’s all interconnected.” She considered that. Fire to heat the water, stone to retain that heat. Water to feed the land, to nourish crops and animals. She said, “Why is she fading?”

  “Theft.” His tone was hard. It had been the wrong question.

  She said, hastily, “You want the water to come back.” He did not trouble to reply to that. She stirred the pool again. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Your kind did this, not mine.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant…” She had to lead him away from that track of accusation. “I meant tell me about the things that happened, about the changes. What you noticed.”

  He turned back to his contemplation of the water. She studied him a moment longer, then began carefully to work his comb through her hair. Her combs at home were made of tortoiseshell and fine bone, with silver handles. This one was steel, its teeth sharp and harsh on her scalp. Liyan made this, she thought. Liyan made this to remind Sujien of his own cruelty, and wondered where that thought came from. She said, “Why was she a concubine? I thought you were bodyguards.”

  “We guard. We watch. We advise.”

  “Yes, but Tsai…” It was a fact that, in the Silver City, well-born women were not encouraged to talk about the habits and proclivities of men. Aude hesitated. “She was…is, I mean…a bit more than that.”

  “Water binds earth. Earth shields and cradles water. They are made to be close.”

  “So the Grass King and Tsai…” She wished more than ever for Jehan. He would know how to phrase this. He had the right to talk of such things; he had the words, the familiarity. She shook herself. She was a married woman. She had made herself a mistress before becoming a wife. She straightened her spine and said, “Why Tsai? Why didn’t the Grass King marry a water elemental or something?”

  “What?” Sujien stared at her, eyes wide, mouth open. And then, slowly, he began to laugh. She gazed back at him, irritated and perplexed.

  She said, “I don’t see why that’s funny.”

  “Do you…” He was gasping. “Do you know…the Court of Water? They don’t…”

  It was easy to laugh at ignorance. Easy and contemptuous. She set down the comb and glared. “So I don’t know anything. What do you expect? You kidnapped me, you hit me, you accuse me of…of sabotage and theft and practically murder without giving me the least clue and—”

  “Peace.” He held up a hand. She halted, watched him warily. He drew in a long, ragged breath, and said, “I forgot humans know little of the domains. And what they think they know is lies.” If that was an apology, it was a weak one. She held her silence. He went on, “The creatures of water, they aren’t such things that one might wed. They aren’t…” He waved a hand at the room, the arches, “They aren’t like this. They change. They don’t hold a shape or a method, they just are. And the domains do not, in general, interact in such ways. Marriage. Alliance. Those are your ways, not ours.”

  “But you’re mixed.” She laid her annoyance to one side, caught by this new knowledge.

  “That is my nature.” He considered her, brows drawing down. “The domains stand alone. But they don’t exist alone. We share things. Some things, some aspects, are closer than others. And Tsai is water in earth.”

  She saw. It went with that picture in the Concubine’s rooms, earth and water united to produce that green fertility. She said, “She’s the only one like that here?”

  “Yes…” His voice was uncertain. “The Water Banner…They have somewhat of her nature, but weaker.”

  “So she always…She’s always been Cadre and Concubine? That’s how things are here?”

  “No.”

  It was not the answer she had expected. That was curious. This, then, was perhaps one of the pieces she sought. She frowned, trying to phrase her next question carefully. We watch, we guard, we advise. Slowly, she said, “So she decided to become his Concubine, because it was the best way to…to protect him?”

  Sujien looked away. “Tsai doesn’t decide.”

  “Then…” Then what? “The Grass King chose?”

  “Yes.” His voice was tight. There was something more here. Disapproval. She waited, working the comb through her hair. Wet strands snagged in the grazes on her fingers, making her wince. After a moment, he said, “It shouldn’t be like that. It isn’t balanced.”

  She said, “When did it start?”

  He shook his head, turning again. He swung his feet up out of the pool and pulled them up under him. “Then.” Another of his waving gestures. “Before…Before the captive. After the first Darkchild. I don’t know. She wasn’t. Then she was. The Grass King chose, as is his right. That isn’t the cause of the trouble. It was the writings. The captive and his writings.”

  Another hair caught in a cut, stinging. Distracted, she said, “Well, I don’t have any writers in my family.” Not that she knew of, anyway. She sucked at the finger as it began to bleed again.

  He grabbed at her wrist, and she pulled back. Her knife was tucked away. She was too vulnerable here, clad only in a thin robe, balanced on the edge of the deep pool. He said, “Keep still.”

  She twisted her arm, felt its protest. “Let go.”

  “I can’t help if you struggle.” With his free hand, he pulled the comb from her fingers. Then he released her. “Turn.”

  She could not follow his moods. She could not make sense of him at all. She turned awkwardly, uncomfortably, angling herself so that she could still see him in her peripheral vision. Muttering in some tongue she did not know, he took hold of her shoulders and turned her farther. “Like that. Now stay there. Keep your head level.” She sat, anxious as a child before an angry nursemaid, and he lifted her hair. She fought not to cringe, anticipating the drag and yank of hard combing. Instead, his hands were oddly careful, working at the knots with slow patience. He said, “You must learn to manage this better. It does you no good to leave your skin on our drains.”

  “If,” Aude said, “you hadn’t locked me up, it wouldn’t have been necessary.”

  “If,” he said, “you refrained from curiosity, you wouldn’t have injured yourself.”

  “Leaving that to you?”

  He pulled on a lock of her hair. “You’re our captive. It’s my right.”

  Clearly. But she did not say it. Captives, it seemed, possessed no rights. It was another situation whose origins she did not know. She said, instead, “What do you mean, writings?”

  He snorted. “You know them. All your kind do.”

  “There are a lot of written things. You could be talking about any of them.”

  “Unlikely.” But his voice lacked certainty. “You call them sacred, those books of lies.”

  Sacred. She said, “You mean the Books of Marcellan?”

  “Yes.”

  “He came here? Marcellan? He was a real person?”

  “Yes. He had no right. The domains are not for flesh things, human things.” Again he tugged her hair. “This is our place. You do not belong.
”

  Marcellan was real, as real as this domain. Which meant…She could not work through it all. A single man, who must have come here long, long ago. Came and left, for his writings had made their way to her world. And if he had found a way out, so could she. She lifted her chin and said, “You could always release me.”

  He ignored her. “He told his lies. He wrote them down, so others of his kind might know them, spread them. He forced shapes where shapes were not, forms where forms were not. He came here and wrote more lies and spread those too. And Liyan helped him. Marcellan came here of his own volition. To spy, to make more trouble. As is the nature of all human things.” Anger trembled once again on the fringes of his voice. She kept very still. He went on, “He came here, asking questions. Making things go as they should not. Encouraging Liyan to do what he should not.”

  She did not understand. She said, “But he just wrote about you.”

  “He made changes.” That tremor of anger rumbled closer. “He wanted us more known to you.”

  “But…” Aude said, and stopped. Description and making. Reflection and shaping…The pamphlets and broadsheets of the Brass and Silver cities all tried to define what they saw, to put the life of the cities into words, to make it change or grow, to justify or demonize it. Words mattered. Words defined. Jehan had told her to read. In their cloisters and towers, hermitages and temples, some of the priests and their followers claimed that the Books of Marcellan defined the world, shaped its workings and usages. She had never really believed that, despite the shining place. If Marcellan had looked at the domains and written down their natures…She said, “But you don’t have to believe in them. The Books, I mean. Lots of people don’t.”

  “But he did. And he made others do so. He made what your kind believed more…more solid.”

  “Yes, but if you don’t believe in them—I mean your kind—then it doesn’t matter, surely?”

  “We aren’t shaped that way. That’s your nature, not ours.”

  Without thinking, she turned to look at him, pulling her own hair. “Ow.”

  “I told you to be still.”

  “Yes.” She frowned. “I’m trying to understand. You’re saying that Marcellan affected you somehow. That he made you, I don’t know, different…”

  “He hurt us. Hurt Tsai.”

  “But what’s that to do with me? I’m not related to Marcellan.” No one was related to Marcellan. Of that, she was sure. Marcellan was too distant, too unlikely.

  “Marcellan harmed us. He told things. To your kind. To Liyan.” He took his hands away from her hair, set the comb down. “There. You’re tidy.”

  “Thank you.” She spoke absently. Water and drought. A captive. Two captives, now. She said, “What happened to him? To Marcellan?”

  “What was necessary.”

  “You killed him?”

  “He was…” Sujien was hunting for words, it seemed. “He was corrected. As was appropriate. But his damage was not undone. His words still escaped. Tsai wasn’t healed.”

  “I don’t think you can unmake books.” She had seen that in the underground presses of the Brass City. Whatever the Silver City councils decided, however many books and pamphlets were banned or presses were seized, their contents came out anyway. If books vanished, it took a long time. And they left footprints behind them, hints and quotations, influences and shadows in the pages of other writings and the memories of readers. “They get…they get woven into people.”

  “People forget.” But he did not seem convinced. He lifted the comb again and began to unwind the loose hairs from them. He said, “Damage can be cut out, like bruises from fruit. It can be repaired. It can be removed, replaced.”

  Aude stared into the pool. Its tiles showed cobalt and scarlet, amber and verdigris and deep gray, tracing spirals about each other, shimmering and dancing with the movement of water. She said, “Where does it come from? The water here and in the Concubine’s rooms?”

  “The source.”

  “You mean a spring or a well?”

  He wound the hairs about his fingers, smoothing them. “A conduit.”

  “And it’s still flowing?”

  “It lessens constantly. It withdraws itself, from the ground, from the air, from everything.”

  Four years ago, the well had run dry on one of her distant estates. The factor there had sent her accounts for the employment of surveyors, to seek out other potential sources of water, engineers to build drains and sinkholes. She did not think, somehow, that such measures would be appropriate here. She said, “But you must have noticed. I mean, it didn’t just happen suddenly, surely?”

  “No. But…” He slid the small skein from his hand and tucked it into his sleeve. “There were distractions. Tsai…” Abruptly, he rose. “Talking does no good.”

  “Well, you need to find a solution somehow.”

  He looked down at her, strong and dour. “I have my solution.”

  “I told you, I don’t have anything to do with all this.”

  He leaned forward, his shadow eclipsing her. She shivered. She should never have allowed herself to relax around him. He said, “You have everything.” He placed one hand on her nape, and she swallowed. His fingers were cool and heavy. He said, “I just have to find it.”

  The fingers began to tighten. She grabbed at them, tugging, found his grip too strong to break. She groped for some kind of weapon, and her hand closed on the comb. She raked the tines across his forearm. He pulled back with a curse. She wobbled, caught at the edge of the pool to steady herself. Scrambling to her feet, she began to ease away from him, reaching covertly for her knife.

  He said, “It’s Qiaqia who’d kill you. Not me. Shirai has ordered us to keep you alive. And Shirai is first among us.”

  Evidence belied him. She kept moving.

  He went on, “But you fight me. You don’t cooperate.” He stepped toward her, and she drew the knife.

  He continued toward her. She backed, found herself against the foot of the stair. Turning, she fled up it. At the top, she stopped and cursed herself. No exit here, save through one of the latticed windows. She went to the closest and opened it. Roofs…She reached out with her free hand, and a thin breeze wound itself around her arm. She looked back at the arch. Was he following? She could hear no steps. She peered out of the window at a drop of more than man height. She could jump. The roof below was angled, so it would be hard to land safely. The breeze returned, tugged at the lattice, flipped her sleeves and hair. She could not see what lay beyond the lip of the roof, how long a fall it might be. The breeze slammed into her, knocking her aside, slamming the lattice closed. From the doorway, Sujien said, “There’s nowhere I can’t find you.”

  The wall was cold against her shoulders. She leaned into it, felt herself trembling. She wanted Jehan to come striding into the room behind Sujien, with sword and carbine at the ready. She wanted her uncle to appear from nowhere and whisk her back to the safety of her townhouse. She wanted never to have set eyes on the shining place or the Brass City and its problems and pamphlets. She said, “I’m not the one you want.”

  “But you are.” The wind had dropped again. Sujien stood there, arms crossed, studying her. His face was calm. “You have to put things right.”

  “But I don’t know how!” She could not pull back the words—they burst from her on a shameful note of despair. “I don’t know anything about this. I was just looking for my past.”

  He put his head to one side, frowning. Then he came into the room. Despite herself, Aude cringed back against the wall. He passed her and picked up one of the cups from the table. He poured another measure of liquid into it and brought it to her. “Drink and calm yourself. This panic does no good.”

  She did not want to drink with him. She wanted to run, to find a dark warm corner somewhere and curl up into a ball. She wanted Jehan. She swallowed, hard, and took the cup from Sujien’s hand.

  “Good.” He went back to the table and sat. “I have decided to be
lieve you.”

  Her hands were shaking—she could see that in the surface of the liquid. She said, “So you’ll let me go?”

  “No. For one thing, that isn’t for me to decide. And for another, you remain the key.” He slid his right hand into his left sleeve and drew out the little coil of her hair. He said, “But you’re ignorant. You’ve forgotten the boundaries, the duties. You aren’t ready yet. You require teaching.”

  She did not want to think about what methods he might use in teaching. It could not be good. Perhaps her uncertainty showed—without warning, he began to laugh again.

  It was the cold noise that wind makes hunting for an entry through chimneys or cracks. It shook her, ran sharp fingers down her spine. She bit her lip. He said, “And you’re slow to learn. You don’t pay attention. You don’t obey.” He began to twist the hair around his fingers. Wind nudged her, tugging her away from her sanctuary, pulling and dragging on her garments, her limbs. She braced against it, and it strengthened, forcing her to take a few stumbling steps toward him.

  “Hold.” Shirai stood at the top of the stair. “Jien-kai, you go too far.” A handful of bees drifted around him. “I’ve warned you before. Do not make me act to stop you.”

  The wind dropped. Released, Aude sagged back against the wall, shaking. Sujien glared at her and folded his arms tight. Coming into the room, Shirai said, “Forgive us. We forget that your kind are weaker than we are.” The expression on Sujien’s face suggested he did not agree with that, but he said nothing. To him, Shirai added, “We seek help from her to mend what has been broken. Compulsion will not serve us.”

  “She’s too stupid to help us any other way. She won’t learn.”

  “Then we must give her longer and help her more.” Shirai held Sujien’s gaze until the latter looked down. “There will be no compulsion. I have said so.”

  Sujien put up his scarf and turned his back. Anger made a line across his shoulders.

  Swallowing, Aude took a nervous step toward the stairs. The bees flew to her, circling. Their presence was oddly comforting. She smoothed her tunic.