The Grass King’s Concubine (16 page)

Cadre

I
N THE COURTYARD OF THE CADRE, the bronze fountains stood silent. Leaves littered their basins, cracked and dry; the tiled pathways were dusty. All around, the lattices studding the arcade were closed. In the alcoves of the main archways, stone guardsmen watched, blank eyed. There was no peace to the stillness: it fizzed and snapped with waiting.

Bare feet silent on the path, a figure paced, hands buried in his long sleeves. Here, in their private place, he walked bareheaded and unarmed, long plait swinging loose down his back, clad in light green tunic and trousers. Only the twisting line of braid at collar and cuffs marked his status. Corn ears and rice fronds denoted that he was a bannerman, sworn to the service of the Grass King. A pale blue coil bordered them, marking that he belonged to the Banner of Air. A single line of gold woven into that showed him to be one of the five Cadre, intimate of the king and leader of all the Banner of Air.

His name was Sujien, and he was not precisely human.

He reached one side of the court and turned. The plait bounced forward, and he pushed it back with one hand. Ten paces. Twenty. He reached the center and halted, tilting his head up and back into the eternal twilight of the Grass King’s realm of WorldBelow. He said, “The air knows. It still tells me.”

“And yet we found nothing.” Shirai sat on the lip of the central fountain, watching Sujien. His face was square, his body set solid and strong. The border to his braid redoubled the patterns of the Grass King, earth upon earth. The leader of the Earth Banner, he was oldest and first among them. His voice was deep as stone. “Cold air, dry soil, water locked away, death everywhere.”

“We must look again.”

“I didn’t say we would not.”

“Yet you brought us back.”

Shirai drew his own plait forward and began, methodically, to undo it. The golden half-light picked him out, traced his shadow across the empty bowl of the fountain. His hair was flecked with bronze, his skin two shades darker.

Sujien resumed pacing. He said, “We’ve delayed and delayed. It’s gained us nothing. The humans brought this on us. I felt that. You know it. The captive. His allies. I can smell them on the wind. They’re getting closer. I can feel it.”

“The air is a fickle messenger,” Shirai said, mildly. “It changes.”

“Not always.” There was a bite to that. Wisps of wind began to gather in the corners of the courtyard, troubling the leaves. A scent of sour orange traced the margins of the air. A single bee browsed among the drooping brown blossoms that still clung, here and there, to the branches. Sujien said, “You were there. We all were. We smelled it. Earth magic and water magic where it should not be. A human who reeks of it. We called to it. I have called to it, to that human thing, over and over. We can make it come to us. We can make it put things right. But we have to act.”

Shirai made no answer.

“We’re failing.” Turning to face Shirai, Sujien pointed to a stone guard. “We’re returning to earth. That is not how it should be. If we act, if we find that human thing…”

“Impatience threshes no grain, Jien-kai.”

“Neither does inaction.” Sujien stood for a moment, then shook his head and stalked into the arcade. It was chill
under the vaulted roof, where all should be pleasant and warm. The floor was laid in bronze and green; iridescent color washed over clay by loving hands. The walls were plastered and molded; a frieze of trees extended long boughs, inlaid with fruits of turquoise and tiger’s eye, carnelian and jade. Here and there a human figure labored among them, gathering fruit. Sujien walked past them to the bead-hung arch into the bathing room, and stopped. Over a shoulder, he said, “It’s the doing of the human. The captive. I have told you so, over and over.”

“How so?” Shirai asked. “He no longer has ink and parchment, nor wax, nor wood, nor writing instruments of any kind. He has no more contact with Liyan. He has no form that might use any of those, anyway.”

“He has his mind and his blood.” The bee rose from the dead flowers and began to drift toward the arcade.

“He has no means of transmitting his ideas. No denizen of WorldBelow will heed him. Liyan’s machine is broken, and the twins have been exiled.” Shirai rose.

“It wasn’t always so.” Sujien waited for Shirai to join him. “We didn’t check the gate inside the Stone House, Shirai-kai. That’s how the captive entered. We could call the human we need to it.” The bee bumbled into a wall, seeking nectar from the painted fruits. The movement caught Sujien’s eye, and he hissed, raised a hand.

Shirai said, “Do not.”

“It’s a pest. All of them are.”

“The Grass King chose to make them. We do not have the right to interfere with that, any more than we have right of entry to the Stone House. The Grass King gave that guardianship to the twins.”

“To those who helped and cozened the prisoner.”

“The Grass King chose them, Jien-kai. He had reasons.” Shirai made to pass.

“And you know them?” Sujien was cynical.

“He had reasons,” Shirai said, “but they don’t answer the questions you have now.” He placed his hand over Sujien’s. “Come. Let’s bathe.”

“The twins watch the gate. The twins betrayed us once. This speaks of their hand. I smell them in all this, too. We should have done something about them long ago. They’re nothing but trouble, they’re not fit guardians for anything.”

“The Grass King chose them. We have no right to question that. He has not changed his view. And the earth speaks to me of human things, blood and possessiveness, as the air does to you.”

“Then we must follow that voice.” Sujien looked again at a stone guard, then along the arcade to an arch traced in cobalt and turquoise. “First WorldBelow then WorldAbove have grown dry. We grow dry with them. And Tsai is all but gone.”

“We will act,” Shirai said, “when the earth tells me. It will call, Jien-kai. It always does.”

A Net of Dust and Air

W
ITHIN THE WIND-WRACKED WALLS of the Woven House, Aude slept pillowed on a pile of ancient scrolls. Their words, in black and brown, left smudges on her cheeks and slipped into her dreams. She stood on the steps up to the house, and it was spring. Beyond the enclosure on all sides rice plants marched away, shocking green against the rich dark mud. She walked among them, barefoot. The mud kissed her soles, slid lover’s fingers between her toes. Water shimmered thick and brown around the plants, murmured down the irrigation channels. She brushed a hand over the rice plants and felt their freshness rising. She lifted her face to the sky and watched clouds glide by. Here and there, amid the paddies, houses rose in ones and twos, neat on their stilts, doors and windows open to the air. People dressed in loose pale robes worked the paddies. She came to the edge of one paddy, climbed the low dyke to the irrigation channel beyond. Kneeling, she dipped her hands into it, scooped up a palmful. It tasted crisp on her tongue, promising growth and new leaves. She inhaled, clean green air filling her throat and lungs. Reflected in the water, her face was a pure oval, dark as old honey. Beads of moisture ran from her fingertips, dropping back into the channel. She swung her legs around and slid down into the water. It welcomed her, caressing skin, lifting limbs, fanning hair around her, drifted, eddied, breathed her
in. She closed her eyes. Small currents tugged her, carrying with them memories of soil, of warm pale roots growing stout and strong. She could hear it all, out there beneath the rice paddies, the hot hum of growth. It washed through her, worked through her, fed her out into the young rice, drew her back in, earth and water and air all balanced and anchored through her. She lay limp, letting her heart slow. Overhead, the sun lulled her. There was no barrier between her and the water, no difference between her floating limbs and the blades of rice. She drifted while the rice ripened to harvest, shrunk back down to fallow, and the water nourished and cherished, rose and fell.

And fell. She was stretched thin, the riverbed shrinking beneath her. Cracks opened; her limbs flaked and dried. The air turned cold, pinned her to the hard dry earth with cold strong hands. Her lungs choked on dust and death. She was bound down into the soil as it froze, eyes blinded, ears stopped, gasping for one taste, one sip of water, body flaking, breaking, scouring away on the wind.

The wind wound into her hair and tugged. She twisted. Pain scraped along her arms and neck. Her mouth was clogged. The earth hung onto her, held her tight, pulled her breath from her. The wind scrubbed at her. She would be pulled asunder; she would fracture and fly away. She fought to struggle, inhaled dirt and ice, felt her lungs cramp. No trace now of the cool green stream. The rice plants were dust. She pushed against the riverbed, felt her skin start to tear. The wind tightened its grip, forced her head back. Something slipped along her neck, cold as the wind, strong as the ground. She could smell sour yeast and dry orange. The grip on her was the same hard strength that pursued her through all her sour dreams of her shining place. Her heart pounded, fluttered, faltered.

She summoned what strength she could and twisted. Pain shot down her left side as an arm wrenched free. Her scalp burned. She raised her left hand, groped for the grip about her neck. No substance met her fingers, only a chill, tingling deadness. She twisted again, felt her right side
begin to come free. She coughed, struggled for breath, fought open her eyes. A hand—a true hand—caught at her chin and forced her head upward. She resisted, pushing down with all her might. The grip tightened. She squirmed and bit down hard.

“Ow!”

The hand let go. Her head snapped back and her eyes flew open to hot darkness. It engulfed her, clutching her as hard as the soil. She inhaled heat and coughed, body trying to jackknife. A weight held her down, crushing her chest.
But,
said Aude to Aude,
I’m dreaming; this can’t be real; it has to be my dream again…
In a moment she would wake up, and the bonds would be cramp and the earth just the smell of dirt that blew in from the window, all jumbled in with her old nightmare. She was in the Woven House; she had fallen asleep over her scrolls, that was all. She forced herself to concentrate, to ignore the pain, the clutching, the darkness. It fought to encompass her, to possess her. She set her teeth, knotted muscles, resisting from her very depths.

Cold air, colder than the steppe, colder than any memory she had. It sliced into her, flaying, stripping skin and flesh from bone. She gasped and struggled and screamed.

And woke, to find herself alone at the desk in the Woven House.

In the Silver City most young people married in a temple. It was the custom, although Aude could count fewer than ten acquaintances who attached any real belief to the ceremony. Perhaps there were more believers in the Brass City. Certainly that was what was said in salons and at soirées.
Imagine, the working people are so superstitious; they still credit all that temple nonsense.
History was trade pacts and border wars, not talking rocks and living waters, however much she might want it to be otherwise. There had been no ritual at all to her marriage to Jehan. The Public Notary had witnessed their statements and put a seal to
their wedding lines in Jehan’s cramped cell. It had been necessary, however much in her heart she yearned for the incense and bells of a temple ceremony. This marriage was about haste and secrecy. The Notary asked no questions; her money had seen to that. She supposed that, if she thought about it at all, he would have assumed she was pregnant. Ladies from the Silver City did not marry guardsmen in any other circumstance.

The truth had been simpler. The wedding had solved two problems at once. She did not want to enter the gilded cage that marriage to her aristocratic fiancé promised. She had seen enough of the Silver City and its hollow ways. She was not so very far from her majority. Chin out and head high, she had sworn her freedom to wed before the notary without flinching. She would marry Jehan and go publicly to his bed, and let her uncle rant and rave as he wished. No scion of the aristocracy, however money-hungry, would want the shame of marriage to a woman who had openly preferred a low-ranked officer. Her uncle could try to break her marriage, but he’d find it nigh on impossible to find a new husband for her at any rank he approved. Jehan’s family was poor, but at least they were gentry, or what passed for it in the border provinces. Her uncle would have to make the best of it. If he could find her. Aude intended to make that as difficult as possible.