The Grass King’s Concubine (2 page)

Something dug into her thigh; she wriggled, trying to get comfortable, and everything around her shifted. She froze, mouth dropping open in surprise. The bush—
her
bush—shook and shivered behind her like Aude herself on cold mornings. She put a hand down to steady herself, and the ground shuddered, throwing her backward. Her elbow slammed into a stubby branch, and she cried out, tears starting to her eyes. Leaves shook loose, twigs bounced and twisted, snatching at her coat and hair. Behind her, the bush gave a deep, pained groan. Aude flung herself
forward, scrambling frantically back toward the path. The earth heaved, rolling her over and over, back into the arms of her bush. She squeezed her eyes shut. Tangled in the bush, she was rocked and shaken and bounced, back and forth, up and down, harder and wilder than any pony ride.

And then it stopped. She lay for long moments where the turmoil had thrown her, left cheek pressed into the dirt. Her elbow throbbed. Her neck ached, as if someone had grabbed her and shaken her hard. Her mouth was full of soil and broken bits of leaf. She could smell something funny, something not the usual damp leafy smell of the shrubbery. It smelled like kitchen slops and orange and bread left too long to rise. She opened her eyes, carefully, and found them full of dirt. Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps the bush had fallen on her and squashed her flat, and Nurse had buried her. Panic made a big knot in her throat. She gulped and coughed on her mouthful of earth. She wasn’t dead. She didn’t want to be dead. She hadn’t even gone to the village by herself yet. She couldn’t be dead. She rubbed at her eyes with her dirty mittens, blinked and blinked until they cleared.

And stared. There, outside her bush, hung a shimmer of amber light. Aude forgot her panic. A soft breeze reached her, brushed over her with a touch of silk. The strange smell thickened, sweetened to spice cake and fresh bread and oranges. In the midst of the golden shimmer, shapes moved like dancers. Buildings formed behind them, bright colored and shining. They were nothing like the buildings she was used to, not square and solid, not built of redbrick and dark wood, but tall and light, peach colored arches supporting low roofs, doorways filled with misty curtains in scarlet and turquoise and green, slender windows filled with delicate stone lace. It was not a house like her house, safe and boring and known. It was the home of a princess or a queen. Aude stretched one hand out toward them, and the light shifted toward her, widening her view. It was summer there inside the glow: Roses twined up the walls and over the arches, their petals unfurled in shades of gold and yellow.
The dancing shapes were men and women, dressed in long silky clothes, their hair unbound to hang down their backs, like the princesses and queens in her storybook. One of them turned, looked up, and saw her. She gasped. The figure smiled at her and held out a hand. Such a beautiful face, with big warm eyes and long lashes. She began to crawl forward, toward the light and the sweet smells and the promise in that face.

Something caught her by the collar and held her back. She squirmed, and a sharp twig dragged itself down her face. She squealed, tugged at it with one hand, and drew her mitten back bloodied. The amber shimmer stilled, paled, died. Sprawled on her side, a branch caught in her coat and a long bleeding scratch on her face, Aude began to cry.

Nurse found her at the edge of the shrubbery, shaking and sobbing, and swept her into a scolding embrace. “There now, lovey, that’s what happens when you run away from me. You hurt yourself, and you spoil your nice clothes.”

Aude gulped. “The ground shook me. It made me hurt myself. It wouldn’t let me go and play with the pretty dancers.”

Nurse hugged her close. “Such an imagination you have. No, don’t cry. Nurse isn’t angry.”

For the rest of that autumn and beyond, Aude hunted for her shining place through the twigs and leaves of the shrubbery. Nurse shook her and grumbled about muddied sleeves and torn stockings, but Aude would not be dissuaded. The bush—her bush—had shown her the shining place once, then held her back. Next time—and she was sure there would be a next time—she would be ready. She checked the size of her hiding place, snapping off twigs that hung too low or pressed too close. She dug out armloads of dead leaves to clear the ground. And above all else, she waited. Whenever she could get free of Nurse, she ran as fast as she could to sit and watch for the earth to shake and the shimmer to form once more. But it never did, though she waited and waited at all the times she could, from straight after breakfast to the hour after her bedtime. But
the shimmering light never once returned, at least not while she was awake. But ever after, she would dream of it, of the drift of orange and roses, of that long-lashed, beautiful face gazing at her, reaching out a long hand to call her. She would wake breathless and confused, her own small hands knotted in the coverlet. “Just a dream, lovey,” Nurse would say, stroking her forehead. But Aude was not comforted. They wanted her to come, the shining dancers, and she had let them down.

She was seven when she learned she was to marry. One morning her uncle, on one of his rare visits, called her into his study. The room smelled of beeswax and wood smoke. The huge desk stood almost as tall as she did, its top an expanse wider than the nursery table. Her best shoes were too tight, but she must not fidget, even though she longed to be elsewhere. Nurse had ordered her to keep quiet and still. She watched her uncle’s hands on the desk; they were big and white and dusted with wiry dark hairs. She worried, later, that such hairs might grow on her own plump hands. Nurse was delighted at her sudden enthusiasm for the washing basin and the nailbrush. In the study, she had clenched her fingers into the fabric of her brown dress and tried to keep her eyes on her uncle’s face.

He spoke to the top of her head. Perhaps he was waiting for her to grow up so he wouldn’t have to bend. His large voice was hard to follow, with its rolls and booms. It made her think of the scullery, of the clang of pots against the stone sink. It left her breathless and wide-eyed, tumbling to keep up. “I have arranged your marriage,” he had said. She had carried the information back upstairs with her, contemplating it with every step. Getting married meant cake and a pretty dress: those were most certainly good things. For days and days afterward, she woke every morning in expectation of a scarlet dress and a house decked out with flowers. She wondered if her new husband would be as old as her uncle and what he would do and which room he would sleep in. She did not want to sleep in the same room as a stranger. That kept her awake until Nurse fretted and
felt her head to see if she was unwell. “No fever, but what’s keeping you awake, lovey? Did you have your dream again?”

“No,” Aude said. The dream would have been better. “It’s the husband. I don’t want him in my room here.”

Nurse smiled and shook her head. “He won’t sleep here. Nor will you. He has a fine big house in the Silver City, and you’ll both live there.”

The Silver City…She would see the streets and buildings made of metal, all bright and clean. For a moment she was excited. And then she remembered her shining place. If she left here, if she left this house, how would she ever find it again? Her eyes filled with tears. “But I have to stay here.” She clutched at Nurse. “I won’t go, I won’t. I want to stay here.”

Nurse rocked her. “It’s all right. You don’t have to go for years and years. Not till you’re a grown-up girl.”

Aude gulped. That sounded better. A year was a long time. She knew that; she had already been alive for seven of them, and that was ages and ages. She would not be grown up for at least another two years, maybe more, and she would find her shining place again before that. She snuggled close to Nurse and let her eyes close. She’d find it tomorrow, for certain, and if not, then next week. She’d find it long before the husband and the red dress and the threat of the Silver City.

Later that year, she turned eight, and a governess was engaged. Lessons began to take up more and more of the time that once had been spent playing and exploring. Slowly, her visits to the shrubbery grew less regular, as other things came to occupy her mind. The undercook taught her to make soda bread and let her help roll out the pastry. The kitchen cat gave birth to four plump kittens, and Aude was allowed to keep the two prettiest as her very own pets. She learned to dance and to make butter, to keep accounts and play the spinet. The dream came less frequently, too, as her memory of the dancers blurred. But still, once or twice a year, she woke to a sense of something calling her and a trace in the air of roses and orange and amber.

Then there were books…At first, they were little more than a burden, a tedium forced on her by adults who valued odd things called “learning your letters” and “self-improvement.” The words she puzzled out in her chapbook were invariably dull and flat compared to the stories Nurse told her at bedtime or her own imaginings about the shining place. Lesson books, with their facts about the lengths of rivers and uses of plants, were little better. She would not mind being the person who measured the rivers—that might have been exciting. But the geography book did not touch on that. It was just fact after boring fact. “And what good are they?” she grumbled to her governess.

“Men suffered a lot to find those things out,” the governess said. And made children suffer ever after, Aude thought. But she did not say it. The governess had the look on her face that suggested trouble. Nevertheless, the next day, the governess offered her a small book with a green cover in place of the schoolbook. “There. To show you how hard it was to find those things out.”

It was called
Some Memoirs on the Mapping of the Southern Plains
, and the only pictures inside were a couple of faded maps. Aude stared at it with suspicion, certain of a trap. The author was one Colonel Lord J-A Saverell, which sounded all too like one of her uncle’s friends. “Read that and write an account of it,” said the governess, and she swept out of the room, doubtless to hobnob with the housekeeper in the warm staff sitting room. Left behind in the chilly nursery, Aude picked up the book and reluctantly turned to the first chapter. After a while, she got up and fetched the big dictionary from the governess’ desk. Then she went on reading.

That night, it was she who told Nurse a story, about the colonel’s adventures with wild animals and raging rivers as he crossed the huge plains. The colonel had seen things even stranger than those in her nursery tales, although he had not seen the shining place—or not on that trip, anyway. The next morning, she composed a letter to the colonel, asking him if he had ever seen a place such as hers and, if
not, requesting him to go on a new expedition to find it. The governess shook her head, and laughed. “Colonel Saverell is dead, child. He can’t go anywhere.”

“Then I will,” Aude said, and stuck out her chin. “Next year. Or the one after.” She considered the governess, who was middle-aged and inclined to plumpness. “You can come, too, but there’ll be a lot of walking.”

None of the books she read after that—and reading became one of her greatest pleasures—had much to add to her vision. But she hoped, all the same.

When she was ten, her uncle summoned her to the library after nursery supper and showed her a drawer full of estate rolls and letters patent. “This is your inheritance.” On a map, he pointed out to her where her lands lay, the woods she owned, the rivers she controlled. He had grown shorter, somehow, and his voice quieter, but his hands were the same. She was more interested in the map than those hands by then, leaning over them in the hope of finding the shining place. She asked her uncle, “Where are there palaces with lots of arches?”

He frowned. It was not the kind of thing she was supposed to be thinking about. He said, “A well-built house is far better than a palace. Silly, wasteful things. Not even the emperor lives in one now.”

“Yes, Uncle.” It did not do to make him angry. “I was just wondering about…about what sort of places you find them in.”

“Tarnaroq, I suppose. But they’re empty.”

Tarnaroq was where the emperor lived. She had studied him with her governess. His courts and abandoned palaces did not sound anything like what she had seen that day in the shrubbery or later in her dreams.

Her uncle was often away, and the governess allowed her free run of the library. By then she had transferred most of her hunt for knowledge to books. Her old hiding place in the shrubbery was too small for her now, and she no longer liked to get dirty. In the library, she had started with the shelves nearest the big window, where the books about
animals and birds were kept. After that she began to work her way around the room case by case, taking down the most interesting-looking books from each. She was nearly eleven when she reached the case containing the religious books. Her family attended temple at festival times, of course, and she enjoyed the dancing and the special cakes afterward. Nurse had taught her the words to the simple rites, and, with the governess, she had studied the history of the temples. But apart from Cook, no one in the household was particularly religious. Aude was tempted, as a result, to skip those books entirely and move on to the next case, which looked more alluring. But something—some impulse to tidiness, perhaps—held her back, and she took a dark-covered book at random from the middle shelf. It was called
The Marcellan Epitome,
and it was printed in small dense type with no pictures. She would read one chapter and move on.

She had heard of Marcellan, of course. He had written the first stories about the otherworld and its lords. The priest at the town temple called him the Pioneer, and Cook kept a little booklet of his tenets in her apron pocket. Marcellan had taught people to read and to work iron, to use the stars to navigate, and to build irrigation channels. “Although,” the governess said, “these days most people don’t think he did all those things. But he was a great scholar.”

He had also written about the gods and their lives in the five massive books named for him. There was a set of those, bound in green leather and tooled in silver, in the library. They were almost too big and too heavy for Aude to lift. She did not think anyone ever read them, not even Cook. The dark book was a summary of those writings, its introduction told her, made by some retired priest “for the convenience of busy readers.” She took it to her favorite seat in the window and settled in with it, expecting to be bored.