The Grass King’s Concubine (29 page)

The twins pressed close together. Liyan was planning. The consequences of that were seldom comfortable.

The Courtyard
of the Clepsydra

O
N A PILE OF SOFT PILLOWS, AUDE RECLINED. At her right hand a brass pitcher full of clear water and a platter of oranges sat upon a low table. A small bowl held a selection of nuts and candied fruits. A warm light breeze played through the window lattices, scenting the air with citrus and spice. Her garments were silk, her cold-abused skin soothed and polished with oils and lotions, her hair—trimmed to new tidiness—hung shining and clean around her face and neck. She had dreamed for weeks of such comfort.

She was seething. Two days and nights had passed, insofar as she could judge in this place without sun or moons, and she was no nearer to finding a way of any kind out of the courtyard. Room by room, foot by foot, she had explored it all. She had opened every chest, every drawer, every cupboard, and found only clothes and embroidery frames, sherbet glasses and cosmetic sets and dust. Standing on stools, on chests, she had tested the strength of each filigree window and found them unshakable. Dragging the tallest chest she could move, she had attempted to scale the wall that closed off the fourth side of the courtyard, and found its plaster surface unclimbable. She had tapped walls, pressed bosses, lifted hangings and carpets and piles of cushions. She had found nothing.

At the far end of the quarters of the Concubine, beyond
that eerie bedroom, she discovered an antechamber. It held only a low pallet, a stool, and a small cupboard. A room for a maid, perhaps; its walls were the plainest of any in the courtyard. In its back right-hand corner was a door, made of some richly perfumed red wood and bound in gold-washed iron. Its surface boasted neither handle nor lock. She had poked and prodded, twisted and thumped and scraped at it until her fingers bled, but it would not open. She was trapped. Jehan was out there, somewhere, up in that other world. And she was here in the place of her childhood dreams, and it was ashes.

Twice a day—and that was her main means of counting time—the Cadre came to bring her meals: rice and spiced vegetables, sour pickles and sweet relishes, sesame-flavored flatbreads, bean pastes and fruit and honey. Porcelain vessels held fragrant infusions, rice wine, barley beer. All her physical wants were catered to.

All save that of freedom. She never saw the Cadre enter, although she watched until her eyes drooped in the antechamber for one of them to open the door only to find a meal served and waiting for her in another room. For all she could tell, the Cadre could walk through walls.

She could not get a sense of them. They came and went in ones and twos. Sometimes they spoke to her, sometimes not. Shirai—the big, square one—was the kindest. His flat face was always unveiled; he smiled at her. He never forgot the felt wrap to keep her tea warm, and he always spoke when he appeared, in order not to startle her. Sometimes he would sit and talk to her while she ate, though he would not answer questions about the way out, nor about Jehan. It was Shirai who helped her trim her hair, who told her fragments about the Grass King and his court, who offered her books of poetry to while away the hours. She did not want to trust him—she did not want to trust any of the Cadre—yet something in his plain flat face made her feel calmer, somehow. Qiaqia came and went without warning, sometimes smiling and talkative, sometimes silent and hurried. Liyan, the one she had seen least of, accompanied
Qiaqia once or twice and stood silent and veiled. He never came alone. Sujien slapped trays onto tables, spilling their contents, stood too close to her, called her “creature” or “human thing,” when he spoke at all. She had tried to ask about that, about his constant anger. Shirai had considered the question and said, “It is his nature.”

“What does that mean?” she had asked.

“We are as the Grass King shaped us to be. Sujien is Sujien.”

Qiaqia had flung a glance at Liyan and laughed. “I don’t see,” said Aude, “what’s funny.”

“Sujien,” said Qiaqia, and she put up her veil.

They would not explain. They would not release her. She clenched her fists into her pillows and glared at the picture wall. She had moved into the Concubine’s suite. The rooms were larger, more comfortable, more appropriate to her rank. Clinging to that made her feel stronger, somehow. “Not
your
place,” said Sujien, eyes narrowed and angry, brows drawn into a line, when he found her there.

Aude had caught up a lamp from the nearest table, ready to defend herself. She would not become his punching bag, however he raged. At his elbow, Shirai sighed and said, “Let be, Jien-kai.”

“It isn’t proper.”

“It isn’t harmful.”

That had been a small victory. She knew that and prized it. She bathed twice daily in the deep bath, using the stock of lotions. She took and wore silk robes from the chests and cupboards, played solo games of chess with the alabaster set she found in a drawer, toyed with the half-finished embroideries. But when she grew tired, she curled up to sleep on the divan in the room with the mural. She could not bring herself to use the bedroom, however much it might serve to irritate her captors. Something lingered there, in the air, in the draperies, something sour and stagnant. She shivered from it and quickened her steps when passing through to the antechamber. She longed for Jehan. He would be hunting for her. She was sure of that. If only he would come…

Now she frowned as she gazed at the picture wall. She had traveled halfway across the known world, risked bandits and corrupt border officials, river crossings and mountain passes, the stir of the sea and the desolation of the steppe in pursuit of her dreams and her questions. She would not be stalled here, however legendary the walls of her prison. She set her jaw. If she could not find an exit route, then she would make the Cadre understand that she was not what they thought her. That she was not guilty of the crime they held against her.

She was beginning to hate the courtyard. Better the cold, dry steppe, for all its discomforts. The courtyard was immutable, trapped in some moment she neither recognized nor sought. Nothing and no one could thrive in this stasis: not the dusty roses, not the orange trees, not, patently, the Concubine. No birds sang in the branches, scratched in the soil, perched on roof or wall. No voices or footfalls seeped through from the other sides of the lattices. In this entire place she had seen no living thing—no
moving
thing—save herself and the Cadre and the bees who sometimes hunted for pollen amid the tired blossoms. If this was the domain of the Grass King described in the
Books of Marcellan
, then it was greatly fallen from those lush, legendary times. Gone were the courtiers in their silk robes and jewels, gone the feasts and dances, gone the quick-footed smiling servants and the hum of fertile farming life from beyond the worlds. It was a shell, a shadow, an echo of a dream. There was nothing here for her, for any living thing. There was nothing at all but dust and age and the Cadre.

She was bred to complaisance, to a life laid out in prescribed lines. She was not bred to captivity. She glared at the mural wall. What good to her, here, was this fanciful depiction of the steppe with its rice paddies? Better by far a picture of this place, with all that lay outside the courtyard. That could lead her to freedom.

Something flickered, right on the edge of her vision. She sat up. If it was one of her captors…Sujien would sneak
up on her if he could. She looked around her. Nothing. And yet…Another flicker and with it the faintest breath of sound, a ghost, a shade, a low thrumming. She swung her bare feet to the floor and twisted, tracking for movement. Yes, there was the motion again, shivering across the surface of the wall to the right of the picture. A shadow. Definitely a shadow and a small one at that. She rose, trying to pin down the source. Somewhere behind her…

On the other side of one of the lattices piercing the wall into the arcade, something shifted, a careful looping progress, up and around, down and back. Barefoot, she padded to the beaded arch. The sound grew deeper. Beyond the arch, she glimpsed a flitting flash of black and orange and gossamer.

A bee. Her shoulders slumped. Bees could not help her. Bees could crawl through cracks in brick and plaster, fly over roof tiles or pass through the tiny holes in the lattices. She could do none of that. She half turned, letting the beads fall. The bee bumped the lattice closest to her.

She lifted the curtain and slipped outside into the shade of the arcade. The tiles were warm and gritty under her feet. Petals dropped from the roses and lay in exhausted clumps in the dry watercourses. High above her, in the top corner of the window frame, a large bee tumbled and turned, singing to itself as it tasted the plasterwork. Despite herself, despite her frustration, she smiled, said, “Oh, you silly thing, that’s not a flower. They’re there, in the garden.” The bee bumped at the lattice again, then jinked and began to track downward to the base of the window. It halted on the frame, wings stilled, then took off again to brush along the wall, testing painted blossoms for nectar. Aude stood to watch it. It worked its way closer and closer, flower by pictured flower. She remained still, hands hanging limp, until it came to perch on a raised plaster lily only a foot away from her.

It was larger than any she had seen before. The stripes across its wide back looked soft and plushy; its wings were a filigree tissue finer than the silken veils of the Cadre. It
bobbed closer to her, its buzz a rich contralto. The breath of its flight brushed her forearm. Softly, wistfully, she said, “You must know far more of this place than I do.” The bee paused, almost as if considering her. She continued, “You can go anywhere you want.” There were no walls, no locks, no captors to hold a bee from its flight. It could, if it chose, explore every inch of this place, this prison-palace, and leave it on a whim. Somewhere over the roofs, beyond the walls, it must have a stone hive, a papery nest in an old tree, a place of safety of its own.

There had been beehives at the foot of the old orchard attached to the home farm on her family estate. She had been taken to see them often as a small child, part of the round of petting puppies and bottle-feeding orphan lambs, which had been her privilege. She had sat in the cool damp grass, Nurse fussing around her, and watched as bees hurried to and from their domed dwellings, caring for their young and their queen. “Like us and you, little mistress,” the farmer’s wife had said, bringing her a glass of new milk. She must have been no more than six. For years afterward she had pictured the bee queens as little girls in starched pinafores and ringlets, surrounded by huge, bossy, bustling adults. She had been surprised when, years later, the farmer’s younger son had shown her the queen bee tucked away in the heart of the hive. “But she’s the biggest!” she had said.

The boy—two years her junior and in thrall to her smooth amber skin and dark eyes—had gawped at her. “Queens always are, Mademoiselle.”

Queens were prisoners, too. She had learned that from the same boy and from her steward, who had threatened beatings when he learned that she was spending time alone with a tenant’s child. Queens were kept safe and snug in their fortresses, waited on and nurtured and protected for as long as they did not try to escape. Or so it had seemed to her at fourteen. New queens, the boy told her, fought the old queen for control or else fled away accompanied by a court of workers. “Don’t they run away alone?” she had asked him.

“No, Mademoiselle.” The boy had been puzzled. “Why would they do that?”

To be alone. To be in charge of their own lives. But at that age she had not known how to express that, not even known exactly what it was that she wanted. Queen bees had but one taste of freedom, in their mating flight, before returning to their waxy cages to beget more generations of bees. Perhaps her own freedom was to prove as ephemeral, one flight from the questions of the Silver City to the emptiness of the Woven House and this courtyard of dust and barriers. She looked at the bee, now, and said, “Are you a queen?” The bee crawled away from her to investigate another painted flower.

Aude sat down on the low wall that blocked off most of the arches along the arcade on the Concubine’s side of the courtyard. She said, “I suppose you usually send your servants out for you. Fetching and carrying.” Like her in her Silver City townhouse. “But you got bored and wanted to explore.” Again, like her. How hard did the worker bees protest when the queen was restless? Did they summon bee equivalents of uncles and guardians to preach reason? Did they tut and scowl and try to hide exits? Did they worry that she would use her mating flight to run away, that alone in her cell she plotted to evade her suitors and escape, or watched her guards carefully for any sign of weakness? She looked around. There were no other bees anywhere. “Well done,” she said to the bee. “But should you be wandering about here? Shouldn’t you go farther away so they find it hard to track you?” The bee ignored her, tasting the flower.

Aude said, “I wish I could fly out of here.” No chance of that. She shook her head. “There has to be some way out, but I can’t find it.”