The Grass King’s Concubine (4 page)

“They expected us to chew,” said Yelena. “Chewing is what we’re known for. It made punishing us easy, that time.”

“That was an ordinary crime,” Julana said. “Not like claiming a mortal. No one ever thought we’d do that.”

“Claiming Marcellan.” Yelena said. “Making him ours. Letting him change us. That was embarrassing. We aren’t supposed to be embarrassing.”

“It isn’t a normal punishment,” said Julana, mutinous. “It’s boring.”

Though they kept the Stone House, they did not precisely live there. Rather, they infested it. It made feeding easier and greatly reduced the need for dusting. It also provided a splendid excuse for biting anyone who tried to visit. In their true, ferret shape, they had silky dark fur and shiny dark eyes and teeth that were strong and sharp and yellow. Most humans who ventured close enough to the Stone House to catch a glimpse of them looked quickly away. The sillier ones sometimes shrieked or hid behind their veils. “Although I like it best when they faint,” said Julana.

“And if they do,” said Yelena, “we bite them.”

“We bite them
hard
,” said Julana. “It discourages visitors.” Rare indeed were the humans whose curiosity persisted once blood had been drawn. Rarer still were those willing and able to dig in and try to outwait the sisters’ patience. It did not do, the twins felt, to become too familiar with the neighbors. But even so, every little while, someone came who wanted more than a glimpse of fur, a nip of teeth, and a long damp wait on the muddy doorstep.

The woman who came trudging up the dirt road from the nearest hamlet that Midsummer Day was one of those rare ones. Her robes—good silk and well dyed—were splashed with mud and torn here and there on twigs and stones. Her hands were soiled, too, and bleeding. Her veil hung awry, soaked with sweat and showing more than was meet of her thin face. She looked young and tired and
foolish, yet for all that she sank down on the step cross-legged and tugged off her shoes. “We’ll have to bite this one,” Yelena said, peering through a crack at the base of the door. “She doesn’t look like the fainting kind.” The woman pulled a foot into her lap and began to rub it. “We’ll have to bite several times. She looks determined.”

“I like biting,” said Julana.

It was a matter of a moment for them both to be outside; a quick skitter of sharp claws, a twist, a wriggle, and two lithe fast bodies shot from under the step, straight in front of the visitor. She did not shriek. She did not even start. Two pointed noses twitched, two sets of small ears pulled back, then Julana rose up onto her hindquarters to stare. The woman looked down at her, smooth-browed above the tattered veil. Julana dropped back to all fours, gathered her haunches beneath her, and leaped. There was a puff of mud, a flap of fabric, a short cry. The woman drew back on the step, sucking on a finger under her veil. Around it, she said “Nasty dirty little creatures.”

“Dirty herself,” said Julana, hopping back down to rejoin her sister. “You should taste her. Stale.”

Yelena sniffed at her, whiskers twitching. “She’s different,” she said. “She smells strange.”

Julana twisted, reaching back to groom a ruffled spot. Muffled in fur, she said, “That explains the taste.”

“Hush,” said Yelena.

The woman took the finger from her mouth, examined it. Then she said, rather calmly, “You can bite all you like. I’m not leaving until I see your mistresses.”

“Strange and crazy,” said Julana.

“I know there are witches here,” the woman continued. “Everyone says so. And I intend to see them.”

“She thinks we’re familiars,” Yelena said, wondering.

Looking round from her grooming, Julana showed fangs. “We are,” she said. “But not the way she means it. You bite her this time.”

“Witches,” Yelena repeated. Something new lit in her dark eyes. “We
could
be witches. If we wanted.”

“The Grass King won’t like it.” Julana said, happily. “But I do.”

“Me too,” said Yelena.

The woman went back to rubbing her foot. Without looking up, she said, “Chitter as much as you want. I know how to wait.” She glanced up, briefly. “Or do you want another taste of me?” She thrust the soiled foot at the twins. “Go ahead.”

“She’s nasty,” Yelena, fastidious, recoiled. “She isn’t deserving.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Julana tugged one last clump of fur into place. “We’re not about that.”

“We might do more.” Yelena was thoughtful. “We could make her help us get Marcellan back.”

“How?” Julana asked. And then, as her twin simply blinked at her, “Well, can I be the witch?”

“You’ll forget your whiskers. Or you’ll squeak or bite her.”

“Marcellan likes that.”

“She isn’t Marcellan.”

The twins fell silent, considering their visitor. She ignored them, starting work on her second foot. She might have been any one of the hundred hundred humans who toiled and died in the long shadow of the Stone House. They were all the same, with their ephemeral silly wants and needs. Only Marcellan had been different. Only Marcellan had come to them. “I’ll be the witch,” Yelena said. “Let’s go back inside.”

Changing was easy; the twins had practiced it long and hard. A sneeze would take longer. Humanwise, Yelena was sharp and angular, pungent as acid. Her hair grew dense and short in a bushy black cap; under heavy brows her eyes were deep-set in shadowed sockets, brightly brown. Her teeth were still sharp and shiny. “But,” said Julana, as Yelena pulled upright, “we should make her wait longer. She said that she wanted to.”

“It’s good to be dignified,” Yelena said. “Dignified people don’t fuss.”

Julana tipped her head upward to stare at her sister. “She’ll expect clothes. Humans are silly.”

“We’ll find some. We had some.”

“Itchy.”

“You don’t have to wear them.”

Perhaps Yelena looked odd when at last she wrenched open the door. The issue did not arise. (“As if,” said Julana, “what a human thought mattered.”) The long shirt she wore was yellowed with age and frayed at the hem. It had belonged to Marcellan once, before the twins stole it to add to their nest. Yelena reached down to scoop up Julana and settle her on her shoulder. Then she stood back from the doorway in the dank stone shadow.

Aside from dust and dried old mud, there was little of remark inside the first room of the Stone House. A rough-hewn trestle, piled with dirty earthenware, stood crookedly across it, accompanied by a few three-legged stools. Two doors to further rooms hung ajar; in the back a narrow stone stairway headed upward into darkness. The house smelled of damp and cobwebs and the twins’ warm musk. It was unlike any hut in the village, even any of the big houses of the one nearby town. It was unlike anywhere a local human might want to live at all. But then again, no local woman would stand barefaced and barelegged to admit a stranger. The twins had never been good at remembering such things. They just didn’t see how it mattered.

The veiled woman turned her head, then rose. Her eyes offered nothing as she stepped over the threshold and seated herself, unasked, on a stool. Her straight back was no more revealing than her eyes. “Much she should sneer at,” said Julana. “At least it’s dry in here.”

“For now,” said Yelena. Her voice, in human form, was thin and sharp. The woman looked at her, brows drawing in.

“Don’t explain,” said Julana. “I want us to worry her.”

“Hush,” said Yelena.

“I’m not a fool,” the woman said. “I know you can talk with your vermin.”

“Vermin yourself,” said Julana.

“I want something from you,” the woman went on. “I didn’t come all the way out here to look at you or to
gossip.” Yelena said nothing, staring at the stranger. The woman said, finally, “I want you to give me a boy child.”

“We don’t keep human children,” said Julana, indignant. “I ought to have bitten her harder.” And then, “Don’t answer her. Make her work.” Yelena let the silence lengthen, until the woman looked down and shuffled her bare feet on the cold floor. Gray light filtered in through the still-open door, coating the floor with murky shadows. On Yelena’s shoulder, Julana preened her whiskers, one by careful one.

At last, the woman gave in. “I’m the headman’s favorite. But he had a wife before me, and she gave him a daughter, the old sow. Now she wants him to get rid of me, says I make them unlucky, that she’ll get a son once I’m gone. So I have to have one first. She’s just another mudfoot; she isn’t even young. But I have proper blood; my grandmam lay with a northern soldier and got my da that way. He came from money, and he left her with gold to care for my da.” She looked up again, and her eyes had turned sly. “I still have a piece of it. I could give it to you, for a boy child.”

“We don’t like gold,” Yelena said in her thin high voice. “It isn’t useful to us.”

“We like rabbits,” said Julana. “Or a nest of young rats.”

“I can get you silks,” the woman said. “Wine from the North. I can see that the headman protects you.”

“We don’t like silk and wine,” Yelena said. “We don’t need protection.” She hesitated. “You have to do better than that.” She reached up, ran a finger along Julana’s spine. “You have to offer something we want.”

The woman lifted her chin. “I can have men come. They’ll burn down your house.”

“The Stone House won’t burn.”

“But I need this child.” The woman’s voice turned pleading as her arrogance began to crack.

Yelena walked slowly up to the table. He face was feral in the dim light. The woman curled back on the stool, shoulders hunching under her veils. Coolly Yelena said, “A big magic, to make children. The land doesn’t like it. You have to steal the goodness from the earth. You have to give us
something that makes the change stick. Something written down.”

“I can’t write,” the woman said.

“Bring us a book,” Yelena said.

On her shoulder, Julana quivered. “One of Marcellan’s books.”

“We want,” said Yelena, “the book called
The Fivefold Domains
. Get us that, and you get a son.”

The woman rose, pulled her robes tight. She looked neither right nor left as she walked out of the house and into the rain. She said nothing. On the doorstep, she hesitated, but she neither looked back nor spat on the ground. “And now?” said Julana.

“She’ll bring the book,” Yelena said. “We’ll read it, and the way will open again.”

“We can’t read,” said Julana.

“She’ll bring the book,” Yelena repeated, “and someone else will come to read it. You’ll see.”

The Brass City

T
HE YEAR AUDE TURNED SEVENTEEN, her uncle moved the entire household from the country to the Silver City. She had learned, by then, that a name was just a name; the streets and houses she saw from the windows of her carriage did not shine, nor were they made of any precious metal. They were precious enough, for all that, the streets wide and well kept, their pavements lying smooth and clean, the houses large and elegant behind their high walls and wrought-iron gates. Gentlemen hastened by, mounted on high-stepping horses or driving finely dressed ladies in curricles. Servants in crisp liveries hustled from place to place, eyes fixed on the ground. For all of her life, Aude had known where she belonged, known that she was, for the most part, approved and appreciated. Now, in the eyes of the Silver City nobles, she discovered for the first time that she was not, after all, good enough. The gentlemen smiled at the sight of the old-fashioned coach; the ladies tittered. Aude herself was hidden behind the window shutter, yet she felt she had already been judged and found wanting.

Her uncle’s house lay at the far end of one of the quieter boulevards. This was one of the finest districts of the Silver City. To the north lay the parklands surrounding the palace of the regent. To the west, beyond the paths and lawns and trees of her family’s grounds, stood more dwellings of the
aristocracy. To the east, a road swept past, carrying the gentry toward the fashionable shopping districts. To the south…To the south, the trees had been permitted to grow tall, the shrubs dense. Beyond them was a high wrought-iron fence with spikes along its crown, then a wilderness, and, beyond that, a cliff. Long ago, a river had birthed that cliff, and then a plain, and last of all, on that plain, a village. The village had grown rich from the river and gathered more people, becoming a port, a town, a city. Its buildings marched back and back until they met the cliff, and its streets grew danker and narrower, and its people more varied. Wealth learned to sneer at need and need to prey upon wealth, until one by one the richest left to seek space and light and sweeter air on the heights of the cliff. Their houses were white or palest gray, embellished, cherished, indulged. The bright quarter, men called it—the jewel box, the Silver City. At its foot, the old dwellings crouched in a mantle of yellow fog, hidden from the view of their former owners on the heights.

Aude owned factories and tenements down under that miasma. She had seen the neat rows of figures submitted to her uncle’s man of business by their overseers. She was not, she learned, expected to see the factories themselves. “We’re not here for you to dirty yourself poking about in weaving sheds and foundries,” her uncle said, when she asked him over breakfast on the first day in the new house. “We’re here for you to meet the people who matter in your husband’s world.”