The Grass King’s Concubine (41 page)

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 believe 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.

“Let me escort you back to your rooms,” Shirai said. “There’s food waiting. I asked Liyan to ensure it stayed warm.”

“Thank you.” That was perhaps not quite the right thing to say. She could think of nothing better.

“Come.”

The bees followed them down the stair and back through the Courtyard of the Cadre. Aude held herself tense despite that. She had left her prison without permission. She had sought an escape. Liyan might have ignored that, but Shirai was the leader. He was sure to have something to say about her actions. But he walked in silence beside her, his face calm.

She said, “I told you I didn’t belong here. That I want to go home.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not what Sujien thinks I am. I don’t know anything about what my ancestors did. I can’t fix it.”

“Not yet, perhaps. These things take time.” They came to the end of a corridor. Shirai turned left, paused to hold a curtain aside for her. “And we have not been as helpful to you as we might, I think.” She did not know how to answer that. He went on, “I’ll show you how to open the door to your rooms, so you can explore. I should have done so sooner. Why didn’t you ask?”

She stopped where she was and stared at him. It had never occurred to her to ask. Captives did not get to set the bounds of their own captivity. She said, weakly, “Thank you.” And then, “I never thought…I mean, you dragged me here.”

“Yes. But it will not help us if you don’t come to understand the Rice Palace.” They had reached a short flight of stairs. At their foot was a high, arcaded hall ending in a door, iron bound and closed.

The door whose opening mechanisms she had been unable to fathom.

Coming to a halt before it, Shirai said, “It needs to learn you. Place your hand on it. It doesn’t matter where.”

She put her right hand on the wooden surface, felt it solid and cool under her palm. “And then?”

His hand came down over hers, eclipsing it. His fingers were broad and strong and warm. His arm brushed along the length of hers and despite herself she felt somehow safer. He said, “Now tell it your name.”

She inhaled, and felt him inhale with her. She said, “Aude Pèlerin des Puiz. My name is Aude Pèlerin des Puiz.” A breeze wrapped her forearm, slid its way over her wrist, lapping at bones and tendons, shimmering over skin, slipping over the back of her hand to flow between her fingers. Under her hand, the door swung open.

“There,” Shirai said. “It knows you. Henceforth, it’ll open as you require.” He released her and stepped back.

Her mouth was dry. She swallowed and looked up at him. She said, “How…?”

“Because I can.” He studied her a few moments, then smiled. “I’m made that way. This place knows me. We belong.”

“Does that mean I…” She was not sure how to ask. “Will things like that happen for me now, too?”

“No. I’ve taught the door.” The smile broadened. “The rest is up to you.”

A Machine to Shape the Sky

M
ARCELLAN DID NOT UNDERSTAND, though the twins glared at him, knocked over his inkcakes and water, chewed his pens, left damp pawmarks on his carefully written pages. “Dangerous,” Yelena said, spitting. “Words are bad. This…this…
printing
is bad. Grass King won’t like it. It doesn’t belong.” She tugged at Marcellan’s sleeve. “Don’t write. Writing is bad.”

“It will be all right.” Putting his pen down, Marcellan patted her hand. “I’ve written many books. I know how to be careful.”

If Marcellan understood how to be careful, he would have stayed in WorldAbove. There was little safety for humans in WorldBelow to begin with. It was not their proper place; it was not shaped for them. Its fields and rivers, rocks and woodlands held secrets that men did not know and would not understand. Even the Rice Palace, built as it was to the Grass King’s will and peopled with his creatures, had places that were not to be trusted.

Places and people. Liyan’s workshop was full of sharp, odd, untrustworthy things, birds that breathed fire and flowers that stung. Liyan, above all, was not to be trusted. Trouble followed him wherever he went, and if it lagged behind, he urged it on. “He burned down the Water Granary,” Julana told Marcellan, thin face solemn. “He made holes in the walls of the Blue Morning Pavilion, and it fell
on the seventh underchamberlain. He made all the fountains in the courtyards of the lesser lords run warm.”

“Warm and green.” Yelena added. “It tasted bad. Old apples.”

“Old apples and manure. They burst, made everything wet.” Julana’s nose wrinkled. “The lesser lords had to live with the Clerks of the Robes for days and days. More days than my toes.”

“The Grass King made him mend the fountains and sent him to walk the bounds of the outer rice paddies.”

“And that was a little bad thing.”

“He’s done worse. Big fires. Big explosions.”

“Qiaqia.”

“Qiaqia was really bad.” Yelena caught herself up short and looked anxiously at the door. The twins were afraid of Qiaqia. She was not like the rest of the Cadre. She did things no one could predict. She killed things. If she heard them speak of her, if she learned that they had taught themselves human shape, human speech…Yelena shuddered. Not safe. Not safe at all.

Marcellan looked across at her and smiled. “You don’t have to be scared. The printing press is just a thing. It can’t hurt you. It’s just wood and metal.”

Wood and metal did not matter. What mattered was what the printing press did. The twins could not imagine that the Grass King would like it, letting words breed like that, and without his supervision and approval. Words were important. The senior chamberlain and his many clerks had huge tall racks in which words were tied down with string and sealing wax. That would not happen if words were not dangerous somehow.

Marcellan said, “And anyway, the books aren’t for here. They’re for my kind. They won’t stay in WorldBelow.”

The twins exchanged a glance. Suspiciously, Yelena said, “Where will they go?”

“To where I came from.”

“No.” Julana came to her feet. “Not good. Things of our world don’t go to yours. Not safe. Not allowed.”

“But the books aren’t of your world,” Marcellan said. “They’re human things. They were made for my kind.”

That almost made sense. Julana thought about it, chewing her lower lip. Marcellan wrote the words. Marcellan had taught Liyan about the printing press. Did that make it his? It seemed possible. She looked again at Yelena.
Is that right? Does that make it all right?

Yelena frowned. Slowly, she said, “Liyan shaped the machine.”

“I wrote the words. Human words. Not words from here.”

Words were big things, complex, hard to manage, harder still to catch and hold down. Yelena said, “Your words?”

“All mine. I promise.”

Perhaps that made it all right. Yelena did not know.

It did not occur to either twin to wonder what those written words might say. Days succeeded nights, and nights days, and the Grass King took no steps against the printing press. It thumped and clacked away in Liyan’s courtyard, spilling out pages under the efficient hands of the Fire Banner. “It does what you said,” Liyan said to Marcellan, sitting on the steps of his workshop early one evening. “No more than that.” He set down his cup and stretched out his legs before him. “It’s not so interesting. I don’t see why you carried parts of it with you.”

“The importance is what can be done with it,” Marcellan said.

“Books and papers.” Liyan said. “We’ve done those, too.”

“There are always different books. New books.”

“Perhaps.” But Liyan’s lack of interest was clear. “That’s a matter for clerks. The machine itself…It’s built, it works.”

Under the steps, the twins exchanged glances. Liyan had tired of the project, as he tired, in the end, of all his projects. All his mechanical projects, anyway. (Qiaqia was another matter. But the twins did not like to think about Qiaqia.) And if Liyan was bored, he would not want more words from Marcellan, and Marcellan would be safe. “We learned
human shape for
this
,” Julana said, disgusted. “He wouldn’t listen. We could have waited for Liyan to be bored.”

“Yes,” Yelena said. But she was not sure. There was still something…She said, “It might have worked. Marcellan might have listened.”

“Human shape doesn’t listen.”

“No…” But Yelena still hesitated. Something teased at her, like a breeze in her fur. “Maybe, later, we might need it.”

“Maybe.” But Julana was not convinced. She yawned. “Hungry. I want rabbits. Or rats.”

“There are rats in the granaries,” Yelena said. “Too many. I heard the steward talking.”

“Rats are fun to catch. Good to eat.”

“Grass King likes us to catch rats.” The twins exchanged another look.

“Hunting,” Julana said.

“We like hunting.” And in a twist of whiskers and tails, they were gone.

“You can see the stars,” Marcellan said, “but not the moons or the sun. Why is that?”

Two days had passed, or four. The twins had not needed to count them, knowing that their man was once again safe from danger. They had hunted rats in the big south granaries, and slept off their meal in a tangle of silk bales in one of the nearby storerooms. They had chased each other around and around the roofs of the Courtyard of the Middle Ladies, dislodging moss and tile chips, dirt, and a scolding flock of starlings. They had breakfasted with the Grass King, lolling beside him and the Concubine on his favorite terrace. Content filled them, wrote satisfaction along every line of their long bodies, from sharp noses to tail tips.

They did not know about the sky. It was there, amber and ocher and flecked with stars. It was always there, like the waters that flowed from the great rock at the center of the Rice Palace, fed its fountains and pools, washed under its courts, and swept out, at last, to form the great river that
ran through all the lands of the Grass King. They paused in their investigations in the long grass around the boles of the plum orchard to look back at their man in wonderment. “Can’t eat the sky,” Julana said. “Can’t chase it. It’s not useful.”