Lords of Grass and Thunder (50 page)

“His majesty says he’s had enough of adventures but will defend this place, his own realm, with all the power of the toads.”

“Ribbit!” King Toad swelled his throat, which flushed with a florid warning of the poison exudations of his skin.

“We are welcome here, to share in the peace of the mossy trees under his protection.” Eluneke translated, and again, when the prince asked, “Thank him for me, please,” with the formality of one royal to another.

“Croak!”

With a bob of his head to acknowledge the courtesy, the king of the toads withdrew, leaving them with the illusion of privacy, though Eluneke knew more than one set of toady eyes were watching them. They were her totem, however, closer to her in some ways than her own skin. In her totem form, they
were
her own skin. So she rested under the prince’s arm, her head leaning on his shoulder, and said nothing of Great Moon Lun chasing her brothers from the sky.

Qutula woke with the smell of moist earth in his nose. By the drugged heaviness of his limbs he guessed that he had slept for some time. The stars that had glittered in a clear sky above the rocks where he’d lain his coats had vanished, but the dark remained, more complete than any night he had ever known. His coats were gone, and so were his clothes and his weapons, but beneath him the softness of silk cradled his naked back. No breeze stirred. He lay alone, surrounded by stone, with only the fragment of jade from the battlefield sprawled by its golden thread across his heart to cover him.

“What?” He tried to rise; the question had escaped his sleep fogged senses. With a moment to orient himself, he knew the truth. Only his lady of mystery could have found him in the shadows cast by the tumbled stones, and only she would have troubled to remove his hunting clothes. But where had she brought him? And where had she gone?

A cool, firm hand, lightly cupped over the jade talisman, pressed him back, then lifted, leaving him bereft even of her shadow. He didn’t try to rise again; didn’t think he could, so there wasn’t much point in trying except to make a fool of himself.

“Where are my clothes?”

“Safe.” He’d never disrobed in her presence before. It felt dangerous to do so now and his body tightened with the anticipation.

He heard a sound like the snapping of fingers, smelled sulfur, and a lamp leaped to life, its flame quickly hidden behind its shutters. By the smothered light he saw that she had set it on an outcrop of stone that roughened the otherwise smooth curve of a low-roofed cavern. Underground. How had she brought him there? Beneath him lay his mother’s best coat—he recognized it in the half-light—and about him other items of silk or gold set with precious stones, that he recognized from the camp. Then his lady crossed into the light.

Though her long dark hair hid her face from him, her emerald green coats hung open from her shoulders, lamplight gilding her naked curves. Her legs remained partly in shadow; he made out just the suggestion of their long, curving sweep, outlined in the golden light. Almost absently her hands met across her belly, kneading softly the flesh over her womb like an invitation. Never before had she made herself so vulnerable to his eyes.

Qutula’s arms felt heavy when he reached for her. “Let me hold you.” He meant to command her, but it sounded too much like pleading in his own ears to please him.

This time, however, she allowed it. “Of course, my beloved.”

He could see her smile behind the drape of hair that crossed her cheek. Then she came to him, dropping the coats she wore in a heap on the ground before standing astride him. The lethargy that had overwhelmed him on waking had gone, but looking at her, he couldn’t breathe for a moment. In the half-light of the shuttered lamp, what he could see of her was as beautiful as feel had taught him in the dark and he wanted to touch her again, to relearn the delicate sensations of her skin against his rough fingertips, against his belly and thighs.

Her ankles rested on either side of his hips and he took them in his hands, smoothed the skin of her calves, following that curve like a swan’s neck to her thighs. He pulled her down so that she must kneel to him, over him. Her breasts came within his reach and he took them, soft in his hands, and drew her down to bury his mouth in them.

“This time tomorrow, it will be over,” he said, meaning the prince’s death.

And, “How,” she answered back. “How will it be done?”

“By poison. The vial in my sleeve.”

Her fingers traced the knife-sharp bones of his face and he turned his head to kiss her wrist where it poised near his lips. She would, he supposed, return his coats with the prince’s death folded in the cuff. “Already I’ve dosed him in small amounts. The whole court believes he suffers some malady of evil spirits. When he dies suffering the same ache in his gut, they can have no suspicion. I have eaten the same food as he, after all, and drunk from the same bowl.”

His mother had provided him the antidote, which Qutula had taken with great care. No suspicion would fall on him.

“And if he doesn’t eat or drink the tainted food? Or if he survives the poison?” Her voice was muffled, her face buried in his neck then lower, trailing a flicking dry tongue over the taut flesh that banded his rib cage. Not a human tongue, but when her fingers were so busy elsewhere on his flesh, it was hard to remember why that might matter.

“Then war,” he answered, thinking,
One, two, three,
and
who knew he had so many ribs?
Not enough of them, if it meant she had come to the end of that careful addition of their sum. He had other parts, however. His belly, his hip: she found each with her mouth and explored it with her fingertips, leaving the bloody traces of her sharp nails to show where she had gone.

“Steal the girl,” she murmured into the hollow of his throat. “If the poison fails, the prince will look for her. You can draw him away from the court and kill him then.”

She was right. A hostage would simplify the murder of the prince, if it came to a fight. Qutula hesitated to tell her so; he hated taking orders from a woman, even his mother, who had worked all her life to put him on the dais. He didn’t want this one to think she could control him with her ideas.

“Of course, I may have misjudged you.” Her cool belly brushed against his softly, but she withdrew from him with her voice. “She is your sister, after all.”

And his father had acknowledged her before either of the sons who had served him all their lives. “As Tayyichiut is my cousin,” he agreed at least on the kinship. “She is one more obstacle between my father and his true heir.” Once the prince was safely murdered, the girl would follow him to the ancestors. Killing her would be easier than holding her hostage, though.

“She’s a shamaness and I am no bridegroom kidnapping his willing bride. She can vanish into the dreamscape and travel anywhere at the speed of thought. How do we take and hold her against her will?”

As he talked, he traced circles insubstantial as a kiss around the pink nipple that brushed his fingertips.

“With this.” From around his neck the lady of mysteries plucked the gold thread and passed it over her own head, so that the smooth jade fragment rested gleaming over her burnished breasts. “Let me keep it for a little while; you will have it back soon enough. When the time comes, set the talisman around the girl’s neck. At our command, the power it binds will pin her to the mortal realm, invisible to her teachers in the dreamscape, until she goes to meet her ancestors. Which will, I trust, be soon.”

“Then we are agreed.”

Though he felt more naked in its absence than he had from his lack of clothing, Qutula didn’t ask when she would return the jade talisman, or how. A lifetime spent in the tent of his mother had taught him not to question certain powers but to command them through others, by cunning. Now, the thought of such powers in his hands fed his desire. He would have tipped her over and taken her in one sweep of his strong body, but she nipped him more than playfully on the shoulder and he felt a cold like death spread from the wound.

“I will give you the means to take the dais of your father,” she said, though as yet she had done little more than suggest the ways by which he might do it for himself.

He owed her nothing, but it cost him less to humor her, at least until the princess his sister had gone to her ancestors. He might need her help for that. So he lowered his lashes humbly and answered, “I am in your debt, my lady.”

“I know. And tonight you will give me my heart’s desire in payment of that debt.”

Her voice, imperial and desperate, fired his senses. “You already have it,” he assured her. “The prince will die tonight, I swear it.” The bargain cost him little. He had already told her of his intention to kill his cousin that very day.

“Not enough, not enough,” she groaned into his ear. Frustrated in his desire to have her, it was on the tip of his tongue to rebuff her demand and override her objections by force, if necessary. But: “It’s time,” she moaned, her voice rising in an anguished cry of desire more powerful than any he had felt in her before.

“Oh, gods, my fathers, it’s time!” With those strange words she took his willing body inside her, rocking with little moans, “Mine, mine.”

He thought she meant himself, her willing property at such moments, and answered, “Yours, yours.”

Suddenly, she went very still over him. He would have screamed, or strangled her until she had no choice but to serve his body or die, but the cold on his shoulder was spreading. She might kill him if he tried.

He needn’t have feared, however. She said only, “Do you mean it? Mine?”

How could she doubt? When she had him in this way, at least. “Anything,” he answered, “I have sworn my life to you. Anything I am is yours.” The thing about promises, he had already learned, was that they were so easy to make when they served him, and so easy to break when that served him better.

He could tell by her sigh of satisfaction, by the renewed interest she showed in his body, that she had believed him. When finally he had spent himself inside her once, and again by the power of his youthful vigor and her eager encouragement, she lay across him weak with her own pleasure.

“You, too, have made promises, my lady,” he said, and brushed her hair aside with fingers gone slack with satisfaction. “Before I leave this place, I must know who you are.”

“Time,” she agreed, and lifted her head. Suddenly, it seemed as though a hood had been lifted from his eyes, so that he could see for the first time.

“My Lady Chaiujin!” His heart stuttered in his chest, for reflected in her human eyes he saw the slitted obsidian of the serpent. Framing her sweet oval face he saw the faint tracery of a serpent’s green scales. A part of him, he realized, had known all along that it was she, or something very like the serpent-demon who had taken the Tinglut princess’ place in his uncle’s bed. Torn between a natural terror and covetous lust, he wondered if Chimbai-Khan had seen the demon behind the human face of his second wife, and if he had courted the danger in the pleasure, until it killed him.

She must have seen the confused lust in his eyes, because she smiled and revealed to him the forked tongue that flicked pleasure where his neck joined his shoulder. Her sinuous hands stroked him and he felt the smooth dry shift of scales against his skin when she wrapped her legs around him.

Qutula grinned up at her, then quick as any snake rolled her under him. “With you beside me, and your power in my grasp, we can rule the world.” He took the globes of her breasts in his hands; through the pale green of her skin, a rosy blush deepened at their tips as he mapped the paths of his conquests on her flesh. She wanted him, and by her acquiescent smile let him know that she would allow his dominance this once.

He took what she offered, kissed her mouth with its strange tongue and plunged deep between her parted legs. Still a woman there, she could not become fully serpent while he pressed her thighs apart. Then he was done, gasping for breath while his sweat fell, drop, drop, drop, on her dry, smooth skin. Her fingers soothed him, tracing the fall of his braids on his shoulder.

As he drifted to sleep, he felt the slither of a serpent cross his flesh. Reaching out with the last strength of his arm for her, he let the smooth scales glide effortlessly through fingers growing numb and heavy and strange. Without knowing quite how it had happened, he surrendered consciousness to strange and pain-filled dreams.

Chapter Thirty-one

I
N HER SERPENT form the false Lady Chaiujin left the comfort of her nest for the grassy surface. Great Moon Lun had set, but Little Sun had not yet risen; she moved by starlight too pale to aid a human eye, and the vibration of the air, which she sensed with her flicking tongue. Wrapped around her green scales she wore the golden thread, with the fragment of smooth round jade balanced on her back.

Once that fragment had formed the bottom of a drinking bowl, the match to a wedding cup carried by the god-king Llesho. At the bottom she had incised her image, a coiled rune that tied her demon soul to his more godlike one. He’d used her badly in his war against the demon-king, but that was over now. The cup was broken, her mark carved in skin instead of jade. A new war began; if she moved the stones on the board just so, she might go home or, barring that, place on the dais of the khan the son now growing in the egg she carried. What that child would be she did not know. Already, however, she felt the power of his demon kind stir within her womb.