Lords of Grass and Thunder (39 page)

“Not so fast, my lady. We have a bargain!”

A bargain? What bargain had Sechule made with his lover, and how did she know about the token his mysterious lady had printed like a scent on his flesh? However it had happened, his own rage equaled that of the serpent.

“Don’t!” he cried, bereft as the mark tore free of his breast. Though he welcomed the relief from the pain the creature had so recently inflicted on him, it felt as if his mother had torn out part of his soul.

But—“Don’t be a fool!” she said, and popped the serpent into a jar that stood open on her workbench. “Cover yourself up! Next time I will let her sink those sharp fangs into you and welcome. Must I do everything myself?”

“You knew her by her token!” he stumbled over the words, busy commanding his hands, which would reach for the jar that imprisoned the serpent if he relaxed his control.

“Of course I did,” she answered. Pounding the stopper into the jar with the heel of her hand she set it on a shelf in the chest that hid her poisons. “But that is neither here nor there. Your brother must be with us in the coming struggle to secure your father’s love, not with the shamaness against us. Find him and return him to the palace before he commits treason! It will be over for us all if he throws in his lot against the gur-khan’s interests.”

Qutula bowed his head in obedience to his mother, but his gaze turned longingly to the jar where the serpent lay. His mother saw and cut off the request with a bladelike fall of her hand.

“Not now,” she insisted. “You’ll need your mind clear and unfettered when you talk to your brother. And it would mean disaster to bring the lady’s token into the tent of the shamaness. The lady is more powerful, but to use that power would reveal too much before you are ready to act.”

“I’ve acted already,” he reminded her with a dull glare. The prince suffered nightly from the poison Qutula administered in his drink.

His mother made sense—until Mergen named him heir they could reveal no part of their aspirations—but her words seemed to come from too far away to matter. Only the mysterious lady mattered, and the gift of her name and her body she had promised him when he had taken the khanate. The serpent bound their conspiracy with the reality of her pleasure and her pain. He would allow no one to steal the mark of that bond from him—

Sechule stood between him and the painted chest, however, a fearsome look in her eyes. For a moment they stood that way, poised between mastery and rebellion. She was no witch, but she had powers of her own he didn’t want to cross. And of course, she was right.

“I’ll go,” he promised, and left his mother with a kiss on her cheek and a backward longing glance at the chest of poisons where his lady’s token slumbered. He would deal with his mother later, when he had the crown. . . .

Deep in the heart of the stoneware jar, the serpent demon roused from an intermittent slumber. Sechule’s voice summoned her from the other side of human.

“I’m ready to let you go, my lady, but first you must swear not to bite me or hurt me in any way.”

Once, the serpent remembered, she had walked upright among the Qubal as the Lady Chaiujin. In her snaky form the memory seemed to belong to some other creature. This wasn’t her true shape either, but the wiles of a serpent came closer to her demon nature. She thought of herself only as serpent now, and as serpent she slithered out of the jar with no thought more than to sink her sharp, curved fangs into the hand that had imprisoned her and kill it. Perfectly still, she rested her beady gaze on the woman, using her cold and lidless stare to freeze her prey. She could tell by the heat radiating in waves off the woman’s skin that she was afraid. Sechule’s heart thundered, as loud to the serpent as the herds running on the plains.

In spite of her fear, the woman kept a firm grip behind the serpent’s jaws, calling her back to two-legged memories. “I mean no disrespect, khaness, but feared that you would kill my unworthy child before he had served his purpose in our design.”

Ah, yes. Revenge. And motherhood.

Floating beneath the surface of her thoughts, the false Lady Chaiujin knew she needed this woman’s cooperation. So it wouldn’t serve her in the long run to sink her fangs into the meat of Sechule’s hand, where the thumb met the wrist. The serpent tongue flicked out restlessly, tasting food, though hunter-sense said the human was too big. The jaws of a bamboo snake would never stretch that wide.

“Do you hear me, lady? If we do not have an agreement, I can make a stew of your flesh and use your skin for a lovely pair of mittens.”

Sechule gave her a little shake, rattling her right down to her tail. The serpent was no lady but a daughter of the underworld. She had been gone so long that she sometimes forgot her own name in that other kingdom, but she never forgot where she belonged. So she bowed her head in submission while promising her snaky self,
not for long
. The mortal was too big to eat, but not too big to die.

Sechule seemed content that she had the agreement she demanded, however. “We still have the same goal. But Qutula is the weapon we must wield to attain it.” Biting nervously at her lip, the woman put her down on the floor of the tent.

With a shiver that started at her head and rippled all the way through her, the demon’s serpent-self stretched until once again she stood in a woman’s skin. Her scales became the fine embroidered silk of her coats which she settled around her as she sat across from her recent captor.

“Don’t do that again,” she said. “The serpent has a mind of her own, and she doesn’t like you.”

“I’ll leave my herb chest open a crack, like this,” Sechule negotiated a truce with a bow that indicated her regret without lowering herself to apologize. “If someone comes in unexpectedly, you can hide inside until they are gone.”

The chest had a lock which might be turned to trap her, but the false Lady Chaiujin accepted that some risks came with every alliance. As Qutula’s mother, the human female must be put off her guard until the son had attained the dais. It would be easier to kill her then. Until that time, she must convince Sechule they were allies. Friends, the humans called it. The word had uses when persuading an enemy to one’s aid.

“Friends.” She smiled at Sechule and took a cup of tea from her hands in a show of trust between poisoners. “I regret the pain I caused your older son, but I assure you his rewards are equal to his punishments. The younger, however, proves resistant to the charms of a stranger in his bed.”

“Bekter is a fool,” Sechule agreed. “But his loss at this time would rouse suspicions before we are ready to act.”

“But later,” the serpent-demon bargained in her human form. His rebuff had insulted her; she would not be denied her revenge.

“Later,” Sechule agreed. Her eyes told a different truth, however, of serpents crushed underfoot and herself on the dais. The lady recognized the ambition, and didn’t begrudge it in her ally. It was, after all, what she planned to do to Sechule, once she had planted her egg on the dais of the khan.

“Then our bargain still stands,” she agreed.

Sechule bowed, dropping her lashes respectfully. When she looked up again, the lady had vanished into smoke. As vapor she watched a moment more, but Sechule went back to the potion cooking on the firebox. And the lady found that she missed the warmth of her lover’s breast.

As Qutula rode deeper into the camp in search of his brother and the shamaness, the tattoo made itself felt as a missing part of himself, falling into place beneath the shard of jade he wore by a thread beneath his shirt. He had found the jade outside a cave in which the hideous king of demons had died at the hand of the god-king and had picked it up for luck. Once it held a coiled serpent incised on it, but the carving had faded or the lady had taken the jade and had replaced it with a talisman of her own while he had slept beside her in the grass.

He had grown into the habit of worrying it when he sensed the absence of his lady’s attention, but now his hand dropped to his side. The low hum of the returning presence tingled through his nerves with a kiss of warmth that carried the promise of her anger. He wondered what had caused her fury, but hesitated to invite her retribution again with the question. Perhaps, when their bodies locked in lovemaking, the lady herself would more freely give up her secrets. Now, however, he had his brother to consider, and their father waiting impatiently with dangerous guests on the way.

The shamaness was easy enough to find. There were fewer of the lower ranks remaining in the khan’s city every day. He recognized her tent by the raven feathers sewn to the felt covering and the raven staring at him from over her door. Dismounting in the wind-driven rain that tore at his clothing, he left his horse to graze what it might from the beaten grass between the scattered tents and entered without announcing himself, as one might do among lowly neighbors. The shamaness knelt at the firebox, making barley tea. Though it was midday, the bedclothes lay in an untidy tumble on the floor. Qutula saw no sign of her apprentice or his brother.

“May I help you?” She rose unhurriedly and reached for her shaman’s robes, which hung from a peg on the lattice. It seemed like an accidental brush of her hand that turned the mirror on him, but under his clothes the tattoo shrank in on itself, so cold on his skin that the shamaness had to ask the question again to pierce his distraction.

She had put on the robes and her headdress. He knew the raven was dead and stuffed on top of her head, but still he saw it blink its beady eyes at him. “I can help you with the demon you carry,” she said, and stretched a finger to his breast.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a decoration, just ink.” He drew back as if hers were the poison touch, while the emerald green bamboo snake burrowed into the flesh above his heart. “I’m looking for Bekter, the gur-khan’s poet.” Annoyance at his brother cut through the distraction of the lady’s token.

The shamaness reached for her medicine stick. “And to what purpose?”

He wondered if they had met before, though he remembered no such encounter. For whatever reason, she didn’t seem to like him, not surprising if she had designs of her own to use her apprentice against the prince and gain the dais for herself. Mergen had already seen through that ploy, however. He had only to find his brother before his father sent guards to arrest her.

“The gur-khan has need of his services. If you know where I can find him, it will go better for you to tell me now.” She had begun to mutter some incantation beneath her breath when two things happened at once.

The rumpled bedding heaved like an earthquake.

“Better how?” Bekter’s head appeared over the blankets, followed by a naked shoulder. He rubbed absently at his tangled hair, loosening the braids even more than a roll in a shamaness’ bed had done, but his gaze was sharp with questions.

At that moment, the door was swept aside to reveal Mergen’s blue-coated guardsmen, Captain Chahar at their head.

“Captain,” Qutula ground out between clenched teeth, though he managed to produce the proper bow between equals in rank.

Chahar returned the courtesy, “Captain,” with the same precisely calculated bow. His eyes, however, absorbed every detail of the scene, including the court poet, Qutula’s brother, diving under the shamaness’ blankets in search of his clothes.

“What is going on here?” Bekter grumbled when he appeared again a moment later, still shoving his arms into the sleeves of his court silks. He had made no effort to disguise himself for his lover and Chahar was no fool. This was exactly the confrontation Qutula had wanted to avoid.

“I know why Captain Qutula has come,” the shamaness added her own questions, showing in her glance that she understood more by that than Qutula’s search for his brother. “But to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit after so many years, Captain Chahar?”

“No pleasure at all, my lady shamaness,” Chahar announced, half stumbling in an aborted bow much deeper than Qutula thought proper for any errand of the court in this tent. “I have come as a matter of honor between my lord the gur-khan and my father’s tents, to take you into custody, together with your apprentice, the girl Eluneke.”

“You mean, he wants to arrest her.” Bekter had pulled himself to order and now he stood between Chahar and the shamaness.

“I’ll attend the gur-khan and be honored to do so.” She stepped away from Bekter’s offer of protection with a sweeping gesture to demonstrate that the little tent was empty, except for her disheveled lover and the khan’s various emissaries. “But as you can see, my apprentice isn’t here.”

“And does her disappearance have anything to do with my father’s absence from his place at court?” Chahar asked.

Before Qutula could chastise his fellow captain for usurping the gur-khan’s right to question his prisoner, the shamaness herself rebuked him.

“You know I can’t answer that,” she told him, more gently than Qutula would have done it.

That seemed to be all the answer Chahar needed, however. “Everyone doesn’t have to become a shaman,” he complained, confirming Qutula’s suspicions about the girl.

“For some, there is no other choice.” She spoke as if this were an old argument between them. Worse news: though Bekter seemed uneasy with her answer, he didn’t seem surprised.

“It will go ill for you. The gur-khan would not have chosen that road.” Chahar shook his head, trying, Qutula thought, to rid it of the inevitable conclusions he had himself drawn. Whatever plot the shaman folk had to use the girl as a lure for the prince, Bolghai was a part of it. It only remained to ask how deeply they had ensnared his brother, Bekter.

But: “Ill or well, it must be faced,” the shamaness said. She already wore her robes and she ruffled out the feathers that hung from every leather strip.

“I’ll be there to speak for you if need be,” Bekter promised her.

“I know you will.” She smiled more like a proud mother than a lover, but kissed him with enthusiasm. Then, in a flurry of robes and feathers, she disappeared.