Even by the fading light, his skin was parchment-pale and the corners of his mouth were drawn painfully tight. For a moment, they were certain that Si-yu had done that daring bit of riding for a corpse, but then they saw the slight rise and fall of his chest. It was ragged, and there was a stutter to it that made Chih nervous, but it was still there.
“Thank the Sky, oh thank the Sky,” Si-yu murmured, clasping her hands in front of her mouth. Her hood fell back, and she looked young then, too young by far.
“What’s wrong with him?” Chih asked, their voice hushed.
“More like what’s not wrong with him,” Si-yu said. “His skull isn’t cracked. His stomach hasn’t been chewed open.”
Si-yu took a long wavering breath and sat up straight, pulling Bao-so’s hood more securely around his head.
“He’s breathing. As long as he is breathing, we can say that he will be fine.”
Chih smiled a little.
“That was some riding you did.”
“If only riding were enough.”
“What do you—”
Si-yu nodded towards the open front of the barn, and when Chih turned their head to look, their breath snagged hard in their throat, threatening to choke them.
Three tigers waited beyond the shelter of the barn, and as the last of the light faded from the sky, the largest one started to laugh.
Chapter Three
CHIH REMEMBERED A STORY that said it was tremendously unlucky to hear a tiger laugh, but they couldn’t remember why. Was it a cultural taboo? Was it a curse? Was it simply that tigers thought that killing and eating people was funny? They wished they could remember. They wished they could stop shaking. They wished the tigers would simply leave.
None of those things happened, and Piluk lumbered back to her feet, snorting and tossing her head from side to side. Si-yu rose to stand next to the mammoth with her lance gripped tight in her hand, but Chih could see that the scout was shaking.
“They won’t come to meet Piluk head on,” she repeated. “They’re cowards, they won’t come close if she’s facing them . . .”
“You may stop saying that at any time,” said the largest tiger, and there was something so inhuman about it, words shaped in a tiger’s throat, that Piluk pawed at the ground, bugling in alarm, and Si-yu had to pull Chih back before Piluk’s trunk knocked them off their feet.
“Stop it!” Si-yu cried. “Stop it, talk like a person!”
No, no, the tiger is a person. It is only that the tiger is a person that might eat us if we get too close, Chih thought, but before they could shape that thought with their mouth, the tiger made a chuffing sound, still threatening, less unnatural.
For a moment, the air between the barn and the tiger grew strangely dense, thick like boiled gelatin or a soupy fog, and then instead of a tiger, there was a woman there, the same one that Chih had seen momentarily next to Bao-so’s prone body.
The woman was of medium height, and her thick black hair was braided and coiled into multiple loops secured to her head by a wooden comb. Otherwise, she was completely naked, her body thick and strong with small breasts set high on her chest, and a belly halved with a heavy crease that sagged just a little towards her thick powerful thighs. She was a handsome woman, but the animal impassivity of her eyes and the way her teeth looked a little too large for her mouth gave her a menacing look, the tiger in her sitting in wait beneath her human skin.
“There,” she said. “Now bring out the man so that my sisters and I might eat him.”
Si-yu growled, and Chih swallowed hard before speaking up. It was a small chance, but then, so was their chance of getting through this without something going terribly wrong.
“Begging your pardon, Your Majesty, but our laws do not allow this,” they tried.
“Your Highness?” echoed Si-yu, but Chih could see the tigers’ ears flatten momentarily in understanding.
The naked woman, her face inexpressive and unable to gesture with her whiskers or her ears, nodded and sighed.
“Ah. You are something like a civilized thing, and I suppose that I must treat you as such.”
“We would much prefer it, madam,” Chih said respectfully, and the tiger turned towards the darkness, though her two sisters stayed to watch like guardian lions.
“Did you send them away?” Si-yu whispered urgently, and Chih shook their head.
“No. How long before your uncle comes looking for you?”
“Late afternoon tomorrow,” Si-yu said, biting her lip. “Maybe tomorrow night. If the storm comes early . . . not until it’s over.”
“All right. Then we’re going to hope he’s coming by tomorrow afternoon. The tiger who is speaking, call her Your Majesty when you first speak to her, and then madam after that. Her sisters are ladies. Do not confuse them . . .”
“Why are we talking to tigers?” asked Si-yu.
“Because they are talking to us,” Chih said, stifling a somewhat hysterical giggle. “They can talk, and now they’ve seen that we can. That’s—that means that they’ll treat us like people.”
“But there’s still a chance that they’re going to eat us.”
“Oh yes. Some people are just more . . . edible than others if you are a tiger.”
Si-yu stared, but then the woman came back. The firelight glittered over the garnet threads woven through her stiff black tunic. It had a high collar like the robes worn in Anh, but it came down nearly to the jeweled slippers on her feet and was split up to her waist on both sides over wide white silk trousers. Rough rubies dangled from her ears, and she had painted her lips with red cream. She looked beautiful, and dressed for summer while the wind left ice crystals in her hair, she was certainly no human.
But a person and a queen, and if we can remember that, we might be all right.
The tiger settled on the ground at the mouth of the barn, as at home as a queen would be in her palace. After a moment, her two sisters came to lie down on either side of her, and she stretched out between them, her feet pressed into one’s belly while looping her arm around the other’s neck.
“I am Ho Sinh Loan, and here is my sister Sinh Hoa and my sister Sinh Cam. I am the queen of the Boarbacks and the march to the Green Mountain. Tell me your names.”
Si-yu’s people didn’t call the mountains they stood on the Boarbacks, but it certainly wasn’t the first time that Chih had dealt with alternative geography. By Chih’s best guess, the tiger had just claimed the entire mountain chain and most of territory known in the north as Ogai as well. The Ogaiese would be startled to find themselves under the rule of a tiger, but it wasn’t as if she were levying taxes or soldiers.
“Your Majesty, I’m Si-yu, daughter of Ha-lan and descended from the Crane from Isai. This is Piluk, by Kiean out of Lotuk.”
The tiger nodded and turned to Chih expectantly.
“Madam, I’m Cleric Chih from the abbey at Singing Hills. I’ve come—”
“To be dinner, I think,” said the tiger cordially. “All three of you will be. The mammoth can go home if she wishes.”
“The mammoth—” Si-yu started angrily, but Chih elbowed her and she shut up.
“I’m afraid our laws do not allow it,” Chih repeated. “Madam, I have come north instead to listen to your stories and to glorify your name.”