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.”
“Flattery, cleric,” said the tiger. “It doesn’t taste very good, and it has never filled a stomach.”
“History, madam,” Chih responded hopefully. “History and your place in it. We have the stories of Ho Dong Vinh and Ho Thi Thao, and—”
“Ho Thi Thao?”
The tiger spoke sharply, and at her side, her two sisters sat up, their eyes narrowed and their whiskers pressed aggressively forward.
“Cleric, what have you done?” asked Si-yu flatly, and Chih resisted the urge to shrink back a little from the display of predatory interest.
“What do you know about Ho Thi Thao?” asked the tiger.
“Well, my job is rather to find out what you know,” Chih said, remembering at the last moment not to smile. Smiling bared teeth, and Chih knew that theirs would not hold up next to the tiger’s.
“Singing Hills does archival and investigative work, and I know for sure that we would love to have your account of the marriage of Ho Thi Thao.”
“Our account,” sneered the tiger. “You mean the true one.”
“Of course,” Chih said brightly.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then . . .”
“No, I think you are going to tell us what you know instead,” said Sinh Loan.
“We’ll tell you when you get it wrong,” growled Sinh Hoa abruptly, her voice like falling rocks. “We shall correct you.”
“Best not get it wrong too often,” advised Sinh Cam, her voice like dangerous water.
“What are you doing?” hissed Si-yu.
“Telling a story,” Chih said, and they wished that Almost Brilliant was there to scold them for such a foolish thing.
* * *
The tigers waited patiently as Si-yu and Chih built up the fire, Sinh Cam even briefly turning into a human to drag over an armload of firewood from behind the way station. She was younger than Sinh Loan; Chih guessed that both she and Sinh Hoa were, given how they deferred to their sister. When Chih and Si-yu came forward to take the gift of wood, Chih saw that Sinh Cam’s face was completely still, as if she were not used to human expression, and that she gave off an odor of mud and cold and clean fur.
As Chih built the fire, Piluk made an uneasy groaning sound, swaying from foot to foot like a nervous child. She bumped Chih with her trunk gently, as if trying to draw their attention to the three predators lounging at the mouth of the barn.
“I know, baby,” Chih said. “It’s all right.”
“It might be,” Si-yu murmured, rising from Bao-so’s side. “He woke up enough to say a few words to me and to ask for water. He’s not in tremendous shape, but he’ll last. If we don’t all get eaten.”
“Oh it could be much worse,” Sinh Loan said cheerfully. “His heart has grown steady now, not jumping around like Hare at the sun’s feast.”
Si-yu made a face, and Chih reminded themself of how good tiger ears were.
Finally there was a fire roaring between them, built well enough to last the night, if they lasted all night. When they finally sat down by the fire, they felt colder immediately, and Chih gratefully took the extra blanket that Si-yu offered.
Piluk had settled down, still uneasily whimpering from time to time, but easier now that Si-yu had dragged Bao-so close and came to sit next to her as well.
Chih looked through the flames at the three faces watching them hungrily, took a deep breath, and began.