“Boots can’t tell me what—hic—to do,” said Tess.
The next morning, however, she tried them on just to see. The left fit perfectly. The right would have fit, but there was an obstruction in the toe. She upturned the boot, and a pewter ring dropped out, pinging across the floor. She scurried after it and saw that it was a thnik, one of the cheap ones now ubiquitous in the Lavondaville markets.
Seraphina had the mate, presumably, but Tess declined to test the thing. The implication seemed clear. Seraphina expected Tess to take her boots and go, and if she ran into trouble, she could call home with this thnik.
That was almost enough to make her stay. Such was the contrarian nature of Tess—especially against Seraphina—that she would have tossed out ten babies and drunk their bathwater rather than take a hint. She would have cut off someone else’s nose and swapped it with her own, the better to spite everybody’s face. She would have walked twenty miles backward through a snowstorm for a bowl of bitterness if there were a proverb about that—and maybe even more so if there wasn’t. The proverbs were going to have to keep up with Tess; she outstripped them at every turn.
Tess put the boots back in their box and shoved it under her bed. She threw the ring hard at the cherub-crusted ceiling. It ricocheted and landed who knew where.
Still, Tess found herself in the kitchens with nothing to do later that day, and—because she was bored, merely—she stole some little cheeses while the cook’s back was turned. She nosed around in spare rooms and came up with a satchel and some sturdy kirtles, the sort that would make her look like a respectable laboring countrywoman. She nicked a broad straw hat from the garden shed; it would be missed by the gardeners, but presumably they could tell the Queen it had been eaten by marmots and she’d requisition a new one.
“The royal gardening-hat budget,” Tess imagined Queen Glisselda telling Seraphina, “has gone right through the roof. It’s the marmots, you know. They’re insatiable.”
The next day Tess pinched some oatcake, some stockings, and a bottle of wine. Upon the fourth day she took a wool blanket and filched a second bottle of wine. The first bottle was, perhaps not mysteriously, already empty.
A map of the Southlands—Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam, plus some of the southern islands—took up almost an entire wall of the cottage’s library. Tess found herself studying it, especially Ninys, her mother’s ancestral homeland. She spoke serviceable, if rusty, Ninysh. She didn’t have family there anymore; her great-grandfather Count Julian Belgioso had been exiled along with all his progeny for a variety of crimes, real and imagined. They’d come from Segosh, which was easy enough to find, being the capital. Whoever had drawn this map had represented the city with fanciful buildings and spires; Tess touched it as gently as one might pet a skittish finch, as if it might flutter off.
You could start over in a city, expunge your past, be anybody. Her Belgioso family had done it, coming north. Contrary to Mama’s claim, women sometimes did leave home to live unchaperoned. Tess had heard tales, and they didn’t always end in disaster.
She’d spent the last two years altering Jeanne’s clothes; she didn’t enjoy it much, but she could work as a seamstress.
An actual seamstress, not a harlot. The Abominable Paul could go die in a fire.
If Seraphina noticed Tess sneaking and plotting, she gave no sign. The eldest Dombegh sister, stately at twenty-two, kept to her routines: composition in the morning, a garden walk in the afternoon, a visit with the midwife after supper. Tess saw her at meals and managed, with effort, not to quarrel with her again.
Upon the fifth morning, Seraphina perused a letter at the breakfast table. “You will be interested to hear this, Tess,” she said, gesturing with her teacup. “Papa and Anne-Marie—”
“Not interested,” said Tess through a mouthful of kipper.
“—intend to come here tomorrow,” Seraphina continued, as if Tess had not spoken. “Not to fetch you home—I’ve told them you may stay as long as you wish—but to bring two abbesses to meet you: Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s order, and Mother Nancy of St. Agnyesta’s.” Seraphina raised her guileless brown eyes to Tess’s face and smiled. “Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it? They make cheese at St. Agnyesta’s. You’d like that better than plague, I should think.”
Tess wasn’t listening about the cheese; she’d gotten stuck on the word tomorrow. She was out of time. The letter didn’t say they were coming to fetch her, but the letter was a liar, if she knew her mother. Seraphina couldn’t protect Tess from their parents; living in the Queen’s house didn’t give her a queen’s power. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter what Seraphina did. One look at Mama’s tearful, disappointed face and something would crumple inside Tess. She would swallow her despair and comply, because Mama’s despair was heavier, and Tess’s conscience couldn’t bear adding to it.
What was this power called Mama? Why couldn’t Tess stand against it? She had bucked against Seraphina for the last several days, and the very act of pushing back made Tess feel alive. But there was no pushing against Mama.
Tess picked needle-fine bones out of her breakfast fish and realized she could leave tonight, under cover of darkness. She could be over the fields and halfway to Trowebridge before her parents arrived. Why wait for darkness? She could tell Seraphina she was ill.
“I’m going to miss lunch,” said Tess, pushing back from the table. “And supper.”
“Are you, indeed?” said Seraphina, buttering a scone. “I thought you looked unwell, but I didn’t like to mention it.”
Tess scowled ferociously, hating the way Seraphina saw through her, but Seraphina couldn’t be bothered to look up and face the withering glare. “You know what you are?” said Tess, who couldn’t leave without kicking her sister once more. “Insufferable and smug. You think you’re so sensible and that you know what other people are going to do, but you’re wrong. You don’t know anything. I am going to astonish you someday, and you will fall right over dead from the shock of it.”
Seraphina looked up, deliberately finished chewing her scone, and said, “I’ll die happy, then. That’s good news. Of course, now I shall be expecting it.”
Tess stuck out her tongue, rudely blew a farewell serenade, turned on her heel, and went.
Tess quit the house, her family, and her entire life before lunch.
It would be exactly like Papa to arrive early, so Tess eschewed the front drive. She cut across broad lawns, through a yew hedge and a garden of old, twisted rosebushes (not even leafed out yet), across a field of sheep bleating anxiously to their lambs, and over a stile in a stone wall. The field beyond the wall was full of scrub and bramble, and Tess had hopes that this marked the edge of the Queen’s summer estate. You never could be sure with the Queen, though; anything not explicitly owned by someone else was hers by default.
The stile was an A-shaped wooden ladder over the wall, and Tess paused at the top, the whole of Ducana province spread at her booted feet. Farmsteads and village churches dotted the rolling hills, while hedgerows and stone walls divided them into a chessboard of fields, the yellow-green of new shoots alternating with black, sodden earth. The sky glowed warmly blue, as if it were determined to make the day not merely fine but over-the-top, ridiculously beautiful.