To Tess’s immeasurable disappointment, she woke up.
She could tell without even opening her eyes that she’d made herself ill. Her throat pricked and stabbed as if she’d swallowed a prickly gorse branch. Every inch of her hurt. Her feet were blistered from the stiff new boots, her muscles sore from seventeen miles of hills. The hard ground had compounded her aches; her joints felt swollen and wrong.
Sleeping longer might have helped, but rumbling wagons and tramping feet rudely imposed consciousness upon her. She lay on her side, curled in her blanket with the gardening hat for a scratchy pillow, listening and resenting and wondering if she could avoid getting up. She curled tighter. Surely she never had to move again if she didn’t want to.
And she might not have, either, had the man not grabbed her from behind.
Panic lifted her to her feet before she could even think, and she stared at the ragged, twig-thin man who’d crept up in the night to sleep next to her. He was old, with barely a tooth in his head, and he yawned grotesquely, his mouth a dark hole in his white furze-bush beard. His right hand, clutching a corner of her blanket to his chest, was missing two fingers. He was disgusting.
Tess’s head pounded from the sudden movement, and her fear condensed into rage.
“Give me that,” she growled, grabbing at her blanket. It was trapped under his body.
He croaked, incongruously, “Annie?”
Tess shoved him off, rolled him over, but the fellow had an iron grip on the corner of the blanket. She tried prying his knobby fist open, which only made him shriek and flail about. His forearm smacked Tess’s aching head so hard her ear started ringing, and the next thing she knew she was kicking him once, twice, thrice in the ribs. His thorax made a hollow sound.
Tess backed away, panting, horrified at herself. She’d never…she’d been so angry…she could have broken his rib cage as easily as crushing a wicker basket.
“Oh, Annie,” said the vagrant mournfully. He’d curled into a bony ball, his cheek pressed into the dirt. “I know I deserve that.”
Tess snatched up her blanket and whipped it furiously, shaking the dust out.
“What is this place?” he said. He sounded like a child. The dust made him cough.
Fold blanket. Into satchel with both hands. She had to get out of here.
The old man ran his three-fingered hand through his wild white hair. “Did the dragon chase you here? I saw it and came running. I thought I could save you this time.”
The more he talked, the worse her conscience stabbed. She’d kicked a delusional geezer who didn’t know where or when he was. She was a terrible person. Tess swung her pack onto her back and scuttled out from under the bridge. The old man called after her—“Annie!”—but she pretended not to hear.
Tess hauled herself out of the shadows, desperate to leave bridge and beggar behind, up the rocky embankment onto the road. It was so bright up here, she couldn’t open her eyes all the way. She staggered onto the bridge, into horse and pedestrian traffic. Food carts lined the roadway, and the smell of cooking twisted her stomach painfully; she couldn’t tell if she was hungry or nauseated.
Tess hurried like one pursued, pushing past the broad buttocks of horses and the shopping baskets of young wives, toward the market square. Around her, children laughed; the sun shone on the market tents; bright flags flapped in the spring breeze; swallows swooped and sang overhead. Every beautiful thing felt like a fist clamped around Tess’s heart, squeezing.
She stuck her face in the market fountain, not caring how uncouth she looked, and gulped water frantically, like she was trying to drown.
She’d kicked an old man. He’d been no danger to her, and she’d viciously attacked him, and she’d done it (if she was being honest) in part because he was so feeble. Of all the men she might have liked to kick, she’d kicked the one who couldn’t fight back.
Tess raised her face from the fountain, gasping, and wiped it on her arm. Women with water jars stared at her; she hurried away, ashamed. She didn’t make it ten steps before she had to pause and lean against a market stall, shaking and sweating and unable to catch her breath.
She was despicable. How could she go on?
At that very moment, Tess chanced to raise her eyes and look across the crowded square. There, shining like Heaven’s own messenger, sat that most eminently kickable of men, her father, upon a borrowed horse. Relief coursed through her, and an unaccustomed tenderness.
He’d come to find her and save her from herself. He’d been worried; he loved her.
Her lungs unclenched and she took an enormous, restorative breath. This had to be a sign from the Saints. She’d made her point—and made a mess of everything, as usual—and now it was time to concede defeat. She was too tired to keep fighting.
Tess made a beeline toward her father, ready to place herself in his gentle and capable hands, but herds of milling shoppers stood in her way. “Papa!” she shouted, waving, but he neither heard nor saw. He turned his horse up a side street. She was losing him; even a liberal application of elbows couldn’t clear a path through the crowd quickly enough. She noted where his hat plume disappeared, and the spot became her pole star, guiding her.
He was long gone by the time Tess broke free of the square. Praying he’d kept to this road and hadn’t turned up any side streets, she ran past mercers, tailors, leatherworkers, her boots thunking on the hard-packed dirt of the road, her head thumping painfully. About a mile along, it curved south, dead-ending at a wide wooden building with a statue at the apex of the roof. Papa was nowhere in sight, but the horse he’d been riding was tied up out front alongside a tiny donkey.
Tess’s feet slowed at the sight of the Saint on the roof, recognizing her big green apple even before reading the plaque: ST. LOOLA’S HOSPICE FOR THE INDIGENT AND INCAPACITATED.
Papa wasn’t looking for Tess; he did not yet realize she’d run away. He’d come for Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s. Of course the nuns had to be fetched from town. They wouldn’t have been wandering the fields near Cragmarog, grazing and mooing.
Tess wasn’t sure what to do. He wouldn’t be relieved to see her, as she’d…Her lungs tightened again. She should have known better than to hope. He might not even take her back home, not when this was where he ultimately wanted to leave her.
The door opened, and Tess darted behind the horse. She pulled her blanket out of her satchel and wrapped it over her head like a widow’s shawl.
A widow’s shawl with a light plaid weave. This would fool no one.
Papa approached the steed to untie it, but he was on the other side, engrossed in conversation with an elderly nun, Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s, as per yesterday’s letter. “We’re at our wits’ end,” Tess heard Papa saying, his voice strained. “My wife insists this daughter was simply born bad—”
“No one is born bad,” snapped the nun. Tess peeked at her over the horse’s back; she was at least sixty and built like a grain stack, an impression enhanced by her yellow habit. She was looking at Papa shrewdly. “Anyway, you don’t agree with your wife. What’s your theory?”
Papa hesitated; contradicting Anne-Marie always made him anxious. “I suppose…I assumed our Tess misbehaves for the pure, anarchic joy of disobedience.”
He thought she was bad on purpose? He might as well have reached across the horse and slapped Tess. She’d never heard what he really thought of her before.
“So you have no idea, either,” said Mother Philomela flatly. “Tell me more about her. I suppose she’s out drinking till all hours, entertaining young men, dressing like a slattern?”
“Erm,” said Papa, removing his hat and scratching his balding head.
He didn’t know, Tess realized, her ears growing hot. He had no idea how she dressed or what she did all day, or why. Mama was bitter and mean, but at least she paid attention.