“See?” cried Pathka. “You wanted to learn the laws of nature. Not stupid!”
Tess smiled wistfully at his innocent faith in her, but didn’t refute him. If she paused, she’d lose her momentum. “I met a boy, William of Affle, and—”
What could she say about Will that wouldn’t hurt? He was handsome, and he took care of me?
No.
He promised he’d marry me?
Double no.
We were going to travel together in search of the World Serpents someday?
Ha.
Pathka offered an interpretation: “You loved him, like princesses loved Dozerius.”
Tess considered. She was still so angry that he’d left, so humiliated and mortified, that she couldn’t quite remember feeling love. She probably had. It didn’t matter.
“I loved him, and I did everything my mother ever told me not to do.”
“How else were you to determine it couldn’t be done?” said Pathka reasonably.
“Y-yes,” said Tess. That wasn’t exactly what had happened with Will, but it gave the story a clean logic and put the blame squarely where it belonged. “I was the cat curiosity would kill, Seraphina used to say. Anyway, not listening to your mother leads to pregnancy, I learned.”
Flippancy wasn’t helping; tears threatened again. She puffed her breath like Chessey the midwife had advised during childbirth.
“The body wants what it wants,” said Pathka sagely.
That irritated her. Her good judgment had not been overcome by bodily lusts; Pathka was misunderstanding. Arguing meant delving deeper into the story, however, and…She couldn’t. It was time to fold up this memory and wedge it into the darkest corner of her mind, out of sight.
“I threw my future away,” she said curtly, summing up. That was the whole story, the real story. “Jeanne got to be ‘eldest’ and marry a duke. I had to wait on her at court.”
Tess launched into an account of Jeanne’s courtship and wedding, which she could tell with humor, at least. Pathka listened raptly, squawking sympathy at Tess’s humiliations, flailing his tail in excitement when she punched Jacomo in the nose.
“There,” cried Pathka, as if he’d been waiting for it. “You’re still yourself after all.”
“What, a priest-puncher?” she said.
“No, no.” Pathka head-butted her ribs. “I feared that your misfortunes had cured you of your taste for adventure, that you’d decided to live a small, circumscribed life, like the penitent Julithima Rotha.”
Julissima Rossa had been one of the pirate Dozerius’s lovers. Guilt had driven her to give up adventuring, and then, when Dozerius wouldn’t leave her in peace, she’d taken her own life, the gleaming knife pressed to her ebony breast.
Tess had found that description terribly romantic as a child, but she hadn’t thought about the story in years. She wouldn’t die that beautifully; she always did everything the wrong way.
“Surely you ran away to go adventuring, like we always spoke of,” Pathka was insisting.
Tess emitted a bitter laugh. “Pathka, dear, I can no more go adventuring than I can fly. It was one thing to dream of it when I was little and didn’t know better. Now that I have more sense of what’s possible”—and how bad the results can be—“there’s no way. Even in the Dozerius stories, women never hare off on adventures by themselves. It’s too dangerous.”
Pathka cocked his head to one side. “Julithima Rotha fought alongside—”
“Julissima Rossa killed herself!” cried Tess. “Julissima Rossa proves the rule: women plus adventure equals disaster.”
Pathka was silent, as if pondering her vehemence. “Why did you leave home, then?”
“Because these boots seemed to demand it,” Tess joked weakly. “I barely had a plan, beyond escaping my family and avoiding the convent.”
“You were on your way to somewhere,” Pathka pressed. “You can’t walk away without also walking toward.”
Tess snorted. “Assuming I could get anywhere without being ravaged, robbed, and left for dead in the weeds, I suppose…I had some notion to head south, to Ninys.”
Pathka bounced excitedly, barely able to contain himself. “I’m going south! The world brought you to me for a reason. I wasn’t meant to go alone; no quigutl should have to be forever alone.”
“You’re going where?” asked Tess, baffled.
“Back to the beginning, back to the wellspring of my people, to Anathuthia!” cried Pathka. “Anathuthia, Anathuthia, Anathuthia!”
Tess sat up. Beams of moonlight cut through chinks in the planked wall, and Pathka danced in and out of them, flashing and slashing like some ancient spirit, a creature out of myth.
“You don’t mean…,” said Tess through a laugh.
Pathka stopped dancing and grabbed her face. His padded ventral hands felt hot against her cheeks. “The World Serpent. The one beneath our continent, the one who will restore us to ourselves. I dreamed she was under a field of waving wheat, the Ninysh high plains.”
“Do quigutl dream?” asked Tess. The great dragons didn’t.
“Only when we’re alone. We don’t dream all together in a nest—and yet I did,” said Pathka. “That’s why this is important: because it’s impossible.”
No, it was merely eccentric. A woman walking the roads alone was impossible. If she traveled with Pathka, though, she wouldn’t be alone.
“Think it over,” said Pathka as Tess lay down again. He turned in a tight circle and lay beside her with his tail in her face. “You suggested finding the World Serpents a long time ago. This dream means Anathuthia is ready to be found.”
Tess had indeed been keen to search, before Will had run off with her future and all her courage and enthusiasm. Tess laid a hand on Pathka’s ridged spine, her bones leaden with weariness. “Sleep, friend. Let’s decide in the morning.”
It wasn’t the only decision she was putting off till then.
Pathka rested his chin on her ankle and soon began to snore.
* * *
There is no snore quite like a quigutl’s. The greater dragons snore, of course, but they rumble so deeply that the sound is more tactile than auditory. Quigutl snore in chords, like sad, deflating accordions with several jammed keys, a tune to keep teeth on edge and make skin crawl.
Seraphina could have identified the exact notes; Tess, alas, had to suffer in ignorance.
Not at first, however. She was so exhausted that she slept through the wheezing—to say nothing of Pathka’s gnarled feet in her face, his spiky head upon her leg, and his body temperature like a portable furnace.
Once she’d slept enough to take the edge off her exhaustion, the snoring woke her, and sleep fled. She mulled over Pathka’s words. You’re still yourself after all, he’d said, as if he’d worried that she’d become something else in the years since they’d last seen each other.
Of course she had. One didn’t fall as hard as she’d fallen and come out the same. When she was little—when Pathka had known her—she’d still had hope that maybe, if she tried, she could be good enough to see the Golden House and dwell forever with Allsaints and Jeanne. That maybe her mother—or anyone, really—would be proud of her someday, moved to say, She wasn’t the sweet one, or the smart one, but she contrived to be worthy in her own way.
Punching a priest had not been worthy, or good, or even entirely reasonable, so what had Pathka gleaned? That she was as childish and impulsive as she’d always been? That she still stupidly aspired to be like Dozerius, answering the world with her fists?
Dozerius hadn’t always punched his way out of trouble, though. He could be wily when he had to be, or suave, or sneaky. Dozerius’s chief virtue was resourcefulness. There’s never just one trick to try, comrades, he used to say.
Tess rolled over, abandoning the blanket to Pathka. She didn’t want to be Tess anymore; Tess was nothing but trouble. Why couldn’t she be Dozerius instead? It didn’t seem so childish an aspiration, here in the wee hours. It certainly beat dying.