If there were impossible, unpassable roads ahead of him, would Dozerius quail and quake and cry? Indeed, he would not. He’d find another trick to try.
Tess extracted herself from the bits of Pathka that were still draped over her—a dorsal arm, his tail—and crept down the loft ladder. She opened the barn door slowly, cringing at the vocal hinges, and slipped outside. A slender moon lingered near the horizon, giving a little light, but she had no idea how to gauge the time by it. She hurried across the gravel yard, toward where she remembered seeing a laundry line.
The time had come, Tess thought, for her own thuthmeptha.
The clothes were stiff from hanging and damp with dew. She found braes and breeches and a padded jacket, but no shirts. Never mind, this would do. She hustled back to the barn and changed into her pilfered outfit. “Yarr,” she muttered piratically as she pulled the breeches on. They were snug across her behind, but they fastened with adjustable buckles, which helped.
She solved the shirt problem with her little knife, making a nick in her chemise at mid-thigh level and tearing the fabric along the bias. Years of sewing hadn’t been for nothing. She tucked the shirt into the breeches and tried the jacket. It was padded and fitted, somebody’s feast-day best, and it smashed her breasts encouragingly flat. They’d been nothing remarkable to begin with; post-baby they’d deflated further. She wouldn’t miss them.
Sin is etched into woman’s very form, St. Vitt liked to say.
To the devil with her form, then. She would be a new person, with a different shape.
She climbed the loft ladder, carrying her knife and the spare linen, wondering what to do about her hair. Men often wore their hair long, especially in Ninys, but Tess didn’t have a strong enough chin to pull it off. Her dark waves gave her too soft and feminine an aspect.
She sat in the loft with her legs dangling down, held out her little knife, and…hesitated. This felt serious, a boundary crossed, no going back. She’d never considered herself that attached to her plait, but apparently it carried symbolic weight. She’d be someone else without it.
Good.
She took a breath—determination! decisiveness!—and tried to saw the damned thing off. A few strands severed, reluctantly, but it was like trying to chop down a forest with a hatchet. Tess stubbornly persevered.
In the farmyard, a cock crowed. Time was passing, and she’d made little progress.
“Let me.” Pathka’s voice at her shoulder startled her.
“What will you do?” asked Tess, lowering her hands. “Bite it off?”
Pathka deftly undid her braid, and Tess soon smelled the sharp reek of burning hair. He was using his flaming quigutl tongue.
“Do hold still,” he said between bursts.
Hair drifted down, soft, smoldering snow. Pathka, gentle and precise, took a handful at a time, puffed through the strands, and pinched off the singed part close to her head. Tess never felt a flame lick her scalp.
When he’d finished, Tess raised trembling hands to her head. It felt like a fuzzy peach. This would take some getting used to. “I should have stolen a cap,” she said.
“You don’t need a cap,” said Pathka stoutly. “You look lovely.”
That beggared belief. Tess fell back into the pile of hair, laughing. “I appreciate the thought,” she said at last, wiping her eyes.
The door of the barn shrieked as it opened; Tess sat up in alarm. A weedy young man, his mouse-brown hair more awake and upright than any other part of him, groggily shuffled into the barn.
He lifted a lantern, squinted through the dust she’d kicked up, and said, “Who’s larfing?”
Pathka had scurried up the roof joists and hidden in the rafters, leaving Tess alone in the lamplight, uselessly frozen. She teetered on the edge of panic, but only for a moment. The lad was too young and scrawny to be intimidating. He looked like Neddie, but stretched; his hair had clearly been up all night having adventures without him.
He’d think she was his peer, not some scared, vulnerable girl. She needed to act the part.
Tess straightened her shoulders and said haughtily, “Is there a law against laughing in barns? One may not laugh in church, but in a barn one should be free to laugh as one sees fit.”
She spoke in her most highfalutin accent, trying to pitch her voice low. A persona was developing in her mind, someone who would wear these breeches and this jacket with these boots. The boots sharpened her focus. A ridiculous situation was surely no hindrance with boots like these. She could kick her way out of anything.
The lad, who had maybe fifteen years, looked flummoxed. “What’re you up there for?”
“I was about to leave, in fact,” said Tess. “I’d hoped to be off before sunrise. I’m running away from home and I’d rather not be seen.”
The lad’s bovine eyes widened, as if he’d considered running away himself and had a certain respect for it.
“Won’t your mother miss you?” he said, a bit quieter. His own mother had evidently been the sticking point for him.
“My mother is Elga, Duchess Pfanzlig,” said Tess, her face dramatically mournful. “I daresay she shan’t miss me, the old harridan.”
Her audience seemed suitably awed by Tess’s parentage, or by her boldness in calling the duchess names. Doubt crept into his eyes, however, and Tess worried that she’d overstepped. She was dressed in peasant clothes, after all, not like the son of a duke.
It wasn’t her style that perplexed the lad, however, but a specific garment: “Why’re you wearing my jacket?”
St. Daan in a pan! Of course she was, and of course he’d recognize it even with bits of straw and hair clinging to it. It was striped, for one thing. She was half inclined to toss it down to him, but feared being known for a girl, even in the semidarkness. Her chemise-shirt was too lightweight to conceal the obvious; the jacket was integral to her disguise.
“I saw it outside,” she said, keeping her voice stern. “And I liked the look of it, so I took it. I can do that, you know. I’m the son of a duke. A dukeling, if you will.”
The lad bobbed his head, not daring to contradict her, and for one giddy instant Tess thought, That was easy. What else could I get away with?
A mean girl might’ve demanded money or tribute. A practical girl might’ve sworn him to silence. Tess, however, was a tenderhearted…boy. She pitied the misplaced awe in his eyes.
“Listen,” she said, easing off the pomposity, “I need this jacket. I lost mine in a terrible overclothes accident, and there’s no going back. However, my father the duke would not wish any miller to go jacketless. Bring me parchment, pen, and ink, and I will write to my father, enjoining him to repay you.”
The boy looked horrified, and she wondered what she’d said wrong this time. He soon, and stammeringly, made it clear: “I—I’m not a miller, m’lord. I’m only the grist lout.”
A servant. She’d seen him at dinner, now that she thought about it, waiting upon the miller’s grown sons. He could not bring her writing materials without stealing from his masters.
“That’s no good,” said Tess, furrowing her brow. “Do you have a psalter of your own?”
“My ma does,” said the boy.
She’d be the cook, most likely.
“Run and fetch it, then. The Saints surely left me a blank half page to write upon.”
The boy turned to go.
“And bring some bread,” Tess called. “Or venison scraps. Or anything edible, really. I’m not as finicky as one might anticipate in a nobleman.”
Tess had nothing to write with, even if the lad returned with a blank page.
“You, Pathka,” she called into the eaves. “You can burn my hair off, but can you make me some charcoal?”
“I have some in my throat pouch,” the shadows replied. “Good for an upset stomach.”
“Do quigutl get queasy?” asked Tess, amused by the notion. “You eat garbage. Surely you have cast-iron bellies.”