“Indeed,” said Pathka dryly, scuttling down the wall. “But in these modern times, as we affect the trappings of ‘civilization,’ we challenge our digestion with human foods. Cheese, for example. We wouldn’t normally eat mammalian secretions.”
“Why didn’t you tell me I’ve been poisoning you all these years?” Tess cried, half distraught, half angry with him.
“Because I really like cheese,” said Pathka.
Tess had packed, retrieved the charcoal from Pathka, and descended from the loft by the time the boy returned. He gave Tess a day-old loaf and a dry sausage, and then handed over his mother’s book. Tess tried the back cover first, but that page was filled with a hand-drawn family tree. This peasant lad—Florian, by the book’s reckoning—was descended from Samsamese earls on his mother’s side, six generations back. Tess wondered if the knowledge galled him.
She flipped pages and found space upon the verso of the final hymn to St. Eustace, patron of the dead, who had more pages of poetry than most.
When Tess and Jeanne had trained to be ladies-in-waiting, their most surprising lesson had been handwriting; knowing different hands enabled one to pass notes at court. Tess, immediately grasping the potential for mischief and intrigue, had eagerly exceeded her twin, learning seventeen hands to Jeanne’s eight. She knew exactly how the sons of a duke would form their letters, so she wrote in her best courtly masculine hand:
To my revered parents, the Duke and Duchess Pfanzlig of Ducana:
Please give the bearer of this book two new doublets and three new pairs of breeches (or the monetary equivalent therein) as a reward for kindness shown me on the road. I have vouched for your generosity and rely upon it. Your affectionate and honorable son,
Tess hesitated over which name to sign, but supposed it could only be Jacomo, who would soon travel back to seminary in Lavondaville. Jacomo (she decided) was the sort of humorless killjoy who would keep his signature square and uptight.
Too bad she couldn’t have counterfeited Heinrigh, who probably used a dozen flourishes. Tess enjoyed flourishes.
“Whatever you do,” she admonished the lad, handing back the book, “don’t tell my parents I was hiding in your goat shed. If they demand an explanation, say I was thrown from my horse, but I’m better now and on my way to seminary and they needn’t concern themselves.”
The boy Florian stared skeptically at the note. “Can you read that?” asked Tess.
“No. For aught I know, it tells them to have me strung up.”
He was canny, if illiterate.
Tess read it to him, accounting for each word with her finger. Doublets were nicer than jackets, and he was to receive more than she had taken.
He still seemed unconvinced. “I’ll have Father Barnard read it over before I take it, beggin’ Your Grace’s pardon.”
“You are a prudent and cautious individual, Florian,” said Tess warmly, filled with sisterly fondness. “You’re right not to trust Lord Jacomo on the strength of his lordliness alone.”
Florian returned to his chores; Tess and Pathka slipped out into the foggy morning.
“That was cleverly done,” said Pathka after about a mile down the river road. The sun had burned off the mist; gravel crunched beneath their feet. “I’d have bitten him, if need be, but this is better. He was only a hatchling.”
Tess filled her lungs with clean morning air. She hadn’t slept much, but she was delighted with her new clothes, and her new self.
“Have you given Anathuthia any more thought?” said Pathka, bounding ahead of her and turning in a circle. “What have you decided? What what what?”
He was all motion, arching his back, bobbing his head, waggling his head spines hopefully (or maybe plaintively), twitching his tail. These added up to one big emotion; there would be a quigutl name for it, something oddly specific and semipoetic, like when you can’t find your nest because your siblings moved it for a prank, or when your eggshell first breaks and you see the world is distressingly big.
Tess felt it with him, but the Goreddi word eluded her.
No, it didn’t. He was anxious. Transcendently so, like he might explode from it.
He was afraid she’d say no.
Was this journey that important to him? It looked like it. Tess hadn’t grasped the gravity, and still didn’t fully understand his reasons, but it didn’t matter. Of course she would help.
She would pretend to herself later that this was a well-considered decision, that she’d systematically tallied up the benefits of traveling with a companion, plus the satisfaction of her once boundless curiosity, and an extra dollop of hope that she might find a World Serpent before Will (wherever he was, Heaven punch his smug face), but that was all retroactive rationalization.
Pathka, her oldest friend, who’d known her when she was still herself, needed her. Her heart answered.
“All right,” said Tess. “Let’s go find her.”
She’d half expected Pathka to start running in circles of unbridled quigutl joy. Instead, he stopped stock-still, a churning, glopping sound coming from his insides, and then he vomited right at her feet.
Tess skipped back a step, alarmed. Pathka hurled again, and then a third time.
“What’s wrong?” Tess cried. “Is it the cheese?”
“No, no,” gasped the quigutl, “it’s just”—splort—“an excess of emotion.” Glargh. “You do a similar thing when you feel too much. It comes out of your eyes.”
Tess boggled at him. “You mean—crying? You’re crying?”
“Obviously, I’m not crying,” snapped Pathka, who was now into dry heaves and growing short-tempered. “That’s the closest analogy. The body can’t hold it in anymore.”
His fit wound down; he scooped up a mouthful of sand and gravel, gargled with it, and spit it out again. Tess stood over him protectively, but nobody came down the road. They walked on when Pathka was able.
“You probably want an explanation,” he said after they’d climbed another rise.
“You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful,” said Tess, recalling what he’d so kindly said the night before.
Pathka’s underside rippled with another spasm, as if the sick was returning, but he settled down. “It’s about Karpeth, and how ko died, but whenever I remember the story, I’m there again, and I can’t—”
“I know,” said Tess quietly. “It’s all right.”
“I will say, for now, that you are saving my life for a third time.”
“If this were a children’s story,” said Tess, “the third time would mean I get a wish.”
“Of course you do,” said Pathka, scampering up the road ahead of her.
Even though she knew, or thought she knew, that the little quigutl was humoring her, Tess clasped a hand to her heart (she felt it beating even through Florian’s jacket) and wished with all her might. Not for the classical piratical standbys—vengeance, fame, or fortune—but that she might shed the past like a skin and walk on with nothing, empty and new.
The breeze tickled her newly shorn scalp, as if in answer. It seemed a good sign. She would walk on one more day.
The world was a failure, at first.
It had wanted to be useful, kindly, and beautiful, a habitat for the plants and animals it envisioned in its mind’s eye, but it couldn’t bring its ideas to fruition. It collapsed into a petulant ball of fire and water. No air, no land.
The sun and moon looked down on it pityingly. “You boasted that you could make life,” they sneered. “But what could thrive upon a tempestuous wreck like you?”
One thing did survive among the flames and storms, though: memory. The world had a memory of what it had once intended and entirely failed to be. The memory hardened and cooled into seven strands, and each strand became a serpent. Then the world was frightened, and didn’t want the memory anymore, but there was no stopping the serpents, no controlling them. They ate fire and water and cooled it into earth and air, like worms renewing the soil.
The world screamed in agony and fought them, but the serpents knew what they were doing.