“Hold very still,” they advised the world. “Let us do our work, coursing through you like blood and breath. Only when we have carved you into pieces can you be whole again.”
The frightened world tried to believe them. It stopped struggling, although its fiery heart still trembled, and let the serpents do their work.
* * *
That was the first World Serpent story Pathka had told Tess, the beginning of her long fascination. Tess had never heard such a tale, obvious and elusive at once, raw and wild and elemental. It went nowhere, and yet it was everywhere. She demanded to hear it again and again.
The second time Pathka told it, however, the serpents weren’t memories. They were knowledge. Tess blamed her poor Quootla, assuming she’d misunderstood, until Pathka told the story yet another way. It changed with every telling: the serpents were conscience or calamity, a plague that healed or a darkness that brought light.
Only toward the end of her time with Pathka, before the war broke out, was Tess brave enough to ask about the changes. “What were the serpents, really?”
“The word we usually use to describe them is thmepitlkikiu,” said Pathka, “which means ‘something that kills any words you try to put upon it.’ It’s too great, too terrible, too much. You can shout words into the void forever and never fill it up.”
“So you’ve called the serpents something different each time—”
“To give you some idea how complicated they are,” said Pathka, throat pouch puffing affirmation. “They ate the entire world, after all. They contain everything.”
Tess fidgeted, working up her nerve to ask the most important question: “But are the serpents real, or just a story?”
Pathka’s eyes swiveled quizzically. “There’s nothing ‘just’ about stories. Stories are the most real.”
“But…literally real? Could we go find them, out in the world?”
“We could indeed,” said the little quigutl.
“Then that’s what I want to do,” Tess had declared. “Surely they won’t seem so vast and incomprehensible once we look them in the eye.”
“Or they might seem even more incomprehensible,” Pathka had said.
“It will be our greatest adventure,” said Tess. “We’ll go after them when I’m grown.”
“Of course we will,” said Pathka, but there had been something shifty in her aspect.
Tess hadn’t understood in the moment that Pathka was about to leave for good.
* * *
Finding the serpents had been more than a childish fancy to Tess (although it had also been that). The serpents were like a mirror that revealed your insides instead of your outsides, Pathka had sometimes claimed. Once you glimpsed the truth about yourself, your understanding was complete and you could finally be at peace.
There were things Tess wanted to understand, answers she needed, even if she could not easily formulate the questions.
Not that the Saints of her own faith didn’t provide answers. St. Vitt, in particular, had messages tailored to her shortcomings: Yes, child, your very nature is flawed. Yes, young woman, your body is the cradle of sin and depravity. You must work tirelessly, every minute of every day, to have any hope of seeing Heaven’s Golden House.
She didn’t like those answers, even as she feared they were true.
But Pathka vanished. St. Jannoula’s War came and went. Faffy died—rest he on Heaven’s sun-drenched cushions. Tess grew, inexorably, reaching her full height and new womanhood by thirteen.
Growing up brought nothing but tedium and disappointment. That is to say, lady-in-waiting lessons.
Once St. Jannoula’s War was over and peace had broken out again, the lawyers’ guild convened an ethics panel to discuss Papa’s first marriage. Mama saw the future as clearly as any seer: hard times were coming. She’d have done anything to secure her children, but the children had parts to play, too. Tess, as the elder twin, would have to marry well, and the best place to find a rich husband was at court.
The Dombegh twins had enough pedigree to merit a lowly position: Papa’s older brother, Jean-Philippe, was a minor baronet, Mama’s grandfather an exiled Ninysh count. Even so, Seraphina (their connection at court) had to pull every string at her disposal to get them in.
This took time; Seraphina’s political capital grew but slowly, and she insisted on finding places for both twins. “I know there’s only dowry for one, but they’ll be happier together. A sulky lady-in-waiting won’t catch anyone’s eye,” she’d said sensibly.
Mama had glared at Tess as if preemptively blaming her posture for her future hypothetical failure to find a husband. Tess, though it galled her, sat up straighter.
After much late-night debating—or shouting, as it was called in lawyer-free households—Mama convinced Papa that investing in a course of good manners would be to the entire family’s benefit. Mistress Edwina, a dowager baroness down on her luck, came to live in their attic and whip the girls into geniuses of etiquette.
Tessie had envied Seraphina’s tutors as a child, but now that she had one of her own, she hated it. Manners were a noisome and fiddly art. There was a lot of sitting still, something to which Tess was constitutionally disinclined, and a great deal of mannerly calculus involving her own rank vis-à-vis the ranks of others. There were sixteen variants on courtesy, all of them used at court.
Tess had heard of half courtesy, even quarter courtesy, but five-sixteenths courtesy was going to be the death of her.
“When you begin, you will be maids of the robes, or maids of the bedchamber if you’re lucky,” said Mistress Edwina, who was ancient and wrinkled as a raisin. “Through diligent and impeccable discretion, you may move up to maid of honor, meaning your lady relies upon you particularly. You will be her confidante, trusted with her correspondence and intrigues.”
Tess’s mind had already wandered; she could just manage to keep herself anchored to her seat by practicing ecclesiastical hand or satin stitch, but listening to Mistress Edwina’s minutiae at the same time was beyond her limits.
Jeanne, on the other hand, asked brightly: “Is a maid of honor a maid of the court?”
“An apt question!” cried Mistress Edwina, pleased that Jeanne was so keen. “A maid of the court merits her own maid of the robes, whereas a mere maid of honor does not.”
Tess made Jeanne explain it later, at their midnight conference. Jeanne fretted, “You need to listen and take this seriously, Sisi. The whole family is relying upon you.”
“Oh, fie,” Tessie had cried, tweaking her sister’s nose. “If the family relies upon me, then surely I may, in turn, rely upon you. It is us against the world, after all. It always has been.”
Jeanne’s smile grew pained in the semidarkness. Tess tickled her worries away.
Tess was all empty bravado, though. Every day, as Mistress Edwina droned on, Tess felt more incapable and inadequate, as if clinging wet rags were being piled upon her. Each was nothing in itself, but together the pile weighed a ton and dragged her down.
Adulthood was going to smother her.
It was Cousin Kenneth, unexpectedly, who gave Tess an inkling that she might escape the soggy rag heap of duty. Kenneth at sixteen was as benignly towheaded and apple-cheeked as ever, but fully six feet tall and strong from unloading cargo crates. He would come over after working the Belgioso warehouses to mooch dinner off Mama, his older sister, and slouch around the parlor. Sometimes he’d lure Tessie and Jeanne into a game of backgammon or grouse chess. The twins made an ineffective team. Jeanne whimpered if Tessie got too aggressive, Tessie pulled her punches to reassure her sister, and Kenneth, that rapscallion, seized every opening.
One evening, when Mama had taken the other children to late Mass, Tess stayed home, ill with her monthly flux, which seemed determined to kill her. She’d been plagued with it for nearly a year now, whereas Jeanne’s had not yet materialized.