This one was sparsely attended, so Tess and Kenneth took the boys up front. A saarantras, silver bell pinned conscientiously to his shoulder, stood upon a dais behind a long table covered in strange apparatuses. Behind him loomed a large slate upon a stand, whereupon his assistant, a young man of nineteen or twenty, could jot notes and make diagrams with chalk.
Tess had met saarantrai before—Seraphina’s crabby uncle, for one—so she wasn’t unduly fascinated by Professor the dragon Ondir. His monotonous voice and the esoteric nature of his subject didn’t capture her attention, either; the hard pew made wiggling almost inevitable. Indeed, Tess’s first lecture might have been her last, had not her attention been wholly captured by what stood behind him.
The altarpiece had been removed, since the building was no longer a church, and replaced by a vast mural, a gift from St. Fredricka before she’d departed for her home in the Archipelagos. The painting depicted the myriad creatures of land, sky, and sea, cavorting in their legions. In the center, human and dragon clasped hand and talon in friendship. Everything was in motion around those two poles of stillness. The birds looked ready to flutter into the heights of the nave, the ocean to spill out across the seats. The auroch capered with the frog, and the bee danced with the wolf. It was a harmonious, deathless world, a dream.
Tess found it deeply moving. Indeed, it colored everything Saar Ondir had to say about electrostatics. “The world is made up of infinitesimal particles, smaller than we can see or envision,” he began, his voice nasal and atonal, but Tess felt she could see these particles, like gnats and bright butterflies, soaring through the mural’s skies.
“Lodestones are drawn together by an invisible force called magnetism,” the professor droned, and Tess thought she saw it manifested in the schools of mackerel and flocks of starlings, lines of motion, attraction and repulsion, the great whirl of life.
The mural was teeming. She wanted to walk straight into that world and never look back.
Paul and Neddie wiggled during the lecture but enjoyed the machines later. Paul turned a crank, building up enough charge in a wand to give his brother a snapping shock; Ned made a tube glow by moving a magnet over a coil of wire, then dropped the heavy lodestone on his brother’s toe.
This was their usual nonsense. Tess barely gave it a second thought, automatically scolding or comforting by turns. Her eyes were still on the mural. There was something she couldn’t quite make out in one corner, a vague suggestion of coiling behind the seals and belugas and icebergs. Sometimes it looked like the water, like her eyes playing tricks on her, but sometimes she was sure she saw it.
Each glimpse gave her shivers. She felt a flame reigniting in her heart, something the wet rags of stultification had all but extinguished.
“Excuse me,” she said quietly to Professor the dragon Ondir’s assistant, tall, with knowing blue eyes, who had swooped in to rescue a spinning engine from Neddie. “What’s that in the corner of the painting? That’s not supposed to be one of the World Serpents, is it?”
“World Serpents?” said the young man in a light, merry voice. “I’ve not heard of those.”
Of course he wouldn’t know the name; it was the translation from Quootla, which nobody bothered learning. “A quigutl told me stories,” she began, but the fellow interrupted her.
“Quigutl can’t speak Goreddi,” he said, as if explaining to a child.
“I taught myself Quootla,” said Tess crisply, nettled by his tone.
“Did you indeed?” he said, managing to sound both astonished and contrite. “You must be older than you look.”
“I’m sixteen,” said Tess, who wasn’t.
“So that’s a no,” he said impudently. Tess wrestled a smile, secretly pleased that she could pass for sixteen. That was nearly grown-up. It didn’t occur to her that a thirteen-year-old who knew Quootla would have been even more impressive.
“There are seven World Serpents,” Tess explained. “And they…they hold the world together. They have wondrous powers.”
She cringed at how silly it sounded, like magical creatures out of a Dozerius tale. He wasn’t going to take her seriously.
“Come look at the corner of the mural,” she said.
Tess led him around the table and showed him where the picture seemed ambiguous. There were stories about St. Fredricka’s paintings, that they moved or wept or changed, and indeed the image seemed to come and go most disconcertingly.
The young man tossed his fair hair out of his eyes. “There is a faint something. Damned if I can tell what it is.” He rubbed his cleft chin. “They tell tales in the Archipelagos of a monster under the ice. St. Fredricka came from those parts, you know. Maybe she included a hint of the old legends for her own amusement. Artists do silly things like that all the time.”
“But if the southern peoples have stories, and the quigutl have similar stories, don’t you think there could be something to it?” Tess implored.
“Dragon scholars have never mentioned anything of the kind,” he said. “If creatures like this existed, bigger and more powerful than the saar, don’t you think—”
“That the dragons would admit they weren’t the greatest monsters in the world?”
His startled expression lit a flame of satisfaction in Tess’s heart. She’d got him thinking.
“The quigutl say dragons deny the World Serpents because they can’t bear to be second at anything,” she added.
Ondir’s assistant smiled, quite alarmingly. “Well, aren’t you an unorthodox little thinker. What’s your name, then?”
Tess felt instinctively that she ought not give her real name. Word would get back to Mama that she’d spoken to a young man. She wasn’t sure how that was a crime, exactly, only that Mama would make it so. However, she wasn’t entirely quick on her toes making up a name, and said, “Therese Belgioso.”
“That’s a lovely name.” His smile widened and warmed. “Welcome to the lectures, Therese. Do I glean correctly that you’re interested in animals?”
Pathka and Faffy—how she missed them both!—sprang to mind and produced a knot in Tess’s throat, so she could only nod vigorously.
“Well then, let me extend a personal invitation to my talk on mountain megafauna next week,” said the young man, his eyes twinkling. “I hope you’ll be back for that.”
Tess was struggling to regain her voice and think of a clever response—something a real sixteen-year-old unorthodox thinker might say—when Saar Ondir called, “William, finish socializing. I require your assistance with the pulser before these children break it.”
That was Tess’s cue to fetch her brothers. She grabbed Neddie, and Kenneth steered Paul; they left St. Bert’s an hour after the boys’ bedtime and headed back across town.
“I want to attend the lecture on animals next week,” Tess told Kenneth.
“I saw you examining the mural.”
Tess felt herself blush in the darkness, even though his tone was not suggestive.
“There are loads of lectures on animals, or explorers talking about the fantastical creatures of distant isles. And there’s not just the public lectures. There are classes—night classes, for honest working people—on any subject you wish. I’ve been thinking of taking one on astronomy. I can’t work at the warehouse forever,” Kenneth added quietly, so the little boys’ big ears wouldn’t overhear. “I hate it. There’s talk of sending me out for collections, because I’m strong. Imagine me breaking the fingers of poor villains who can’t pay.”
Tess couldn’t; Kenneth could be self-absorbed, but he had a gentle heart. Such violence would surely shatter it.
“I need to get away from the family,” he was saying. Belgiosos always called themselves the family, as if there were no other. “Anne-Marie had the right idea, marrying outside the business, even if your father turned out to be a rummy choice.”
Tess scowled at his description of her father. He and Mama did not love each other anymore, if they ever had, but it hurt to hear it said so plainly.