“If you take a class, maybe I’ll take one, too,” said Tess.
“Braver together, eh?” said Kenneth, elbowing her and grinning, and for a moment she was painfully reminded of Jeanne, of us against the world. Jeanne had never been a partner for her exploits, though. Pathka had been, but Pathka was gone.
Tess could endure anything—all the manners and morality lessons in the world—as long as she had a secret joy, something she loved that was hers alone. Sneaking out to St. Bert’s was just the thing to make her life delicious once again, and if it should happen occasionally to bring her into contact with learned young men who would answer her questions and treat her like she was all grown up, so much the better.
She held the word megafauna in her heart like the key that would unlock her prison.
Tess and Pathka followed the river until it turned east, and then took the road south over a low ridge. The land beyond flattened and stretched. The sky was enormous here. Tess, who’d grown up in a city, had always thought of the sky as a kind of ceiling, painted blue above her, but out here it was clearly a dome. It went all the way to the ground.
Pathka had set out in a frolicsome mood, but by late afternoon he was growing cagey. He left the road in favor of creeping under bushes and through ditches, and kept glancing back.
“We’re being followed,” he said at last, emerging from a muddy culvert.
Tess leaped to a panicked conclusion: “Papa!”
Pathka’s head spines flared. “No. My brethren. I knew a few would be tenacious.”
Tess squinted against the glare. The road behind them stretched straight and empty for a mile or more. “I don’t see anyone.”
“I smell them,” said Pathka. “If the wind shifts, they’ll smell me. They’re following my tracks, so I’m leading them on a chase.” He sprang over a stone wall into a pasture, scattering sheep.
The plain ended in low, lumpy hills, thrown up by a river barging heedlessly along. Tess recognized the phenomenon from geology lectures, which amused her.
The road crossed the river at a frothy ford, putting Tess’s boots to the test.
Pathka didn’t let her return to the road but led her upstream, through the shallows. “If they can’t immediately smell us, they might give up,” he said. He was up to his neck, swimming with an elegant serpentine ripple. “Even the stubbornest must be tired of following me by now.”
The bank was thick with horsetails and mud that almost sucked the boots off Tess’s feet. They climbed out into a coppice, a domesticated forest, which made for easy walking, and by the time they glimpsed the road again, it was nearly dark.
The coppice was made of firewood; Tess gathered some for a campfire, and Pathka’s tongue set the small pile alight. They had nothing to cook, but a fire can dispel a great deal of gloom, and Tess, feet blistered and muscles aching, needed to stave off a darkness encroaching on her heart.
It was her mother’s voice again. It had been quieter today, or Tess had been distracted, but as soon as the sun had set, it had lit into her: What are you doing out here? You don’t know the first thing about survival. You’ll be eaten by a bear.
Ah, death. She smiled mirthlessly, and reckoned she could put it off again, until morning at least. She felt squirmy, though, and wished they had some wine. There was only water, and the last of Florian’s bread and sausage, and some cheese (which she felt guilty giving to Pathka now). They ate in silence, and then Tess spread her blanket and lay down, still restless. She was too tired to walk another step, and yet she felt like running, punching, kicking things.
It was that gadfly voice, still buzzing. She swatted at the air, which helped not at all.
“Would you tell me a World Serpent story?” Tess asked Pathka.
Pathka poked the fire with a stick. “Which one? The creation of dragons and quigutl? How the dragons turned their tails upon the truth?”
The dragons had indeed, Tess recalled wryly. Professor the dragon Ondir had vehemently denied the World Serpents’ existence, and the scholar Spira, Will’s archrival, had written papers demonstrating their physical impossibility. It had been enough to make even Tess doubt.
“Tell me a story that proves they’re real, that we’re not chasing a phantom,” Tess said, settling with her pack under her head.
Pathka, usually a blur of motion, grew still and solemn. “For once, let us squat upon time/no-time,” he intoned, and Tess nearly burst out laughing.
She’d tried to teach him to begin stories with “Once upon a time.” As a child, alas, she’d been unable to explain exactly what the idiom meant, so Pathka had invented an idiosyncratic Quootla translation. He couldn’t conceive of being “upon” unless there was some verb to go with it, hence “squat.” Since “time” in this case really indicated timelessness, Pathka had put the word in contradictory case.
Quootla had a suffix, -utl, that could be glued to the end of anything—nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, small rodents—and meant the word itself plus its opposite, simultaneously. It didn’t always translate into Goreddi. Time/no-time almost made sense; blue/orange or fall/rise or dog/whatever-the-opposite-of-dog-is were perfectly intelligible in Quootla but boggling to nearly everyone else.
Even Seraphina, who had mostly refused to help Tess understand quigutl speech, was baffled by contradictory case. “It’s an illogical quigutl innovation,” she’d said. “Proper dragons wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense. Their brains would implode.”
Tess’s mind had been malleable in those days, however, and she’d made peace with the usage, even if her understanding would never be perfect.
“Squatting upon the smug face of time-utl,” she said now, grinning up at the merry stars.
Pathka’s eyes closed; his skin glowed orangish in the firelight. “The World Serpents are sometimes called the Most Alone, but they weren’t always solitary. The greater dragons and quigutl lived with them for an age of the earth. Long after the dragons abandoned them, chasing after rationality, the quigutl stayed. We cared for our great mothers until our wings shriveled into spindly arms, and our fierce flame became precise and gentle. We would lie upon them, skin to skin, and our dreams would twist and entwine together like smoke.
“I know they’re real, Tethie, because we all ache with their absence when we’re alone. Sometimes we even dream of them, if there are no other quigutl around.”
“I thought you said your dreaming was impossible,” said Tess.
“It was, because I dreamed in the nest, not on my own. Sleeping in heaps silences the dreams, mutes our loss, and lets us forget that we aren’t meant to be apart—”
A dark shape suddenly shot out of the underbrush like a ballista bolt, hitting Pathka squarely in the side and knocking him into the fire.
Pathka landed hard, scattering burning branches, but popped back up like an uncoiling spring. His adversary hissed and scratched, spines splayed in fury, and tried to bite Pathka’s neck. They rolled, kicking up dust; thrashing tails struck the fire and sent up sparks.
Tess leaped uselessly to her feet and flailed around for some way to stop this. She couldn’t throw water on them; she only had what was in the water skin. She flung her blanket at the assailant quigutl like a net, succeeding only in catching the corner on fire.
Pathka, who’d started out giving as good as he got, abruptly stopped fighting. He rolled onto his back, legs spread and throat stretched out, leaving himself almost mockingly vulnerable.
“Fight me, Mother!” his attacker squawked in frustration. It was Kikiu.
“I did fight,” said Pathka evenly. “We’ve had our fatluketh, and now we’re done.”
Kikiu hesitated, panting, then bit Pathka viciously on the thigh. Pathka skreeled in pain.
“Now we’re done,” said Kikiu, spitting a scrap of Pathka’s skin into the fire pit.