“You’re not making me feel better,” said Tess miserably.
“Then how about this,” said Pathka. “You’ll be naming your life as well. Anathuthia will hold a mirror to your heart, answer the unanswerable, plane the rough places.”
“Destroy the world?” Tess was still skeptical.
“The world is surprisingly hard to destroy,” said Pathka gently. “Whereas saving it can be done a bit at a time. Anyway, don’t be afraid. We’re walking away from death, not toward it. Death is going back to Trowebridge.”
Tess rolled her eyes at the Quootla pun, and the tension broke. Pathka asked if there was any breakfast, and Tess brought out the last cheese.
Under its pristine wax shell, alas, the cheese was riddled with worms. Pathka gobbled it down, maggots and all. “They’re full of cheese, so they taste like cheese!” he announced. Tess couldn’t bring herself to try any. They walked through budding coppice toward the southern road, ignoring the ominous rumblings of Tess’s stomach, or any thoughts of what it would take, in the absence of coins, to fill it.
From her pocket, the ring niggled at her.
Pathka, who had an inner furnace to stoke, could not be satisfied with one grubby cheese. He rooted around in flooded ditches by the side of the road for rotting tubers and corms. Strands of algae dribbled from his chin like a horrible green beard.
Tess tried not to watch him eat, or smell his breath afterward.
Later in the year, the countryside would become a banquet of delicious things: berries, honey, wild onions, nuts. The fields Tess passed, alas, had but the first inklings, a verdant hint of bounty to come, or they were black and sodden, heaped with clotted dung (Pathka, disturbingly, ate his fill of dung). The scattered patches of forest held no edible treasures that Tess could discern; the blackberry canes barely had leaves yet, let alone berries.
She might have milked a sheep—not that she knew how. She considered it as she paralleled a pasture, watching the new lambs nurse and not watching Pathka sneak around the field eating dried-up ovine afterbirths.
He was making the ewes cagey. Could a stampede of sheep kill you? Even if the answer was no, Tess felt certain they’d make an exception for her. That would be an embarrassing way to go, and she’d already decided to walk on today. She didn’t dare risk it.
Capering lambs, endemic to the Goreddi countryside in spring, leaped into the air for pure exuberance, as if stung by bees of joy. They were happiness incarnate upon the new grass. Tess’s heart was lifted at first, but by her second hungry day, she took little pleasure in their antics.
By the third day, Tess was so ravenous that the pewter ring in her pack began whispering: One word, and Seraphina would fetch you. You were never hungry at home. You never got blisters or raw places where your boot tops chafed you.
“Quiet, ring,” Tess muttered through her teeth. There was no going home. She’d be delivering herself up to the convent.
Plenty to eat at a convent, said the ring, sensibly.
Nearby lambs bleated raucously and kicked up their silly heels in agreement. “Quiet, lambs!” Tess cried, walking faster.
Beyond the next rise, a well-to-do yeoman farmstead stretched along a burbling creek, tidy and bucolic, like something out of a painting. Cherubs would not have been out of place in the blossoming peach trees, or a sunbeam bursting out of the clouds to set the thatched roofs ablaze with gold.
Tess froze in her tracks, not for awe but because she’d caught a waft of baking bread and found herself paralyzed by want.
“Pathka,” she half whispered, and Pathka appeared beside her, like a fairy godlizard. “It’s all right to steal if you’re very hungry, isn’t it? Heaven would forgive me, surely?”
“Is that why you haven’t been eating?” said Pathka. “I thought maybe you were fasting to let your gut fauna recuperate.”
Gut fauna was not a quigutl phrase Tess knew. Even with copious explanation—“Your intestines are full of tiny bugs”—her ears rebelled from understanding. It couldn’t be true. Pathka was teasing.
“I don’t want to steal from serfs and villeins,” she said. “They’re poor.”
“Poorer than you?” asked Pathka shrewdly. “Not likely. Anyway, I reject ‘poor’ as the artificial creation of humans and dragons. Hunger exists, though, and a hungry creature is entitled to eat.”
Tess was so hungry, in fact, that the smell of bread was making her dizzy. She couldn’t follow Pathka’s argument, but she could follow him toward the farmstead.
“You grab some bread,” he was saying, like a general laying out battle plans. “I’ll sneak into the henhouse and the cold storage. I’ll meet you on the other side of the stream, in that stand of beech trees.”
He disappeared into the weeds behind the walled garden. Tess shook herself, trying to focus, and crept into the farmstead.
Stealing from a yeoman farmstead wasn’t the same as stealing from serfs, though Tess didn’t appreciate the distinction; country folk were all “peasants” to her. A yeoman farmer did not own land—that belonged to his lord—but he owned the house and stock and was free to give up farming if he liked. Serfs were more like trees: they couldn’t move, owned nothing but their leaves (so to speak), and could be cut down at will. A yeoman might have serfs in his charge, belonging to the land he rented. The yeoman made use of their labor, oversaw the payment of debts and the resolution of disputes, and acted as a subcontracted agent for the local lord.
Tess was not, therefore, stealing from the abjectly poor this time. Knowing would not have eased her conscience, though. Her head was full of scriptural admonitions against thievery, recited helpfully in her mother’s voice, as she crept across the farmyard.
The brick oven had been emptied; a girl cleared out the ashes with a hoe. Tess passed behind her, walking when the hoe scraped, pausing when it paused. She still smelled bread, and it didn’t take the olfactory prowess of a quigutl to tell it was coming from the main house.
Her nose led to an open window and five perfect loaves cooling on a breadboard inside. Tess almost reached in, but at the last minute glanced up and saw the woman of the house stirring a cauldron over the fire. Tess ducked, heart pounding, and listened hard. The woman hummed as she worked; the sound came no closer. Tess stood up to one side, out of view, and peeked cautiously around the frame. The woman hadn’t moved.
Silent as a shadow, Tess leaned over the sill and wrapped her fingers around the nearest loaf.
It was hot; she winced but didn’t cry out. She fetched the loaf back quickly, so as not to burn herself. In her haste, her elbow bumped the rod holding the casement open, and the window fell on Tess’s shoulder. She gasped. The woman turned, saw Tess, and bellowed like a bull. Tess valiantly kept her grip on the hot bread, pulling it out and letting the window fall shut.
Then she ran.
There was no time for care or consideration in this run. She noticed farmhands, dimly, and dodged behind the barn, the henhouse, the well, a wheelbarrow, whatever she could to avoid them. Maybe they saw her, maybe they didn’t; they were running indoors to answer the woman’s cry, and Tess’s presence might not have sunk in until they reached the kitchen and heard the story. Then they probably thought, Wait, I did see a boy in a striped jacket, now that you mention it, and he looked a proper villain, and maybe I should set the dogs loose and they’ll sort him out.