Every morning, as she’d promised herself in Trowebridge, Tess made the decision to live. It was getting easier, even if thieving was difficult and dangerous and she never got any better at it. She had Pathka, and she found joy in walking the road.
This eccentric quest was a pilgrimage, she decided. Pathka hadn’t said so explicitly, but Anathuthia was more than megafauna to him. She was practically a goddess, which was astonishing if you knew anything about quigutl. They weren’t as purely rationalistic as the greater dragons, but one didn’t expect religion of any kind in reptiles. Tess had been taught from childhood that belief was uniquely human.
Quigutl religion would have made an astonishing lecture at the Collegium. Tess sometimes imagined herself on the dais in front of St. Fredricka’s mural, dumbfounding everyone. Spira would be in one corner, mouth open in disbelief. Ondir (implausibly) would have fainted dead away, and Will…
She always stopped imagining when Will showed up, and turned her attention back to the real world, where Pathka was zigzagging merrily ahead of her.
Over the years apart, she’d all but forgotten what Pathka was like, so lively and nosy, always in motion. He reminded her, achingly, of Faffy—not that Pathka was a pet (an offensive notion to a quigutl), or that he physically resembled the long-legged, narrow-waisted snaphound. Together they’d been a trio of pure mischief, frolicking in the courtyard, exploring tunnels under the city. They’d formed a continuum, with Faffy at the animal end, Tess at the human, and Pathka definitively demonstrating that there was no great distance between the poles.
“If you have a personality, you’re a person,” Seraphina had once told Anne-Marie in defense of dragonkind. Tess had taken this deeply to heart. Faffy and Pathka were both persons to her, the main difference being that Pathka could talk.
Pathka had understood Goreddi and had known the Southlander alphabet well enough to improvise spelling. Tess had quickly gained insight into Quootla without Seraphina’s help.
Which was just as well, because Seraphina, prickly as a thistle, didn’t like quigutl. “I can’t stand listening to them,” she’d said, tuning her oud and barely glancing at Tess. “Their language is nothing but Mootya with a bad lisp, and it drives me to distraction.”
“It’s not Mootya at all,” Tess had answered crossly. “They have their own language, and it’s called Quootla, and you don’t understand anything.”
That was one time Tess had been indisputably right, and that heady feeling had goaded her to learn contradictory case, future-past tense, the secret words quigutl never uttered in front of dragons—anything Seraphina wouldn’t know. Seraphina hadn’t taken it graciously; she always had to know one thing more than you. She had the facts.
Mama had the moral answers. And Tess was always wrong.
The farther she walked, the more irrelevant that seemed.
Walking was a good in itself, right and just and necessary. The road gave her no small measure of joy. Every day brought new vistas—the white conical roofs of oast-houses, a fox with her kits, an undiscovered color in the evening sky. Anything might be around the next bend; she could walk forever and never reach the end.
The road was possibility, the kind she’d thought her life would never hold again, and Tess herself was motion. Motion had no past, only future. Any direction you walked was forward, and that was as must be.
Walk on became her credo; she repeated it to herself every morning upon deciding to get up and exist for one more day.
* * *
Her days began before dawn, when the birds started arguing. Tess would eat whatever scrap of food she had left and listen to animated avian conversation all around her.
Birdsong was a language, unquestionably. She could discern calls and answers, aggression and capitulation and seduction. Warnings. Rapture. She wondered how long it would take to learn such a language without the advantages she’d had with Pathka.
If you’d paid as much attention to family and duty as you paid to dumb animals, said her mother’s voice in her mind, you might not have been such a disappointing daughter.
That kind of thought was her cue to get going.
“Walking on now,” Tess told Mama-in-her-head, kicking dirt over last night’s ashes. “I think I’ll live one more day.”
She’d slept in an orchard, and disintegrating apple blossoms had shed petals over everything like snow. Heavy dew made them cling to her blanket and pack.
Pathka was nowhere to be seen, but he often woke earlier than she did and went foraging. She’d start walking. Pathka always found her.
The sun began to rise in earnest; Tess loved the way it illuminated treetops first, turning the foliage white-gold. The sky behind was warmly blue, and in the west a gibbous moon lingered in the branches like a pale fish caught in a net.
Like a delicious secret. Tess blew it a cheeky kiss.
The sun was well up and the moon long set by the time Tess reached a peasant hamlet. This was not a village as a city girl like Tess understood it. There was no church, no tavern, no fountain or market square, but a collection of house-barns, wherein people lived under the same roof as their animals, clustered around a green for common grazing. The fields were cultivated in long strips, so no single household got all the best land. There’d be an ancient vaulted chamber under the green, a place to hide in the event of dragon attack, used for hay storage now. It was an antiquated arrangement, the old high-feudal style.
At one corner of the green stood the communal bake oven, like an upturned clay bowl, its aging whitewash streaked with soot. It belched smoke like a little dragon.
Tess paused in the road, her stomach souring. If walking was the best part of her day, stealing was the worst, and she was sorry to stumble into it so soon. She didn’t dare pass this place by. Who knew how far away the next opportunity would be?
Pathka still hadn’t caught up, which concerned her. If he was off bleeding in some cavern by himself, she was going to be thoroughly cross. They had a deal.
An unspoken deal, she now realized. She’d have to change that.
Tess glumly began picking her way toward the oven. Most of the peasants, dressed in smocks and clogs, were working the long strip fields, spreading manure (the breeze confirmed) and hoeing cabbage sprouts. Someone should be watching the lambs on the green and minding that oven. Tess couldn’t see anyone yet.
The hamlet was a maze of low stone walls. Tess duck-walked alongside them, but inconveniently there were no gates, only jutting stone stiles, difficult to clamber over discreetly. She poked her nose over a wall, like a mole taking stock of the upside world, and then flattened herself against the top and rolled over into the next yard. She crossed three walls this way without spotting the shepherd.
As Tess topped the fourth wall, however, she glimpsed a pair of girls about her own age across the green. They’d been sitting in the shade of the wall, deep in conversation, and were now getting to their feet, crooks in hand.
They saw her at the same moment she saw them.
Tess dived over and quickly crabbed on all fours. She scuttled around a corner and out of sight before the girls reached the near edge of the green.
“We seen you spying, Mumpinello,” cried one of the girls. “You can’t hide from us in our own home. We will flush you out.”
“And then beat you with a stick,” called her shorter companion enthusiastically.
The girls, who clearly knew their business, hopped onto the wall and began walking around on top, crooks in hand, peering into every enclosure.
Tess crawled frantically; the only way to elude them was to keep moving. She reached one dead end and then another, until her only options were a muddy culvert (which would surely ruin her jacket) and a pigsty where a sow nursed her piglets. Sows—even a city girl knew—were famously fierce. Even if it didn’t bite her, it would scream, and Tess would be found.
She’d lost this game of hide-and-seek. There was nothing left but make it no worse.