“Quick!” Tess grabbed Griss’s arm and pulled him up the dark corridor toward the kitchen. She heard Reg and Rowan coming down the stairs, but she didn’t look back. In the foyer, the caretaker’s dogs bayed. She hoped the hounds would keep those villains occupied.
Pathka was nowhere to be seen in the kitchen, although there was a golden plate on the floor with a bite out of it. Tess hoped that meant he’d fled, and she’d find him outside.
If she spirited Griss out of the bolt-hole in the pantry, maybe she could get him away from those two clowns. That would ease her stinging conscience.
It was hard to convince Griss to go down the hole, though, and harder still, once he was down, to persuade him to crawl forward. He blubbered in terror. “I don’t know where I am,” he sobbed. “And I don’t know where Annie is. Annie doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Follow me,” said Tess, squeezing past after failing to budge him any other way. From above came crashing, yelling, and the baying of dogs, a terrible altercation, caretaker versus vagrants. With luck, it would keep them all occupied until she and Griss were well away.
She emerged into the weedy moat-ditch. Griss crawled out after. She hauled him to his feet and found him light as a child. Pathka was still nowhere to be seen. Tess ran for the river, hoping the old man would keep up, but he skidded and fell on the steep gravel drive. Tess rushed back, wrapped his arm around her neck, and helped him to the strand, barely keeping her feet.
Pathka wasn’t at the ferry, either. Tess, full of panicky energy, managed to shove the heavy craft halfway into the water, praying that the little quigutl would turn up.
Pathka could sniff her out; he could swim the river, no problem. Still, she dared not launch the ferry until she was sure nothing untoward had happened to him. “Pathka!” she cried, her voice echoing down the riverbank. There was no answering rustle in the underbrush. She was loath to return to the lodge but saw no other option. He might be trapped, or hurt.
“Stay here,” she admonished Griss, seating him on the raft. “If you see a quigutl, yell.”
He nodded, but his gaze was vacant. She might have been directing the wind.
Tess ran toward the lodge, not troubling to conceal herself. If the caretaker appeared, she’d be a concerned passerby who’d heard noises.
Reg and Rowan burst out the front, laughing hysterically. Each carried a bundle of pilfered goods wrapped in a blanket, and Reg’s smock was spattered rusty red. The fact that it wasn’t quigutl blood was cold comfort.
“Go!” Reg called to his companion, hopping on one foot while he sheathed his blade. “Go, go, go!”
The underbrush across the drive rustled: it was Pathka, signaling her to stay put, step back, let Reg and Rowan barrel past. She might have done it had not Griss cried out, “Run, Johnny! If they catch you poaching, you’ll hang for sure this time!”
Tess didn’t know the quigutl gestures for I can’t just abandon him or I feel responsible. She hoped Pathka could read it in her face. She darted toward the ferry ahead of Reg and Rowan and started shoving the craft again, but it was heavier with Griss on it, and then Reg and Rowan caught up and launched the vessel.
They assumed she’d been trying to help, not flee with their captive, which was probably for the best. They kept laughing as they hauled the ferry hand over hand along the towrope. Tess tried to catch her breath; Pathka swam behind, glaring, like an ill-tempered crocodile.
Griss grabbed Tess’s hand and clung to it. On the far bank, he wouldn’t get off the boat. “C’mon, milord,” said Rowan coaxingly. “Don’t look so frightened. ’Tain’t blood on Reg’s smock, but some wine he spilled. We’re your dearest friends. You remember us, don’t yeh?”
“Wreck and Ruin,” said Griss. He winked at Tess, and she realized that, at this moment anyway, he was lucid enough to mock his captors. Apparently his fog of senility could part sometimes, letting a keen sense of humor glimmer through.
He reminded her so strongly of Grandma Therese that her heart ached.
Rowan seemed not to get it. “Always foretelling doom,” he muttered.
“Could we hasten away from this river?” griped his companion. Reg had swished his shirt in the water and was wringing it out; rusty drops stained the gravel. His body was pale as a toadstool, and marked with scars. “The hounds are dead,” he said, “but I’m not a thousand percent sure I killed the caretaker. He’ll know we crossed the river. We need to vanish.”
The men shoved the ferry back into the water, to drift downstream and confuse pursuers. Pathka crept up beside Tess and hissed, “I got what I needed. Let’s go.”
Tess knelt as if to scratch Pathka’s head spines and whispered, “I want to get the old one out of their clutches. I hurt him when I first set out from home; I need to make amends.”
Pathka’s eyes twitched skeptically. “We can follow them for a while, if your conscience demands it, as long as they’re traveling south. Once I finish our thniks, though, I want to go underground. I don’t want them with us—not even the old one.”
“Understood,” said Tess, standing up.
The two ruffians were halfway up the hill already, towing Griss between them. Griss balked, craning his head to look for her, and whined plaintively, “Johnny?”
Tess set her shoulders and followed doggedly, Pathka rattling up the hill behind her.
* * *
Rowan kept glancing warily back at Pathka; Tess’s threat to his favorite limb had clearly made an impression. Reg steadfastly ignored Tess and Pathka’s presence, although he held Griss’s upper arm so tightly his knuckles whitened, and he scanned the woods on either side of the road as if he would have liked to bolt. Perhaps he would have tried to run if Griss could have gone any faster than a shuffle.
Evening fell, and the ruffians kept walking into the gloaming. Tess wondered if they meant to walk all night, until Rowan started whining. Reg answered him with a sharp hiss, and they had a quiet, intense argument just beyond her hearing.
She hoped it wasn’t about whether to kill her. She needed to give them reasons not to.
There was a clearing not twenty feet off the road. At Tess’s gesture, Pathka got to work building a campfire there. Tess sliced up the sausages she’d pilfered and began frying them. Reg and Rowan, still arguing, ignored all this, but Griss stared longingly. His eyes reflected the fire like a nocturnal animal’s.
The smell of sausage finally grew irresistible enough to draw Reg and Rowan toward the circle of firelight. They still looked wary, so Tess smiled enormously and waved a hand around the pan to show she was willing to buy her way into their good graces. Her food would be gone by tomorrow if they took her up on it; she tried not to think about that.
“What’re you playing at?” said Reg, eyes narrowed, staring at her across the fire. He held out an arm to stop Rowan and Griss coming any nearer without his say-so.
“Supper?” said Tess, trying to keep her voice low. It occurred to her that cooking for everyone was a rather feminine stratagem. Was she holding the pan handle too delicately?
There were many ways to discredit her disguise. Her hand sweated against the cast iron.
“Look, friends,” said Tess hastily, “we’re traveling in the same direction. I figured we may as well pool our resour—”
“And which direction is that, precisely?” Reg had not relaxed his posture or his glare. His voice was the tail of a cat about to pounce: only the most minuscule twitch of excitement showed what danger you were in.
Pathka stepped up to Tess’s side and glared back, his tail twitching more obviously.
“?‘Toward fame and glory, comrades,’?” Tess said carefully, quoting Dozerius the Pirate, “?‘but toward treasure will do, in a pinch.’?”