There was a long silence. Tess wondered whether they could hear her heart pounding.
Then both ruffians burst out laughing, and Tess laughed, too, desperately, hoping this meant she’d put their minds at ease. They drew near the fire, at any rate. Rowan flopped onto his fat bottom and pulled Griss down to sit beside him.
Reg sauntered around the perimeter of the firelight with studied casualness, until he stood beside Tess. The back of her neck prickled; she tried not to cringe too obviously. Pathka, on Tess’s other side, growled, but Reg ignored this, squatted down, and put his mouth near her ear.
“Who are you really?” he snarled. “No comrade of ours. Your speech is too well bred.”
“Innit, though?” cried Rowan, helping himself to a slice of hot sausage. “?‘Which of your limbs is your favorite?’?”
He mocked her in a high-pitched voice; Tess hoped he meant to be insulting, and that she didn’t really sound like that. Her disguise wouldn’t last if her voice was like a little girl’s.
Pathka’s angry spine flare made it hard to think. Tess put a hand on his head to calm him. She needed to tell a plausible story before her friend decided to take matters into his own jaws.
A hundred Dozerius tales at her disposal, none of them the right one. If she made herself sound important, they might seize her for ransom; if she seemed too dangerous, they might decide to kill her preemptively. Reg had pulled out his knife and was twirling it idly.
“I’m called Jacomo. I was raised in the church, but I lost my faith upon reaching, erm, manhood,” she finally said. It was hard to sound confident with a knife on one side and a protective quigutl on the other. “The prior ordered me to go on pilgrimage and find it. Instead, I’ve discovered a talent for breaking and entering, and many fine things to steal.”
Rowan burst into ugly laughter. Reg stopped playing with his blade and used it to stab a few sausage slices. Tess let herself relax a little.
“So how did you acquire a pet quigutl, Father Filch-My-Jewels?” asked Reg with his mouth full. “And what holy relics did you bring us from that hunting lodge? The chalice of St. Gilded Goblet? The bones of Saints Amethyst and Pearl?”
“Have some respect. He’ll be the Archbishop of Pilfering-Booty someday,” cried Rowan. He laughed uproariously at his own joke, clutching his sides as if he might burst like a ripe plum.
“Enough,” Reg snapped. Rowan shoved his sleeve into his mouth, stifling himself.
“There’s your pet,” hissed Pathka. “So obedient. So docile.”
A knife whizzed past Pathka’s head and stuck, vibrating, in a tree behind him.
“If you mean to share our road, Brother Bat-Dung,” said Reg, striding over to retrieve his weapon, “I don’t want to hear this monster speak. Are we clear?”
“Extremely,” said Tess, before Pathka could speak again. Pathka glared vitriol at her, and she didn’t know how to reassure him. “We won’t be with you long.”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say,” said Reg, sheathing his knife at last. “We may walk the same way awhile, but you’re not our comrade. We’re not sharing the reward.”
Tess would have asked, What reward? but Rowan was sneering: “Griss is our mad nobleman. We found him first, and you can go hang, by St. Masha.”
“Is that your scheme? Locate his family and collect a bounty?” asked Tess.
The ruffians didn’t answer, though. They were busy polishing off the last of her sausages.
* * *
Tess would have absconded with Griss that very night, but the men tied him to a tree. “What in Heaven’s name—” Tess began, appalled at this indignity. Rowan, glimpsing thunderclouds over his partner’s head, took her aside and confided, “Lord Griss wanders if we don’t. You’re not the only Johnny he sees, y’know. He chases Johnnies all over creation, and he’s like to chase one over a clift.”
Griss smiled sadly from across the fire. “It’s all right, Jacomo,” he called. “I asked them to. It’s embarrassing to wake up Heaven knows where, next to someone you don’t recognize.”
It was the closest he’d come to remembering.
Even so, Tess might’ve untied him if she hadn’t had to lean over a man with a knife to do it. Reg and Rowan plunked themselves down at the base of the same tree.
She didn’t like her odds. She spread her blanket next to Pathka on the far side of the fire.
“Can I speak now?” Pathka growled. “We should leave. I don’t care that it’s dark and your heart is gnawed by remorse. The tall one will eventually kill one of us on impulse, while insisting it was logical.”
“I can’t,” Tess said levelly. “Griss is in serious dang—”
“Burn him!” Pathka hissed. “You have no duty toward him. Your guilt will kill us.”
Tess nestled under her blanket, thinking. She didn’t feel this as duty; indeed, duty might have sent her running the other way. And it wasn’t mere guilt. She felt…like her heart and conscience demanded it. Like this was where she was supposed to be. How could she turn her back when someone right in front of her needed help? Especially when that someone reminded her so keenly of Grandma Therese, who’d kept her going through the worst days of her life.
* * *
Tess had been fourteen, barely, when she’d had to confess all to her mother.
Bad girls in stories always fell pregnant on the first go; sometimes (depending on the story) they’d done little more than enter a man’s room and close the door. It wasn’t clear to Tess (until it was) what they’d been getting up to, only that judgment was swift and sure.
Saith St. Vitt: Sin, and you sin before the eyes of Heaven. Heaven does not blink.
Several months of Will passed without consequence; Tess carried on in merry denial. When her monthlies were finally delayed, she didn’t mind. Who’d miss that mess? After three months’ delay, however, she began to wonder and then to fear. If she was pregnant, wouldn’t she be ill? Mama had been vomiting till the bitter end with Ned. Tess felt nothing but a gnawing anxiety. She grew quiet and then withdrawn. If Will noticed, he didn’t ask what was wrong.
Finally she could maintain her denial no longer. She determined to ask Will; a naturalist might have some insight. Before she could tell him, though, he disappeared. Paid up at the Mallet and Mullet, no forwarding address. No one knew where he’d gone, not Roger and Harald, who’d wondered aloud whether she might require a new paramour, nor yet the saar Spira, who’d ogled her wall-eyed, as if he could smell her secret.
Even Will’s adviser, Professor the dragon Ondir, had had no warning. “He didn’t defend his thesis,” the old saar said flatly. “Tell him he won’t get his degree until he does.”
In desperation, Tess asked Kenneth to eavesdrop at the Belgioso warehouses. She didn’t believe Will had owed Count Julian money, but she was out of ideas. If Will was at the bottom of the river, at least she’d know. No one had killed Will, though, as far as Kenneth could discern.
Tess’s gowns grew tight around the waist. She had to tell somebody, or go die in a gutter like the slattern she was. The latter, distressingly, seemed like the pleasanter option.
She’d tell Jeanne first. Jeanne would be sympathetic, even if she didn’t know what to do.