“Even worse!” cried Reg. “You dolts, she’s a bloody Saint. You think she’d have filthy woman parts under her skirts? Never. She’ll be pure as the driveled snow, virginal and unsculleried. You owe penance for your disgusting thoughts, Heaven slap you silly.”
Tess had sense and sobriety enough to bite her tongue. She’d seen Seraphina in the bath and would have vouched for anything but breasts, which weren’t her sister’s strong suit. “Plant some cabbages in those fields!” Tess had once sassed Seraphina, and then, ye Saints, she’d been spanked so hard. It was the one time she knew for sure that Seraphina had told on her.
This foolishness got her no closer to rescuing Griss. Tess stalked out, slept it off, and dogged them again the next day.
Once, by some miracle, Reg and Rowan left without Griss. Tess, who’d been watching the tavern door, rushed in. Someone screamed upstairs; Tess took the stairs two at a time and found the proprietress shrieking at poor Griss, who was tied to the bed, lying in his own filth and weeping in terror. This was Tess’s chance to free him, but he needed to be cleaned up, and she could not, in good conscience, leave the proprietress with the mess. Tess promised the woman a chip of gold (praying Pathka had some; he’d been using various precious metals to construct the thniks), and together they untied Griss, took up the sheets, carried his bedding down to the fire, and hauled up fresh straw from the shed. They sluiced poor Griss in the yard by the chickens, toweled him off, and dressed him in a pair of breeches the tapmaster had grown too stout for.
Tess found Pathka up an apple tree and asked for a crumb of gold. “They’re going to kill you,” he said, handing her a chunk the size of her thumbnail. Before Tess could ask him to bite off a smaller piece, noise made her look up. Across the green, the proprietress was shouting at Wreck and Ruin and beating them with a broom, but they drew their knives and took Griss away between them.
Tess ended up giving the proprietress the entire gold chunk.
This was the last straw. Tess couldn’t wait for the right circumstances to present themselves; the longer she took, the more abuse Griss endured. He wasn’t going to last.
Tess was going to have to make her own opportunity.
Before she left the village, Tess asked the proprietress what lay to the south—landscapes, manor houses, hospices? “If you mean to save that old granddad, let me help,” said the woman, placing the gold on the counter beside Tess’s hand. Tess began to protest (although, to be fair, the nugget had shrunk significantly), but the woman wouldn’t hear of it. “Call it charity,” she said. “There, by Heaven’s grace, go we all eventually.”
Tess left the village with a plan, some money, and a hopeful spring in her step.
* * *
“I’ve heard tell of a palace nearby,” Tess told Reg and Rowan once she caught them up. They were well into their cups at the Hefty Heifer in the village of Faverly. Tess had availed herself of a mug of ale, just one, funded by charitable donation. She was about Griss’s business, after all, and she needed courage. “The palace,” she reiterated, since they were ignoring her, “belongs to the Duke of Barrabou. According to locals, he’s fantastically rich, and—here’s the best of it—he lost his father a few months ago. I don’t mean dead, I mean lost.”
Rowan eyed her sidelong. “Sounds like carelessness.”
“Indeed,” said Tess, keeping a straight face. “The old duke wandered the rose garden at night. No one minded, thinking at worst he’d get caught in the thorns. One day, though, the gardener left the gate open. The old man wandered into the forest and was never seen again.”
She had Reg’s attention now. He picked his nose with his thumb meditatively and said, “I suppose you want something for this information?”
“I ask no reward,” said Tess hastily, as if to fend off their generosity. “I’ll just sneak in the back while you’ve got everyone occupied in front, and walk off with a few golden forks.”
The men laughed and hailed the tapmaster for more ale, whereupon Griss whispered in Tess’s ear: “There is no Duke of Barrabou.”
“You need to keep that very quiet,” Tess whispered back. “Can you do that?”
Griss nodded solemnly; Tess might’ve worried, but she was sure he’d forget the Duke of Barrabou even quicker than his promise.
* * *
They headed across country, under Tess’s direction, toward a distant southern ridge. It would take most of a day to reach it, the proprietress had told her. Tess had been on the road long enough to estimate distances with some accuracy; it sounded like a four-or five-hour walk to her, even at Griss’s slow shuffle. The chief foot-draggers, though, were Reg and Rowan. The ridge was farther than they usually walked in a day. By noon their feet hurt and they were thirsty, and why hurry? The Duke of Barrabou’s palace wasn’t going anywhere.
Tess didn’t dare let them stop at a tavern, though, lest they learn the duke didn’t exist. “It’s a haul today,” she said, “but tomorrow’s an easy downhill stroll to the manor if we camp on the ridge. I know you hate camping”—she raised her voice over their protests—“so I bought a bottle of pisky to ease your pains.”
They seemed somewhat placated by the promise of pisky. “Too bad I’ve nothing but dried sausage to go with it,” Tess muttered to Griss, taking his bony arm. “If I were really Johnny, I’d poach us a stag, how about that?”
Griss shook his leonine head. “Snare the…the little ones with ears. Those are loyal.”
It took some asking before Tess understood: he meant hares, and that it was legal. “If I knew how to set snares, Griss, I’d have been eating like a king out here.”
The old man glanced mischievously at Pathka. “Does your baby dragon have any…” He mimed tugging something long with both hands. “String. No, metal string.”
In fact, Pathka could make wire from the scraps in his pouch; he extruded some when they stopped for lunch and a bit of a nap. Griss, too keyed up to sleep, showed Tess how to make a wire snare. His hands remembered how—a small loop, twist, thread through a bigger loop.
He explained how to set it. “Look for where they…they make a beat. A path. You shouldn’t be there at night. That’s how it got Annie.” He grew melancholy. “I could have told her where it hunted. It had been in our dale awhile; I’d been tracking it.”
He’d switched seamlessly from hares to the dragon that had eaten his sister. “Why did she go there?” Tess asked quietly. “Tell Jacomo what happened.”
“Johnny was poaching. I’d turned a blind eye, but then I lost my fingers.” He mimed a bear trap closing. “I told on him. I thought Papa would yell and—” He mimed throwing a punch. “But he told the duke. Johnny was going to hang. Annie went out to warn him away, and—” He made a snatching motion with his three-fingered hand. A dragon got her.
Tess had never heard him put the whole story together. It was as if making the snare had opened a door in his mind, if only for a moment.
They reached the ridge with daylight left. Tess helped Griss set the snare—upon a hare’s beat, not a dragon’s—and within a couple of hours they’d caught one. Griss twisted its neck sharply (Tess watched with mixed revulsion and curiosity; she needed to learn this, gruesome though it was). He skinned it with Rowan’s knife so swiftly that Tess could hardly comprehend what he’d done. It looked like he’d turned the poor creature inside out.