Thus Tess ended up staying among the nuns longer than anticipated. She didn’t begrudge it, and unexpectedly she wasn’t bored. She explored Muddle-on-the-Fussy, the nearby fields and hills, the black raspberry patches along the river. She told stories to Griss and the other hospice patients. It had been a long time since she’d stayed in one place with enough to eat and no urgency to get anywhere. Apparently she’d needed rest as well.
Tess felt some guilt over Pathka’s injuries. Following Reg and Rowan, getting Griss to safety, had been entirely her project; Pathka had participated reluctantly and paid a heavy price. She needed to make it up to him. If she could locate a large cavern in the vicinity, Pathka might finally be able to do his kemthikemthlutl, to dream with Anathuthia and call to her.
Tess asked around. If there were large caves nearby, there would be stories. Surely cows sometimes fell down them, or young lovers got lost. Nuns and villagers alike gave the same answer: she should try Big Spooky, a cave so enormous it had swallowed an entire castle.
She told Pathka about the cave after he’d been in the infirmary a couple of weeks; he still seemed to be in a lot of pain, and she thought he could use the encouragement. “It’s only a couple of miles away,” Tess told him. She’d nearly said an hour’s walk, but she wasn’t sure how quickly he’d be walking, or how soon.
Pathka, curled in the nest of quilts the nuns had made him, didn’t respond.
“You still haven’t found your subterranean monster?” sneered Kikiu, who was just sauntering in from wherever she slept at night.
Kikiu was still here after two weeks, leaving Pathka’s side only to sleep. Tess had eyed the hatchling with skepticism at first, unsure what Kikiu intended, but the youngster had made no threatening move. The nuns had locked the bite enhancer in a strongbox, which eased Tess’s mind considerably.
Pathka raised his head for Kikiu, at least. “Did you get it?” he rasped. The hole in his throat made it difficult to speak.
Kikiu bent over Pathka and bared her teeth. They glistened coldly.
“Don’t you dare!” cried Tess, almost before she understood what she was seeing.
Kikiu was wearing the bite enhancer.
The young quigutl swiveled her eye cones, looking shifty, but Pathka interjected, “It’s all right. I asked ko to…show me. Wanted to…understand.”
“Those teeth were under lock and key,” said Tess, still not trusting this.
“Not a very sturdy lock,” said Kikiu slyly. She turned back to Pathka and opened her nightmarish jaws, letting her mother examine them from different angles. “I gave them good shear strength,” she said. “They’re fast-snapping. Won’t rust or jam.”
Pathka held out a cautious finger; Kikiu held still and let him touch the jagged steel.
Tess squirmed, and yet she had no reason, surely. They seemed to be getting along.
“I did what you said,” said Kikiu quietly. “You were right about Trowebridge. It was a false nest. I couldn’t go back.”
“What I said?” said Pathka with effort. “Seeking your true nature?”
Kikiu nodded eagerly. “I think you’d approve of how I’ve been living. No money, no—”
“If that’s true,” hissed Pathka viciously, arching his back, “then why the…enhancer? You’re…making yourself unnatural.”
Kikiu recoiled from Pathka’s ferocity, looking so abashed and awkward that Tess couldn’t help feeling sorry for the hatchling.
“Why did you really…come back?” Pathka roared, his pouch perforation adding an extra whistling wheeze to his utterance.
“Where else was I to go?” said Kikiu hotly.
“But how…did you find me?” wheezed Pathka.
Kikiu looked away, avoiding his gaze, mumbling something Tess couldn’t hear.
“That’s not it,” said Pathka. “You knew…where I was.”
Pathka lunged fiercely, without warning, and bit the front of Kikiu’s face, her whole muzzle, nose and mouth, so she couldn’t speak or breathe. Kikiu thrashed and tried to pull away, eyes rolling in panic. They writhed together on the floor, Pathka heedless of his open wounds, Kikiu flailing with the frenzied energy of someone who believed this might be her last struggle.
“Pathka, stop!” cried Tess in absolute horror. She picked up the stool she’d been sitting on and bashed him over the head with it.
Pathka let go.
“Are you mad?” screamed Kikiu, scuttling backward toward the wall, away from Pathka.
“There,” said Pathka, panting with agony. He’d torn his throat pouch afresh, and it was oozing. “I needed…one more. Fatluketh didn’t work…we were still bound. Finally…free.”
Kikiu’s snout was bleeding. She could have lunged at Pathka with her metal jaws—Tess feared as much—but instead Kikiu said bitterly, “We still won’t be free. You’ll see. There’s something wrong between us, and always has been.”
Kikiu bolted toward the door. Tess looked frantically at Pathka, appalled by what had just happened, but Pathka made no move to go after Kikiu.
Tess knew quigutl bit each other, and that it looked crueler than it was, but this was different. Kikiu’s reaction told her that much, and the fact that Pathka could have killed the hatchling.
She wasn’t sure he would’ve let go if she hadn’t brained him with the stool.
Tess dashed after Kikiu into the courtyard. The front gates were shut; Kikiu had climbed to the top and was ready to leap down. When Tess cried, “Wait!” Kikiu paused, spines flattened like a chastened dog’s.
“Pathka isn’t himself,” said Tess, jogging up to the gate. “He’s still hurt. He’s not thinking clearly. I know him, and this is not like him, and I’m sure he couldn’t have meant to—” Tess paused to catch her breath, and to wonder at the litany of unsolicited excuses she was making for Pathka’s violence. At last she said weakly, “Are you all right?”
“I have never been all right,” said Kikiu evenly. “I came here hoping ko would be proud of me, if you can believe it. I am making my own way through the wilderness, through my own nightmares. But what good does it do? Ko isn’t interested in the slightest.”
“Nightmares?” said Tess, a spark of hope blossoming. “You’re dreaming, without your nestmates around you. Have you dreamed of the serpent? Tell Pathka that. I think he’d—”
“Give me another wrongful bite?” said Kikiu, peering down at Tess like a cat in a tree. “Hear this, human: I have always dreamed, even back in Trowebridge. I worked so hard to make my place there, to follow the rules and fit in there. And still I dreamed, even with my brethren piled around me, as if I were old and senile. I was so ashamed.
“Then Pathka had that dream—that call—and bragged about it, as if it were a miracle and not proof that ko, too, was irretrievably alone.”
“But then that’s something you’ve got in common,” said Tess. Surely this was a misunderstanding. Pathka couldn’t have meant to be cruel, wouldn’t have been if he had known. “Come back and talk to him. You can still be nest to each other.”
“We have never been nest,” said Kikiu. “And never will be.”
“If you’re dreaming of the serpent, then you’re called,” said Tess, pleading now. “You belong with us, searching for the Most Alone.”
“I am the most alone,” hissed Kikiu. “Exactly as my mother made me.”
With a serpentine tail ripple, Kikiu twisted around and leaped from the gates, out of the hospice, and away.
Tess stared at the spot where Kikiu had been. “Mother” had hit her like a slap, and she finally saw what had been there all along: Pathka, her best friend in the world, had been a wholly inadequate parent.
Kikiu, conceived in violence, whose birth almost killed Pathka, would have been eaten if Tess hadn’t put a stop to it. Pathka hadn’t wanted Kikiu, or loved her, or been nest to her. Tess didn’t know what was considered good quigutl parenting, but if Kikiu had been so alone that she was dreaming, Pathka couldn’t have been doing his job.
It was completely understandable, and it was a heartbreaking shame.
Tess stumbled back indoors, stricken with a kind of vertigo, wondering whether there was anything she could do.
* * *