Will had hypothesized that the serpents could heal—pagan and Pelaguese myths hinted as much—but seeing the evidence was still a shock. “How is this possible?” Tess said, stroking Pathka’s scarred flesh. “This wasn’t some kind of…of supernatural—”
“No, friend,” said Pathka gently. “If it exists in nature, it is natural, not thupernatural. The world is different than you thought, maybe. We quigutl are the serpents, Tess, made from their dreams and bones, and they are us. They sent us after the great dragons, to bring them back, but we never made it home. I don’t know why. We forgot who we were, and I suspect the serpents forgot us. What do you call that thing you do to remind your Thaints that you exist? You say special words, like waving a flag for them to find you.”
“Prayer?” said Tess. “This was a prayer to Anathuthia?”
“I am the prayer,” said Pathka, repeating the Goreddi word. “To the Most Alone, from my people.”
This was the Pathka she loved, full of myth and wisdom and enthusiasm. The serpent had restored not just his body but his spirit as well.
If ever there was a time to bring up Kikiu—that other most alone—it was surely now. Kikiu was suffering, had suffered for years; Pathka would care, if only he could be made to see it.
“Kikiu told me something before she left,” said Tess. “Did you know she dreams?”
“On the road? Of course,” said Pathka. “Without the nest to mute them—”
“No, no. It started back in Trowebridge,” said Tess, “before yours did. She was ashamed to tell anyone. She thought it just showed how misplaced and disconnected she was.”
Pathka stared at Tess hard, saying nothing.
“I thought you should know,” Tess persisted. “You have this quirk in common. If you reached out to her, the dreams could be a bridge between you, a way of being nest to—”
“I was called,” Pathka snapped. “I’m the one who’s been alone, ever since Karpeth died. I’m the one who’s lived in pain. Kikiu has nothing to complain about.”
It was an unsympathetic, waspish reply, like something Mama might have said. Her acute suffering—real suffering, Tess couldn’t pretend otherwise—had always blinded her to everyone else’s.
Tess could tell by the set of his spines that there was no discussing this now.
“We must keep walking south,” said Pathka sourly. His tail was twitching side to side with barely concealed anger. “Anathuthia says the world will bring us to her, and I have faith that it will. I’m called to find her.”
Tess swallowed her disappointment and shoved the bowl-scales into her pack, in case they were needed again. Pathka led her in irritated silence through the maze of caverns, toward some distant egress that only he could discern.
They emerged on the other side of the ridge, which put them, according to the nuns, a couple of miles from the Ninysh border. Now that Pathka was healed, they made good time.
Borders are curiously fluid over centuries. Like a river carving a wide valley, this border had rampaged all over, however docile it might look in its present channel.
A Goreddi castle guarded the boundary these days. In times of Ninysh ascendance, when the border had passed farther north, the fortress had been called Palasho du Mornay, but now it was plain old Castle Morney. Tess spied it in the distance, a crusty wart on a hillside; the road led around it to the west. She would know she was in Ninys, land of her mother’s people, when she had to look over her shoulder to see the battlements.
This was a milestone worth taking note of, and not merely because she’d have to shine up her rusty Ninysh to communicate. Crossing an international border—upon the solstice, no less—felt like an accomplishment. She’d walked a long, stubborn way, without stopping, chickening out, giving up, or needing anyone’s help. She was a child of the Road.
“We should celebrate,” Tess said to Pathka’s shadow in the tall grass. “There’s a village in the valley under the castle, looks like. Let’s stop for a proper meal.”
The words were out before she’d thought it through: Pathka couldn’t eat in a public house. “Just bring me out some cheese,” he said, cutting off her apology.
He was still cross with her. It wasn’t like him to stay annoyed; Tess had really stepped on his tail, bringing up Kikiu, and she didn’t know how to fix it.
And she couldn’t apologize. That much she felt sure of.
The village, made up of fewer than a hundred households, was a two-church, four-tavern affair and, Tess quickly learned, bilingual. That explained the doubles. This close to the ebb and flow of the border, everyone would be jumbled together yet fiercely separate. Judging the inns by their names, Tess settled on Do Flaquette, a Ninysh establishment with pancakes painted on the sign. Her Belgioso aunties made glorious pancakes; Tess had hopes.
The tapmaster hailed her, and she understood him perfectly—“What will it be, my bravo?”—but was hard-pressed to dredge up an answer from the reluctant sludge of memory.
Mama spoke Ninysh with her aunties all the time, so Tess had considered herself decent at it. Understanding was simpler than finding the right words and stringing them together, however. “I, er…give at me the pancake and the cheese and the…not the beet. Not the bee. St. Daan in a pan, I know this!”
She’d uttered that last phrase in frustrated Goreddi. The room fell silent; heads turned toward her. “That language, here?” somebody called. “Do you need me to punch you, Puco?”
“Hush,” said the barkeep, glaring at this rude patron. “He’s clearly from the uncouth north and has no idea what he’s doing. Ferdono, lead him to one of the Goreddi bars.”
“Aw,” said Ferdono, a freckled scullion, drying a glass. “Can’t I put him with the horses? His money’s still good.”
“Make it quick,” cried someone else. “Every word is an ear-turd, stinking up the room.”
Tess, who’d begun in embarrassment, now faced her detractors indignantly, hands on her hips. She could not have said where the words came from—maybe Aunt Mimi—but they’d clearly been stored up a long time, fermenting. “Foul-mouthed child!” she cried. “The devil’s in your eyes, but I’ll beat you till he comes out your nose. Think I won’t?”
There was a shocked silence as thirty patrons tried to figure out where on earth Tess could have come from. “Eh, he’ll do,” said a big man beside her at the counter. “A little mad, perhaps. What do you call yourself, bravo?”
Tess archly gave the Ninysh name Kenneth had bestowed upon her: “Tes’puco.”
A titter went up, and then another, and then an avalanche of laughter swept the room clean of all resentments, and Tess was proclaimed a “child of Heaven.” She sensed that this wasn’t a compliment, but if they’d decided to let her be, she couldn’t complain.
“Friend, what is it called, this drink?” asked Tess, plucking at the big man’s sleeve.
“Beer,” he said, lifting his mug so she could see inside. “You’ve spent more time in deep Goredd than is good for you. We don’t make it with bees or beets here in Afale.”
Tess, unexpectedly, felt like she’d been slapped. “Forgive me,” she said, fighting a tremor in her voice. “What did you call it, the name of this village?”
“A-fa-le,” he said, enunciating exaggeratedly. The final vowel was a light schwa after a languid el, just enough to sound slightly different from the Goreddi version of the name.
But not so different as all that.
Tess had arrived in Affle, Will’s hometown.
And then—the next thing she was aware of—she was outside Affle, beyond it, laboring up a hill. The last rays of daylight cut across her path, staining it orange.
She paused, breathing hard, and looked back. Will’s village nestled into the valley. All was calm; nobody had followed her. Had she stormed out of the tavern? Slunk? Run, clutching her stomach?
She sat heavily in the dirt, stunned. Broad leaves rustled beside her, and then Pathka crawled out of the underbrush. He let her finish crying—or let her face finish, anyway; it had begun without permission. Tess barely noticed until she had to blow her nose.