Tess looked away, a ticklish feeling rising in her chest. She knew she wasn’t that good, especially after what she’d just done to Spira, and yet—
“You’re a rare and beautiful thing,” Will was saying. His fair hair haloed his head in the moonlight. “I wish I could build you a cage, little bird, or a beautiful tower, to keep you safe from the corrupt, cynical world. You don’t know how precious it is to be naive and innocent. I only want to protect you, so you can sing and be free like the golden bird you were born to be.”
It didn’t matter if he was wrong; she was hungry to be told exactly this, that she was not a waste of space or a born troublemaker, not a spank magnet or a little devil girl. That she wasn’t failing all the deepest wishes of her heart.
Will beckoned. She hesitated, and then returned to his lap.
“Your virtue heals me, and makes me want to be better,” Will whispered in her ear. His warm breath on her neck made her shiver. “Even a kiss”—he kissed her lingeringly—“could be a sordid thing, but you refine it into something radiant and pure.”
She fell into his kiss again. And when, soon after, his hand returned to her breast—outside her bodice, this time—she let it lie, reasoning that this, too, was not the Final Thing, and that someone who so valued her might be granted a little more liberty. Maybe this touch, too, was within her power to purify, like a refiner’s fire.
* * *
Night had fully fallen over Affle, starless and overcast. Tess shivered, despite the heat.
“I used to look back on that evening and laugh,” she said in a hollow voice, like the wind through reeds. “I thought of it as a hilarious Dozerius tale, ‘Wherein Our Heroes Trick Spira, Who Had It Coming.’ We were lively and alive—how could that be wrong?—and I thought I’d done something genuinely helpful for Will, who was haunted by some hurt he wouldn’t explain.”
Like the romantic hero of almost any story. She felt embarrassingly transparent.
“But the harm we did outweighed everything,” Tess continued. “Spira had to stand before a dragon tribunal for deviant behavior. Those herbs were medicine. He—” No, that was wrong. She still wasn’t treating the scholar like a person, saying he. “Ko had Tathlann’s syndrome. No maternal memories; no male or female parts; weak immune system. We made ko sick.”
Pathka shifted his head uncomfortably in her lap.
“It’s one of my biggest regrets. I wish there were some way to make it up to Spira,” Tess added, hoping Pathka didn’t think her a terrible person.
Pathka raised his head sharply and said, “You won’t like hearing this, but sometimes you can’t fix what you broke. Sometimes you just have to live with it.”
He was so riled up there were sparks coming out of his nostrils.
She’d made him angry again.
Tess backed away, mostly so she wouldn’t catch fire, and said hesitantly, “I didn’t mean to—are we talking about the same thing now?”
“About responsibility, and making up for past mistakes?” said Pathka, and there was a bite in his voice that Tess had never heard before. “Oh yes. You were subtle, but I’m sure we understand each other.”
“Pathka!” cried Tess in frustration. “I’m confessing my sins. I can regret how I treated Spira without it being an underhanded criticism of…of you and Kikiu.”
Pathka was done listening. He turned, tail snaking ominously, and walked off into the descending night. Tess called after him, to no avail, until he was almost out of sight.
She had no choice but to follow, into the uncertain darkness.
They camped, eventually, and by morning Pathka seemed to have forgiven her, or at least recovered his equanimity. They followed the road south in silence.
The roads in Ninys were better than those in Goredd; this was a fact, and an artifact of their different histories. Faced with marauding dragons, Goredd hadn’t prioritized things such as paving stones, roadbed grading, or drainage. Indeed, for generations it had been safer to stay off the roads. Dragons knew to look for you there.
In this era of Queen Glisselda’s Peace, Heaven let it last, Goreddi roads were finally receiving some attention. Improvements spread from the capital outward, like a seed sprouting shoots, but they had not yet reached the far corners of the realm.
It would be an exaggeration to say the roads grew immediately straighter and tidier the moment one crossed the border, but that was because the border had moved so often. The roads around Affle were hearteningly decent; a few miles beyond, the paving stones took on a geometric regularity. The roadbed acquired a curve, encouraging water to sluice off the sides instead of accumulating in the middle as a paradise for mosquitoes and stink. Tess, who’d become something of a road connoisseur, appreciated the greater ease of walking.
The flavor of the thing was hard to get used to, however. Ninysh roads smacked more of civilization than mystery. Tess had to squint to see the potential, to keep believing that anything might be around the next corner. All roads were one, surely, even if their textures differed.
Was she as varied, a part of herself as rough and rutted as the Goreddi roads, and some other part as efficient as the Ninysh? She often felt, early in the morning, when the world seemed most malleable, that she contained these different potentials, and more. It wasn’t merely that she could be anything, but that she was everything, all at once.
When Tess came across the road crew, therefore, she approached with curiosity. Here was a different way of engaging with the road, and it seemed as open to her as any other.
Pathka, without a word, dived into the wheat to hide.
The workers had a big encampment, a dozen tents and nearly as many wagons. As Tess drew nearer, she saw workmen clustered around a yawning sinkhole in the middle of the roadbed. It had been there long enough that passing travelers had carved wheel ruts through the adjacent wheat field as they gave the hole wide berth.
Tess walked up beside a ruddy young man who was leaning on his shovel and chewing a blade of grass. A wagon, opposite, dumped gravel into the chasm, raising clouds of dust and making everyone cough and complain. When the dust cleared, the hole looked as empty as ever. The redheaded fellow spit into the abyss.
“Was the rock eaten by water?” said Tess, edging up and peering into the darkness. She couldn’t say limestone in Ninysh—but this wasn’t limestone anyway. This far south was all Ninysh Shield, as she’d heard it called, an expanse of basalt. It didn’t erode as readily as limestone; a sinkhole was rather surprising.
The lad—scarcely older than Tess—flicked a glance at her and rubbed his freckled nose. “We dug this ourselves,” he drawled. “It’s a latrine.”
Tess ignored the sarcasm. “What causes this?”
He shrugged, instantly bored with her if she wouldn’t laugh at his jokes. “Our geologist don’t know. It’s a giant cave, like nobody from the Academy ever seen before. He’s got a bee up his bum, cuz Boss Gen won’t let him down there after the cave-in killed Daniele.” The lad pointed across at a man in a leather apron, long hair tied back, on his stomach lowering a rope into the hole. “He’s sending down a wren in a cage. Not much else he can do.”
Men worked around the geologist, shoveling gravel down the hole. “Felix, you son of a donkey, there’s nothing to do on that side!” one shouted, glaring across at the lad who was talking to Tess. Even the geologist looked up and frowned.
“I was only telling this lout to talk to Boss Gen if he wants work!” Felix shouted back, thumbing his nose. “Excuse me for trying to find someone to replace poor Daniele.”
“Daniele wasn’t a lazy git, at least,” said a muscular gray-haired man, rounding the side of the wagon. The others pretended to have been working hard rather than leering at Felix.