The Road, however, was not so easily abandoned. It led straight through the gates of the city, whereupon it divided itself, strands interweaving between buildings. Here it was called Streets and Boulevards and Alleyways, but it was the same entity, and she was still its progeny.
She’d grown up in a city, and never appreciated this until now.
This felt like a triumphant homecoming, back to civilization, and Tess entered like a hero, even if no one noticed. If she’d been Dozerius, this would have been the part of the story where all her trials were rewarded, where she finally got the recognition she deserved. She’d take her discovery to the Ninysh Academy and become the famous explorer she’d always dreamed of being.
It felt not just possible but inevitable. She’d done something truly astonishing, and had beaten a certain naturalist of her acquaintance to it. He could kiss her mud-spattered boot. She grinned impishly at the lone cloud in the sky, which was not particularly Will-shaped, and thought, Eat your heart out, scholar.
(The thought of Will gave her pause. The Ninysh Academy was an obvious, logical place he might have gone when he left. Heaven forfend that she’d run into him, but even if she did, wasn’t she strong and capable? She’d accomplished things Will could only dream of. He didn’t scare her. A whole Academy full of Wills couldn’t scare her.)
Conquering the Academy would not be accomplished in a single afternoon; more urgent was securing a place to sleep tonight, and paying work. City streets had no comfy green verge for her to bed down upon. The alleys were full of rats and rubbish and elderly gents who made Old Griss look clean and polished.
She thought she glimpsed him once, but it was clothes on a line, a trick of the light.
The embroiderers’ district, she quickly learned, consisted of a narrow byway called Crewel Ramble. Crewel, of course, referred to a style of embroidery. Tess understood Ramble the minute she laid eyes on the street: it was having trouble committing to being a street at all, crooked and narrow as it was. Most streets run in a certain direction, but this one stumbled and teetered between the looming half-timbered buildings, as if it were drunk.
She asked after work at several houses, but as soon as she asked for accommodation also, they all directed her toward a house at the end of the street called Fine Eyes. “Mother Gaida’s got a room you can have for free, if you’re strong enough, but she won’t let you have it if you’re working for another house,” was the general consensus.
Tess didn’t need to be told more than thrice. She knocked at the door of Fine Eyes (wondering whether the name was a pun on “fine work,” eyes and work being quite similar words in Ninysh). Three young women, blond and giggling, answered the door. They’d spotted Tess through the corbelled window and taken her for the young fellow she appeared to be. Tess doffed her cap and gave one-quarter courtesy—more than they merited—causing a rapture of squealing.
“Forgive the intrusion, ladies,” said Tess, dredging her manners up from the bottom of some deep river in her soul. It was a nice cold river; it had kept them fresh, if slightly damp. “I’m looking for Mother Gaida.”
The ladies left Tess in the parlor on a densely embroidered sofa between riotous pillows. The fringed drapes were overgrown with brocade. Tess found herself grinning stupidly at a framed shepherd and shepherdess above the hearth. Smoothly executed satin stitch, she noted, and finely rendered features. Dove knots. Helical whorls. She stood for a closer look, hands clasped behind her back.
“Can I help you, sir?” said a crisp voice. Tess turned to face Mother Gaida, a diminutive old woman in a close-fitted caul, lean and tough as a strip of hide. “Are you here with a portrait commission?” The woman lifted her brows, indicating the figures above the hearth. “I do those myself. We embroider clothing, of course, and take in mending on the side—unless you’re from the Guild of Tailors, in which case I deny everything.”
“I’m looking for work, madam, and a place to stay. The houses up the street said—”
“That I might hire a young fellow like you?” said Gaida, quirking an eyebrow.
“I’m not a ‘fellow,’ first of all,” said Tess. “And I know my stitches. I embroidered at the court of Goredd for Lady Farquist—”
“We’ll see about that; I’ll want a sample,” said Mother Gaida, raising a bony finger. “You also said you need a place to stay. I have one, but you may not want it, not-fellow.”
“No?” said Tess, crestfallen, because that was what she needed most in this strange city.
“Because of my son, you understand,” said Gaida. “I need a boarder who can help care for him. He was thrown from a horse several years ago and can’t walk. He’d be dead, but for the miracles of St. Blanche the Mechanic.” She kissed her red knuckle. “He can do most things himself, Saints hold him, but he needs help getting in and out of the bath, for example. I can’t lift him, and I’ll wager a weedy thing like you can’t, either.”
“Indeed I could,” said Tess, feeling the woman was being unfair to both herself and her male alter egos. “I mean, unless he’s big as a barn.”
Gaida drew herself to full height, which wasn’t much, and sniffed disdainfully. “He takes after his mama in all his finest qualities, including his svelte phys—”
She got no further because Tess, tired of trying to move the immovable, ducked her head under the old woman’s outstretched arm and flung Mother Gaida over her shoulder like a sack of grain. Turning hay and pounding roadbed had given Tess some strength in her arms and back. The old woman shouted shocking obscenities as Tess turned her around. Back on her feet, Mother Gaida swayed dizzily, swatted Tess’s ear, and began to laugh.
“What are you?” she cried, unable to fit Tess into her usual categories for human people.
Tess wanted to say, A child of the Road, but feared she was already too eccentric for the old seamstress. Instead she said, “Just myself, Mother Gaida. Nothing more.”
The old woman still hesitated. “But…you’ve seen a man naked before? I’m afraid it’s not quite decent work for a young lady.”
“Let me meet him,” said Tess. “If he and I together feel it could work, I’d happily be his nursemaid until the end of winter.” Perhaps longer, but she wasn’t sure she’d want to keep that promise. Come spring, the Road would surely start calling again.
This satisfied the aged embroiderer. She tested Tess’s stitches, came to an agreement about wages, and found Tess some fill work to do (shocking her other embroiderers, who found Tess less giggle-worthy now). At the end of the day, Gaida locked up shop and led Tess a short way up the crooked street to another house, bigger than the place Tess’s family had been living in for the last couple of years. Its three stories were cantilevered above the street, each a little farther than the last, stone and then brick and then timber. The front entrance was a double door, like the doors of a stable.
The sun had set, but it was bright within; someone had lit the lamps. They seemed to have walked directly into the kitchen. “The house is laid out to accommodate my boy,” Gaida was explaining. “His bedroom is here.” She indicated another double door across the room. “Sitting room’s upstairs. You’ll be on the third floor, under the eaves.”
Before Tess could answer, a clanking and creaking from the next room raised the hairs on her arms. She shot a glance at Gaida, whose fuzzy chin wrinkled anxiously.
The double doors sprang open together, and in the doorway stood a man with eight legs.