Josquin looked up at her, a look with uncountable facets; she waited for the words. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I feel like I should, and maybe someday I will, but…I don’t know how to make you understand. On a bad day—and there have been plenty of those—I might’ve said yes, please, wave your wand and make it go away. Now, though? I hate how ungrateful I sound, but I find the idea insulting, as if you were saying, ‘All your pain was a mistake. Here, have everything back.’ Except it wouldn’t be everything, not the time, not the suffering, not the thousand ways I’ve changed.”
He shifted in the water. “I wouldn’t wish for this, Tess, but I’m not sure I’d wish it away, either. Does that make any sense at all?”
Tess couldn’t speak. She remembered Countess Margarethe, swooping in like some fairy godmother with all of Tess’s abandoned hopes on a plate, and remembered her own reaction.
His hand was still on the edge of the tub. Tess laid her hand over his and squeezed. And that was the beginning, though neither of them knew it yet.
Tess, who was occupied a great deal with embroidery, did not at first understand that Josquin didn’t stay home all day. She’d assumed he must be a shut-in; he’d mentioned friends, but she figured they came to see him and not the other way around. Only when she noticed that Gaida never seemed to do any shopping but there was always food at home did she begin to realize Josquin had an entire life outside the house.
If the weather cooperated, he went out every day. He’d been off the herald circuit for more than five years, but he still knew half of Segosh. When Tess had an afternoon off, she began to accompany him, to market or the Hall of Archives or the Spotted Livery, where elderly members of the Brotherhood of Heralds drank.
If Tess didn’t have an afternoon off, she soon learned that she could get one by saying to Gaida, “Josquin asked me to—”
“Of course,” Gaida would reply. “Go.”
Josquin knew the masters of the Ninysh Academy. “When you’re a marvel of medicine and engineering,” he explained to Tess as she followed him through the market with a shopping basket, “of course they all want a good look. I should have died, if not from my injury then from infection. Between Dr. Belestros and St. Blanche, I’ve been a prop at more than twenty lectures.”
Tess looked at him sidelong. “?‘Prop’? That must get old quickly.”
“It would,” he said, “but St. Blanche is a darling and I can begrudge her nothing. Also, it’s important. Others will be saved, thanks to my patient posing. It’s a small price to pay.”
He didn’t say it aloud, but Tess understood: a miraculous serpent-cure would render their work and his sacrifices unnecessary. That didn’t make it bad, just…less simple than it seemed.
Tess polished an apple on her jerkin. “Could you get Tes’puco an invitation to speak?”
“I can advise Tes’puco—if that is his real name—that Grand High Master Pashfloria wants to be petitioned in writing.”
Tess got right to it, colonizing Josquin’s desk when they got home. He barely had time to hide his poetry. “He who snoozeth gets his verses read,” said Tess while Josquin snatched away notes, correspondence, and poems dense with scrawled commentary. Tess wasn’t that interested in his poetry, which was surely all damp laments for lost Seraphina; she only meant to tease him.
“What hand would Tes’puco use? Something brash and masculine.” She wrote I swashed and buckled my way across Iboia in several trial scripts.
“Which hand is your own?” said Josquin, sorting his work onto different shelves.
“All of them,” said Tess, choosing her manliest and setting to work.
She signed her long petition Tes’puco the Explorer. “You sound like a character in a children’s story,” Josquin teased, but Tess would not be dissuaded.
Master Pashfloria replied two days later, expressing mild doubts about her story. Tess sent him one of the bowl-sized scales from Big Spooky, a sketch of Santi Prudia and the caverns beneath it, and finally, for good measure, a wholly inadequate drawing of Anathuthia.
It took the Grand High Master a week to write back, and Tess despaired that her request had been denied. When his letter finally arrived, however, it told her she was booked to give a speech before the entire assembly at the Great Odeon in three weeks. She wrote a gracious note of acceptance in Tes’puco’s best formal handwriting. Less formally, she danced around Josquin’s room; he watched her with a spark of fond amusement in his eye.
Josquin had called upon his old comrades at the Brotherhood of Heralds to deliver these missives. “We need the work,” he told her as they trundled down to the Spotted Livery. “Now that thniks have become so commonplace, our ranks are dwindling. We still escort dignitaries, but we’re not the fastest way to carry news anymore.”
Tess noted the first-person pronouns. He was still a herald in his heart.
Taking the letters gave him an excuse to spend an afternoon with the old-timers. Not that he needed an excuse; in addition to his poetry, he was writing a history of the Ninysh heralds, so he went several times a week to take notes and drink beer around the flimsy green tables.
Tess liked to go along and listen. The old heralds had ridden every road in Ninys, and there was something comforting and familiar in their tales. The Road took them from adventure to adventure; they met curious characters, left them behind, and found them again. Tess could almost see the warp and weft of a great tapestry, the world, being woven as they spoke.
Occasionally the stories got ribald. Tess’s presence seemed not to deter anyone from telling such tales; she only hoped Josquin didn’t see how she blushed. Indeed, Josquin’s bawdy stories were in some ways the worst. Not that he went into lascivious detail—he wasn’t one to wax rhapsodic about heaving bosoms or curvaceous backsides—but he was unfailingly frank. If he’d painted himself as a dashing romantic hero, she could have imagined he was talking about someone else. Tess found herself uncomfortably moved by his transparency.
“Tell me something,” she said one day as they walked home to make supper for Gaida. The late autumn sky arced clear and blue above them. “Have you had a lot of paramours?”
“How many is a lot?” he said. “More than six? Less than eight? In that case, yes. Most of them after the accident, if that’s your real question.”
Tess gaped at him; she should have known he’d be forthright and direct. “But…do you have bastard children? Surely you must.”
“Heavens, I hope not. No one’s ever told me so,” he said, raising his brows mildly as if this had never occurred to him. “It’s easy enough to avoid.” Tess frowned at the word easy.
“Remind me sometime and I’ll show you Rebecca’s ‘basket of joy,’?” he said. “Midwives know these things; she always had a mountain of herbs, Porphyrian pessary resin, you name it.”
Tess could not have named any of it and was lightly appalled that he could mention such things so casually, as if they were nothing. Deep in her gut, a little flame of anger burned. She could’ve used such knowledge, once upon a time, if anyone had seen fit to inform her. She scowled to herself, but had no intention of reminding him to show her the basket.
And yet.
Like the metaphorical cat she was—stalked by curiosity—she finally conquered her mortification and asked. Josquin showed her everything in the basket and explained what it was for. Tess learned new words and went red as a beet, and Josquin kindly pretended not to notice.
* * *
It was probably inevitable that Tess began to feel things for Josquin that she would rather not have felt.
It wasn’t merely that he was so open about his lovers and willing to answer her questions, although that certainly helped. Tess saw Josquin naked almost every day. He was beautiful, there was no denying it, even if his legs were thin and he had odd equipment. This was not a euphemism: he had a variety of apparatuses that helped him live—braces, tubes, catheters—designed and installed by St. Blanche. Tess had at first pretended not to see, but after a while it seemed no more grotesque than anything else a body had on offer—sinew, blood, or bone. There was a poetry to it, and a comedy, and much less tragedy than she would have assumed.