Tess and Pathka reached the great southern seaport of Mardou two weeks later. So did Kikiu, Pathka reported, though she did not travel with them. “I feel ko following,” said Pathka reassuringly. “Ko pushes and pulls but will not run away. Have a little faith.”
Pathka himself seemed different in a way Tess could not put her finger on. There was no more frolicking and vomiting and rubbing up against her knee—and no easily wounded irritation, which was a relief. He seemed to float along on some unseen, tranquil river. She chalked it up to Anathuthia, that the dreaming had given her friend a wider perspective, or that he was no longer quite of this world.
She couldn’t bring herself to mention the capture of the egg, not yet. Pathka seemed fragile, like a cobweb, and she did not know what would send him back into the splitting death.
The town of Mardou had a harbor large enough to hold ships from around the world as well as river barges from the interior. Tess, who’d led a thoroughly landlocked existence up to now, gazed in awe at the forest of masts and sails, the cargo cranes creaking and straining, and the wide, dark sea.
It touched sky at a far horizon. She remembered how, when she’d first left Trowebridge, the sky had looked impossibly huge over the plain. The blue dome seemed even vaster out here.
Tess took a room at a dockside inn, Do Gabitta (The Gull), and set to learning whatever she could about Countess Mardou. Crucially, the expedition had not yet departed; the countess’s Porphyrian baranque, the Avodendron, still languished in harbor, waiting on the delivery of “Lord Morney’s contraption,” whatever that might be.
The countess herself was easy to find: you had only to follow the excitement and cheering, and then look for the bobbing plumes of her hat. She scorned carriages and could frequently be seen striding through the center of town in her shiny boots, kissing babies and accepting gifts and adulation.
Tess tailed her at a distance, studying her and looking for the best angle of approach.
The easiest thing would have been to call on the countess at home, so of course Tess rejected that out of hand. Seraphina had told her exactly what to do—beg forgiveness and list her serpent-finding credentials—but Tess was Tess, however far she walked, and no less pigheaded than the day she’d set out. She would do this her own way.
If she could figure out how. There was always Seraphina’s way to fall back on if intuition failed, galling though it was.
Upon her third day in Mardou, an enormous crate arrived in a wagon hauled by six heavy horses. It took the largest crane in the harbor to get it aboard the Avodendron. Lord Morney’s contraption had arrived at last; Tess’s time was up.
The tide would be right for departure at sunset. She had eight hours to come up with the best way to approach Countess Margarethe. Tess paced the piers, trying not to fret. Trying to empty her mind, in fact, on the principle that she knew the answer already and needed to give it a chance to come to the surface, unimpeded.
Tess’s peregrinations took her past a contract house, where sea captains and shipping companies signed agreements before a lawyer. The top half of the door was open, in celebration of the warm morning (it wasn’t that warm, but one of those spring days that feel balmy compared with the previous months), and conversation was spilling out. One voice, in particular, like a nail on slate—a grating, nasal whinge—pulled Tess out of her reverie. There was no mistaking it. She stopped short, backed up a few steps, and squinted into the dim interior.
A solicitor, pale and narrow as a moonbeam, sat behind a broad desk, scribbling diligently. To his left stood a frowsy sea captain; to his right, a cluster of four saarantrai, silver bells dinging tinnily. Tess’s eye went straight to the dragons, to the one whose voice she knew, though she could barely believe it. Scholar Spira, like a lumpy dumpling, hair of indeterminate color curling at the ears, pedantically instructed the solicitor about some fussy contract detail.
Scholar Spira and three other dragons were hiring a ship.
The solicitor stated the obvious: “I’ve never contracted an exploration vessel for dragons before. I wonder that you don’t just fly south under your own power. You’ve no treaty with the islanders stating you can’t.”
“Bah, they wouldn’t want to fly,” grumbled the sea captain, who had an interest in their not flying, to be sure. “Nothing for them to eat in the far south but Voorka tusk-seals.”
“My paramour is Pelaguese,” said the solicitor tartly, “and he makes a delicious Voorka-flipper pie.”
“Forgive us, sir,” Spira interceded in a syrupy voice. “The seals are fatty, as you know, and they upset our tummies.”
That comment was so Spira, so patronizing and obsequious at once, that Tess had to stifle a laugh. It came out as a snort.
Scholar Spira looked up sharply and met Tess’s eyes.
She turned and ran, which was probably unnecessary. Surely Spira wouldn’t have recognized her, four years later, with her hair short? And even if the scholar had known Tess’s face, or smelled her at that distance, what was going to happen? Would Spira exact long-delayed revenge for the theft and reprimand?
Tess’s feet slowed. Guilt had propelled her, and a reflexive association of Spira with Will. She owed the scholar an apology, certainly, but that was nothing to be afraid of.
In fact, Spira’s presence might be a blessing.
Tess had barely formulated this idea when she thought she heard her name. She’d reached the end of the pier, where the wind whipped flags around their poles and suspended furious, flapping gulls in midair. Only snatches of her name got through at first: a T and then the vowel, which might have been a barking seal. The -ss was lost altogether.
She turned, expecting Spira, but a tall, stout man was approaching. The wind harassed his longish dark hair into his eyes. He wore a gray cloak and sturdy boots and had traveled far on foot (she could spot another child of the Road).
Tess crossed her arms, not sure what to think.
“You seem not to recognize me,” he said in Goreddi as he stepped up beside her. He had a familiar, aristocratic accent. Those haughty vowels had been present at some terrible moment, but she couldn’t…
Oh yes she could. Her eyes snapped to his face, and there were the beetling brows, the sharp crow’s eyes, the nose she’d broken. “Saints’ bones,” she said warily. “What are you doing at the butt end of Ninys?”
Jacomo—Lord Jacomo, the student-priest, often imitated—smiled. That had not been a custom of his, to her recollection, and she didn’t trust it. “I’ve only come where you led me,” he said, shivering against the intrusive wind.
“You’ve been following me?” This couldn’t be good.
He held up his hands as if to fend off a blow.
Tess refolded her arms, which had indeed risen to defend her.
Jacomo said, “Not…not the way you make it sound. Your sister sent me.”
“I just saw her,” said Tess incredulously. “She couldn’t call me on the thnimi?”
“Your other sister, Tess. Your twin.”
Of course he meant Jeanne. How had Jeanne evaporated so completely from her worries?
“Could we go indoors?” Jacomo asked. “The wind is blowing my words the wrong way.”
Tess ushered him toward Seaman’s Row, a convenient line of taverns awaiting sailors home from the south. Singing wafted from the first public house they reached, bawdy verses punctuated by abundant yo! and ho!—the universal syllables of maritime mirth.
She wouldn’t have been able to hear Jacomo in there, which was tempting, but she led him past it to a quieter, dumpier bar called Des Mamashuperes (The Squids).