Pathka opened his eyes; he’d been asleep. “Kikiu doesn’t resent me,” he said at last, ignoring the rest of Tess’s barbs. “It’s more like…ko has grown too big and feels trapped in ko own skin. It pinches. Kikiu needs to shed that polluted nest, but of course ko won’t. Ko has assimilated to their unnatural ways, and anyway, it’s easier to blame me. What’s a mother for but to be blamed?”
With that, he rolled onto his side away from the fire, signaling sleep more aggressively, and Tess was left to fend off her unwieldy feelings alone. She lay a long time, staring through branches at the night sky, until her temper was soothed by the cold impartiality of the stars.
* * *
First thing in the morning, as she was burying the ashes of the fire, Tess kicked up two stray bits of metal. One turned out to be a tiny key; Kikiu had apparently spit it into the dirt on parting. It unfastened the heavy manacle around Pathka’s ankle.
“That was kind of her,” said Tess.
“Symbolic, actually,” said Pathka, tossing the key and manacle into the ashes. “Now I’m completely free. Not that I’m complaining.”
Tess had palmed the other bit of metal, a pewter ring, which must have come from her pack. That meddling Seraphina had evidently sneaked it in there when she wasn’t looking.
“Pathka, be honest,” said Tess, worrying the thnik behind her back. “You said I was saving your life by journeying with you. Kikiu says I’m leading you toward death. Which is it?”
Pathka’s throat pouch quivered as he breathed. “I said you were naming my life, which is similar but not identical to saving. We name something to make it real, to give it meaning. You can name my life and I might still die. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“You’re not making me feel better,” said Tess miserably.
“Then how about this,” said Pathka. “You’ll be naming your life as well. Anathuthia will hold a mirror to your heart, answer the unanswerable, plane the rough places.”
“Destroy the world?” Tess was still skeptical.
“The world is surprisingly hard to destroy,” said Pathka gently. “Whereas saving it can be done a bit at a time. Anyway, don’t be afraid. We’re walking away from death, not toward it. Death is going back to Trowebridge.”
Tess rolled her eyes at the Quootla pun, and the tension broke. Pathka asked if there was any breakfast, and Tess brought out the last cheese.
Under its pristine wax shell, alas, the cheese was riddled with worms. Pathka gobbled it down, maggots and all. “They’re full of cheese, so they taste like cheese!” he announced. Tess couldn’t bring herself to try any. They walked through budding coppice toward the southern road, ignoring the ominous rumblings of Tess’s stomach, or any thoughts of what it would take, in the absence of coins, to fill it.
From her pocket, the ring niggled at her.
Pathka, who had an inner furnace to stoke, could not be satisfied with one grubby cheese. He rooted around in flooded ditches by the side of the road for rotting tubers and corms. Strands of algae dribbled from his chin like a horrible green beard.
Tess tried not to watch him eat, or smell his breath afterward.
Later in the year, the countryside would become a banquet of delicious things: berries, honey, wild onions, nuts. The fields Tess passed, alas, had but the first inklings, a verdant hint of bounty to come, or they were black and sodden, heaped with clotted dung (Pathka, disturbingly, ate his fill of dung). The scattered patches of forest held no edible treasures that Tess could discern; the blackberry canes barely had leaves yet, let alone berries.
She might have milked a sheep—not that she knew how. She considered it as she paralleled a pasture, watching the new lambs nurse and not watching Pathka sneak around the field eating dried-up ovine afterbirths.
He was making the ewes cagey. Could a stampede of sheep kill you? Even if the answer was no, Tess felt certain they’d make an exception for her. That would be an embarrassing way to go, and she’d already decided to walk on today. She didn’t dare risk it.
Capering lambs, endemic to the Goreddi countryside in spring, leaped into the air for pure exuberance, as if stung by bees of joy. They were happiness incarnate upon the new grass. Tess’s heart was lifted at first, but by her second hungry day, she took little pleasure in their antics.
By the third day, Tess was so ravenous that the pewter ring in her pack began whispering: One word, and Seraphina would fetch you. You were never hungry at home. You never got blisters or raw places where your boot tops chafed you.
“Quiet, ring,” Tess muttered through her teeth. There was no going home. She’d be delivering herself up to the convent.
Plenty to eat at a convent, said the ring, sensibly.
Nearby lambs bleated raucously and kicked up their silly heels in agreement. “Quiet, lambs!” Tess cried, walking faster.
Beyond the next rise, a well-to-do yeoman farmstead stretched along a burbling creek, tidy and bucolic, like something out of a painting. Cherubs would not have been out of place in the blossoming peach trees, or a sunbeam bursting out of the clouds to set the thatched roofs ablaze with gold.
Tess froze in her tracks, not for awe but because she’d caught a waft of baking bread and found herself paralyzed by want.
“Pathka,” she half whispered, and Pathka appeared beside her, like a fairy godlizard. “It’s all right to steal if you’re very hungry, isn’t it? Heaven would forgive me, surely?”
“Is that why you haven’t been eating?” said Pathka. “I thought maybe you were fasting to let your gut fauna recuperate.”
Gut fauna was not a quigutl phrase Tess knew. Even with copious explanation—“Your intestines are full of tiny bugs”—her ears rebelled from understanding. It couldn’t be true. Pathka was teasing.
“I don’t want to steal from serfs and villeins,” she said. “They’re poor.”
“Poorer than you?” asked Pathka shrewdly. “Not likely. Anyway, I reject ‘poor’ as the artificial creation of humans and dragons. Hunger exists, though, and a hungry creature is entitled to eat.”
Tess was so hungry, in fact, that the smell of bread was making her dizzy. She couldn’t follow Pathka’s argument, but she could follow him toward the farmstead.
“You grab some bread,” he was saying, like a general laying out battle plans. “I’ll sneak into the henhouse and the cold storage. I’ll meet you on the other side of the stream, in that stand of beech trees.”
He disappeared into the weeds behind the walled garden. Tess shook herself, trying to focus, and crept into the farmstead.
Stealing from a yeoman farmstead wasn’t the same as stealing from serfs, though Tess didn’t appreciate the distinction; country folk were all “peasants” to her. A yeoman farmer did not own land—that belonged to his lord—but he owned the house and stock and was free to give up farming if he liked. Serfs were more like trees: they couldn’t move, owned nothing but their leaves (so to speak), and could be cut down at will. A yeoman might have serfs in his charge, belonging to the land he rented. The yeoman made use of their labor, oversaw the payment of debts and the resolution of disputes, and acted as a subcontracted agent for the local lord.
Tess was not, therefore, stealing from the abjectly poor this time. Knowing would not have eased her conscience, though. Her head was full of scriptural admonitions against thievery, recited helpfully in her mother’s voice, as she crept across the farmyard.
The brick oven had been emptied; a girl cleared out the ashes with a hoe. Tess passed behind her, walking when the hoe scraped, pausing when it paused. She still smelled bread, and it didn’t take the olfactory prowess of a quigutl to tell it was coming from the main house.
Her nose led to an open window and five perfect loaves cooling on a breadboard inside. Tess almost reached in, but at the last minute glanced up and saw the woman of the house stirring a cauld
ron over the fire. Tess ducked, heart pounding, and listened hard. The woman hummed as she worked; the sound came no closer. Tess stood up to one side, out of view, and peeked cautiously around the frame. The woman hadn’t moved.
Silent as a shadow, Tess leaned over the sill and wrapped her fingers around the nearest loaf.
It was hot; she winced but didn’t cry out. She fetched the loaf back quickly, so as not to burn herself. In her haste, her elbow bumped the rod holding the casement open, and the window fell on Tess’s shoulder. She gasped. The woman turned, saw Tess, and bellowed like a bull. Tess valiantly kept her grip on the hot bread, pulling it out and letting the window fall shut.
Then she ran.
There was no time for care or consideration in this run. She noticed farmhands, dimly, and dodged behind the barn, the henhouse, the well, a wheelbarrow, whatever she could to avoid them. Maybe they saw her, maybe they didn’t; they were running indoors to answer the woman’s cry, and Tess’s presence might not have sunk in until they reached the kitchen and heard the story. Then they probably thought, Wait, I did see a boy in a striped jacket, now that you mention it, and he looked a proper villain, and maybe I should set the dogs loose and they’ll sort him out.
Tess’s lungs burned and her vision was spotty by the time she reached the beech grove where Pathka had said to meet. She didn’t dare stop so close to the house. She ran—or, more accurately, staggered stubbornly onward—until she reached a cattle guard, a bridge of narrow slats that a cow, being bulky, would shy away from crossing. She crawled into the ditch under the bridge and lay in the weeds, panting. Sunlight poured through the slats in slanting stripes.
When she had breath enough, she laughed, and when she could laugh no more, she tore into that bread like a vulture into a bloated carcass. The interior steamed, scalding the roof of her mouth, but she didn’t care. She’d never tasted such sweet, rapturous bread in her life.
Her head nested in spindly weeds; beyond them the sky glowed preternaturally blue through the slats. As her chewing slowed, she noticed a bee crawling along a blade of grass above her head. She counted its stripes, amazed to see them juxtaposed with the stripes of sky. The bee’s were a warning, the sky’s a promise she could not yet fathom, and for a moment everything seemed connected, aching beauty and imminent danger, the fragility of the bee and the scalded roof of her mouth, the transcendent savor of bread and the fact that she was literally lying in a ditch.
The moment made such a deep impression that she never forgot it, but she couldn’t explain it except with the single word: there. She was there. Present in herself. She wasn’t always, so it was worth remarking upon.
Pathka caught up soon after, an iron pan in his dorsal hands, and in the pan fresh eggs, smoked meat, a wedge of soft cheese, and a jar of peach jam. There was no bread left for the jam, but Tess happily scooped it out with two fingers and ate it like that. The bee had buzzed off, or she might’ve extended a jammy finger to it, as if it were a friend.
She closed the jar and stowed the rest in her pack for later. “Are they still looking for me?” she whispered to Pathka.
“They’re looking for a quigutl,” he said, his voice like a gravel road. “I showed myself and left musk about to confuse the dogs. Try to be stealthier, if you don’t mind.”
“It was my first time!” Tess protested, crawling out from under the bridge.
“It was almost your last,” said Pathka mildly. “I suppose you’ll improve with practice.”
* * *
Tess slept hard that night, her belly full and her whole being exhausted by running and danger. Pathka let her sleep a whole hour past sunrise before pouncing on her.
“I spotted several cave entrances when I was foraging,” he cried, sitting on her chest. “Today we find the best one and begin our journey toward Anathuthia.”
“Pluhhh,” said Tess blearily. She’d been having a terrible dream—her mother had dismembered her, put her in a basket, and lowered her into a pit where a monster lurked, all the while berating her for choosing to be sacrificed this way. She’d been so deep, in both sleep and pit, that she was having trouble pulling herself out.
“I thought we’d begun,” she muttered. “And that Anathuthia was south. In Ninys. Under a wheat field.”
A terrible idea occurred to her; she tried to sit up but was prevented by Pathka’s weight on her ribs. “You don’t intend us to travel underground to Ninys,” said Tess, flopping back.
“No, no. Do you remember what I was doing in Trowebridge that upset everyone?”
“Bleeding in the well?” Tess eyed him suspiciously.
“That’s what I did, but it wasn’t what I was doing,” said Pathka, climbing off her. “I was calling to Anathuthia. We can’t go to her without calling her first; we’d never get close. I need to get deep underground to do the—the needful things.”
Tess sat up, still suspicious. He was blazing with tics and wriggles, body language she couldn’t quite parse. “Does it involve bleeding?”
“Kikiu made it sound worse than it is,” said Pathka.
“Then make it sound better.”
“It’s called kemthikemthlutl,” he said. Tess untangled the word with some difficulty: a dream within a dream that is also the opposite of a dream within a dream. “I need to go deep and sleep,” Pathka went on, “and also bleed, but only a little. It will let Anathuthia know I’m coming, and she, in turn, will indicate more precisely where we should go. I hope.”
The thought of blood made Tess shudder, but she decided this was some kind of ritual, a symbolic sacrifice not meant to kill him, and that reconciled her a bit.
“Fine,” she said with more bravado than she felt. “You can try it, but if I perceive that you’re in danger of dying—”
There was no way to finish that sentence. She had no idea what she’d do.
She ate hastily, packed up, and followed him toward a stream leading into the trees. They soon reached a humid glen where a cave mouth gaped under a crumbling overhang.
Tess had never been in a cave, though Goredd was riddled with them. Soft limestone underpinned this part of the Southlands, and it was carved by trickling, persistent streams that joined into underground rivers, the unseen arteries of the world. Some were reputedly enormous, bigger than any river on land, rushing through darkness toward who knew where.
Caves made for fascinating lectures at St. Bert’s, but the actual cave mouth exhaled a breath of decay. The prospect of entering that empty darkness made Tess shudder. “What if there’s a cave-in?” she asked Pathka, who was winding dry fern fronds upon the end of a stick. “Limestone caves are prone to those. Water weakens the rock, and—”
“We won’t know what hit us, because we’ll be dead,” said Pathka, his nimble dorsal fingers tying the fronds securely. He set them aflame with his tongue. “Or we will know, and we’ll die in protracted agony. There’s no point worrying about it beforehand.”
He handed Tess the torch and plunged into the darkness without a backward glance.
Tess, intensely discomfited, got up her nerve and followed.
The cramped, muddy cave pierced deep into the hillside and soon left daylight behind. A giggling rivulet traipsed across the floor; Tess avoided it at first, then decided that’s what boots were for. Pathka adhered himself to the ceiling and crawled upside down. Tess worried about singeing his tail with her torch, but if the flames licked him, he seemed not to notice. He wound among jutting thumbs of rock, none dramatic enough to be called a stalactite. Tess hit her head twice, because her attention was occupied downward. Minnows swam in the rivulet, and a fat white salamander. She laid her hand on a rock, and something disturbingly leggy scuttled over it.
Tess recoiled, inhaling sharply; the torch revealed an enormous ghostly cricket, almost transparent. She laughed then at her own apprehensions. The darkness was full, fuller than sh
e would ever have guessed, and she found this curiously comforting.
They reached the egress and burst out into sunshine again. Tess felt strangely exhilarated and sorry to be out so soon. Pathka seemed twitchy and cranky. “You didn’t try your dream-in-a-bloody-not-dream thing,” Tess said.
“It wasn’t right,” Pathka said, rubbing himself in the grass. “I can’t reach her here.”
Tess didn’t mind. She extinguished her torch and said, “Let’s find another.”
There were many such crevasses to choose from. They tried two more that afternoon, to Tess’s immense delight, but Pathka soon became frustrated. “These limestone crannies are too shallow,” he grumbled. “I suspect we need something deeper.”
The word gave Tess a chill, eagerness and dread combined. Deeper would be more dangerous, without question; she both wanted and feared it. Pathka, however, seemed done for the day. For now, Tess had to settle for deeper south. She followed Pathka through tall grass, across a stony field of sprouts, and back to the road, into the heart of the heart of the country.
Every morning, as she’d promised herself in Trowebridge, Tess made the decision to live. It was getting easier, even if thieving was difficult and dangerous and she never got any better at it. She had Pathka, and she found joy in walking the road.
This eccentric quest was a pilgrimage, she decided. Pathka hadn’t said so explicitly, but Anathuthia was more than megafauna to him. She was practically a goddess, which was astonishing if you knew anything about quigutl. They weren’t as purely rationalistic as the greater dragons, but one didn’t expect religion of any kind in reptiles. Tess had been taught from childhood that belief was uniquely human.
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