Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  Quigutl religion would have made an astonishing lecture at the Collegium. Tess sometimes imagined herself on the dais in front of St. Fredricka’s mural, dumbfounding everyone. Spira would be in one corner, mouth open in disbelief. Ondir (implausibly) would have fainted dead away, and Will…

  She always stopped imagining when Will showed up, and turned her attention back to the real world, where Pathka was zigzagging merrily ahead of her.

  Over the years apart, she’d all but forgotten what Pathka was like, so lively and nosy, always in motion. He reminded her, achingly, of Faffy—not that Pathka was a pet (an offensive notion to a quigutl), or that he physically resembled the long-legged, narrow-waisted snaphound. Together they’d been a trio of pure mischief, frolicking in the courtyard, exploring tunnels under the city. They’d formed a continuum, with Faffy at the animal end, Tess at the human, and Pathka definitively demonstrating that there was no great distance between the poles.

  “If you have a personality, you’re a person,” Seraphina had once told Anne-Marie in defense of dragonkind. Tess had taken this deeply to heart. Faffy and Pathka were both persons to her, the main difference being that Pathka could talk.

  Pathka had understood Goreddi and had known the Southlander alphabet well enough to improvise spelling. Tess had quickly gained insight into Quootla without Seraphina’s help.

  Which was just as well, because Seraphina, prickly as a thistle, didn’t like quigutl. “I can’t stand listening to them,” she’d said, tuning her oud and barely glancing at Tess. “Their language is nothing but Mootya with a bad lisp, and it drives me to distraction.”

  “It’s not Mootya at all,” Tess had answered crossly. “They have their own language, and it’s called Quootla, and you don’t understand anything.”

  That was one time Tess had been indisputably right, and that heady feeling had goaded her to learn contradictory case, future-past tense, the secret words quigutl never uttered in front of dragons—anything Seraphina wouldn’t know. Seraphina hadn’t taken it graciously; she always had to know one thing more than you. She had the facts.

  Mama had the moral answers. And Tess was always wrong.

  The farther she walked, the more irrelevant that seemed.

  Walking was a good in itself, right and just and necessary. The road gave her no small measure of joy. Every day brought new vistas—the white conical roofs of oast-houses, a fox with her kits, an undiscovered color in the evening sky. Anything might be around the next bend; she could walk forever and never reach the end.

  The road was possibility, the kind she’d thought her life would never hold again, and Tess herself was motion. Motion had no past, only future. Any direction you walked was forward, and that was as must be.

  Walk on became her credo; she repeated it to herself every morning upon deciding to get up and exist for one more day.

  * * *

  Her days began before dawn, when the birds started arguing. Tess would eat whatever scrap of food she had left and listen to animated avian conversation all around her.

  Birdsong was a language, unquestionably. She could discern calls and answers, aggression and capitulation and seduction. Warnings. Rapture. She wondered how long it would take to learn such a language without the advantages she’d had with Pathka.

  If you’d paid as much attention to family and duty as you paid to dumb animals, said her mother’s voice in her mind, you might not have been such a disappointing daughter.

  That kind of thought was her cue to get going.

  “Walking on now,” Tess told Mama-in-her-head, kicking dirt over last night’s ashes. “I think I’ll live one more day.”

  She’d slept in an orchard, and disintegrating apple blossoms had shed petals over everything like snow. Heavy dew made them cling to her blanket and pack.

  Pathka was nowhere to be seen, but he often woke earlier than she did and went foraging. She’d start walking. Pathka always found her.

  The sun began to rise in earnest; Tess loved the way it illuminated treetops first, turning the foliage white-gold. The sky behind was warmly blue, and in the west a gibbous moon lingered in the branches like a pale fish caught in a net.

  Like a delicious secret. Tess blew it a cheeky kiss.

  The sun was well up and the moon long set by the time Tess reached a peasant hamlet. This was not a village as a city girl like Tess understood it. There was no church, no tavern, no fountain or market square, but a collection of house-barns, wherein people lived under the same roof as their animals, clustered around a green for common grazing. The fields were cultivated in long strips, so no single household got all the best land. There’d be an ancient vaulted chamber under the green, a place to hide in the event of dragon attack, used for hay storage now. It was an antiquated arrangement, the old high-feudal style.

  At one corner of the green stood the communal bake oven, like an upturned clay bowl, its aging whitewash streaked with soot. It belched smoke like a little dragon.

  Tess paused in the road, her stomach souring. If walking was the best part of her day, stealing was the worst, and she was sorry to stumble into it so soon. She didn’t dare pass this place by. Who knew how far away the next opportunity would be?

  Pathka still hadn’t caught up, which concerned her. If he was off bleeding in some cavern by himself, she was going to be thoroughly cross. They had a deal.

  An unspoken deal, she now realized. She’d have to change that.

  Tess glumly began picking her way toward the oven. Most of the peasants, dressed in smocks and clogs, were working the long strip fields, spreading manure (the breeze confirmed) and hoeing cabbage sprouts. Someone should be watching the lambs on the green and minding that oven. Tess couldn’t see anyone yet.

  The hamlet was a maze of low stone walls. Tess duck-walked alongside them, but inconveniently there were no gates, only jutting stone stiles, difficult to clamber over discreetly. She poked her nose over a wall, like a mole taking stock of the upside world, and then flattened herself against the top and rolled over into the next yard. She crossed three walls this way without spotting the shepherd.

  As Tess topped the fourth wall, however, she glimpsed a pair of girls about her own age across the green. They’d been sitting in the shade of the wall, deep in conversation, and were now getting to their feet, crooks in hand.

  They saw her at the same moment she saw them.

  Tess dived over and quickly crabbed on all fours. She scuttled around a corner and out of sight before the girls reached the near edge of the green.

  “We seen you spying, Mumpinello,” cried one of the girls. “You can’t hide from us in our own home. We will flush you out.”

  “And then beat you with a stick,” called her shorter companion enthusiastically.

  The girls, who clearly knew their business, hopped onto the wall and began walking around on top, crooks in hand, peering into every enclosure.

  Tess crawled frantically; the only way to elude them was to keep moving. She reached one dead end and then another, until her only options were a muddy culvert (which would surely ruin her jacket) and a pigsty where a sow nursed her piglets. Sows—even a city girl knew—were famously fierce. Even if it didn’t bite her, it would scream, and Tess would be found.

  She’d lost this game of hide-and-seek. There was nothing left but make it no worse.

  She stood up, hands raised in a gesture of submission.

  The peasant girls ran toward her over top of the walls, surefooted as goats. They were laughing, which Tess took as an encouraging sign.

  “Oh, fie, it’s not Mumpinello at all,” said the taller and stouter of the girls, gathering her homespun skirts and leaping down to stand by Tess. “State your sneaky business, stranger,” she said, tossing her fair braids behind her shoulders, “and submit to our righteous judgment.”

  “This is the cour
t of the shepherdesses,” said the smaller, darker one cheekily. She stayed atop the wall, her crook leveled at Tess’s head. “Behave, villain. I’d hate to have to scream for my da.”

  “I can assure you—” Tess began, but the short one swatted her on the head.

  “None of your oily talk,” said the lass beside Tess, putting her hands on her broad hips. “We ask the questions. Why were you spying on us? If it were for lecherous purposes, I warn you, we will string you up.”

  “By your walnuts,” cried the shepherdess on the wall, the tiny dog barking loudest.

  “I can assure you”—some instinct helped Tess dodge another swing of the crook—“I have no vile designs upon your persons.”

  Here the shepherdesses looked unexpectedly crestfallen. Tess blinked at the pair of them, uncomprehending. “I—I only wanted some bread,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “So you thought to rob us!” cried the small, elevated one, shaking her crook menacingly.

  “Our father will thank us for catching a robbing bastard,” said the bigger girl at Tess’s elbow, practically purring in Tess’s ear. “You’ll never persuade me and Blodwen to let you go.”

  “Actually,” said Tess, whose father was a lawyer, “it would have been theft, not robbery. Robbery implies violence, and I am not prepared for violence in any way.”

  Blodwen, on the wall, threw up her hands; the girl beside Tess snorted disgustedly. There was some game they were trying to play with her, Tess suddenly realized. Her capture was the most exciting thing since Mumpinello, whoever that was, and now she was disappointing them.

  “B-because I’ve given up my former violent ways,” Tess added hastily, improvising. “After killing that man. I vowed never to be violent again, and went to become a priest.”

  The girls pricked up their ears and exchanged a meaningful look. “Old Father Martius,” said Blodwen from the wall, nodding portentously. “He’s probably a killer, too, Gwenda.”

  “So many priests have secret pasts,” said Gwenda, her wheaten brows arched mournfully. “But what did you do, Father? Was it a crime of passion or of cold-blooded calculation?”

  Tess, secretly amused to be called Father, molded her mouth into a frown with some difficulty. “Passion, of course,” she said.

  The shepherdesses clapped and grinned with morbid glee. Tess realized they would not be satisfied until they’d wrung every gory detail from the tale. She cleared her throat. “It’s a long story, and I could tell it better if my throat weren’t so dry.”

  The girls eagerly took the hint. Blodwen pranced along the wall to fetch Tess a drink, while Gwenda led Tess over a stile into the sheep enclosure where they might sit in the shade and resume tending lambs while Tess talked. Blodwen returned with a rough-hewn cup of barley water—you could never be sure if a priest would drink beer—but it was cooling and delicious and Tess couldn’t complain.

  Tess licked the last drops off her lips. She’d had time to think of a good story. “I fell in love with Julissima Rossa, wife of the Duke of Barrabou, and she with me.”

  It was a Dozerius the Pirate tale; they surely didn’t have imported Porphyrian storybooks out here. The girls listened raptly to how Tess had gone half mad and attacked the duke with a sword over breakfast, only to have Julissima Rossa repent her infidelity when she saw the old man bleeding into his porridge.

  “You cruel, terrible man,” cried Julissima Rossa, putting a jeweled dagger to her ebony breast. “You’ve killed my husband and ruined me, and I curse you for it.”

  The shepherdesses gasped at Julissima Rossa’s suicide and clutched at their hearts in pity to hear that her family had barred Tess from the funeral.

  “The duke’s son still pursues me,” said Tess in conclusion. “And he will continue unto the ends of the earth until he has vengeance, a bill paid in my very blood.”

  “Won’t the church protect you, Father?” said Blodwen with tears in her brown eyes. “Does it mean nothing that you’ve repented?”

  “It matters not a jot,” said Tess, her voice breaking slightly, overcome by her own imaginings. “What’s done cannot be undone. A moment’s lapse in judgment, and you’re lost forever. I should probably lie down in a ditch and wait for my fate to overtake me.”

  “Never!” cried Gwenda, with such vehemence that three nearby ewes, startled from their grazing, trotted away across the green. “Blodwen, fetch Father…um…”

  “Father Jacomo,” Tess offered helpfully, feeling a little foolish to be invoking Jeanne’s brother-in-law yet again. She needed a deeper well of emergency names.

  “Fetch Father Jacomo some bread,” said Gwenda, hauling herself to her feet. “I know which stores Auntie Dee won’t miss.”

  The girls rushed off and returned with bread, eggs, and a jar of pickled beets bundled into a clean kerchief. Tess felt a pang of guilt: this was a big gift from people who couldn’t spare much. She began to stammer an apology, but the girls wouldn’t hear it. They walked Tess to the edge of the hamlet, eyeing the road in both directions as if expecting any moment to see the junior Duke of Barrabou thundering toward them on a charger.

  “Ah,” said Tess, pressing a hand mournfully to her heart, “if things were different, and I hadn’t taken orders, I’d give you each a kiss for your generosity.”

  “You joined a celibate order?” cried Blodwen, apparently disappointed.

  “Of course he did, stupid,” said Gwenda, swatting her. “He’s genuinely penitent, and his crime was amorous as well as violent.”

  “I belong to St. Vitt,” said Tess, flashing a pained smile. “No half measures for me.”

  “As must be, Father,” said Gwenda, bowing her head. “Heaven mind your road.”

  “When your enemies come looking, we won’t tell them where you went,” piped up Blodwen as Tess turned to go. “We never saw you here.”

  Tess walked backward, waving goodbye, and then set her face southward again.

  * * *

  The shepherdesses’ merriment wore off, and Tess found herself curiously unhappy, itchy in her very soul. Fields of buttercups nodded under the noonday sky; Tess drifted past, unseeing, spooling out uncomfortable feelings like a weaver untangling her weft.

  She’d been so wrapped up in her story that she’d inadvertently told the girls something true: it mattered not a jot that she’d repented. A moment’s lapse in judgment, and her future had been lost forever.

  The shepherdesses, though, had forgiven her transgressions—or rather, Father Jacomo’s transgressions. He’d killed a man in a fit of passion, he was a murderer, but the sin was adorable on him because of course he hadn’t meant to, poor darling. He was the victim of his own strong emotions, which made him terribly romantic.

  And the worst was, Tess had felt it, too. She’d been as caught up as the shepherdesses—the story was an old favorite, in fact—but at the same time something had changed. Some part of that tale galled her. She felt like she was seeing with two different eyes: an eye full of stars that still saw the romance, and a new eye, one she’d acquired while walking, an eye full of…

  It was full of fire, she decided. Her second eye saw the flesh of this story burned away, held the bones up to her own story, and saw the injustice.

  She’d committed a crime of passion, too, but hers had created life, whereas Father Jacomo—Dozerius the Pirate, really—had taken life. In fact, accounting accurately, the pirate had two lives on his hands: he’d driven Julissima Rossa to kill herself.

  So why could Dozerius be forgiven, when Tess could not?

  This question put her in a spiraling, simmering rage. She threw the jar of beets against a tree, and it shattered, red pulp everywhere, like brains or like her heart. It was a terrible waste, but she didn’t like beets anyway and she wanted to be wasteful.

  Or she wanted to lay waste to…something. Anything. Everything. />
  Pathka found her soon after and assured her that he hadn’t been bleeding underground. She didn’t listen beyond that. She brushed off his nosy questions and walked in a haze, barely seeing the road, and then finally it was nighttime and she slouched by the fire, still steaming.

  Pathka went to sleep, but Tess couldn’t. The foundational stories of her life had betrayed her; the inside of her head jangled with dissonance. Whose fault was this? Whom could she break her ire upon?

  It was probably her own fault for being gullible. That just made her madder.

  It occurred to her, all of a sudden, that she still had the pewter ring. Once she’d gotten enough to eat, it had stopped beckoning her home, so she’d half forgotten about it. She scrabbled through her pack, found it, rolled it between her fingers, desiring but not daring. It was the middle of the night, the rudest time to wake her sister. Seraphina wouldn’t get mad, that was not her way, but she was bound to say something to make Tess mad, and then Tess would have someone to yell at.

  That would make her feel better.

  Tess flipped the switch. The thnik hummed in her hand. Once, twice. Half a dozen times.

  Finally, a voice crackled through. “Sisi?”

  That wasn’t Seraphina. Tess’s throat seized up.

  “Tess, is it you?” said Jeanne, her voice small and plaintive. “Seraphina said you had the mate to this ring, but I call and call and you never answer. Please, where are you? We’ve been so worried. I cry every night, imagining what might happen to you out there. Mama says to consider you dead, but—”

  Tess flung the ring away, as if it burned her. The sandy soil stopped it from bouncing. Tess ground her heel upon it, stomped and crunched, her breath heavy and ragged. Jeanne’s voice crackled and went out.

  A wash of cold regret hit her hard. Why was she so accursedly impulsive? She should have spoken to her sister. Jeanne was hurting, and it was her fault and she could have reassured her, but this flash of rage had…Why had she…