She’d walk into the dewy fields first thing and work all morning in exchange for a share of the midday meal. Aside from the unexpected pleasure of physical labor, she was glad to finally get along without stealing. Well, mostly. She did steal a leather jerkin that had been left on a stump, because the weather was getting unpleasantly warm for Florian’s jacket, and she needed something that would hide her breasts without giving her heatstroke. She left a small bouquet of field poppies as a thank-you but knew that didn’t make up for it.
After lunch Tess would hurry after Reg and Rowan. They never walked more than three or four miles and usually stopped for the night by midafternoon, so she caught them up easily. If she couldn’t tell which tavern was getting them drunk, Pathka would sniff them out.
Not without grumbling, however. “They’re going to kill you,” he’d say. “Who will help me call Anathuthia then? Not the oldster. Not your ghost.”
Reg and Rowan seemed determined to drink away the loot they’d stolen from the hunting lodge. Tess hoped they’d get so drunk that she could spirit Griss away, but it wasn’t that simple. They preferred inns to camping, and they barred their door at night.
Tess sat with them at tavern tables in the evenings, so they knew she still had her eye on them. They avoided speaking; Tess would listen to the village fiddler and nurse her single ale, if she’d been lucky enough to muck out the stable or perform some other chore for the tapmaster.
One memorable evening, a priest gave the news: a child was born unto Queen Glisselda! A girl, not yet named. The tapmaster, in a fit of celebratory generosity, proclaimed a round on the house, and Tess—who couldn’t hold it like she used to—found herself in conversation with Reg and Rowan at last. “What would you say if I told you the child wasn’t Glisselda’s at all?” said Tess ill-advisedly. “What if I told you it was Seraphina’s, being passed off as the Queen’s?”
Luckily, Reg was twice as drunk as she was. “I’d tell you to go drown yourself in St. Pandowdy’s Pond, because you’ve uttered the most serene blasphemy ever heard.”
“Blasphemy?” cried Tess. “It’s ‘disrespect to Her Majesty,’ not blapshemy. I mean phlasbemy. Damnation!” She couldn’t say it twice, which was embarrassing.
“Idiot,” said Reg, taking a superior air. “St. Seraphina couldn’t possibly get pregnant.”
“She’s half dragon,” offered Rowan. “She’d be infertile, like a mule.”
“Even worse!” cried Reg. “You dolts, she’s a bloody Saint. You think she’d have filthy woman parts under her skirts? Never. She’ll be pure as the driveled snow, virginal and unsculleried. You owe penance for your disgusting thoughts, Heaven slap you silly.”
Tess had sense and sobriety enough to bite her tongue. She’d seen Seraphina in the bath and would have vouched for anything but breasts, which weren’t her sister’s strong suit. “Plant some cabbages in those fields!” Tess had once sassed Seraphina, and then, ye Saints, she’d been spanked so hard. It was the one time she knew for sure that Seraphina had told on her.
This foolishness got her no closer to rescuing Griss. Tess stalked out, slept it off, and dogged them again the next day.
Once, by some miracle, Reg and Rowan left without Griss. Tess, who’d been watching the tavern door, rushed in. Someone screamed upstairs; Tess took the stairs two at a time and found the proprietress shrieking at poor Griss, who was tied to the bed, lying in his own filth and weeping in terror. This was Tess’s chance to free him, but he needed to be cleaned up, and she could not, in good conscience, leave the proprietress with the mess. Tess promised the woman a chip of gold (praying Pathka had some; he’d been using various precious metals to construct the thniks), and together they untied Griss, took up the sheets, carried his bedding down to the fire, and hauled up fresh straw from the shed. They sluiced poor Griss in the yard by the chickens, toweled him off, and dressed him in a pair of breeches the tapmaster had grown too stout for.
Tess found Pathka up an apple tree and asked for a crumb of gold. “They’re going to kill you,” he said, handing her a chunk the size of her thumbnail. Before Tess could ask him to bite off a smaller piece, noise made her look up. Across the green, the proprietress was shouting at Wreck and Ruin and beating them with a broom, but they drew their knives and took Griss away between them.
Tess ended up giving the proprietress the entire gold chunk.
This was the last straw. Tess couldn’t wait for the right circumstances to present themselves; the longer she took, the more abuse Griss endured. He wasn’t going to last.
Tess was going to have to make her own opportunity.
Before she left the village, Tess asked the proprietress what lay to the south—landscapes, manor houses, hospices? “If you mean to save that old granddad, let me help,” said the woman, placing the gold on the counter beside Tess’s hand. Tess began to protest (although, to be fair, the nugget had shrunk significantly), but the woman wouldn’t hear of it. “Call it charity,” she said. “There, by Heaven’s grace, go we all eventually.”
Tess left the village with a plan, some money, and a hopeful spring in her step.
* * *
“I’ve heard tell of a palace nearby,” Tess told Reg and Rowan once she caught them up. They were well into their cups at the Hefty Heifer in the village of Faverly. Tess had availed herself of a mug of ale, just one, funded by charitable donation. She was about Griss’s business, after all, and she needed courage. “The palace,” she reiterated, since they were ignoring her, “belongs to the Duke of Barrabou. According to locals, he’s fantastically rich, and—here’s the best of it—he lost his father a few months ago. I don’t mean dead, I mean lost.”
Rowan eyed her sidelong. “Sounds like carelessness.”
“Indeed,” said Tess, keeping a straight face. “The old duke wandered the rose garden at night. No one minded, thinking at worst he’d get caught in the thorns. One day, though, the gardener left the gate open. The old man wandered into the forest and was never seen again.”
She had Reg’s attention now. He picked his nose with his thumb meditatively and said, “I suppose you want something for this information?”
“I ask no reward,” said Tess hastily, as if to fend off their generosity. “I’ll just sneak in the back while you’ve got everyone occupied in front, and walk off with a few golden forks.”
The men laughed and hailed the tapmaster for more ale, whereupon Griss whispered in Tess’s ear: “There is no Duke of Barrabou.”
“You need to keep that very quiet,” Tess whispered back. “Can you do that?”
Griss nodded solemnly; Tess might’ve worried, but she was sure he’d forget the Duke of Barrabou even quicker than his promise.
* * *
They headed across country, under Tess’s direction, toward a distant southern ridge. It would take most of a day to reach it, the proprietress had told her. Tess had been on the road long enough to estimate distances with some accuracy; it sounded like a four- or five-hour walk to her, even at Griss’s slow shuffle. The chief foot-draggers, though, were Reg and Rowan. The ridge was farther than they usually walked in a day. By noon their feet hurt and they were thirsty, and why hurry? The Duke of Barrabou’s palace wasn’t going anywhere.
Tess didn’t dare let them stop at a tavern, though, lest they learn the duke didn’t exist. “It’s a haul today,” she said, “but tomorrow’s an easy downhill stroll to the manor if we camp on the ridge. I know you hate camping”—she raised her voice over their protests—“so I bought a bottle of pisky to ease your pains.”
They seemed somewhat placated by the promise of pisky. “Too bad I’ve nothing but dried sausage to go with it,” Tess muttered to Griss, taking his bony arm. “If I were really Johnny, I’d poach us a stag, how about that?”
Griss shook his leonine head. “Snare the…the little ones with ears. Those are loyal.”
&n
bsp; It took some asking before Tess understood: he meant hares, and that it was legal. “If I knew how to set snares, Griss, I’d have been eating like a king out here.”
The old man glanced mischievously at Pathka. “Does your baby dragon have any…” He mimed tugging something long with both hands. “String. No, metal string.”
In fact, Pathka could make wire from the scraps in his pouch; he extruded some when they stopped for lunch and a bit of a nap. Griss, too keyed up to sleep, showed Tess how to make a wire snare. His hands remembered how—a small loop, twist, thread through a bigger loop.
He explained how to set it. “Look for where they…they make a beat. A path. You shouldn’t be there at night. That’s how it got Annie.” He grew melancholy. “I could have told her where it hunted. It had been in our dale awhile; I’d been tracking it.”
He’d switched seamlessly from hares to the dragon that had eaten his sister. “Why did she go there?” Tess asked quietly. “Tell Jacomo what happened.”
“Johnny was poaching. I’d turned a blind eye, but then I lost my fingers.” He mimed a bear trap closing. “I told on him. I thought Papa would yell and—” He mimed throwing a punch. “But he told the duke. Johnny was going to hang. Annie went out to warn him away, and—” He made a snatching motion with his three-fingered hand. A dragon got her.
Tess had never heard him put the whole story together. It was as if making the snare had opened a door in his mind, if only for a moment.
They reached the ridge with daylight left. Tess helped Griss set the snare—upon a hare’s beat, not a dragon’s—and within a couple of hours they’d caught one. Griss twisted its neck sharply (Tess watched with mixed revulsion and curiosity; she needed to learn this, gruesome though it was). He skinned it with Rowan’s knife so swiftly that Tess could hardly comprehend what he’d done. It looked like he’d turned the poor creature inside out.
However refined his speech and manner, this was what he’d done most of his life, Tess felt certain. Reg, too, was watching, eyes narrowed, likely having similar thoughts and new doubts about the Duke of Barrabou. Tess thanked Heaven that it would all be over tonight.
They feasted on roast hare, and Tess saw to it that Reg and Rowan finished the bottle of pisky (she took none herself; she needed her wits tonight). Getting them falling-down drunk was hard; they had a mighty capacity and years of practice. Tess, wishing she’d sprung for two bottles, tried to keep them sweet-tempered by telling Dozerius stories about fish the size of islands, rhinoceroses and camelopards, beautiful and compliant women. Rowan went from rapt to merry to benevolently snoozy, but Reg’s scowl deepened. He seemed utterly unimpaired.
When the spirits and stories had run out and the fire was down to embers, they tied Griss to a tree as usual. Rowan settled beside him and began snoring. Reg, though, stalked over to Tess and pressed the tip of his knife to her throat. She went still as a hare.
“Dunno what you’re playing at.” His voice raised the hairs on her neck. “If I were plying my comrades with booze and tales, it’d mean something was up. I warn you, lad: I sleep with one eye open. If you so much as get up to piss in the night, I will gut you. Clear?”
Tess dared no more than nod in answer. He’d sleep more soundly than he claimed—half a bottle of pisky wasn’t nothing, even to him—but she’d have to wait, listen, and be sure. Pathka had agreed to burn through the rope so she wouldn’t have to lean across Reg and Rowan to untie Griss. It was the old man who worried her. He’d be disoriented when she freed him; he might cry out in fear. Stuffing a rag in his mouth would frighten him all the more.
She’d have to play it by ear.
Around midnight she awoke to rain spattering her face, fat drops, hard as pebbles. The leafy canopy had blocked lighter rain, but now it was getting through; thunder rumbled above the urgent hiss of the rain-shower. Rowan and Reg cried out inarticulately, swatting at the air, unsure where they were or how they’d got here.
Then the storm got serious.
The wind whipped branches around. Clumps of wet leaves slapped Tess’s face and body, while above her tree limbs groaned and cracked ominously. Lightning struck a tree at the top of the ridge, and then another, which briefly caught fire. Close thunderclaps left her ears ringing.
Tess rushed to Griss’s tree. Reg and Rowan had fled into the darkness after the second lightning strike, Heaven knew where.
Pathka had seized the opportunity to start burning the ropes.
“Come on,” Tess cried above the howling wind, tugging Griss’s hand. “Can you walk?”
Lightning illuminated his horrified face. He flailed about, striking the side of Tess’s head. She clenched her teeth and grabbed him; it was like wrestling an otter, wet and slippery, surprisingly strong, and determined to wriggle free. She hefted him over her shoulders, the way a farmer carries a calf. He bucked at first, but went limp as she staggered to her feet.
Rain lashed her body, rolled down her face in torrents, down her jerkin, down her boots. She nearly tripped over a root that turned out to be Pathka, trying to herd her in the right direction. Thunder and lightning had confused everything; downhill looked the same on both sides of the ridge.
She followed Pathka’s tongue-flame like a will-o’-the-wisp, through stands of trees, around boulders, as fast as she could go without falling. She thought she heard Reg and Rowan, far away, screaming. She hoped they’d run down the wrong side of the ridge, gotten separated, or maybe fallen off a cliff.
At the bottom of the hill spread a field of cabbages, as the innkeeper had described. Tess’s feet churned mud as she ran, black clods flying. She kicked cabbages right off their stems but managed not to slide and fall. The thunder and lightning moved farther up the ridge; she heard Griss shouting, “Watch the sky, Annie!”
The promised village, Muddle-on-the-Fussy, came into view whenever it lightened, bulky thatched cottages, and there, by the river, a wide complex with a Saint at the apex of the roof. Tess reached the courtyard gate, set Griss on the stoop, and knocked with everything she had, hoping they could hear her over the storm.
“I’ll wait here,” said Pathka from a nearby yew bush. “They won’t want me inside.”
Before Tess could argue, the gate opened and out came a novice, her yellow habit eerie in the torchlight. “Mercy on a wet night,” she said, holding the door for Tess and Griss, not even asking their business. No one knocked on a night like this unless it was an emergency.
A quarter of an hour later, they were in the hospice hall, a long room with eight beds, three occupied. Griss, bundled in quilts before the hearth, shivered and whimpered as a second novice spooned soup into his mouth. The young ones had night duty, apparently. The one who’d let them in questioned Tess about Griss’s condition and origins; Tess felt chagrined at how little she knew. “He’s no family of mine; he might be from Trowebridge. I don’t know how old he is. His name may or may not actually be Griss,” she said. And she told them, more than once, “There are two men after him. You mustn’t let them take him. They tie him up at night, and I think they’re going to kill him when he turns out not to be rich.”
“You don’t believe he’s rich?” said a sharp, surprisingly familiar voice from across the infirmary. Tess turned to see a stout, older nun passing between the rows of beds. The room was nearly dark, but the woman’s shape and bearing confirmed Tess’s recognition: this was Mother Philomela, whom she’d seen with her father in Trowebridge.
There are moments that bring into question one’s free will, and whether the world doesn’t have some sentience behind it, trying to send a message. This was such a moment for Tess.
They’d never met face-to-face, and Tess looked very different now, but still she clambered to her feet, extended her hand, and said, “I’m Jacomo,” as if she might preempt the possibility of recognition by giving the woman an assumed name.
The old Mot
her Superior ignored Tess, approached Griss, and felt his forehead. “Are you wealthy, venerable Father? Will you be leaving us an endowment?”
“I’ve nothing,” he said hoarsely. “Nothing is worth having since I killed Annie.”
He told a garbled version of his story. It was his fault Annie was dead; he’d sent her to her doom. He’d wanted to teach Johnny a lesson, see, but no matter how much you wanted to do right in this world, the world would find a way to crush you.
Mother Philomela neither confirmed nor refuted this hypothesis, but smoothed his hair out of his eyes, took his pulse, listened to his lungs—which she pronounced very bad—and instructed the novices to give him as much soup as he would eat.
Tess plucked at the nun’s yellow sleeve as she walked past. “Two ruffians, Reg and Rowan, want to take him away, but don’t let them. He doesn’t deserve that fate.”
“I agree he does not,” said the nun sternly. “It’s curious, though: he’s indisputably one of Heaven’s innocents, and yet so bursting with guilt that he confesses his sins to every passerby.”
Griss looked as innocent as an openmouthed chick, awaiting the next spoonful of soup.
Mother Philomela went to an occupied bed to check the bedpan. “Tell me something, boy,” she called over her shoulder to Tess, who hadn’t followed her. “He’s not your father or grandfather, but you risked your safety to bring him here on such a night, with dangerous men pursuing. What drove you to help? Guilt? Pity? Something else?”
Tess considered, averting her eyes from the messy business Mother Philomela was now engaged in, cleaning up her elderly patient. “He reminds me of my grandmother,” offered Tess.
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