The river road ran relentlessly clear and straight. If they meant to lose pursuers, surely it would be smarter to cut through sheep pastures and hedgerows.
“What good would that do?” said Pathka when she mentioned it. “They’d sniff us out. Our best hope is to put distance between ourselves and town. Most won’t follow us far. Even the most stubborn will decide we aren’t worth the effort beyond a certain distance, say, eight-point-two miles.”
“That’s bizarrely precise,” puffed Tess.
Pathka wriggled his head spines. A quigutl giggle. “Maybe I can quantify laziness.”
Their run devolved to a walk when Tess got a stitch in her side. Trowebridge receded and disappeared behind them, but still they kept on. Near sundown, they reached a confluence of blocky water mills, two on the near side of the river and one on the far side, joined by a bridge. A single imposing house stood among several outbuildings. After a short argument about where to spend the night—the flour storage barn was out, as Pathka was prone to exhaling sparks in his sleep—they settled on the second barn, where the animals stayed.
Tess had argued against it, first because it would stink, and second because they had to tiptoe across a gravel yard to get to it, and Pathka couldn’t tiptoe, exactly. Pathka, however, took a quigutl shortcut over the top of the house, where his sticky, padded toes made no sound. Tess was left to crunch across the yard by herself, directly in front of the tall dining room windows. She paused to watch the miller and his grown sons carving into a venison roast. A serving lad brought wine around; beeswax candles illuminated their merriment. These millers were better off than her own family had been these last several years.
By now her family must know she was gone. She wondered how they were taking it. Mama would be furious, of course, and Tess felt some regret that she couldn’t be there to see it. Papa would be cringing before Mama’s wrath, Seraphina placid and unmoved, Jeanne…
Tess blanched. She’d spent the last two years thinking of Jeanne first, and then she’d run off without giving her twin a single thought. She should have left a note, at least. Tess’s throat tightened. The sun might cease to rise, but Tess would never cease to do the selfish, thoughtless, wrongheaded, hurtful thing.
She swallowed that guilt down, along with the rest of it, and reminded herself that she had put off dying of shame. She could reassess in the morning, but for now, she had to walk on.
Or tiptoe on, as it were. The gravel complained loudly.
The livestock barn was well built and tidy, full of goat smell but no goats; they’d be out to pasture now that it was warm enough. Alas, there was no hay in the barn, either, but Tess and Pathka climbed into the loft anyway, out of view should anyone enter the barn in the night.
Tess broke out her meager provisions; Pathka was ecstatic about the cheese, which made her smile. His enthusiasm was constant, even if so much else had changed.
* * *
Tess had met Pathka when she was…how old? It was going to take some calculation.
Seraphina had broken out in scales the winter before; every family event was measured from that mile marker. Tessie and Jeanne weren’t supposed to know, so of course they did. Their elder sister may have been secretive and aloof, but the twins were perceptive. Also, they were nosy, and Seraphina had been too ill to chase them off when they’d sneaked into her room.
In her feverish delirium, she hadn’t noticed them. Jeanne had gently smoothed Seraphina’s hair off her sweaty forehead. Tess had gone straight for the incipient scales sprouting through Seraphina’s arm. They were silver, surrounded by red, angry, weeping flesh.
Jeanne gasped and covered her eyes; Tessie, bolder, touched one. Seraphina cried out, making Tessie jump and Jeanne shriek. Even more frightening was the suddenly looming figure, a man who’d been sitting so still they hadn’t noticed him. He unfolded himself from his chair, grabbed each girl by an ear, and steered them into the corridor.
Mama was arriving with a tray for Seraphina, which she dropped in alarm. “Don’t touch them, you fiend!” she cried, pulling the twins out of the man’s grasp. “If I had known what you were, you should never have set foot in my house.”
“I’m the only one who can help her,” said Orma, scratching his beard as he turned back into the room. “Find a way to tolerate my presence, madam.”
Mama, quivering with rageful words unspoken, bent down to pick up the broken crockery. Jeanne fetched a towel and Tessie a pail of water. They helped her sop broth off the floor, watching helplessly as angry tears washed Mama’s cheeks.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” Jeanne had ventured at last, putting her arms around Mama’s waist, which was beginning to bulge with the baby that would be Neddie. “Seraphina’s going to be all right. Dragons make good doctors, Papa says, and—”
“He’s not her doctor,” said Mama bitterly. She glanced behind her, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. The door to Seraphina’s room was closed. Her soft face hardened; she led the twins down the hall into the nursery and closed the door. Baby Paul was asleep in the cradle, but no matter. This was the kind of news that could only be whispered. “Saar Orma is Seraphina’s uncle, girls. Claude—” Mama’s voice broke; the twins, in panic, threw their arms around her as she started to weep again.
“You must never tell our Belgioso family,” said Mama when she had recovered enough to speak. “Promise me, girls, that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”
“Of course not, Mama,” said Jeanne, and Tessie shook her head vehemently.
“Your father’s first wife was a dragon,” Mama whispered, clutching them tightly. “A vicious, unscrupulous saarantras who tricked him into thinking she was human.” Mama’s mouth worked spasmodically; her reddened eyes grew fierce. “Or so he claims. I have no choice but to believe him. He’s a clever man, though, your father, and I don’t understand how he couldn’t…there must be differences between dragons and real people.”
Tessie met Jeanne’s eyes, and they had one of those moments—commoner when they were young—where they shared a thought. He still loves that dragon woman, they thought together. Mama knows, and it hurts her.
Mama was kneeling now, her arms around their shoulders. “Girls, remember: this mortal, material world will let you down. Husbands, love, life—everything and everyone will disappoint you eventually. Only one thing never fails. Do you know what that is?”
The twins answered dutifully, “Heaven.”
Mama nodded, steel in her pale eyes. “Faith is the only rock in life’s tempestuous sea. Heaven is perfect and eternal, and it awaits us if we keep our troth to it.”
Jeanne piped up, “Papa doesn’t believe, does he?”
She knew the answer perfectly well, but the twins played this game to calm their mother. The question put Papa in his place and made him manageable.
“His faults are for the Saints to tally,” said Mama, her tone now pitying and superior. “Our job is only to forgive, not to judge.”
This was Tessie’s cue to judge him with everything she had. “Papa is a terrible sinner, Mama, and I hate him!”
“Oh, no, you mustn’t hate, dearest,” said Mama, in command of herself again. “He may be an unbeliever, and he may have let bodily lust blind him to his first wife’s nature—”
That was a new angle on Papa. If Tessie could have swiveled her ears like Faffy the hound, they’d have been on high alert now, pricked up and straining to hear more.
“—but your duty is to love him, warts and all, as is mine,” Mama concluded, to Tess’s disappointment, kissing each girl on the forehead and rising awkwardly to her feet. In the cradle, baby Paul began to wail. Mama picked him up, and the little girls took the opportunity to quietly escape, hand in hand, back to their own room.
Seraphina had fallen ill upon Treaty Morn in the dead of winter, and Pathka had crawled into the basement early the
following summer—before Aunt Jenny’s wedding and Tess’s failed baby-making experiment—so Tess had been not quite six and a half years old.
Mama was laid up for a month before Neddie’s birth. Her old Belgioso aunties took turns skulking around the house, making enormous pots of soup, going on violent cleaning sprees, and putting the twins to work. Seraphina, back on her feet, always contrived to wriggle out of chores; her dragon uncle’s music lessons took precedence over anything else. Besides, the Belgioso side of the family, without knowing why, found Seraphina strange and spooky. Nobody dared press her into service against her will. Tessie and Jeanne, on the other hand, were fair game and big enough to send for water or bedsheets or onions, whatever the avenging aunties needed.
Cabbages were Tessie’s excuse for being in the basement that day. They were in a crate up front, by the stairs, and she needn’t have spent more than three minutes fetching one, but Aunt Mimi was there today, the most unpleasant of Mama’s aunties. She was also, fortuitously, the easiest to avoid. She had bad knees; all you had to do was contrive to get yourself sent up or down, and you were out of range of her cane and her braying voice.
Jeanne had landed the plum assignment of taking Mama her tea. Aunt Mimi liked Jeanne best, because she was sweet and compliant and blond like a proper Belgioso. Tessie didn’t begrudge this any more than one might begrudge a rose, but it meant she had to work twice as hard to get away from the old woman. As Auntie made soup, Tess kept asking about ingredients that she knew were in the basement. Unfortunately, a whole box of onions had been hauled up the night before, and Aunt Mimi had only conceded a need for cabbage after making Tess slice ten onions paper-fine.
Tess felt she had earned this basement respite, and she intended to take full advantage.
She dawdled in dark corners where there were no cabbages (as she knew perfectly well). She was Dozerius the Pirate, hero of her favorite Porphyrian adventure stories. His gender was no obstacle, although she carefully refrained from imagining herself afflicted with bodily lusts, just as Mama had always carefully refrained from reading any of the lustier passages aloud (or so the twins had discovered, now that they could read to themselves).
Tess-as-Dozerius had been sent in search of the Jeweled Cabbage of Condamaciatius (Tessie’s approximation of a Porphyrian name) but couldn’t get near it because it was guarded by the Buxom Serpent of Flittifluttius. (Buxom, she had deduced, meant “pretty,” because that was how ladies were described in the paragraphs Mama didn’t read.) The serpent was so pretty no one could bear to harm him, even though he ate every awed adventurer who came near.
“Don’t look, don’t look, he’ll dazzle your eyes,” Tessie sang to herself as she skipped among the crates, casks, and hogsheads of the cellar, bearing a little lamp and brandishing a broomstick-spear. “Come out, fell beast! Dozerius commands you!”
She swatted the side of a half-empty ale cask with her broomstick, which made a pleasant thunk. She smacked it again for good measure, then climbed a chest, treading upon the hem of her skirt and tearing it. From up here, she could cast lamplight over the clutter. She moved her arm in a great circle, making the shadows bow obeisance to valiant, stouthearted Dozerius.
Tessie climbed one tier higher and accidentally knocked off a jar of pickles, which shattered, attracting the attention of Aunt Mimi, who was unfortunately not deaf. The old lady shrieked down the stairs, “Piquietta!” That was Ninysh for “little devil girl,” the Belgiosos’ usual epithet for Tessie. “Get back here!”
“I’m looking for the cabbages, Auntie,” Tessie hollered back.
“They’re at the bottom of the stairs, you monster,” shouted Mimi. “I can see them from here. If it weren’t for my knees, I could get one myself.”
“I don’t see them,” cried Tessie.
“Liar! You’re playing down there, closer to your friend the devil. If you love the basement so much, fine.”
The light waned; Mimi was closing the door.
“Let’s see how long your lamp lasts, and how you like it after that.” She barred the door with a heavy thump.
Tessie’s heart leaped. She could not have asked for better. Aunt Mimi would assume she was contained and forget about her. Tess could do what she liked.
“You don’t imagine, you old behemoth, that there’s only one way into the basement?” Tessie muttered, squeezing through a forest of spare chairs toward the back of the room where a passageway connected to the old tunnels under the city. Before Queen Lavonda’s peace with dragonkind, the citizens of Lavondaville used to hide in those tunnels to escape dragon fire.
The passages were in ill repair, but they hadn’t been filled in. Tess had done enough exploring—even at six and a half—that she’d come this way before. A short spur led to a bigger tunnel under the street, and then a narrow vent opened behind St. Siucre’s shrine down the block. She’d escape that way, come into the house at the back, sneak upstairs, and play with Jeanne—assuming Jeanne had been sensible enough to drag out her own chore and hadn’t obediently returned to the kitchen by now.
You never knew about Jeanne; she was often reflexively well behaved. Tessie loved her for it, but it could be inconvenient at times.
“Damned inconvenient,” she said aloud, relishing the freedom to curse.
She was heading for the tunnel when a spooky sound stopped her short. It came from the darkness ahead, a kind of eeh-eeh-eeh, and then a k-k-k-khhhee, and then a thoo-eee-thoo-eee-thaaaah, most perplexing and uncanny.
Tessie pressed herself against the back wall of the cellar and inched toward the doorway, wishing she dared extinguish her light. The creature would see her approaching.
What would Dozerius do?
Tessie counted to three and then leaped into the doorway, brandishing the broomstick and crying, “Yah-ha!”
Curled on the floor in front of her, shivering uncontrollably, a small quigutl had made a makeshift nest of rags, leaves, paper, and (Tessie noted with interest) a shredded cabbage. The creature had already laid a clutch of eggs—seven whole, one broken—but there was one more egg bulging half in, half out of its body. Tessie stared unabashedly; a neighbor kept hens, so she’d seen eggs laid before, but never such large ones.
The quigutl hissed at her. Tessie came no closer, so it arched its back and carried on with its business. It strained and groaned and growled, but the egg didn’t budge.
Tessie got tired of standing, so she squatted to watch. Did it usually take so much time to lay an egg?
“That must hurt,” she said, not expecting the beast to understand her. It whipped its head around to face her, however, and…was she imagining things? It nodded.
It buckled under the strain of another contraction and shrieked eerily. The egg was making no progress. Something was wrong.
“Do you need help?” asked Tessie. Her lamp was dimming; she’d be no help in the dark.
The quigutl chittered, clearly panicked, and Tessie’s heart quickened. She had to do something—the egg was going to tear the poor creature in two.
“I don’t understand you,” she said, trying to keep her voice soothing, “but my sister can. I’m going to get her, and we’ll help you. I’ll be right back.”
She edged around the nest and then sprinted toward the larger tunnel, up the winding stair to St. Siucre’s shrine and then toward home. Tessie didn’t bother with the back door—no time—but burst through the front. She bolted upstairs and into Seraphina’s room without knocking.
Seraphina barely glanced up from her book. “What is it, Rudeness?”
“Quigutl…dying in the basement…talk to it…” Tessie was out of breath. “Please.”
Seraphina frowned. “Better tell Papa. It’ll stink up the whole house if it dies. He’ll hire somebody to remove it.”
“You don’t understand!” wailed Tessie. “It doesn’t have to die. We can save it.?
??
Seraphina rolled her eyes, marked her place in the book with a ribbon, and followed Tessie downstairs. Tess paused in the parlor for more lamp oil, then led Seraphina outside, toward the shrine of St. Siucre. If Seraphina thought this was a peculiar way to get into the basement, she gave no sign; indeed, she’d opened her book again and was reading as she walked.
The quigutl lay where Tessie had left it, panting and doubled up in pain. Silver streaked the half-laid egg now, the quigutl’s blood. It didn’t look gory to Tess, but Seraphina recoiled.
“Ask what we can do to help,” said Tess, yanking her sister’s arm to pull her closer.
“You just asked,” said Seraphina, wrinkling her nose. “It understands Goreddi.”
“Fine,” cried Tess impatiently. “What does it need?”
Seraphina’s brow crumpled in concentration as she listened to the creature’s jabbering. “Oil,” she translated. “Cooking oil, not lamp oil. And hot water.”
“Argh, those are in the kitchen,” cried Tess, stamping. “Aunt Mimi barred the door.”
Seraphina sighed loudly and handed Tess her book to hold. “I’ll handle her, but all the quigutl midwifery falls to you. I didn’t sign on to stick my arm up anyone’s cloaca.”
“Thank you,” said Tessie. “Only hurry!”
Seraphina took the lamp, leaving Tess and the quigutl in the dark. The creature moaned and thrashed its tail. “Poor thing,” said Tessie. “Don’t fret, little beastie. She’ll be back straightaway.”
Tess reached out, thinking to comfort the poor creature by petting it, but the quigutl didn’t want to be touched. It scuttled out of reach and growled at her.
“Oh! Sorry,” said Tessie. She didn’t take it personally; the creature was hurting.
She rummaged in the pocket of her apron, where she sometimes squirreled away snacks for later, and came up with a lump of damp, crumbling cheese.