Tess of the Road

  Pathka’s eyes swiveled quizzically. “There’s nothing ‘just’ about stories. Stories are the most real.”

  “But…literally real? Could we go find them, out in the world?”

  “We could indeed,” said the little quigutl.

  “Then that’s what I want to do,” Tess had declared. “Surely they won’t seem so vast and incomprehensible once we look them in the eye.”

  “Or they might seem even more incomprehensible,” Pathka had said.

  “It will be our greatest adventure,” said Tess. “We’ll go after them when I’m grown.”

  “Of course we will,” said Pathka, but there had been something shifty in her aspect.

  Tess hadn’t understood in the moment that Pathka was about to leave for good.

  * * *

  Finding the serpents had been more than a childish fancy to Tess (although it had also been that). The serpents were like a mirror that revealed your insides instead of your outsides, Pathka had sometimes claimed. Once you glimpsed the truth about yourself, your understanding was complete and you could finally be at peace.

  There were things Tess wanted to understand, answers she needed, even if she could not easily formulate the questions.

  Not that the Saints of her own faith didn’t provide answers. St. Vitt, in particular, had messages tailored to her shortcomings: Yes, child, your very nature is flawed. Yes, young woman, your body is the cradle of sin and depravity. You must work tirelessly, every minute of every day, to have any hope of seeing Heaven’s Golden House.

  She didn’t like those answers, even as she feared they were true.

  But Pathka vanished. St. Jannoula’s War came and went. Faffy died—rest he on Heaven’s sun-drenched cushions. Tess grew, inexorably, reaching her full height and new womanhood by thirteen.

  Growing up brought nothing but tedium and disappointment. That is to say, lady-in-waiting lessons.

  Once St. Jannoula’s War was over and peace had broken out again, the lawyers’ guild convened an ethics panel to discuss Papa’s first marriage. Mama saw the future as clearly as any seer: hard times were coming. She’d have done anything to secure her children, but the children had parts to play, too. Tess, as the elder twin, would have to marry well, and the best place to find a rich husband was at court.

  The Dombegh twins had enough pedigree to merit a lowly position: Papa’s older brother, Jean-Philippe, was a minor baronet, Mama’s grandfather an exiled Ninysh count. Even so, Seraphina (their connection at court) had to pull every string at her disposal to get them in.

  This took time; Seraphina’s political capital grew but slowly, and she insisted on finding places for both twins. “I know there’s only dowry for one, but they’ll be happier together. A sulky lady-in-waiting won’t catch anyone’s eye,” she’d said sensibly.

  Mama had glared at Tess as if preemptively blaming her posture for her future hypothetical failure to find a husband. Tess, though it galled her, sat up straighter.

  After much late-night debating—or shouting, as it was called in lawyer-free households—Mama convinced Papa that investing in a course of good manners would be to the entire family’s benefit. Mistress Edwina, a dowager baroness down on her luck, came to live in their attic and whip the girls into geniuses of etiquette.

  Tessie had envied Seraphina’s tutors as a child, but now that she had one of her own, she hated it. Manners were a noisome and fiddly art. There was a lot of sitting still, something to which Tess was constitutionally disinclined, and a great deal of mannerly calculus involving her own rank vis-à-vis the ranks of others. There were sixteen variants on courtesy, all of them used at court.

  Tess had heard of half courtesy, even quarter courtesy, but five-sixteenths courtesy was going to be the death of her.

  “When you begin, you will be maids of the robes, or maids of the bedchamber if you’re lucky,” said Mistress Edwina, who was ancient and wrinkled as a raisin. “Through diligent and impeccable discretion, you may move up to maid of honor, meaning your lady relies upon you particularly. You will be her confidante, trusted with her correspondence and intrigues.”

  Tess’s mind had already wandered; she could just manage to keep herself anchored to her seat by practicing ecclesiastical hand or satin stitch, but listening to Mistress Edwina’s minutiae at the same time was beyond her limits.

  Jeanne, on the other hand, asked brightly: “Is a maid of honor a maid of the court?”

  “An apt question!” cried Mistress Edwina, pleased that Jeanne was so keen. “A maid of the court merits her own maid of the robes, whereas a mere maid of honor does not.”

  Tess made Jeanne explain it later, at their midnight conference. Jeanne fretted, “You need to listen and take this seriously, Sisi. The whole family is relying upon you.”

  “Oh, fie,” Tessie had cried, tweaking her sister’s nose. “If the family relies upon me, then surely I may, in turn, rely upon you. It is us against the world, after all. It always has been.”

  Jeanne’s smile grew pained in the semidarkness. Tess tickled her worries away.

  Tess was all empty bravado, though. Every day, as Mistress Edwina droned on, Tess felt more incapable and inadequate, as if clinging wet rags were being piled upon her. Each was nothing in itself, but together the pile weighed a ton and dragged her down.

  Adulthood was going to smother her.

  It was Cousin Kenneth, unexpectedly, who gave Tess an inkling that she might escape the soggy rag heap of duty. Kenneth at sixteen was as benignly towheaded and apple-cheeked as ever, but fully six feet tall and strong from unloading cargo crates. He would come over after working the Belgioso warehouses to mooch dinner off Mama, his older sister, and slouch around the parlor. Sometimes he’d lure Tessie and Jeanne into a game of backgammon or grouse chess. The twins made an ineffective team. Jeanne whimpered if Tessie got too aggressive, Tessie pulled her punches to reassure her sister, and Kenneth, that rapscallion, seized every opening.

  One evening, when Mama had taken the other children to late Mass, Tess stayed home, ill with her monthly flux, which seemed determined to kill her. She’d been plagued with it for nearly a year now, whereas Jeanne’s had not yet materialized.

  “Each in its own time, as Heaven wills,” Mama had said.

  Tess wished, uncharitably, that Heaven had picked Jeanne first. While she enjoyed being so much taller than her sister that she looked years older (rather than mere minutes), it wasn’t worth the cramps and misery.

  She was curled on the couch with a hot compress against the small of her back when there came a knock at the door. “Papa! The door!” she cried, but her father was in his library, culling beloved books with an eye toward selling some. She pried herself out of the upholstery, groaning, and opened the door to Kenneth.

  “You’re come awfully late,” she snapped, concealing the hot compress in the folds of her skirt so he wouldn’t see it, guess why she’d stayed home, and feel uncomfortable or disgusted.

  “I suppose there’s no supper left?” Kenneth brushed past Tess, heading for the kitchen. “Only I haven’t eaten since noon, Tes’puco, and I’m famished.”

  Tessa-puco was Ninysh for “stupid-head”; Kenneth had bestowed the nickname on Tess when she was nine, after one of her pranks had landed him in the river. It was a term of endearment now, one only Kenneth was allowed to use.

  “Were you out with the dark barges?” asked Tess, wrapping her arms around her aching belly while Kenneth dug through the pantry. If the Belgiosos were smuggling, the barges had to be unloaded at night. It was early to have finished that kind of work, though.

  “Noph,” Kenneth said around the end of a sausage, piling rolls and cheese on a plate. “In fact, I cut out early. Uncle Leo will flay me tomorrow, but it was worth it. Is there any mustard?”

  Tess located the mustard, curious as to what Kenneth would find wo
rth a flaying. “What did you sneak off to do, you naughty thing?” She rubbed her lower back. It didn’t help.

  Kenneth, oblivious to her discomfort, waggled his eyebrows at her. “Astronomy lecture.”

  That hardly sounded worth skiving off work for. “Never. You were meeting some boy at the Soggy Lamprey.”

  “Saints’ bones, I wouldn’t lie to you, Tes’puco,” said Kenneth, kissing a knuckle toward Heaven. “It was the public lecture at St. Bert’s. A pair of astronomers—one saar, one human—talked about using lenses to examine the sky.”

  “A spyglass, you mean? Like a pirate?” It always came back to pirates for Tess, even when she was thirteen and taller than her mother and should have outgrown such nonsense.

  “It’s true, I swear. The dragons say there are other worlds out there, and you can see ’em, even without the glass. They’re the traveling stars, the ones the pagans took for gods and the Saints called Heaven’s lanterns. They’re other worlds, Tess, circling the sun.”

  Tess shook her head unconsciously, not because she didn’t believe him but because her imagination was caught already. Other worlds! Pathka would’ve loved the thought of sailing the skies, exploring and marauding upon other seas like some Dozerius of the air.

  “You still don’t believe me,” said Kenneth, leaning against the kitchen table and licking his fingers clean. “There’s two lectures per week, open to the public. They aren’t always about the skies. Next one’s on electrostatics, I think. You should come with me.”

  Tess burst out laughing. “That’s not even a word! And how am I to come?” Her belly twinged. “Mama would never allow it.”

  “Pshaw. She’s not such an ogre. I can handle her,” said Kenneth, waving dismissively.

  He returned the next day, pointedly winking at Tess’s doubts, and helped clear the table and wash the dishes, which raised Anne-Marie’s suspicions. After dinner, when the family gathered in the parlor—even Papa, who typically would have retreated to his library but couldn’t bear to face the new gaps—Kenneth flopped onto an armchair and said languidly, “So. Which of my little cousins wants to come to a free lecture tomorrow evening at St. Bert’s?”

  Nobody jumped to their feet or raised their hand or cried, “Me!” Tess kept quiet, petrified to give any sign or get her hopes up.

  Anne-Marie, darning socks, frowned. “Is that what you’re skulking about for?” she asked her baby brother. “You don’t want to go alone?”

  “Quite the contrary, I already went alone,” said Kenneth, jutting his chin. “For my boldness, I was rewarded with some edification. I peered at the moon through a spyglass.”

  At this, young Paul and Ned pricked up their ears.

  “It’s all pitted on the surface, like it had the graypox,” said Kenneth smugly. “But you wouldn’t know from ogling it with your naked eye.”

  “Kenneth! Language!” cried Anne-Marie, clapping her hands over Neddie’s naked ears.

  “It’s what the astronomers say, sis,” drawled Kenneth. “Nothing to be squeamish about. Anyway, tomorrow’s nothing so scandalous as moon-gazing. They’ll explain electrostatics, the power that runs quigutl devices. They’ll have machines you can play with.”

  He aimed his last words at the boys, whose eyes grew eager. This, Tess understood, was Kenneth’s strategy for getting her to the lecture: preying on Anne-Marie’s indulgence of the boys—an indulgence well remembered from his own boyhood.

  It was working. Paul and Neddie were at Mama’s knee, clamoring to play with the wonderful devices.

  Anne-Marie frowned, unsure, but Kenneth saw the seams in her resolve and began picking at them: “If you don’t want to go, sis, I don’t mind taking them. I’ll keep a close eye out, or if that won’t put your heart at ease, maybe Tess would be so kind as to help me. That’s one boy apiece. No way we can lose them. What say you, Tes’puco, old love?”

  Tess, a natural thespian, knew exactly how to answer. “I have to escort the boys all the time! Surely it’s Jeanne’s turn.”

  “I don’t mind doing it,” said Jeanne.

  “No,” said Mama crisply. “Tess will accompany her brothers. Caring for younger siblings is a duty, Tess, which you shirk at every—”

  Tess suppressed a look of triumph. She had this speech memorized, but she groaned as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

  Outside Anne-Marie’s line of sight, Kenneth winked. He’d been right; he could handle his sister.

  “But this is just one lecture,” Tessie fretted the following night as they traversed the dark streets behind the bounding boys. “How do we convince her next time?”

  “Already wanting to attend a second when you’ve yet to see the first?” said Kenneth laughingly. “At some point, little coz, we won’t have to convince her. She’ll be accustomed to the notion that going to St. Bert’s is something you do. Or, failing that, we find a way to sneak you out. Ever climbed out your window?”

  She’d tried. “Jeanne’s a light sleeper,” Tess grumbled, but a radical notion occurred to her. Did she and Jeanne have to share a room? What if she moved into Seraphina’s old room? Had her existence become so stifling that she could consider abandoning her sister and their midnight conferences?

  She had to do something. She felt like a rat in a trap.

  They arrived at Old St. Bert’s, in the heart of Quighole. Time was, this neighborhood had been locked up at sundown, its wrought-iron gates chained shut. After the war, however, Queen Glisselda had decreed an initiative of normalization. Quighole would no longer be cordoned off, public lectures would occur at the old church in the close, and the human denizens of Lavondaville would learn both natural philosophy and how not to be afraid of the saarantrai and quigutl around them.

  That was the theory. The lectures had not achieved broad popularity yet.

  This one was sparsely attended, so Tess and Kenneth took the boys up front. A saarantras, silver bell pinned conscientiously to his shoulder, stood upon a dais behind a long table covered in strange apparatuses. Behind him loomed a large slate upon a stand, whereupon his assistant, a young man of nineteen or twenty, could jot notes and make diagrams with chalk.

  Tess had met saarantrai before—Seraphina’s crabby uncle, for one—so she wasn’t unduly fascinated by Professor the dragon Ondir. His monotonous voice and the esoteric nature of his subject didn’t capture her attention, either; the hard pew made wiggling almost inevitable. Indeed, Tess’s first lecture might have been her last, had not her attention been wholly captured by what stood behind him.

  The altarpiece had been removed, since the building was no longer a church, and replaced by a vast mural, a gift from St. Fredricka before she’d departed for her home in the Archipelagos. The painting depicted the myriad creatures of land, sky, and sea, cavorting in their legions. In the center, human and dragon clasped hand and talon in friendship. Everything was in motion around those two poles of stillness. The birds looked ready to flutter into the heights of the nave, the ocean to spill out across the seats. The auroch capered with the frog, and the bee danced with the wolf. It was a harmonious, deathless world, a dream.

  Tess found it deeply moving. Indeed, it colored everything Saar Ondir had to say about electrostatics. “The world is made up of infinitesimal particles, smaller than we can see or envision,” he began, his voice nasal and atonal, but Tess felt she could see these particles, like gnats and bright butterflies, soaring through the mural’s skies.

  “Lodestones are drawn together by an invisible force called magnetism,” the professor droned, and Tess thought she saw it manifested in the schools of mackerel and flocks of starlings, lines of motion, attraction and repulsion, the great whirl of life.

  The mural was teeming. She wanted to walk straight into that world and never look back.

  Paul and Neddie wiggled during the lecture but enjoyed the machines later. Paul turned a
crank, building up enough charge in a wand to give his brother a snapping shock; Ned made a tube glow by moving a magnet over a coil of wire, then dropped the heavy lodestone on his brother’s toe.

  This was their usual nonsense. Tess barely gave it a second thought, automatically scolding or comforting by turns. Her eyes were still on the mural. There was something she couldn’t quite make out in one corner, a vague suggestion of coiling behind the seals and belugas and icebergs. Sometimes it looked like the water, like her eyes playing tricks on her, but sometimes she was sure she saw it.

  Each glimpse gave her shivers. She felt a flame reigniting in her heart, something the wet rags of stultification had all but extinguished.

  “Excuse me,” she said quietly to Professor the dragon Ondir’s assistant, tall, with knowing blue eyes, who had swooped in to rescue a spinning engine from Neddie. “What’s that in the corner of the painting? That’s not supposed to be one of the World Serpents, is it?”

  “World Serpents?” said the young man in a light, merry voice. “I’ve not heard of those.”

  Of course he wouldn’t know the name; it was the translation from Quootla, which nobody bothered learning. “A quigutl told me stories,” she began, but the fellow interrupted her.

  “Quigutl can’t speak Goreddi,” he said, as if explaining to a child.

  “I taught myself Quootla,” said Tess crisply, nettled by his tone.

  “Did you indeed?” he said, managing to sound both astonished and contrite. “You must be older than you look.”

  “I’m sixteen,” said Tess, who wasn’t.

  “So that’s a no,” he said impudently. Tess wrestled a smile, secretly pleased that she could pass for sixteen. That was nearly grown-up. It didn’t occur to her that a thirteen-year-old who knew Quootla would have been even more impressive.

  “There are seven World Serpents,” Tess explained. “And they…they hold the world together. They have wondrous powers.”

  She cringed at how silly it sounded, like magical creatures out of a Dozerius tale. He wasn’t going to take her seriously.