“Quick!” Tess grabbed Griss’s arm and pulled him up the dark corridor toward the kitchen. She heard Reg and Rowan coming down the stairs, but she didn’t look back. In the foyer, the caretaker’s dogs bayed. She hoped the hounds would keep those villains occupied.
Pathka was nowhere to be seen in the kitchen, although there was a golden plate on the floor with a bite out of it. Tess hoped that meant he’d fled, and she’d find him outside.
If she spirited Griss out of the bolt-hole in the pantry, maybe she could get him away from those two clowns. That would ease her stinging conscience.
It was hard to convince Griss to go down the hole, though, and harder still, once he was down, to persuade him to crawl forward. He blubbered in terror. “I don’t know where I am,” he sobbed. “And I don’t know where Annie is. Annie doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Follow me,” said Tess, squeezing past after failing to budge him any other way. From above came crashing, yelling, and the baying of dogs, a terrible altercation, caretaker versus vagrants. With luck, it would keep them all occupied until she and Griss were well away.
She emerged into the weedy moat-ditch. Griss crawled out after. She hauled him to his feet and found him light as a child. Pathka was still nowhere to be seen. Tess ran for the river, hoping the old man would keep up, but he skidded and fell on the steep gravel drive. Tess rushed back, wrapped his arm around her neck, and helped him to the strand, barely keeping her feet.
Pathka wasn’t at the ferry, either. Tess, full of panicky energy, managed to shove the heavy craft halfway into the water, praying that the little quigutl would turn up.
Pathka could sniff her out; he could swim the river, no problem. Still, she dared not launch the ferry until she was sure nothing untoward had happened to him. “Pathka!” she cried, her voice echoing down the riverbank. There was no answering rustle in the underbrush. She was loath to return to the lodge but saw no other option. He might be trapped, or hurt.
“Stay here,” she admonished Griss, seating him on the raft. “If you see a quigutl, yell.”
He nodded, but his gaze was vacant. She might have been directing the wind.
Tess ran toward the lodge, not troubling to conceal herself. If the caretaker appeared, she’d be a concerned passerby who’d heard noises.
Reg and Rowan burst out the front, laughing hysterically. Each carried a bundle of pilfered goods wrapped in a blanket, and Reg’s smock was spattered rusty red. The fact that it wasn’t quigutl blood was cold comfort.
“Go!” Reg called to his companion, hopping on one foot while he sheathed his blade. “Go, go, go!”
The underbrush across the drive rustled: it was Pathka, signaling her to stay put, step back, let Reg and Rowan barrel past. She might have done it had not Griss cried out, “Run, Johnny! If they catch you poaching, you’ll hang for sure this time!”
Tess didn’t know the quigutl gestures for I can’t just abandon him or I feel responsible. She hoped Pathka could read it in her face. She darted toward the ferry ahead of Reg and Rowan and started shoving the craft again, but it was heavier with Griss on it, and then Reg and Rowan caught up and launched the vessel.
They assumed she’d been trying to help, not flee with their captive, which was probably for the best. They kept laughing as they hauled the ferry hand over hand along the towrope. Tess tried to catch her breath; Pathka swam behind, glaring, like an ill-tempered crocodile.
Griss grabbed Tess’s hand and clung to it. On the far bank, he wouldn’t get off the boat. “C’mon, milord,” said Rowan coaxingly. “Don’t look so frightened. ’Tain’t blood on Reg’s smock, but some wine he spilled. We’re your dearest friends. You remember us, don’t yeh?”
“Wreck and Ruin,” said Griss. He winked at Tess, and she realized that, at this moment anyway, he was lucid enough to mock his captors. Apparently his fog of senility could part sometimes, letting a keen sense of humor glimmer through.
He reminded her so strongly of Grandma Therese that her heart ached.
Rowan seemed not to get it. “Always foretelling doom,” he muttered.
“Could we hasten away from this river?” griped his companion. Reg had swished his shirt in the water and was wringing it out; rusty drops stained the gravel. His body was pale as a toadstool, and marked with scars. “The hounds are dead,” he said, “but I’m not a thousand percent sure I killed the caretaker. He’ll know we crossed the river. We need to vanish.”
The men shoved the ferry back into the water, to drift downstream and confuse pursuers. Pathka crept up beside Tess and hissed, “I got what I needed. Let’s go.”
Tess knelt as if to scratch Pathka’s head spines and whispered, “I want to get the old one out of their clutches. I hurt him when I first set out from home; I need to make amends.”
Pathka’s eyes twitched skeptically. “We can follow them for a while, if your conscience demands it, as long as they’re traveling south. Once I finish our thniks, though, I want to go underground. I don’t want them with us—not even the old one.”
“Understood,” said Tess, standing up.
The two ruffians were halfway up the hill already, towing Griss between them. Griss balked, craning his head to look for her, and whined plaintively, “Johnny?”
Tess set her shoulders and followed doggedly, Pathka rattling up the hill behind her.
* * *
Rowan kept glancing warily back at Pathka; Tess’s threat to his favorite limb had clearly made an impression. Reg steadfastly ignored Tess and Pathka’s presence, although he held Griss’s upper arm so tightly his knuckles whitened, and he scanned the woods on either side of the road as if he would have liked to bolt. Perhaps he would have tried to run if Griss could have gone any faster than a shuffle.
Evening fell, and the ruffians kept walking into the gloaming. Tess wondered if they meant to walk all night, until Rowan started whining. Reg answered him with a sharp hiss, and they had a quiet, intense argument just beyond her hearing.
She hoped it wasn’t about whether to kill her. She needed to give them reasons not to.
There was a clearing not twenty feet off the road. At Tess’s gesture, Pathka got to work building a campfire there. Tess sliced up the sausages she’d pilfered and began frying them. Reg and Rowan, still arguing, ignored all this, but Griss stared longingly. His eyes reflected the fire like a nocturnal animal’s.
The smell of sausage finally grew irresistible enough to draw Reg and Rowan toward the circle of firelight. They still looked wary, so Tess smiled enormously and waved a hand around the pan to show she was willing to buy her way into their good graces. Her food would be gone by tomorrow if they took her up on it; she tried not to think about that.
“What’re you playing at?” said Reg, eyes narrowed, staring at her across the fire. He held out an arm to stop Rowan and Griss coming any nearer without his say-so.
“Supper?” said Tess, trying to keep her voice low. It occurred to her that cooking for everyone was a rather feminine stratagem. Was she holding the pan handle too delicately?
There were many ways to discredit her disguise. Her hand sweated against the cast iron.
“Look, friends,” said Tess hastily, “we’re traveling in the same direction. I figured we may as well pool our resour—”
“And which direction is that, precisely?” Reg had not relaxed his posture or his glare. His voice was the tail of a cat about to pounce: only the most minuscule twitch of excitement showed what danger you were in.
Pathka stepped up to Tess’s side and glared back, his tail twitching more obviously.
“ ‘Toward fame and glory, comrades,’ ” Tess said carefully, quoting Dozerius the Pirate, “ ‘but toward treasure will do, in a pinch.’ ”
There was a long silence. Tess wondered whether they could hear her heart pounding.
Then both ruff
ians burst out laughing, and Tess laughed, too, desperately, hoping this meant she’d put their minds at ease. They drew near the fire, at any rate. Rowan flopped onto his fat bottom and pulled Griss down to sit beside him.
Reg sauntered around the perimeter of the firelight with studied casualness, until he stood beside Tess. The back of her neck prickled; she tried not to cringe too obviously. Pathka, on Tess’s other side, growled, but Reg ignored this, squatted down, and put his mouth near her ear.
“Who are you really?” he snarled. “No comrade of ours. Your speech is too well bred.”
“Innit, though?” cried Rowan, helping himself to a slice of hot sausage. “ ‘Which of your limbs is your favorite?’ ”
He mocked her in a high-pitched voice; Tess hoped he meant to be insulting, and that she didn’t really sound like that. Her disguise wouldn’t last if her voice was like a little girl’s.
Pathka’s angry spine flare made it hard to think. Tess put a hand on his head to calm him. She needed to tell a plausible story before her friend decided to take matters into his own jaws.
A hundred Dozerius tales at her disposal, none of them the right one. If she made herself sound important, they might seize her for ransom; if she seemed too dangerous, they might decide to kill her preemptively. Reg had pulled out his knife and was twirling it idly.
“I’m called Jacomo. I was raised in the church, but I lost my faith upon reaching, erm, manhood,” she finally said. It was hard to sound confident with a knife on one side and a protective quigutl on the other. “The prior ordered me to go on pilgrimage and find it. Instead, I’ve discovered a talent for breaking and entering, and many fine things to steal.”
Rowan burst into ugly laughter. Reg stopped playing with his blade and used it to stab a few sausage slices. Tess let herself relax a little.
“So how did you acquire a pet quigutl, Father Filch-My-Jewels?” asked Reg with his mouth full. “And what holy relics did you bring us from that hunting lodge? The chalice of St. Gilded Goblet? The bones of Saints Amethyst and Pearl?”
“Have some respect. He’ll be the Archbishop of Pilfering-Booty someday,” cried Rowan. He laughed uproariously at his own joke, clutching his sides as if he might burst like a ripe plum.
“Enough,” Reg snapped. Rowan shoved his sleeve into his mouth, stifling himself.
“There’s your pet,” hissed Pathka. “So obedient. So docile.”
A knife whizzed past Pathka’s head and stuck, vibrating, in a tree behind him.
“If you mean to share our road, Brother Bat-Dung,” said Reg, striding over to retrieve his weapon, “I don’t want to hear this monster speak. Are we clear?”
“Extremely,” said Tess, before Pathka could speak again. Pathka glared vitriol at her, and she didn’t know how to reassure him. “We won’t be with you long.”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say,” said Reg, sheathing his knife at last. “We may walk the same way awhile, but you’re not our comrade. We’re not sharing the reward.”
Tess would have asked, What reward? but Rowan was sneering: “Griss is our mad nobleman. We found him first, and you can go hang, by St. Masha.”
“Is that your scheme? Locate his family and collect a bounty?” asked Tess.
The ruffians didn’t answer, though. They were busy polishing off the last of her sausages.
* * *
Tess would have absconded with Griss that very night, but the men tied him to a tree. “What in Heaven’s name—” Tess began, appalled at this indignity. Rowan, glimpsing thunderclouds over his partner’s head, took her aside and confided, “Lord Griss wanders if we don’t. You’re not the only Johnny he sees, y’know. He chases Johnnies all over creation, and he’s like to chase one over a clift.”
Griss smiled sadly from across the fire. “It’s all right, Jacomo,” he called. “I asked them to. It’s embarrassing to wake up Heaven knows where, next to someone you don’t recognize.”
It was the closest he’d come to remembering.
Even so, Tess might’ve untied him if she hadn’t had to lean over a man with a knife to do it. Reg and Rowan plunked themselves down at the base of the same tree.
She didn’t like her odds. She spread her blanket next to Pathka on the far side of the fire.
“Can I speak now?” Pathka growled. “We should leave. I don’t care that it’s dark and your heart is gnawed by remorse. The tall one will eventually kill one of us on impulse, while insisting it was logical.”
“I can’t,” Tess said levelly. “Griss is in serious dang—”
“Burn him!” Pathka hissed. “You have no duty toward him. Your guilt will kill us.”
Tess nestled under her blanket, thinking. She didn’t feel this as duty; indeed, duty might have sent her running the other way. And it wasn’t mere guilt. She felt…like her heart and conscience demanded it. Like this was where she was supposed to be. How could she turn her back when someone right in front of her needed help? Especially when that someone reminded her so keenly of Grandma Therese, who’d kept her going through the worst days of her life.
* * *
Tess had been fourteen, barely, when she’d had to confess all to her mother.
Bad girls in stories always fell pregnant on the first go; sometimes (depending on the story) they’d done little more than enter a man’s room and close the door. It wasn’t clear to Tess (until it was) what they’d been getting up to, only that judgment was swift and sure.
Saith St. Vitt: Sin, and you sin before the eyes of Heaven. Heaven does not blink.
Several months of Will passed without consequence; Tess carried on in merry denial. When her monthlies were finally delayed, she didn’t mind. Who’d miss that mess? After three months’ delay, however, she began to wonder and then to fear. If she was pregnant, wouldn’t she be ill? Mama had been vomiting till the bitter end with Ned. Tess felt nothing but a gnawing anxiety. She grew quiet and then withdrawn. If Will noticed, he didn’t ask what was wrong.
Finally she could maintain her denial no longer. She determined to ask Will; a naturalist might have some insight. Before she could tell him, though, he disappeared. Paid up at the Mallet and Mullet, no forwarding address. No one knew where he’d gone, not Roger and Harald, who’d wondered aloud whether she might require a new paramour, nor yet the saar Spira, who’d ogled her wall-eyed, as if he could smell her secret.
Even Will’s adviser, Professor the dragon Ondir, had had no warning. “He didn’t defend his thesis,” the old saar said flatly. “Tell him he won’t get his degree until he does.”
In desperation, Tess asked Kenneth to eavesdrop at the Belgioso warehouses. She didn’t believe Will had owed Count Julian money, but she was out of ideas. If Will was at the bottom of the river, at least she’d know. No one had killed Will, though, as far as Kenneth could discern.
Tess’s gowns grew tight around the waist. She had to tell somebody, or go die in a gutter like the slattern she was. The latter, distressingly, seemed like the pleasanter option.
She’d tell Jeanne first. Jeanne would be sympathetic, even if she didn’t know what to do.
She crept into her sister’s room, but Jeanne was already asleep, illuminated by moonlight. Tess sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress, hoping Jeanne would open her eyes. She didn’t, which pierced Tessie to the heart. Once Jeanne would have sensed her there; once there’d been a bond of steel between them, but Tess had selfishly broken it. Ashamed, she skulked back to the room where she now slept alone, which had once been Seraphina’s.
As the patron Saints of comedy and tragedy would have it, the next day brought a carriage with the royal crest to their door. No fanfare—it was only Seraphina, deigning to descend from on high. Papa was at Count Julian’s, humiliating himself for employment, but Seraphina wasn’t here for him today. Mama led her into the parlor, offered tea as if she were a duchess
, and hollered for the twins—unnecessarily, since they were listening at the door. Jeanne bounded in first; that is, she glided like a swan. Only the keen eyes of her twin knew this for unbridled enthusiasm. She perched on the edge of a chair, vibrant as a canary. Tess, by contrast, slouched in and tried to bury herself in the cushions of the couch.
“Tessie, sit up,” Mama admonished. Tess wiggled as if she were trying.
“I come bearing news,” said Seraphina, eyeing Tess. She looked suspicious, though she couldn’t have been. No one yet knew the news Tess was bearing.
“I’ve secured two positions,” Seraphina continued. “Jeanne may accompany Tessie to court, beginning next month. They’ll attend on Lady Farquist, who’s like a dear old auntie to all the young lords. You’ll finally meet some eligible bachelors, Tess.” Seraphina capped off this pronouncement with a suggestive wink; Anne-Marie swatted her arm.
Tessie burst into tears.
She couldn’t go. There was no way. In another month, her belly would be swollen beyond easy concealment, and then? How long did it take to grow a baby? Mama had been pregnant forever with Neddie.
“Tess, stop being melodramatic,” snapped Mama. “However moved you may be, these over-the-top displays are inappropriate. People will think—”
Tess flopped onto her side, keening, which cut the lecture short. Mama’s mouth hung open, as if it began to occur to her that Tess’s sobbing portended something serious. Jeanne rushed to Tess’s side, faithful and unquestioning, pushing Tess’s damp hair out of her face and handing her handkerchiefs. “My love, what’s wrong?”
Seraphina raised her eyebrows, as if waiting for someone to explain this outburst.
“I can’t…,” Tess moaned. She was sweating and dizzy, and was Jeanne wearing perfume? It was ten times stronger than it needed to be; it turned her stomach. “Mama, I can’t go.”
Tess of the Road Page 21
