Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  “Of course I meant it,” he said that night as he held her in his arms, moonlight streaming in the window. “Heaven knows I wasn’t ready to settle down at seventeen. I know one lovely innkeeper who thought me a cad for it.”

  “I’m eighteen,” said Tess, forgetting that she hadn’t told him about her birthday.

  He poked her in the ribs. “When trying to prove you’re not a cad, maybe don’t admit that you lied about your birthday. My point is”—his low voice deepened with emotion—“I know the Road still calls you. I lived for it at your age: I slept in the saddle and ate on the gallop. I’d lick my lips and know where I was by the taste of the dust. It still whispers to me, especially in springtime, only now I can’t follow. How could I keep you from it, in good conscience?”

  “How can you be so sanguine?” said Tess.

  “I’m not, Tess, but I’ve passed this way before,” he said. “I’ll miss you every day, the way I miss Rebecca. The way I miss walking. But this is my road. I’m so happy you came and traveled with me.”

  “I’ll come back,” said Tess, growing emotional.

  “I know you will,” he said, smoothing her hair with a strong hand. “And you’ll have had other paramours by then, and so will I, and we will be dear old friends, happy to see each other, full of wondrous stories.”

  “I love you,” she said weepily, and kissed his lips. He wrapped her in his arms and pulled her on top of him, and that was the last time before she went.

  Tess and Pathka reached the great southern seaport of Mardou two weeks later. So did Kikiu, Pathka reported, though she did not travel with them. “I feel ko following,” said Pathka reassuringly. “Ko pushes and pulls but will not run away. Have a little faith.”

  Pathka himself seemed different in a way Tess could not put her finger on. There was no more frolicking and vomiting and rubbing up against her knee—and no easily wounded irritation, which was a relief. He seemed to float along on some unseen, tranquil river. She chalked it up to Anathuthia, that the dreaming had given her friend a wider perspective, or that he was no longer quite of this world.

  She couldn’t bring herself to mention the capture of the egg, not yet. Pathka seemed fragile, like a cobweb, and she did not know what would send him back into the splitting death.

  The town of Mardou had a harbor large enough to hold ships from around the world as well as river barges from the interior. Tess, who’d led a thoroughly landlocked existence up to now, gazed in awe at the forest of masts and sails, the cargo cranes creaking and straining, and the wide, dark sea.

  It touched sky at a far horizon. She remembered how, when she’d first left Trowebridge, the sky had looked impossibly huge over the plain. The blue dome seemed even vaster out here.

  Tess took a room at a dockside inn, Do Gabitta (The Gull), and set to learning whatever she could about Countess Mardou. Crucially, the expedition had not yet departed; the countess’s Porphyrian baranque, the Avodendron, still languished in harbor, waiting on the delivery of “Lord Morney’s contraption,” whatever that might be.

  The countess herself was easy to find: you had only to follow the excitement and cheering, and then look for the bobbing plumes of her hat. She scorned carriages and could frequently be seen striding through the center of town in her shiny boots, kissing babies and accepting gifts and adulation.

  Tess tailed her at a distance, studying her and looking for the best angle of approach.

  The easiest thing would have been to call on the countess at home, so of course Tess rejected that out of hand. Seraphina had told her exactly what to do—beg forgiveness and list her serpent-finding credentials—but Tess was Tess, however far she walked, and no less pigheaded than the day she’d set out. She would do this her own way.

  If she could figure out how. There was always Seraphina’s way to fall back on if intuition failed, galling though it was.

  Upon her third day in Mardou, an enormous crate arrived in a wagon hauled by six heavy horses. It took the largest crane in the harbor to get it aboard the Avodendron. Lord Morney’s contraption had arrived at last; Tess’s time was up.

  The tide would be right for departure at sunset. She had eight hours to come up with the best way to approach Countess Margarethe. Tess paced the piers, trying not to fret. Trying to empty her mind, in fact, on the principle that she knew the answer already and needed to give it a chance to come to the surface, unimpeded.

  Tess’s peregrinations took her past a contract house, where sea captains and shipping companies signed agreements before a lawyer. The top half of the door was open, in celebration of the warm morning (it wasn’t that warm, but one of those spring days that feel balmy compared with the previous months), and conversation was spilling out. One voice, in particular, like a nail on slate—a grating, nasal whinge—pulled Tess out of her reverie. There was no mistaking it. She stopped short, backed up a few steps, and squinted into the dim interior.

  A solicitor, pale and narrow as a moonbeam, sat behind a broad desk, scribbling diligently. To his left stood a frowsy sea captain; to his right, a cluster of four saarantrai, silver bells dinging tinnily. Tess’s eye went straight to the dragons, to the one whose voice she knew, though she could barely believe it. Scholar Spira, like a lumpy dumpling, hair of indeterminate color curling at the ears, pedantically instructed the solicitor about some fussy contract detail.

  Scholar Spira and three other dragons were hiring a ship.

  The solicitor stated the obvious: “I’ve never contracted an exploration vessel for dragons before. I wonder that you don’t just fly south under your own power. You’ve no treaty with the islanders stating you can’t.”

  “Bah, they wouldn’t want to fly,” grumbled the sea captain, who had an interest in their not flying, to be sure. “Nothing for them to eat in the far south but Voorka tusk-seals.”

  “My paramour is Pelaguese,” said the solicitor tartly, “and he makes a delicious Voorka-flipper pie.”

  “Forgive us, sir,” Spira interceded in a syrupy voice. “The seals are fatty, as you know, and they upset our tummies.”

  That comment was so Spira, so patronizing and obsequious at once, that Tess had to stifle a laugh. It came out as a snort.

  Scholar Spira looked up sharply and met Tess’s eyes.

  She turned and ran, which was probably unnecessary. Surely Spira wouldn’t have recognized her, four years later, with her hair short? And even if the scholar had known Tess’s face, or smelled her at that distance, what was going to happen? Would Spira exact long-delayed revenge for the theft and reprimand?

  Tess’s feet slowed. Guilt had propelled her, and a reflexive association of Spira with Will. She owed the scholar an apology, certainly, but that was nothing to be afraid of.

  In fact, Spira’s presence might be a blessing.

  Tess had barely formulated this idea when she thought she heard her name. She’d reached the end of the pier, where the wind whipped flags around their poles and suspended furious, flapping gulls in midair. Only snatches of her name got through at first: a T and then the vowel, which might have been a barking seal. The -ss was lost altogether.

  She turned, expecting Spira, but a tall, stout man was approaching. The wind harassed his longish dark hair into his eyes. He wore a gray cloak and sturdy boots and had traveled far on foot (she could spot another child of the Road).

  Tess crossed her arms, not sure what to think.

  “You seem not to recognize me,” he said in Goreddi as he stepped up beside her. He had a familiar, aristocratic accent. Those haughty vowels had been present at some terrible moment, but she couldn’t…

  Oh yes she could. Her eyes snapped to his face, and there were the beetling brows, the sharp crow’s eyes, the nose she’d broken. “Saints’ bones,” she said warily. “What are you doing at the butt end of Ninys?”

  Jacomo—Lord Jacomo, the studen
t-priest, often imitated—smiled. That had not been a custom of his, to her recollection, and she didn’t trust it. “I’ve only come where you led me,” he said, shivering against the intrusive wind.

  “You’ve been following me?” This couldn’t be good.

  He held up his hands as if to fend off a blow.

  Tess refolded her arms, which had indeed risen to defend her.

  Jacomo said, “Not…not the way you make it sound. Your sister sent me.”

  “I just saw her,” said Tess incredulously. “She couldn’t call me on the thnimi?”

  “Your other sister, Tess. Your twin.”

  Of course he meant Jeanne. How had Jeanne evaporated so completely from her worries?

  “Could we go indoors?” Jacomo asked. “The wind is blowing my words the wrong way.”

  Tess ushered him toward Seaman’s Row, a convenient line of taverns awaiting sailors home from the south. Singing wafted from the first public house they reached, bawdy verses punctuated by abundant yo! and ho!—the universal syllables of maritime mirth.

  She wouldn’t have been able to hear Jacomo in there, which was tempting, but she led him past it to a quieter, dumpier bar called Des Mamashuperes (The Squids).

  The place was appalling. The sawdust on the floor had possibly never been changed; it might have been the original sawdust, the first ever invented, and as such historical. Objects were hidden in it—broken bottles, fish heads, vomit, cats—so you had to watch your tread.

  If Tess hoped Jacomo wouldn’t deign to drink in a place like this, she was disappointed. He led the way, intrepidly hopping over a large lump (a corpse, perhaps; no one would know). He bellied up to the bar, acquired them both ale, and found a spindly table beside the lone window, a square of gritty glass that glowed with daylight but seemed to begrudge any of it actually getting through.

  Jacomo’s chair broke—it must have been halfway there already—so he tossed it away and fetched another. Tess found it hard to balance hers, as if there were no floor under the sawdust, just sawdust all the way down.

  Jacomo began: “I’m not here to avenge my nose, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “That never occurred to me,” said Tess, who was lying. “I assumed you were here for a second helping. I’ve kept in condition by punching sheep.”

  Jacomo’s smile was unexpectedly self-deprecating; Tess felt unbalanced in more than just her seat.

  “Let me tell you how I come to be here, Tess, and then you can decide whether to hit me again. When you ran away, Jeanne was beside herself. We all searched, for her sake: Richard, Heinrigh, our fathers, every man and hound we had. We tracked you to Trowebridge, where you disappeared.”

  “You didn’t question the quigutl,” said Tess, secretly pleased.

  “Ha! Your father suggested that, and the rest of us pooh-poohed the notion. He persuaded Seraphina to talk to them, but she learned nothing.”

  Nothing she’d revealed, anyway. Tess made a mental note to thank her for that someday.

  “We’d reached a dead end. Jeanne took to her bed, disconsolate,” said Jacomo. “But then we had an unexpected break: a young grist lout called Florian showed up with a note—supposedly written by me—claiming he’d done me a favor and was owed some clothing.”

  “Saints’ dogs,” said Tess. “You were still at home when he arrived.”

  “The search had delayed my return to Lavondaville,” said Jacomo, turning his mug in a fidgety circle. “Father thought the lout was trying to scam us, but he gave what the note demanded, little enough, and it made us look generous. I had my suspicions, however, and questioned Florian in private. He’d encountered ‘Lord Jacomo’ in a barn south of Trowebridge.”

  “That rascal!” cried Tess, slapping the table. “He was supposed to say I was thrown from a horse. Much more romantic than cowering in a barn.”

  “He was honest, unlike the villain he’d met,” said Jacomo, black eyes twinkling. He took a sip of ale. “I determined then and there to go after you myself.”

  Tess blinked, baffled. “Why would you do that?”

  Jacomo lowered his eyes, smiling into his beer, and it was as if a curtain parted. Tess could not put her finger on it, but he was changed. This was not the angry, priggish priest-to-be she’d punched at the wedding. This was someone gentler, someone she had never met.

  “I was desperate not to go back to seminary,” he said quietly. “You have no idea. I never wanted to be a priest, but for a third son—”

  “That’s destiny,” said Tess, remembering Frai Moldi.

  There was a light in his eyes. “If my father had gotten wind of your whereabouts, he’d have sent armed men to bring you back. I could escape my studies by circumventing this. I told only Jeanne and Richard what I’d learned. Jeanne begged me to find you; I pretended I couldn’t refuse. Richard agreed to keep my departure secret, and our parents assumed I’d returned to school—until my exam results came back null, but that took two months.”

  “You ran away,” said Tess, fascinated.

  Jacomo nodded gravely. “I did search for you, in the most halfhearted, desultory manner. You weren’t hard to follow; people remember a thieving knave in a striped jacket.”

  “I was a terrible thief,” said Tess, shuddering. “I had to change my strategy.”

  “Indeed you did.” Jacomo leaned back in his chair. “You met Blodwen and Gwenda, took my name in vain again, and then things started to get interesting.”

  “They weren’t supposed to tell, either,” Tess burst out indignantly. “You might’ve been the junior Duke of Barrabou, come to kill me.”

  Jacomo threw back his head and laughed. “You know, up to that point I believe I had been looking…not to kill you, but to exact revenge. To drag you home in disgrace.”

  He leaned on the creaking table, suddenly serious. “I was small-minded, Tess. I was bitter and narrow and appalling. You told me I was going to be a terrible priest—which was true!—and I wanted you to suffer for saying that. I wanted to punch the world in the face, starting with you. But the farther I walked, the more my rage seemed to cool and blow away as vapor.”

  Tess’s heart was in her throat. “Mine, too.”

  “I know,” said Jacomo. His dark eyes gleamed. “Once I understood whom I was following—it became clear in what you left behind—I wanted to keep following, never quite catching up.”

  Tess had been unaware of leaving anything behind, but to hear Jacomo tell it, he’d played a long, slow game of connect-the-dots, and each dot had been a kindness, farm chores, laughter, a story told. She’d passed through the world, and the world remembered.

  “More than that,” said Jacomo. “You found Fritz. So many tavernmasters told me how kind you were, and in the end you got him to safety. You can’t know what that means to me.”

  “You’re right, I don’t know,” said Tess, mystified. “Who’s Fritz?”

  “Our old game-warden,” said Jacomo. “I called him Griss when I was little; I’m not sure why he adopted the name in his dotage. He taught us to hunt. The bear in Heinrigh’s trophy room was his.”

  Tess remembered now: Fritz’s bear, where she’d found the crème de menthe.

  “He got lost coming back from Trowebridge months before the wedding. We’d given him up for dead.”

  “So he really did know a boy called Jacomo! And baby Lion—”

  “My father, Duke Lionel, as a boy.” Jacomo fidgeted. “I arranged to have him sent home. The sisters think he’s fit for the journey, though he may not live long beyond that. At least he can die among his people.”

  Tess met his eyes and had the eerie feeling that she and Jacomo were family now, not so much through marriage as through Griss. It was as unsettling as it was undeniable.

  “Mother Philomela sends her love,” said Jacomo, brightening. “As does
Nicolas the geologist, who’s exploring a cave system beneath the northern Ninysh roads. Big Arnando showed me the hole that swallowed you up. I heard the legend but did not meet Darling Dulsia,” he added with a wink. “If she could take on an anxious, uptight lad like you, surely she’d have known what to do with a runaway seminarian.”

  Tess still could not believe he was joking with her this way.

  “Who else…I met Frai Moldi,” Jacomo continued. “In fact, I stayed at Santi Prudia most of the winter, snowed in. The serpent, alas, was dead before I arrived,” he said, meeting Tess’s questioning gaze. “Moldi is struggling with its death, as you might imagine.”

  Tess imagined very keenly. But there were two more people she needed to know about: “Father Erique?”

  “Was he the priest accused of rape?” said Jacomo, rubbing his chin between a thick finger and thumb. “He’d left the village by the time I arrived, and I wasn’t welcome there. Apparently you humiliated him in my name. I’m not complaining.”

  Tess laughed and finally drank some of her beer; the odds of punching Jacomo again had diminished to almost nothing. “Angelica?”

  “That’s a name I don’t know,” said Jacomo.

  No news was good news, maybe. She hoped so.

  Tess drummed her fingers on the table, something still perplexing her. “If you never meant to catch up with me, why are you here?”

  “Ah,” said Jacomo, turning serious again. “I have news. Jeanne is pregnant, and scared. She wants you to come home.”

  For a moment Tess couldn’t speak. She felt too much at once, love and fear and duty and, beneath it all, an old, familiar despair.

  Then, to her surprise as much as Jacomo’s, she laughed.

  “Is that funny?” said Jacomo, and Tess caught a glimpse of his old, judgmental self in his eyes.

  “It’s not,” said Tess, wiping her eyes. “It’s just…the absurdity, when you think how far I’ve traveled, of finding the very same choices at this end of the continent. Do I go exploring with Countess Margarethe or go back to Cragmarog and take care of Jeanne’s children?”