Tess had a fever within hours. It raged for three days, during which she remembered only bits and pieces: Pathka sleeping beside her, Josquin feeding her broth, and Dr. Belestros making a poultice from moldy bread (surely she dreamed that; it was too bizarre).
Upon the fourth day, her fever broke enough that she knew where she was and could speak. “Next time, remind me to offer my nondominant arm,” she croaked through parched lips as Josquin propped her head up and St. Blanche put a glass to her lips.
“If she’s well enough to joke, she’s on the mend,” said St. Blanche, and some of Josquin’s tension melted away.
“I’d rather have another baby than be bitten by a quigutl,” Tess declaimed, teetering on the edge of delirium. “I’d rather have ten babies.”
“Noted,” said Josquin, dabbing her forehead and smiling.
“I’d rather marry Will than be bitten by—”
“All right, let’s not exaggerate,” Josquin said.
Tess and Pathka were co-invalids, together on a pallet in Josquin’s room. Pathka didn’t speak at first—he was recovering from pneumonia, on top of everything else—but they lay in comradely silence, nest to each other.
When they finally spoke, it was the middle of the night. Moonlight streamed in the window; Josquin snored lightly across the room. “Pathka,” Tess whispered, “I’m so sorry about Anathuthia. That doesn’t make up for it or fix anything, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Pathka was silent so long that she might have thought him asleep, except he wasn’t snoring. Finally he said, “Anathuthia isn’t gone. There’s still the egg, buried under all that gore. The serpents are eternally renewing themselves; she may have meant to die soon anyway. I wish I knew. I was wrenched out of her dream so abruptly, it’s been hard to orient myself.”
“What was it like to dream with her?” asked Tess.
“All in ard, as the great dragons say,” said Pathka. “I never understood their obsession with order, but there’s no better word for it. I was in the right place, doing the right thing. It was all right.” His eyes unfocused, staring toward the ceiling. “It will be all right.”
“It must have been excruciating to lose her,” said Tess.
Pathka stretched on the blanket, considering. “She’s not gone, Teth. Not completely. Anyway, I feel worse for Kikiu than for myself. Ko arrived just after Anathuthia was killed, and saw only blood and offal.”
“She said she felt it when you started dreaming,” said Tess. “And she felt it when Anathuthia died. Pathka, you said she was broken, and a monster, but that doesn’t sound monstrous to me. That sounds like…I don’t know. Like she’s nest to you?”
“Kikiu and I are bound together in ways I still don’t understand. Fatluketh didn’t set us free; it only bound us tighter.” Pathka shifted in the blankets, reaching a sticky-fingered ventral hand to touch Tess’s cheek. “I haven’t done right by Kikiu. I refused to see ko clearly—or maybe I couldn’t, until I dreamed with Anathuthia and saw everything.
“As much as I want to find another serpent and continue the dream, it’s Kikiu who needs it. Something is broken inside of ko—I was right about that much—but I…I am responsible. I’m still Kikiu’s mother, even if I haven’t been very good at it, and I inexplicably thluff ko.” Pathka burrowed his head under the blanket, avoiding Tess’s eyes.
Tess took his hand and pressed it between both of hers until his pulse slowed. And then, insofar as it was possible for human and quigutl, they dreamed together.
The spring thaw hit hard, turning the streets into muddy rivulets. The sewer under the privy was a torrent of runoff, making the sluice unnecessary for hygiene (although the bathwater still needed to be drained, Tess discovered, or the system backed up). The Ninysh were great devotees of bulb flowers—crocus, tulip, jonquil, hyacinth—and the stubborn things started pushing up everywhere, through mud, through cracks, wherever itinerant bulbs had sailed on the high spring tides. Tess rescued bulbs that had washed ashore in the middle of the street, against a midden of manure, and brought them home for Gaida. The yard was ringed with terra-cotta pots, ready to burst into unruly bloom.
One day a soggy messenger arrived with a letter. Josquin knew him, of course, and made the fellow stand before the hearth and have a cup of tea. They were still shooting the breeze when Tess came home from work, at which point the messenger handed her the missive.
Tess knew the handwriting. Of all the courtly, ecclesiastical, and academic hands she’d learned, there was none quite like it. It was the script of someone who’d taught herself to write at an extraordinarily young age, when her hand was too small to hold a pen in anything but a fist. It spoke of deeply ingrained stubbornness as tutor after tutor tried to correct her penmanship, their pedagogy breaking over her like a storm over a mountain. They’d eroded the fist grip to a two-fingered half fist, but they got no further with Seraphina. Tess could almost hear her, cold as well water, telling those tutors, “It’s legible. You have nothing more to want.”
Josquin knew the handwriting, too, and made as if to liberate the letter from her hands. “Fie, rascal, that’s my name,” Tess cried, dodging him and pointing to the T, which admittedly looked more like a J than it should have. She skittered past him into his room, opening the shutters with one hand and the letter with the other.
Dear Tess:
You’ll be wondering, perhaps, how I know where to find you. For this you may thank Josquin, in whom I hope you have found an otherwise trustworthy friend. Don’t be angry that he wrote me; if he hadn’t, I believe Jeanne would have worried herself right off a cliff. She misses you terribly, but is reassured by the thought that you are alive and in the care of friends.
I don’t know what you’ve heard in Ninys, but I had my baby last midsummer—a girl, called Clotilde Rhademunde Zythia (these royals and their family names! Zythia was my choice, and she will be called that because it’s the nicest of the lot). Officially, she is Glisselda’s. People seem willing to believe that the Queen could have been so subtly pregnant that no one could tell. Such is the magic of queenship, I suppose.
I’m presently in Segosh for several reasons, none of which can be put to paper except that I would like to see you at Palasho Pesavolta at your earliest convenience. I’m only here a week (a week longer than the count would like to host me), so do not procrastinate or dally or indulge in your usual contrarian stubbornness.
Tess laughed so hard at this characterization that she had to lean her head against the window. Josquin clattered up behind her—he couldn’t sneak up on anyone in that contraption—and waited for her to finish. “Good news?” he said when Tess finally caught her breath. “Or is your sister merely being her witty self?”
This only made Tess howl the more, because nothing was as unfunny as Seraphina’s writing. It was stiff as a board. He surely knew this. She handed him the letter and he read it, tutting lightly and saying, “Of course we’ve heard. We’re not such a backwater as that.”
“In an effort not to succumb to my usual contrarian obstructificationism,” said Tess with a mocking curtsy, “I’ll need something court-worthy to wear, as quickly as possible.”
When Gaida came home and heard the news, she went to her bedroom and flung open a trunk. “Unpaid alterations,” she explained, riffling through linens and satins. “Folks sometimes don’t collect their things. I hold ’em as long as I can, but after a certain point they’re fair game.”
They settled on a fine, deep green merino that Gaida had altered for an amber merchant’s wife, unlikely to be claimed now that the merchant was in prison. It was nearly Tess’s size, a bit tight in the upper arms and narrow in the waist; the merchant’s wife apparently hadn’t pounded roadbed or been much for eating. Gaida let out the waist, which she’d previously taken in, but couldn’t do much for the shoulders.