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.