“Those teeth were under lock and key,” said Tess, still not trusting this.
“Not a very sturdy lock,” said Kikiu slyly. She turned back to Pathka and opened her nightmarish jaws, letting her mother examine them from different angles. “I gave them good shear strength,” she said. “They’re fast-snapping. Won’t rust or jam.”
Pathka held out a cautious finger; Kikiu held still and let him touch the jagged steel.
Tess squirmed, and yet she had no reason, surely. They seemed to be getting along.
“I did what you said,” said Kikiu quietly. “You were right about Trowebridge. It was a false nest. I couldn’t go back.”
“What I said?” said Pathka with effort. “Seeking your true nature?”
Kikiu nodded eagerly. “I think you’d approve of how I’ve been living. No money, no—”
“If that’s true,” hissed Pathka viciously, arching his back, “then why the…enhancer? You’re…making yourself unnatural.”
Kikiu recoiled from Pathka’s ferocity, looking so abashed and awkward that Tess couldn’t help feeling sorry for the hatchling.
“Why did you really…come back?” Pathka roared, his pouch perforation adding an extra whistling wheeze to his utterance.
“Where else was I to go?” said Kikiu hotly.
“But how…did you find me?” wheezed Pathka.
Kikiu looked away, avoiding his gaze, mumbling something Tess couldn’t hear.
“That’s not it,” said Pathka. “You knew…where I was.”
Pathka lunged fiercely, without warning, and bit the front of Kikiu’s face, her whole muzzle, nose and mouth, so she couldn’t speak or breathe. Kikiu thrashed and tried to pull away, eyes rolling in panic. They writhed together on the floor, Pathka heedless of his open wounds, Kikiu flailing with the frenzied energy of someone who believed this might be her last struggle.
“Pathka, stop!” cried Tess in absolute horror. She picked up the stool she’d been sitting on and bashed him over the head with it.
Pathka let go.
“Are you mad?” screamed Kikiu, scuttling backward toward the wall, away from Pathka.
“There,” said Pathka, panting with agony. He’d torn his throat pouch afresh, and it was oozing. “I needed…one more. Fatluketh didn’t work…we were still bound. Finally…free.”
Kikiu’s snout was bleeding. She could have lunged at Pathka with her metal jaws—Tess feared as much—but instead Kikiu said bitterly, “We still won’t be free. You’ll see. There’s something wrong between us, and always has been.”
Kikiu bolted toward the door. Tess looked frantically at Pathka, appalled by what had just happened, but Pathka made no move to go after Kikiu.
Tess knew quigutl bit each other, and that it looked crueler than it was, but this was different. Kikiu’s reaction told her that much, and the fact that Pathka could have killed the hatchling.
She wasn’t sure he would’ve let go if she hadn’t brained him with the stool.
Tess dashed after Kikiu into the courtyard. The front gates were shut; Kikiu had climbed to the top and was ready to leap down. When Tess cried, “Wait!” Kikiu paused, spines flattened like a chastened dog’s.
“Pathka isn’t himself,” said Tess, jogging up to the gate. “He’s still hurt. He’s not thinking clearly. I know him, and this is not like him, and I’m sure he couldn’t have meant to—” Tess paused to catch her breath, and to wonder at the litany of unsolicited excuses she was making for Pathka’s violence. At last she said weakly, “Are you all right?”
“I have never been all right,” said Kikiu evenly. “I came here hoping ko would be proud of me, if you can believe it. I am making my own way through the wilderness, through my own nightmares. But what good does it do? Ko isn’t interested in the slightest.”
“Nightmares?” said Tess, a spark of hope blossoming. “You’re dreaming, without your nestmates around you. Have you dreamed of the serpent? Tell Pathka that. I think he’d—”
“Give me another wrongful bite?” said Kikiu, peering down at Tess like a cat in a tree. “Hear this, human: I have always dreamed, even back in Trowebridge. I worked so hard to make my place there, to follow the rules and fit in there. And still I dreamed, even with my brethren piled around me, as if I were old and senile. I was so ashamed.
“Then Pathka had that dream—that call—and bragged about it, as if it were a miracle and not proof that ko, too, was irretrievably alone.”
“But then that’s something you’ve got in common,” said Tess. Surely this was a misunderstanding. Pathka couldn’t have meant to be cruel, wouldn’t have been if he had known. “Come back and talk to him. You can still be nest to each other.”
“We have never been nest,” said Kikiu. “And never will be.”
“If you’re dreaming of the serpent, then you’re called,” said Tess, pleading now. “You belong with us, searching for the Most Alone.”
“I am the most alone,” hissed Kikiu. “Exactly as my mother made me.”
With a serpentine tail ripple, Kikiu twisted around and leaped from the gates, out of the hospice, and away.
Tess stared at the spot where Kikiu had been. “Mother” had hit her like a slap, and she finally saw what had been there all along: Pathka, her best friend in the world, had been a wholly inadequate parent.
Kikiu, conceived in violence, whose birth almost killed Pathka, would have been eaten if Tess hadn’t put a stop to it. Pathka hadn’t wanted Kikiu, or loved her, or been nest to her. Tess didn’t know what was considered good quigutl parenting, but if Kikiu had been so alone that she was dreaming, Pathka couldn’t have been doing his job.
It was completely understandable, and it was a heartbreaking shame.
Tess stumbled back indoors, stricken with a kind of vertigo, wondering whether there was anything she could do.
* * *
Pathka’s impatience to get going outstripped the speed of his healing, and they set off for Big Spooky four days later, on a warm, clear morning, before he was really ready to travel.
The two miles took half a day because they stopped whenever Pathka’s breathing grew too labored. Tess had brought all her gear, plus rations the nuns had kindly packed, hoping not to go back to the hospice, but Pathka crept so slowly that she began to regret not staying another week. It was midafternoon by the time they spotted the ruins on the ridge.
The denizens of Muddle-on-the-Fussy, who had a special talent for naming things, called the shattered keep Old Haunty. It looked like a collapsed soufflé, crumpled in on itself, sunken and shrunken down through the middle. The stone walls bowed and bulged dangerously. Vines snaked over the walls, and saplings grew in the crevices of the ruined battlements. The caverns beneath the castle had collapsed a century ago.
Had the castle’s people had any warning, or had they suddenly fallen down a hole and died? There might still be bones in the caverns, or treasure. Tess felt a vestigial piratical twinge.
Big Spooky’s most accessible entrance, the nuns had insisted, was south of the keep, a fifty-foot pit lined with vegetation. It was a hard climb down for Tess, even with rocks and vines to hold on to, which made her wonder about these nuns. They must be tough as goats.
Pathka, even injured, outclimbed Tess. He was already preparing a torch for her by the time she reached the bottom of the pit, aching, scratched up, and proud of herself.
“Finished these…the night of the storm,” said Pathka in the harsh, sore whisper his voice had become. He gingerly drew from his throat a pair of what looked like large cockroaches. They were thniks, roughly moon-shaped; Tess had mistaken untidy wires for legs. “Only hands and tongue. No tools,” Pathka rasped, amazed at himself.
Tess stowed her bug—she still found it insectoid—down the front of her jerkin. Pathka lit the torch, and together they descended into humid, chi
lly darkness.
These were caves on a different scale than they’d encountered before; they walked for hours. Pathka chose large passageways, looking for someplace deep and majestic enough to perform his calling. He’d know it when he saw it, he insisted. They found a vast lake, which horrified and fascinated Tess, and discovered rooms full of crystalline wonders: frozen waterfalls, gypsum snowballs, pale needles of stone. Nothing suited Pathka.
They reached a chamber like the nave of a cathedral, its ceiling and walls far beyond the torch’s reach. An enormous flat rock, like a dais, lay near the center; it had fallen from the unseen ceiling an age ago.
“Here,” Pathka said approvingly. “Help me, Teth.” He paused, hand to his throat, until the pain passed.
“Of course,” said Tess warmly, wedging the torch between two rocks so she could have her hands free. “What do you need?”
“Pierce my artery,” said Pathka, pointing out a tender spot under his arm. “Collect blood. Sprinkle around while I sleep.”
Caves, it turns out, are incredibly quiet when you’re too stunned to speak.
“Use your knife,” said Pathka gently, as to a frightened child. “Your skillet. I can do the…stabbing, if it’s too hard.” His throat pouch quivered as he spoke.
The stabbing was one place Tess had snagged, certainly, but not the only place. It was too grotesque to fill the skillet with blood, as if she meant to boil it down for quigutl black pudding. What else did she have to catch blood in? Her water skin was in use. The nuns had sent a jar of sauerkraut. She couldn’t possibly eat it quickly enough.
She glanced around in frustration and noticed two odd whitish stones a ways off. They were identical, curved like shallow bowls, roughly the shape of a fingernail and the size of two cupped hands. She’d never heard of such formations in any geology lecture.
They’d hold a good dribble of blood, though.
“Teth!” cried Pathka. “Now. Quick.”
He was already bleeding. Tess grabbed the bowl-stones, one in each hand, and moved them to catch the silver blood. “What are those?” Pathka cried, his arm gushing.
Tess examined the bowl-stones anew. They didn’t feel like stone, in fact. They were too light in her hands, milky and translucent and…flexible? A little? “They feel like fingernails, honestly,” she said, feeling foolish about this observation.
Pathka, with some difficulty, reached his non-bleeding arm across his body and touched the rim of one of the bowls. “Ohhh,” he sighed. “Teth, you’re right…that was…living matter.”
“A shell?” she asked, because the only other living matter she could think of that was this shape was too strange. It couldn’t be. The bowls were too small.
“Anathuthia,” gasped Pathka as if the name took everything he had.
“A shed scale?” There was no way this had come from a great serpent. “It’s too small.”
“She’s been young…many times. Renews herself…parthenogenesis. Must’ve passed this way…long ago.”
Tess didn’t know the word parthenogenesis—in Quootla or Goreddi—but she knew when her friend was suffering. “Is this enough?” she said, swirling blood in both bowls.
“Probably. It’s all a guess,” said Pathka. He seared the wound with his flaming tongue and then flopped back against the flat stone, exhausted. “Wait until I’m asleep.”
“Do I pour it on or around you?” asked Tess, trying not to sound appalled.
“Try both,” he said faintly. “Listen to your instinct. Do what seems right. Intention is more important…than details. Probably.”
Tess sat carefully, a bowl—scale?—full of blood in each hand, and waited, listening for his snores. They came like a trickle, then a roar.
Before she’d made up her mind to start pouring Pathka’s blood, it began to glow. The bowls in her hands glowed pale blue. All around the cavern other blue orbs shone, like a hundred moons reflected in a lake, breathtakingly beautiful. The chamber was full of these…scales?
Pathka had surely guessed right. What besides World Serpent scales would glow in sympathy with a quigutl’s dreaming? Tess, remembering her task, rose awkwardly and circled Pathka’s stone, dribbling blood around him. Every spatter made a constellation.
She flicked the last drops across his body, and Pathka, too, began to glow.
Tess sank to her knees just as the torch sputtered out. The pale blue light of a hundred shining scales suffused everything and was enough. It ebbed and flowed over Pathka like the Southern Lights, flaring upon his throat pouch, his dorsal arm, his skull.
Before her eyes, the hole in his throat closed up.
Tess watched, mesmerized. Then the light began to fade, so slowly that Tess couldn’t tell if the glow still lingered or if it was an afterimage on her eyelids.
Finally the darkness was total. Pathka stopped snoring, and the silence was total as well.
For a moment Tess imagined she didn’t exist. It was surprisingly soothing.
“Teth Teth Teth!” Pathka cried, just beside her. “We did it! I dreamed with her! She’s expecting us now. I can hardly believe it worked—”
The stream of enthusiasm was forestalled, momentarily, by the sound of Pathka vomiting.
His voice sounded stronger. “Are you all right? I can’t see,” said Tess, feeling around.
Pathka reignited the torch and vomited once more. Tess saw what his voice had made her hope: his throat was whole again. She knelt beside him and held up a tentative hand; Pathka stilled himself and let her touch his skin, his arm, the dome of his head, every place that had glowed with extra brilliance. He was whole all over.
Will had hypothesized that the serpents could heal—pagan and Pelaguese myths hinted as much—but seeing the evidence was still a shock. “How is this possible?” Tess said, stroking Pathka’s scarred flesh. “This wasn’t some kind of…of supernatural—”
“No, friend,” said Pathka gently. “If it exists in nature, it is natural, not thupernatural. The world is different than you thought, maybe. We quigutl are the serpents, Tess, made from their dreams and bones, and they are us. They sent us after the great dragons, to bring them back, but we never made it home. I don’t know why. We forgot who we were, and I suspect the serpents forgot us. What do you call that thing you do to remind your Thaints that you exist? You say special words, like waving a flag for them to find you.”
“Prayer?” said Tess. “This was a prayer to Anathuthia?”
“I am the prayer,” said Pathka, repeating the Goreddi word. “To the Most Alone, from my people.”
This was the Pathka she loved, full of myth and wisdom and enthusiasm. The serpent had restored not just his body but his spirit as well.
If ever there was a time to bring up Kikiu—that other most alone—it was surely now. Kikiu was suffering, had suffered for years; Pathka would care, if only he could be made to see it.
“Kikiu told me something before she left,” said Tess. “Did you know she dreams?”
“On the road? Of course,” said Pathka. “Without the nest to mute them—”
“No, no. It started back in Trowebridge,” said Tess, “before yours did. She was ashamed to tell anyone. She thought it just showed how misplaced and disconnected she was.”
Pathka stared at Tess hard, saying nothing.
“I thought you should know,” Tess persisted. “You have this quirk in common. If you reached out to her, the dreams could be a bridge between you, a way of being nest to—”
“I was called,” Pathka snapped. “I’m the one who’s been alone, ever since Karpeth died. I’m the one who’s lived in pain. Kikiu has nothing to complain about.”
It was an unsympathetic, waspish reply, like something Mama might have said. Her acute suffering—real suffering, Tess couldn’t pretend otherwise—had always blinded her to everyone else’s.
/> Tess could tell by the set of his spines that there was no discussing this now.
“We must keep walking south,” said Pathka sourly. His tail was twitching side to side with barely concealed anger. “Anathuthia says the world will bring us to her, and I have faith that it will. I’m called to find her.”
Tess swallowed her disappointment and shoved the bowl-scales into her pack, in case they were needed again. Pathka led her in irritated silence through the maze of caverns, toward some distant egress that only he could discern.
They emerged on the other side of the ridge, which put them, according to the nuns, a couple of miles from the Ninysh border. Now that Pathka was healed, they made good time.
Borders are curiously fluid over centuries. Like a river carving a wide valley, this border had rampaged all over, however docile it might look in its present channel.
A Goreddi castle guarded the boundary these days. In times of Ninysh ascendance, when the border had passed farther north, the fortress had been called Palasho du Mornay, but now it was plain old Castle Morney. Tess spied it in the distance, a crusty wart on a hillside; the road led around it to the west. She would know she was in Ninys, land of her mother’s people, when she had to look over her shoulder to see the battlements.
This was a milestone worth taking note of, and not merely because she’d have to shine up her rusty Ninysh to communicate. Crossing an international border—upon the solstice, no less—felt like an accomplishment. She’d walked a long, stubborn way, without stopping, chickening out, giving up, or needing anyone’s help. She was a child of the Road.
“We should celebrate,” Tess said to Pathka’s shadow in the tall grass. “There’s a village in the valley under the castle, looks like. Let’s stop for a proper meal.”
The words were out before she’d thought it through: Pathka couldn’t eat in a public house. “Just bring me out some cheese,” he said, cutting off her apology.
He was still cross with her. It wasn’t like him to stay annoyed; Tess had really stepped on his tail, bringing up Kikiu, and she didn’t know how to fix it.