Tess glanced warily at her sister’s face, but there was no trace of guile there. There never was, even when Seraphina was lying egregiously.
Tess sighed dramatically, disliking to lean over with her head so achy, but her pregnant sister wasn’t going to bend over the chest again. Tess unfastened the brass clasps and flung open the lid. Inside was a pair of dark leather boots, knee-high and supple, finely tooled, soft as a quigutl hatchling. They smelled delicious.
“I’ve been admiring Countess Marga’s boots since the day I met her,” said Seraphina. “She finally told me who her bootmaker is. Since you and I have about the same-sized feet, I had the boots measured off myself.”
Tess had picked up one of them and cradled it like a child, but this additional narrative from Seraphina soured her on the gift. There was nothing so fine it couldn’t be spoiled by family. Tess let the boot flop out of her hand into the trunk. “Thanks,” she said cuttingly.
Seraphina did not appear cut at all, but one never knew what was going on in the middle of her. She smiled as if choosing to believe Tess liked the gift, and then returned to her instrument.
Tess made a point of leaving the boots behind when she quit the room, but hours later she found they had migrated to her cherub-infested bedroom. “Don’t follow me,” she said, shoving the box under the bed. The boots said nothing in return.
* * *
It is the nature of boots, however, to speak subtly. Tess lay awake that night, thinking about them. They seemed to be a suggestion, tooled in leather.
It’s time to walk away from all this, they said.
“Shut up,” said Tess, and for a while they did.
You dreamed about feet. That means a journey is imminent, said the boots.
“No, I dreamed about cutting off my foot,” said Tess into the darkness. “I’m maimed. Ruined. I can’t go anywhere.”
But that wasn’t quite true. That missed the flavor of the dream entirely. Her dream-foot hadn’t hurt; she’d tied it back onto her leg and walked on it as usual. Hacking it off had been an act of tragic courage, taking all her determination and will.
All her Will. She chuckled, which was absurd because it wasn’t funny.
It’s time to cut ties, said the boots-of-her-heart. That dream was a suggestion, too. It’s going to be hard, but you’re brave enough.
“But do I have the Will?” Tess said, making the joke twice. It was no funnier the second time. William of Affle had brought her nothing but grief; she didn’t want him back. She should not have been laughing—and it’s possible she wasn’t. There’s a line between laughing and crying, and Tess was right on its razor-thin edge, teetering back and forth, expecting any moment to land squarely in one or the other. Tears ran down her face, her diaphragm began to ache, and she couldn’t catch her breath. She buried her face in the pillow and only succeeded in soaking it with tears and giving herself hiccups.
You’ll only avoid the convent by walking away, said the boots sagely.
“Boots can’t tell me what—hic—to do,” said Tess.
The next morning, however, she tried them on just to see. The left fit perfectly. The right would have fit, but there was an obstruction in the toe. She upturned the boot, and a pewter ring dropped out, pinging across the floor. She scurried after it and saw that it was a thnik, one of the cheap ones now ubiquitous in the Lavondaville markets.
Seraphina had the mate, presumably, but Tess declined to test the thing. The implication seemed clear. Seraphina expected Tess to take her boots and go, and if she ran into trouble, she could call home with this thnik.
That was almost enough to make her stay. Such was the contrarian nature of Tess—especially against Seraphina—that she would have tossed out ten babies and drunk their bathwater rather than take a hint. She would have cut off someone else’s nose and swapped it with her own, the better to spite everybody’s face. She would have walked twenty miles backward through a snowstorm for a bowl of bitterness if there were a proverb about that—and maybe even more so if there wasn’t. The proverbs were going to have to keep up with Tess; she outstripped them at every turn.
Tess put the boots back in their box and shoved it under her bed. She threw the ring hard at the cherub-crusted ceiling. It ricocheted and landed who knew where.
Still, Tess found herself in the kitchens with nothing to do later that day, and—because she was bored, merely—she stole some little cheeses while the cook’s back was turned. She nosed around in spare rooms and came up with a satchel and some sturdy kirtles, the sort that would make her look like a respectable laboring countrywoman. She nicked a broad straw hat from the garden shed; it would be missed by the gardeners, but presumably they could tell the Queen it had been eaten by marmots and she’d requisition a new one.
“The royal gardening-hat budget,” Tess imagined Queen Glisselda telling Seraphina, “has gone right through the roof. It’s the marmots, you know. They’re insatiable.”
The next day Tess pinched some oatcake, some stockings, and a bottle of wine. Upon the fourth day she took a wool blanket and filched a second bottle of wine. The first bottle was, perhaps not mysteriously, already empty.
A map of the Southlands—Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam, plus some of the southern islands—took up almost an entire wall of the cottage’s library. Tess found herself studying it, especially Ninys, her mother’s ancestral homeland. She spoke serviceable, if rusty, Ninysh. She didn’t have family there anymore; her great-grandfather Count Julian Belgioso had been exiled along with all his progeny for a variety of crimes, real and imagined. They’d come from Segosh, which was easy enough to find, being the capital. Whoever had drawn this map had represented the city with fanciful buildings and spires; Tess touched it as gently as one might pet a skittish finch, as if it might flutter off.
You could start over in a city, expunge your past, be anybody. Her Belgioso family had done it, coming north. Contrary to Mama’s claim, women sometimes did leave home to live unchaperoned. Tess had heard tales, and they didn’t always end in disaster.
She’d spent the last two years altering Jeanne’s clothes; she didn’t enjoy it much, but she could work as a seamstress.
An actual seamstress, not a harlot. The Abominable Paul could go die in a fire.
If Seraphina noticed Tess sneaking and plotting, she gave no sign. The eldest Dombegh sister, stately at twenty-two, kept to her routines: composition in the morning, a garden walk in the afternoon, a visit with the midwife after supper. Tess saw her at meals and managed, with effort, not to quarrel with her again.
Upon the fifth morning, Seraphina perused a letter at the breakfast table. “You will be interested to hear this, Tess,” she said, gesturing with her teacup. “Papa and Anne-Marie—”
“Not interested,” said Tess through a mouthful of kipper.
“—intend to come here tomorrow,” Seraphina continued, as if Tess had not spoken. “Not to fetch you home—I’ve told them you may stay as long as you wish—but to bring two abbesses to meet you: Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s order, and Mother Nancy of St. Agnyesta’s.” Seraphina raised her guileless brown eyes to Tess’s face and smiled. “Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it? They make cheese at St. Agnyesta’s. You’d like that better than plague, I should think.”
Tess wasn’t listening about the cheese; she’d gotten stuck on the word tomorrow. She was out of time. The letter didn’t say they were coming to fetch her, but the letter was a liar, if she knew her mother. Seraphina couldn’t protect Tess from their parents; living in the Queen’s house didn’t give her a queen’s power. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter what Seraphina did. One look at Mama’s tearful, disappointed face and something would crumple inside Tess. She would swallow her despair and comply, because Mama’s despair was heavier, and Tess’s conscience couldn’t bear adding to it.
What was this power called Mama? Why couldn’t
Tess stand against it? She had bucked against Seraphina for the last several days, and the very act of pushing back made Tess feel alive. But there was no pushing against Mama.
Tess picked needle-fine bones out of her breakfast fish and realized she could leave tonight, under cover of darkness. She could be over the fields and halfway to Trowebridge before her parents arrived. Why wait for darkness? She could tell Seraphina she was ill.
“I’m going to miss lunch,” said Tess, pushing back from the table. “And supper.”
“Are you, indeed?” said Seraphina, buttering a scone. “I thought you looked unwell, but I didn’t like to mention it.”
Tess scowled ferociously, hating the way Seraphina saw through her, but Seraphina couldn’t be bothered to look up and face the withering glare. “You know what you are?” said Tess, who couldn’t leave without kicking her sister once more. “Insufferable and smug. You think you’re so sensible and that you know what other people are going to do, but you’re wrong. You don’t know anything. I am going to astonish you someday, and you will fall right over dead from the shock of it.”
Seraphina looked up, deliberately finished chewing her scone, and said, “I’ll die happy, then. That’s good news. Of course, now I shall be expecting it.”
Tess stuck out her tongue, rudely blew a farewell serenade, turned on her heel, and went.
Tess quit the house, her family, and her entire life before lunch.
It would be exactly like Papa to arrive early, so Tess eschewed the front drive. She cut across broad lawns, through a yew hedge and a garden of old, twisted rosebushes (not even leafed out yet), across a field of sheep bleating anxiously to their lambs, and over a stile in a stone wall. The field beyond the wall was full of scrub and bramble, and Tess had hopes that this marked the edge of the Queen’s summer estate. You never could be sure with the Queen, though; anything not explicitly owned by someone else was hers by default.
The stile was an A-shaped wooden ladder over the wall, and Tess paused at the top, the whole of Ducana province spread at her booted feet. Farmsteads and village churches dotted the rolling hills, while hedgerows and stone walls divided them into a chessboard of fields, the yellow-green of new shoots alternating with black, sodden earth. The sky glowed warmly blue, as if it were determined to make the day not merely fine but over-the-top, ridiculously beautiful.
Even Tess’s self-pitying heart found itself a little bit moved.
The cathedral spires of Trowebridge, the biggest town in Ducana province, rose to the southwest. That had struck Tess as the logical place to go first; she might buy supplies there, and then take the main road south. As soon as she descended this hilltop, the town would disappear from view. The direct route passed by Cragmarog Castle (which she could make out, coiled like a snake in the midst of trees), and that was no good. Her parents—or, more humiliatingly, Jeanne’s in-laws—might be encountered upon that road at any time.
Tess, having studied the map, knew the other landmark to look for in this landscape. Directly south was a hilltop ruin, Pentrach’s Dun, which she could reach via footpaths, ancient right-of-ways leading straight through farmers’ fields. From that hilltop, she should be able to see another road, running westerly to Trowebridge.
She had to go the long way, two sides of the triangle, because the hypotenuse was forbidden her. This struck her as perfectly symbolic of her entire life.
The sun shone; she put on her gardening hat against it. Her satchel straps dug into her shoulders, and the hedgerows snatched at her skirts as she passed. A great cloud of blackbirds ascended, screaming, and scared her. The wind slapped her cheeks, damp soil clogged her boot soles, and the hem of her kirtle grew steadily dirtier.
In spite of all this—in spite of herself, really—her heart began to lift as she walked, or maybe a weight began to fall away. She’d done it. She’d gotten free of her family (for now, a voice at the back of her mind nagged). Dirt and discomfort and uncertainty were nothing to her.
She was almost smiling to herself as she passed a gang of peasants, red-handed men in smocks and clogs. They were in the next pasture over, shouting and whipping the cows with willow switches, driving them away from their hapless calves. Two men would then grab a lone calf by its knobby legs, bucking and kicking, upside down in their arms, and haul it into another enclosure. The cows mooed, low and despairing, their udders heavy with milk for their babies, and the babies cried for their mothers—an inhuman cry, but unmistakable to Tess.
Tess didn’t understand what mysterious agricultural purpose required tearing bovine families apart. She watched with one hand to her heart and the other to her lips, and she was struck by both the cruelty of the men and the realization that she was a woman, walking alone.
She started walking faster, hoping none of them would look her way.
As if they could read her thoughts, one of the men began to sing:
A little pretty bonny lass
Went forth upon the dewy grass
I followed her down to the dell
She snubbed me with a fare-ye-well
Whereupon the rest of the farmhands took up the chorus:
Upon the heath, the holt, the hill,
My girl, I’ll do whate’er I will.
Tess’s face puckered at these lyrics and fell at the next verse (which was too bawdy for general consumption). She hunched her shoulders and kept walking. She thought she heard someone whistle after her, but maybe it was merely the call of the hedge shrike.
No, that was a whistle. Tess didn’t look back.
The world was full of men. She’d been so desperate to get gone that she hadn’t given that consideration the weight it deserved. All unbidden, Mama’s voice spoke in her head: Men are scoundrels, and they only ever want one thing. They will try every trick in the book to seduce you, and if you won’t go willingly, they’ll find a way to take you anyway.
She shuddered. Mama hadn’t said such things often—preferring to focus on Tess’s own inadequacies—but of course they were the corollary to everything St. Vitt had always said. Why should women avert their eyes and dress modestly and suppress their desires, if not for the sake of men? How was the wolf to blame, if the sheep were roaming free?
Thou shalt not tempt wasn’t a commandment of any Saint she knew, but it could’ve been.
Maybe she could find a way to live alone and support herself—she still believed that—but walking across the entire Southlands, with no protector, to get there? Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a clever idea. She wasn’t going to last out here.
She paused in the shade of a hedgerow, out of sight of prying eyes, to peel a cheese and munch an oatcake. It was a filling enough lunch, but fast walking and the warm spring sunshine had made Tess powerfully thirsty. Salty cheese and dry bannock didn’t help.
All she’d brought was wine. She held the bottle up to the light; the sun shone enticingly through green glass and liquid dark as night. It wouldn’t quench her thirst particularly well. The sensible thing to do would be to go looking for water. Every little farmstead surely had a well…and a red-handed cowherd, or a lecherous shepherd, or any other sort of man with a bawdy song in his head and a gleam in his eye as he realized she was at his mercy.
Some of them were surely fine—most of them probably were—but you couldn’t tell by looking, and that was the problem. She drank about half her wine, staggered to her feet, and carried on, trying to stay out of sight now, keeping to the shadows of hedgerows.
As she sneaked, her mother’s voice came to her: You can’t tell if a man might be good or evil, but do you know what they can tell by looking at you? That you’re not where you should be, and therefore not what you should be. You aren’t at home, so you must be public property. No one’s taking care of you, therefore anyone might claim you.
A gang of men with rakes suddenly crossed the road in f
ront of her, moving from one meadow to another. Tess pressed herself into a hedgerow to avoid them. One of the younger ones winked at her; nobody was fooled.
They know, said her mother. You’re an old shoe that might fit any foot. A sucked marrow bone. A gob of chewed honeycomb, its sweetness long gone. No wonder Will left you; he knew what you really were.
“Stop it,” Tess muttered, wiping her eyes. She pulled the bottle back out of her pack and glared at it accusingly. She’d had an agreement with wine: it would be a good friend to her and mute these kinds of voices, but it wasn’t doing the trick today. It had ceded the floor to them and stripped her naked of defenses.
She drank the rest, still hoping it would do what it was supposed to.
Her mother’s voice followed her the rest of the way to Trowebridge. Tess felt it like hot breath at the nape of her neck, smelled it in wafts of woodsmoke and manure. It wrapped around her ankles like a vine, making her stumble, and snagged the hem of her skirt as she climbed over stiles. The voice told her to hide whenever masculine farmhands came into view, called her a contemptible insect for hiding, and then flew above her like a flag to make sure everyone knew.
Tess missed the ancient beauty of Pentrach’s Dun, missed a salmon sunset and the aching curve of the river, so wholly occupied was she with wrestling the unseen.
She reached Trowebridge at dusk and stood on the eponymous stone bridge staring at the shadowy buildings, her heart in her boots. Even if she had enough money for lodgings, which she very much doubted, she didn’t have the wherewithal to knock on strange doors and ask.
Running away was the worst idea she’d ever had. She regretted everything.
An idea bubbled up from her sludgy mind—didn’t storybook trolls live under bridges? It would provide shelter enough for one night, anyway. She picked her way through the weeds and crawled under the bridge. It was humid, but more spacious than she would have guessed. Tess exhaled, finally feeling safe. Like a cockroach in a crevasse, her mother said, unable to resist one last kick while Tess was down. The wine bottle was long empty (she checked one last time, to be absolutely sure), so Tess chucked it toward the river, where it shattered on unseen rocks.