by Victor Milán
The skill and fury with which she fought the Horde won her quick acceptance in the Fugitive Legion, which was in no position to be overly choosy about its recruits’ antecedents. Although Rob still considered Iris, her purple-and-gold sackbut, an assault on the eye.
“We may still have need of castles,” Karyl said quietly. “The whole region’s likely to be in the same state, more or less.”
“Barely a castle.” She sniffed. “The idiot owner tore down the walls and turned the keep into a fancy-house.”
Melchor’s erstwhile barony lay in Providence’s west, with the Imperial High Road its northern boundary and the Laughing Water River, running west to south, serving as the border with Métairie Brulée. It had known comparative peace for a couple of generations, with the bulk of Providence between it and the mountain passes and the raiders they sometimes admitted; even as nominal allies of Guillaume, the Burnt-Farmers had stayed passive. Given those buffers, the fertility of its rolling hills and valleys, lumber and game from a small swath of Telar’s Wood, and the commerce the High Road brought it, the little fief had grown as fat and complacent as its last Baron.
“Not that fancy,” Karyl said, his bearded lips sketching a smile. “The manor itself is strongly built, of good stone, and the windows are narrow. It’s still defensible enough.”
“Not that walls kept out the Horde,” Tristan said.
He ignored the look, half puzzlement, half glare, that Selena shot him. She hadn’t yet gotten accustomed to the rough equality that prevailed in Karyl’s army, where rank was based more on proven ability than on birth—and the mostly lowborn light riders’ impertinent wildness had been not just allowed but actively cultivated, by Karyl himself and their nominal commander, his spymaster Rob.
Rob approved of young Tristan’s impudence. He had no great regard for the privileges and pretensions of the nobility—though, alas, that was the very kind of animal he found himself to be now.
He heard a scuffling noise from somewhere in the wrecked study. Selena’s longsword whispered from its scabbard, its slightly more than meter-long blade splitting a cloud-filtered sunbeam into two silver streams. Rob didn’t lift the meter-long oak haft of Wanda, his dinosaur master’s axe, from his shoulder, but was glad he’d thought to uncase her head to investigate the manor.
“Relax,” Karyl said. “It’s a rat.”
A brown furry shape streaked from a mound of rotting fabric to a smashed-down cabinet. Rob heard a dismal squeak. And out from behind the wreckage strutted a compito, Nuevaropa’s smallest raptor, with the rat squirming in its mouth. The dinosaur tipped its red-crested head ceilingward, and the mammal disappeared headfirst down its gullet.
“And there,” Rob said, with a mix of dismay and delight as befit a dinosaur master, “you have a perfect metaphor for life on Paradise.”
Selena shouted, “Ha!” and with a loud stamp lunged her sword at the Compsognathus. The tiny dinosaur uttered a surprised squeak and gained the sill of a broken-out window nearby with a single astonishing leap, its wing-arms spread. It turned for a moment as if to mock the knight, then vanished into the half-wrecked and wholly overgrown formal garden outside.
“I hate those things,” the Mora said, her olive cheeks turning a girlish pink under the others’ stares. “They eat cats. I … miss my cats.”
“That the compitos do not, lass,” Rob said. “They’re much too small. The wild ones might eat kittens, but so might a stray dog. As for your kitties, well, knowing the sly beasts as I do, they’ll have eluded the mad things and now thrive in the woods. Or scrub, or croplands, or whatever’s around your home castle. If you return, they’ll probably come meowing back, to rub up against your shins in welcome.”
“You really think so? Most people think cats are aloof and unloving.”
“Aye, I do think. Trust a Traveler and dinosaur master to know his cats—and think against the grain.”
Chapter 6
El Basileia de Trebizón, The Empire of Trebizon.…—The greatest trading partner and rival of our own dear Empire of Nuevaropa, Trebizon borders Great Turán to the east. Its dominions follow the Black River south from the Ovdan Plateau to the Aino Ocean. Though dominated by its Griego-speaking capital, the vast, fabulously wealthy, and exotic seaport city of Trebizon in the Black River delta, it is a polyglot dominion, comprising Ruso-speaking provinces and the fractious Taliano city-states, as well as Parsos and Turanes, who are cousins to the inhabitants of Turania. Its ruler is called the Basileus, which means “emperor” or “autocrator.” His court is famed for its intrigues, and Trebizonians carry a reputation for conspiracy and conniving throughout Aphrodite, whether justly or not. Trebizon’s Navy is the largest and most powerful of Aphrodite Terra’s whole southern coast, and wise boys and girls will realize it is no disrespect to our own brave Sea Dragons to acknowledge such a truth, but rather wisdom.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
IMPERIAL CAMP, NEAR CANTERVILLE, FRANCIA
“This is intolerable,” Duke Falk von Hornberg rasped in his deep baritone. “We must wage war on Trebizon and make them pay for their insolence.”
Melodía declined to look at him, lest her father and lover glimpse her hate.
Then she smiled. I don’t need to look at him to contradict him, she thought.
“We can’t, Father,” she said. “It’s premature. We don’t know anything yet.”
“She’s right,” Jaume said.
She smiled at that, too. Then frowned, briefly, because he sounded a trifle surprised. You were my best friend almost my whole life, she thought, before we ever thought of becoming lovers. Does it really surprise you I’m more than facile and clever?
It was a coward’s way of extracting satisfaction from her rapist and despoiler, gainsaying him. But it was the only way she could see, with him a Hero of the Hour, to stand alongside Karyl and Jaume himself. And Shiraa, she guessed, though it was just a dinosaur. Not as if the beast was a horse or anything.
And it did gratify her. She promised herself more of that. Much more.
She was watching her father, who looked thoughtful. On the one hand, that was a good thing—he could be impulsive; and once he made up his mind, he clung to that decision like a matador gnawing on a Thunder-titan thighbone. On the other, before he made up his mind, he was easily swayed.
At least his damned confessor’s not here, she thought. Which was no surprise. Fray Jerónimo never took an active role in Felipe’s councils—as far as she knew, not even her father had laid eyes on the man. But she did know he’d been key in planting and nurturing the seeds of the Providence folly in her father’s mind.
Except, she wondered, was it really folly after all? Felipe had taken his Empire to war precisely because he came to fear that Providence’s philosophical dabblings—the Garden of Beauty and Truth—would somehow provoke a Grey Angel Crusade.
As, of course, it had.
But not for the reasons everybody feared. Raguel had orchestrated things from an early stage—had played the Garden’s leaders, Bogardus and Violette, like vihuelas del arco. But still—
“You’re right, dear.”
Melodía looked at Felipe, feeling her eyes widen. He adored his daughters—when he remembered he had them. But even when he did recall them, he tended to regard Melodía, scion though she was, as a child who was only a little older than poor, poor Montse. Instead of twice her age.
Now he was nodding, his pale amber eyes half obscured by his somewhat full eyelids—a family trait of Torre Ramírez, the Spañol royal line, and one she was glad not to have inherited from him. Like his tendency toward corpulence, which she knew had been lifelong.
“We’d be fools to take any action so major until we have a better idea what really happened,” the Emperor said.
She could hear the pain in his words. It throbbed in resonance with the wound in her own soul.
“Besides, Falk, my boy,” Felipe said, trying to force avuncular jocularity and
failing brutally, “young Hotspur that you are—and I owe my life to that; I won’t forget—you’re not a naval lad. Well, no more am I, nor even Jaume. But—Trebizon’s an empire as large as we are, and possibly more powerful. The Basileus prides himself that the south coast of this whole end of Aphrodite Terra is his personal bathing-porch. And the hada of the thing is: he’s right. The Treb navy masters the Aino as completely as our Sea Dragons do the Channel.”
“Is there anything more to the message, Father?” It was like turning a spear-blade in her belly to ask. She didn’t really want to know. But she had to.
Felipe nodded again, as if surprised his baby could muster such an adult line of thought. He should be surprised I’m not shrieking the question at him, she thought grimly. Grim being an attitude she was clinging to as a shield from the gibbering demons who were trying to crowd inside her soul and rip it to pieces.
“There is, mi querida. Our host, Prince Heriberto, waxes rather voluble, in fact.”
He raised the parchment, crumpled in his right hand and visibly stained with fresh sweat. He frowned as he read.
“There’s little enough. The villains killed two servants. But some survived to tell the story—including one who shortly succumbed to her wounds. Montse was snatched as her minders took her to a morning session with her tutors. She managed to flee to the kitchens. They cornered her there. The kitchen servants fought back—one bravo was blinded by a pot of boiling stew flung in his face. That’s where the second servant was mortally injured. But the kidnappers were professionals. They beat down the servants, recaptured poor Montse, and dragged her off still clutching her pet ferret. There’s no doubt they were the Treb delegation: not only did the servants recognize several of them, one was actually caught alive. Sadly, he took poison before he could be questioned. The other prisoners, including the scalded man, were mere rompadores hired out of the waterfront dives. They told all they know before Heriberto hanged them. But it was little enough, it seems.”
As if it were lead and he was bleeding out, Felipe let the hand clutching the letter fall to a pale, lightly ginger-furred thigh. Her father had never had fat legs, Melodía thought irrelevantly, even when his paunch was bigger than weeks on campaign had made it currently.
He sighed. “Heriberto’s well and truly pissed,” he said. “The mortally wounded woman was his senior servant in the Firefly Palace. And he was already out of sorts with me over the whole decision to make war on Providence.”
“Senior servant?” Melodía asked with a catch in her voice.
Felipe nodded. “He even mentions her name—on account of her valor, you see. A woman named Claudia. She was highly regarded by all. Even the Prince, it seems.”
Falk made a guttural sound of disbelief. “A mere servant?”
Melodía gripped the steel scabbard of her talwar until the knuckles of her left hand felt ready to explode through the skin. Now she looked at Falk and made no attempt to conceal what she felt.
No matter who or what you’ve faced in battle, Corpse-tearer, she thought at the young Alemán, you’ve never been closer to death than you are now.
She pivoted and walked out into the night.
* * *
Claudia, she thought, walking blindly in the space between the Emperor’s grand pavilion and her own tent. I’ve done it again. I’ve gotten someone who helped me killed. Oh, Mother Maia, help me!
She wept. She had the presence of mind to cover her face with her hands—she was a Princesa Imperial, and more than that, a Delgao. But that was as much control as she could maintain.
Claudia. Another servant who had gone nameless for Melodía. For years, apparently. Until, of course, she risked not just her much-sought-after position as a senior member of Prince Heri’s Palace staff but her very life. To rescue her.
Apparently her own prediction had been correct: her status as a servant, and Heriberto’s keen regard for his own prerogatives as host-by-rental to Felipe and his Imperial court-away-from-court, had shielded her from serious punishment for substituting herself for the similarly built Princess. She had swapped the cowl and hood of a plague sufferer—a rarity in Nuevaropa, and an object of horror accordingly—and allowed Melodía to walk right out of her cell in a Palace tower.
Because she felt sorry for Melodía—a Princess. And because Melodía’s sister had asked her to. Melodía had never been quite as scandalized as Montse’s minders were by her baby sister’s fascination with the servants—it was at least better than spending all her time watching the armorers at work in the smithies or, worse, hanging about the notoriously vulgar dinosaur grooms and their great ungainly beasts. And for her part, the younger Imperial sibling had become a special pet to the staff.
So special that Claudia had put herself in a potential death cell because Montse asked her to. And ultimately gave her life trying to do what the vaunted Scarlet Tyrant—the bastard Falk’s boys!—had failed utterly to do: save a tiny, helpless child from abduction by brutes.
Poor Claudia, Melodía thought, sobbing. Poor Pilar.
And poor Montse! I failed you all! She cried until it felt as if her guts would turn inside out.
* * *
“—can’t blame yourself, Majesty,” Falk was saying in his rolling-rock baritone when Melodía reentered the warmth and butter light of Felipe’s tent.
“How could you ever have dreamed of bringing a child so young along on campaign? That would have been the unpardonable sin. You acted correctly, my Emperor. You left her in her home, with every sign of security. If anyone’s to blame, it’s Prince Heriberto himself.”
He scowled. “And my own Scarlet Tyrants, who did nothing to save her. It pleases me that Capitán Moreno had the wit at least to fall on his sword for allowing such a thing.”
Felipe waved that away. “You can’t blame yourself either, my boy. But the fact that Harry can, and ought, is not going to sweeten his disposition.”
Evidently there was more to the Prince’s message than Melodía had heard. “What else do we know, Father?” she asked, with emphasis on Padre.
As desperately as she wanted—needed—to know more about her sister and her possible fate, Melodía was scarcely less in need of a distraction. Otherwise, she would obsess over the brutal fact: her rapist was here to stay. And there was not one thing she could hope to do about it—now. He was an even bigger Hero now, tighter with her father than ever.
She thought—but dispassionately enough now not to actually jump right in and do it–about stabbing him anyway and getting it over with.
But that would end her aspirations to matter—to play a role on the Imperial stage. She’d gotten a taste of consequence in Providence. Even during her impulsive embassy to Count Guillaume of Crève Coeur, a disaster literally she alone survived. And more when for the first time she won something purely on her own merits—first the regard of Rob Korrigan, whom she respected for his ability, scapegrace though he was, and, more important, of Karyl, whom she came near to worshipping. And then command, first of a troop and then of all the army’s light riders.
Giving in to the urge—the burning need—to jam her talwar right through Falk’s rock-muscled belly, right above his prudish Northern blue-silk trunks, would end those aspirations. At best, her father would cover the thing—call her mad and seal her away from the world in some convent forever. If that even would be better than a discreet execution, followed by an announcement of the Princess’s death in a tragic accident. Which she doubted Felipe would ever do to her.
Such an act would dishonor La Familia, she thought. The thought had an unfamiliar taste, like biting into a foreign coin and finding pot metal. She was Daddy’s daughter, Montse’s sister. She wasn’t accustomed to thinking of herself as part of the larger clan. Yet she did, at some level.
And then again, staging a coup, slaughtering family members and allies (annoying assholes though they were), judiciously murdering Father’s best friend, forcing an important heiress into exile, and, oh yes, raping her in the
ass—didn’t that dishonor Torre Delgao too? Suddenly, nothing in all of Paradise was clear except the air.
And, in her thoughts, the impulse to action died.
* * *
“They got clean away from the Palace,” his uncle was saying. “No one even noted that.”
Jaume forced his thoughts to narrow from a cloud of anger, pain, and self-reproach and to extract meaning from Felipe’s words. That, at least, was a clear duty.
Falk nodded. “To the waterfront, unquestionably,” he declared, “to take ship back to Trebizon.”
“No,” Jaume said, without consciously willing himself to speak. Falk’s eyes narrowed; the man didn’t take well to contradiction.
But Jaume, though no mariner himself, as Felipe pointed out, knew he was right. “The main base for the Sea Dragons lies right across Destiny Bay from the Palace. Whatever sway the Trebs have in the Oceáno Aino, the Dragons own every square centimeter of La Canal. Their war-dromons would run them down inside a day.”
“But what if the goblins threatened to kill the girl if the Sea Dragons didn’t let them go?” Falk asked.
Felipe said, very quietly, “The Torre does not negotiate with those who take its members hostage. We kill them. No matter what it costs.”
Melodía sobbed. Jaume’s heart tore. She’s shown so much more fortitude than even I ever suspected she had in her, he thought.
She mustered a smile through blinked-back tears when he gripped her biceps to calm her. Brave girl. He let his hand slide down her arm. She took it as if she were drowning and it was the rope.
“My nephew’s right, as usual,” Felipe said in conversational tones. Jaume was glad he couldn’t truly know what that cost him. “They were reliably reported heading inland up the road from the Palace, obviously intending to get away overland. Four men, one with a bandaged face—that servant woman marked him, it seems. They were escorting a small coach with blacked-out windows. Too long after the fact to be useful, sadly, though Heriberto sent riders in pursuit.”
