The Dinosaur Princess

by Victor Milán

  Where I … do not.

  Karyl glanced around. The rain showed no sign of slacking. Though Mora Selena’s face and eyes were indistinguishable in the gloom, the way they pointed and her attitude in the saddle told Rob she was gazing intently at Karyl. Could that be why he’s so eager to get shut of me, then? Am I an unwelcome distraction?

  Looking back to Rob, Karyl stuck out his hand. “I have to go. I will miss you, my friend.”

  Rob took and shook the proffered hand, then reeled Karyl in for a fervent hug. Karyl stayed as rigid as a plank but managed to bring himself to pat Rob’s ribs vaguely.

  Reluctantly, Rob let him go and stepped back onto the small stoop. “All right. I won’t delay you anymore.”

  Karyl nodded. He turned about and walked back to the waiting Shiraa. She murmured her name to him. He scratched her snout in passing, said something Rob couldn’t make out. She squatted into the mud of the yard, he climbed aboard, and she stood up again, with a smooth-muscled grace that took Rob’s breath away. Even sunk in sorrow and despair, he couldn’t fail to appreciate such beauty in a dinosaur.

  Karyl nodded once, turned his matadora away, and set her off at a trot for the road. His companion raised a gloved hand in brief salute and followed. The rest of the party had headed back for the farm earlier.

  The brim of Rob’s hat collapsed, dumping a load of cold water on his shoulders. He stood watching as the rain swallowed the two riders and their mounts and then for a long time after, as tears mingled with the rain streaming down his face and into his beard.

  SOMEWHERE IN SPAÑA

  Montserrat Angelina Proserpina Telar de los Ángeles Delgao Llobregat, Infanta of Los Almendros and of the Empire, Flower of the Realm, heard someone sniffling. It made her mad.

  “Quit sniveling!” she ordered aloud. Quietly, but aloud.

  So she did.

  The straw she lay on prickled the skin of her cheek through the thin felted-feather blanket she’d been given. Its smell and the condensation on cool stone of the storehouse walls filled her nostrils. In her arms, Silver Mistral stirred, a warm, pliant softness with a core of springy strength inside that soothed her. She knew the ferret got impatient if forced to hold still too long—and knew she was doing her best to do so to comfort Montse.

  But even though the straw was fresh and clean and she had enough blankets to go on top of the hemp smock she had been wearing in the Palace when the bad men grabbed her to make sure she stayed warm, comfort wasn’t going to be easy to come by.

  She frowned. Then she caught a whisper of sound through the bolted and unfortunately quite solidly constructed oak door. Glad of something to concentrate on except simmering in her own internal broth of fear, sorrow, and helpless rage, she frowned hard to listen.

  It was one of the shaven-headed men in the dark robes speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She guessed it must be Griego, because that was what they spoke in Trebizon. He had a tendency to hiss. But he was making no effort to keep his voice down, and it turned strident as he kept talking.

  A calm voice answered. Her scowl deepened until it actually pressed the lid against her right eye. That was the man who had stabbed Claudia. He was languid, tall, and lean, with neatly trimmed hair and beard the color of iron.

  Montse’s friend had fought like an angry vexer there in the Palace kitchen. She had clawed his face up pretty badly with just her fingernails before she fell. The times she’d glimpsed him since, he had had that whole side of his face bandaged, often showing rust-colored stains in the area of his left eye. So Montse hoped Claudia had taken his eye out.

  Of course, she was probably dead now. Montse hoped she’d recovered—she knew that if wounds didn’t kill you fairly soon, you generally did. But she had looked bad when the black cloth bag was dragged over Montse’s head and she was picked up and carried away, kicking furiously and clutching Silver Mistral to her chest.

  The first man started to talk back loudly. He was cut off by a third voice, definitive as a door slam: it was one of the two women. The one who shaved her narrow head and apparently even her eyebrows, which were then painted on over a pale base in a high-arched way that made her look like a frightening statue or terrible doll. She wasn’t large, but the others deferred to her. Even though the hissing man was supposedly in charge.

  The conversation grew heated. Montse managed to catch and comprehend one single word: Basileus. Which she knew was what the Trebizonés called their Emperor, Basileo, in Spañol.

  The thought so flooded her with relief and joy that she bit the inside of her bottom lip hard enough to wince to keep from tumbling into the chaos of tears again. I understand! she thought joyously. I finally can understand … something.

  It was a victory. But a minor one. Aside from catching the bearded man’s name—Dragos—go by a couple of times, she might have been listening to a fountain bubble in one of the many gardens inside the Firefly Palace.

  Bad thought. She had to suck in her deepest breath and frown real hard not to break down over that memory and the wave of homesickness it hit her with.

  The conversation—argument—ended. She heard footsteps, at least one person stamping as hard as sandaled feet could. A door slammed.

  Another woman’s voice—less sibilant, softer, more … reasonable somehow. It spoke a language unmistakably different from the first.

  Dragos answered. This conversation was quieter and calmer. Holding Mistral with one hand in a sort of furry hoop, Montse pressed her ear hard against the door, plucking at the front of her gown to let the sticky bits of straw that had gotten inside fall down and quit sticking her.

  She couldn’t follow this language, either. Yet—it seemed as if she almost could, somehow.

  Some of the words sounded lots like Spañol, she thought. But their accent—it’s like Slavo. She spoke none of that tongue—not even her sister did, so remote and lightly populated with the smallest Gente of her father’s Empire. But there were still Slavos, mostly emissaries of their King, at her father’s court. She knew what their accent sounded like—the rhythms of their speech, the way they pronounced their words.

  She tried to focus on following the conversation. Whatever they were speaking, it offered more promise than Griego, which might as well have been the Heavenly Tongue for all the meaning she could wring from it. But despite her gift of intense concentration, another thought distracted her.

  Dragos was not stupid. Unlike most of the adults she’d ever met, and all the children near her own age. He had also seemed inclined to treat her decently, discouraging the others when they handled her roughly or even carelessly.

  Which would have won her trust by itself. If she hadn’t watched him stab Claudia repeatedly in the belly and sides.

  Suddenly she realized why her mind had wandered down that path: it was a problem! One she could study and work out.

  The problem of Dragos. Not in command of her surprisingly large party of captors—she’d seen over a dozen people while riding in the coach with covered windows and during the brief intervals when they took her hood off inside whatever new place they were keeping her. But clearly important. And, she thought, smarter than his nominal superiors.

  Why does he treat me better? she wondered. She thought the answer was key to helping her understand him.

  She didn’t understand people. Not easily. She’d learned many ways to get others to do what she wanted them to. She’d had the habit when she became aware of herself, around her sixth birthday, and had cultivated it ever since. But she still couldn’t seem to grasp people’s true feelings and motivations. Not the way Melodía did.

  It seemed to her that she might be getting an idea of Dragos’s strings—and how to pluck them to her advantage.

  It wouldn’t be easy. It would take time and effort.

  “What else have I got, Mistral?” she whispered to her ferret. Who stared at her with her eyes beadlike in her pointed, masked face, keenly attentive, as she tended to be. “What else do I have to
do?”

  Well, she could cry and whine and carry on. She actually snorted at that.

  “I will learn,” she promised. “I’ll figure him out. I’ll figure out how to play him against the other bad people.”

  She slid down the door, suddenly weary. Released, Silver Mistral poked her pink, damp nose against Montse’s own. It was the ferret’s best effort at a kiss, Montse had long ago realized.

  She smiled, unable now to hold back tears of love and gratitude—completely. She picked her friend up again, soothed by the warm softness of her fur—and the hint of wiry strength in the long, narrow body within.

  “We’ll get out of this,” she promised. And the tears came in a hot curtain. But now they were fierce. “We’ll beat them.

  I will kill them all. Kill them hard. I won’t torture them. Bad people do that. But when the time comes to kill them, I won’t try real hard to make it easy on them!”

  She put Mistral down on the beaten ground at her side. Instantly, the ferret arched her back and began to hop and beep. It was a common trick of hers that Montse thought of as the Ferret War Dance. It usually meant she was ready to play—or less frequently, fight.

  And now, Montse realized, it meant both.

  * * *

  “Welcome, Baron,” Rob’s new seneschal said as he stepped inside, his rain-soaked hat and heart both heavy. The man was tall and built like a scarecrow, with a slat-thin torso and wide shoulders, and his face was homely enough, with its great blade of nose, to frighten horrors. “I’ve prepared a nice hot toddy for you.”

  “Thank you, Bergdahl,” he said. “It’s most kind of you.”

  Chapter 9

  La Majestad, Majesty—Is the capital of Empire of Nuevaropa, located in the Sierra de Gloria in the midst of the Meseta in Spaña. It is an autonomous city-state, administered by the Imperial Diet, which convenes there. The first Emperor, Manuel Delgao, known as “The Great,” built the beautiful city atop a leveled-off hill called La Mesa de Gloria. A drawbridge connects it to the Emperor’s Palace, El Corazón Imperial, which Manuel had built into the very rock of Monte Gloria, the highest peak of the Glory Range. Its residents call themselves Majestuosos, to reflect the Imperial capital’s pride and dignity, of which they tend to be ever conscious.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  Melodía woke up.

  The clouds above were bright and nearly blinding-white.

  The land around was shades of yellow and brown.

  The air smelled of dust, the warm silver hide and rich sweat of her mare, Meravellosa. And the shit of a hundred other horses and grunting dray-dinosaurs.

  For a moment it was as if she could remember nothing past that terrible night, the night they learned of her beloved sister’s being cruelly snatched away from the Firefly Palace—and the servingwoman, Claudia, Melodía’s savior and a friend she hardly knew—stabbed to death before Montserrat. The night her beloved Jaume, with whom she had so recently been reunited—and reconciled—ran away with his men to hunt down Montserrat’s abductors and bring her back safely, in defiance of the Emperor’s orders.

  As Melodía had devoutly wished he would. Her father too, probably, she guessed. She didn’t know why he’d forbidden Jaume, his established Champion, his kinsman and friend, to go after his daughter. She had no idea why he made a lot of his decisions. Fewer still these days.

  But it wasn’t true, she realized, as she came fully aware of her rocking in response to Meravellosa’s upward pace and the swishing black tail of her father’s bay right before her. It wasn’t really that she’d slept that whole time. More dozed. There was only so long she could sleep, she recalled, before the dreams started.

  Of a hundred possible horribles that might be befalling her sweet baby sister right now at the hands of the notoriously cruel Trebs. Of her friends, dying before her eyes. Of the horrors worked by the Grey Angel Horde. Of Falk and the rape. Of Raguel Himself—the first time he was revealed to her as the real guiding spirit of the Garden of Beauty and Truth. And later, when he presented himself openly to his followers and the world in the Garden villa’s great hall and the memories he had stolen from her of their first encounter flooded back and the Grey Angel Crusade began.

  She recalled a few things of the last two days, a scatter of incidents. Mostly her father dismissing her small retinue of jinetes, the light riders she’d commanded for Karyl, and Rob Korrigan his spymaster and friend. She remembered, or thought she did, his telling her with deep paternal concern that he didn’t want their presence reminding her constantly of the horrors she had just lived through. She remembered feeling sad and also laughing, because it was so funny that her father or anyone could imagine she ever stopped thinking about the things she had seen and heard … and smelled. But at the same time the sadness and hilarity felt distant and removed, as if they were happening across a big room to someone she scarcely knew. Maybe she only laughed in her mind, before sinking into the clammy but somehow inviting depths of despair once more.…

  It was morning and hot. A low, broad conical hat like the ones peasant farm-laborers wore, but made of silk and struts instead of woven out of straw like theirs, shielded her face from the sun, which, despite the constant clouds, was fierce, halfway up the eastern sky. A yoke of feathers, gold and red in the Imperial colors—and those of her family, Torre Delgao—protected her shoulders. A dun panorama of hills and scrub, slashed across by green lines of streams and acequias and patched with cultivated fields, spread out to her left.

  Finally, she knew that they were approaching the top of the road that switched its way up the southwestern face of La Mesa de Gloria. Though they had approached from the northeast, they had to work their way around the whole of what was misleadingly called Sierra de Gloria, the Glory Mountains, but was really just different parts of a single looming mountain, to reach the road that led to the city and the palace of La Merced, capital of the Empire of Nuevaropa.

  Last, she heard the excited buzz of voices, from their escorts ahead and from the long procession winding behind. She had particularly forced awareness of voices from her conscious mind, for fear she’d hear the one that terrified and sickened her most of all: that of Falk, Duke von Hornberg.

  Pressed to the side of the road near the Plateau’s rocky top were wagons piled high with bales of foodstuffs and kegs of water to provide for the hunger and thirst of city and palace. The draft animals, mostly nosehorns with a few other types of hornface thrown in, tossed their heads and bawled in annoyance—and in their own thirst and hunger. The Imperial Herald and a contingent of horseback-mounted Scarlet Tyrant escorts had ridden ahead to clear the way for the Imperial train. Which was now much reduced, with the departure of the peasant levies and most of the knightly contingents back to farms and fiefs, though the 3rd Tercio of the Brown Nodosaurs, the Imperial Will, which had accompanied His Majesty from La Merced, tramped stolidly in everybody else’s dust in the column’s rear to provide an escort only the rashest would care to tangle with.

  Her enemy—she hated even to form the name in her mind—rode in a place of honor at the very head of the Imperial cavalcade. It had paused at the Plateau’s base to allow beasts and humans to drink from the Raging River that curved around it while the dinosaur knights still accompanying Felipe had switched to their war-mounts. Now Snowflake, the unique white Tyrannosaurus, led the marching Imperial bodyguard, the Scarlet Tyrants. Or the sorrowful remnant who were left after Canterville. She had seen their distinctive red and gold armor and plumes among the bodies strewn up the side of the round hill called Le Boule. So many bodies …

  She had thought she’d seen great numbers of bodies left in the wake of the Horde. The dead of Canterville could have filled a whole great city with ghosts, had there been any such thing. Even after experiencing the mobs of La Merced, filling the streets and squares for festival and riots, two things they loved most in all the world, she had somehow never thought that that world held as many people as were dead on
that field.

  Or worse, so worse—not dead.

  With her head raised from the perpetual nod it had occupied before, Melodía could see the Plateau level off before them and the beginnings of the yellow-brown walls of brick and stone and whitewashed mud that rose above the rim.

  “La Majestad!” exclaimed a male voice behind her.

  “At fucking last,” a second said.

  She twisted in the saddle and turned her head. Her neck creaked; having her head lolled forward on it for what was apparently a very long time had made the muscles stiff.

  A quartet of Tyrants, their gilded breastplates bouncing off the highland sun in eye-hurting spears, their gold and red plumes gorgeous and nodding, rode horses not far behind her. Three chestnuts and a grey, she noticed.

  “The Princess is awake!” the first one, a sargento, judging by the red-dyed sidewise crest on his golden helmet, growled. “Watch your fucking language.”

  The others stared at him, then laughed. He should have been commanding a puño, a fist of five men. Presumably three were all that survived.

  “Way to go, Sarge,” called the man to his left, whose voice Melodía recognized as the second speaker’s.

  The sergeant blushed to the grey roots of his black beard. A scar that ran diagonally across his face from left brow to right jaw shone stark white against it and the normal brown of his skin.

  “I’m sorry, Highness,” he stammered. “I spoke without thinking.”

  “’Sallright,” she said, her words slurring as if she were drunk—or still half asleep. “I heard the word before. Said it. Fuck. There. See?”

  The sargento looked at her with eyes like hard-boiled compito eggs. His three men crumpled up their faces to hold back laughter.

  Melodía heard a voice cry ahead of her. “My dearest darling girl!”

  She cranked her head painfully forward. Her father, wearing an outfit similar to hers, except that his feathered shoulder-protector was a red-and-gold cape that spilled halfway down his back, had turned in his saddle to see for himself. The look of relief and love in those pale-green eyes made her feel a pang of something like sadness.