by Victor Milán
He proved his reputation for astuteness by showing that he recognized what he was really looking at: a trap. If his marauders continued, they would find themselves outnumbered, surrounded, in terrain that took away their every advantage and gave them to their enemies.
Without further word or signal the baron turned his stallion and high-stepped the beast back into the woods.
Most of his men, riders and infantry, turned to follow, some sullenly, some—the brighter—with attitudes of relief. One horse-mounted knight, a young buck with long braids and his helmet still attached to his saddle behind him, wheeled his white courser. As the beast sidestepped and whickered he stood up in his stirrups, pulled up the skirt of his mail coat and pulled down his breeches to bare his ass.
A bow thrummed from the barricade. Even without the rain to stretch and weaken the string it was a heroic shot for a shortbow. Yet an arrow sprouted instantly from the knight’s pale left buttock.
He howled. His horse bolted into the brush. Emeric stood on the board of a wagon brandishing his bow.
“Missed, a handspan right!” he shouted after the knight, whose own comrades Rob could hear laughing at him most unchivalrously as his horse crashed through the undergrowth. “Come back, Mor Knight! My sister will plant her spear right between those pink cheeks of yours!”
The defenders cheered uproariously. They hadn’t really believed they could stand off a powerful raiding party, especially after the debacle at Blueflowers. And now they had.
They tried to put Emeric on their shoulders. Instead he waved them off shouting, “It’s Karyl who saved us! Praise him!”
Somebody began to chant the name: Karyl. Karyl. Rob turned to his companion in a combination of delight and astonishment. Truly, the Fae must smile on you, my friend, he thought.
Bogardus strode toward Karyl, his practiced presence commanding every eye. Two meters from the smaller man he stopped, doffed his steel cap, and knelt.
“Captain Karyl,” he said, his face streaming rain—and tears as well, or at least his voice suggested them. “I pledge to follow your commands in war. Will you lead us?”
“Lead us!” the crowd yelled. “Lead us.”
Rob had thrown his fist in the air and was shouting the chant as well. It may have been that he started it.
Karyl’s brow knit. Uncharacteristically he paused before saying, loudly and clearly, “I shall.”
Bogardus grabbed his left hand—his sword hand—and kissed it. As he bent his head Rob saw a stark look come over Karyl’s face. And though Rob had never known a touch of the mind-reading gift, it came clear as a shout to him that his friend was remembering the captive knight’s parting words.
* * *
Like a vast pink Paradise flytrap lined with yellow daggers, the monster’s mouth spread open scarcely ten meters to Melodía’s right. The way her heart practically exploded in her chest, it might have been the same in centimeters. She felt the hot gush of its bellow.
They had outridden the dead titan’s stink, carried away downstream on the wind. The reek of decaying meat-bits caught between those serrated slashing-teeth struck Melodía like a fist.
“Shit!” she yelped. Meravellosa who, like all her short and somewhat chunky kind, was no racehorse, had been running at what Melodía had always known as her best speed. Now muscles bunched and exploded between the rider’s trim muscled thighs. The mare accelerated.
Melodía dared a fast glance back. Their pursuer was skinny, and not just from hunger: little more than a snake with two huge pumping hind-limbs. Teal on the back, shading to greenish-yellow on chest and belly, he would in time darken and acquire the stripes that are characteristic of his kind. But his eyes were already that terrible matador blood-color.
Clearly the Allosaurus was an adolescent male, aggressive and obnoxious enough to be driven from his own family by the prime, not yet strong and seasoned enough to win entrance to another pack. Misjudging his quarry’s speed, he had charged at ninety degrees to their course rather than leading them like a marksman shooting fliers on the wing. That lack of skill was doubtless part of the reason he hadn’t found a new pack.
Trying to correct its aim, the dinosaur skidded sideways into a shallow outlier of the main watercourse. Slipping in the mud, it fell onto its side in a colossal splash, with hind-feet and smaller forelimbs clawing comically at the air.
Youth-agile, it jumped back onto its feet in an eyeblink and hurled itself forward again. It roared as if Melodía’s witnessing its humiliation had made this personal.
Stomach filled with fluttering like a hundred frenzied moths, Melodía turned her head forward again to sweep the valley ahead in a desperate search for cover. The young matador had hips scarcely wider than Meravellosa’s. Melodía knew there could be few hiding places he couldn’t follow them into. Or root them out of by sheer strength and fury.
Then her eyes brushed something promising. They widened. If we can reach it.…, she thought.
Pilar’s marchadora had pulled out in front of Meravellosa. Now Melodía found herself overtaking rapidly. By the elevation of the ambler’s head and the action of her hindquarters Melodía saw to her horror that Pilar was reining her in.
“What’re you doing?” she screamed.
“We can’t outrun the monster,” Pilar shouted back. “I’ll let it take me—”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. Ride, you crazy gypsy!”
Perversely, Pilar opened her mouth to argue. Melodía snatched up the riding crop that dangled unused from her saddle. Pilar’s mount was still too far ahead. But the pack-ambler followed Pilar on a lead, rolling eyes and squealing protests at slowing down with a huge meat-eating dinosaur breathing on his tail.
Veering in close, Melodía slashed the bay marchador viciously across the cruppers. It shrieked—not, it seemed to Melodía, without a note of triumph—and raced forward and bit Pilar’s mount on the rump. The white ambler squealed, seized the bit in her teeth, and bolted.
Breathing like a bellows, sweat flying from her flanks and froth from her mouth, Meravellosa actually managed to overtake and briefly pace the leggier marchadora. It was all Melodía needed to head her a hair to the right.
She glanced back again. The monster had lost a good forty meters with his slapstick slip-and-fall. But he was making back the difference at a terrifying rate. If he holds that pace another fifty meters he’ll have me, Melodía thought. And as mad as he looks he’ll run till his heart bursts.
Looking ahead she saw Pilar’s green eyes, huge as a startled tomcat’s, staring back at her from a face that looked as if it were coated in fine wood-ash.
“Princess, he’s almost got—”
“Eyes forward!” Melodía screeched. “Now, now, now!”
The saucer-wide eyes blinked. Then Pilar obeyed, turning the right way in her saddle.
And ducked low over the ambler’s outstretched neck just in time to avoid smashing her brains out.
A true forest giant, thirty meters long, it had been uprooted and denuded of branches by some prior flood and fetched up against a sinuously carven jut of rock. Stripped of bark, its trunk, as wide as Melodía was tall, angled upward to a ball of mighty root-stubs a good six meters across.
Pilar, her mount, and the pack-ambler passed safely beneath bare wood bleached grey-white like a bone. Melodía ducked and followed at full gallop. Less lucky than her companion she gasped as a short, sharp stump of branch raked down her back. Hot and bright, the pain momentarily left no room in her chest for mere air.
Gritting her teeth, she looked around. Huge jaws gaped not three meters from the tip of Meravellosa’s glossy white tail. Red eyes glared into Melodía’s. The adolescent matador vented a shrill scream of rage and triumph, its entire being focused on the prey it was about to seize.
Then it slammed face-first into the trunk.
The impact actually cracked the driftwood giant. The matador’s hindquarters kept moving. Tail and pedaling legs foremost, it slid twenty meters on it
s back, under the dead tree and beyond. Then it lay in the weeds feebly waving its limbs in the air.
“You meant that to happen?” Pilar called back in amazement.
Melodía grinned. “I sure did. If that bad boy’s not dead, he won’t be aware of anything but the ache in his head for a week. Now let’s ride like the wind, before we meet any of his cousins!”
Chapter 7
Tricornio, Three-horn, Trike—Triceratops horridus. Largest of the widespread hornface (Ceratopsian) family of herbivorous, four-legged dinosaurs with horns, bony neck-frills, and toothed beaks; 10 tonnes, 10 meters long, 3 meters at shoulder. Non-native to Nuevaropa. Feared for the lethality of their long brow-horns as well as their belligerent eagerness to use them.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
When Melodía and Pilar rode into Providence’s seat up La Rue Impériale, they found broad, well-kept cobbled streets between narrow buildings roofed in colorful, gleaming tiles, and the main square abuzz with talk of a herd of fabulous horned monsters supposedly glimpsed in the woods to the west just moments before. Road-worn but energized by the prospect of journey’s end—both hope and fear sizzling in Melodía’s veins like fat in a skillet—they paid little attention to the wild-sounding rumors.
They quickly got directions to the Garden of Beauty and Truth’s villa east of town. Flower-smells and strains of lutes and flutes floated over the wall that surrounded the grounds.
“I thought they were pacifists,” Pilar murmured as they drew up before stone water troughs in the shade of a fig tree outside the front wall.
A pair of guards in morions and enameled leather breastplates, intricately figured with thistle insignias, stood flanking the red-painted gate. They held serious-looking halberds. The effect was spoiled somewhat by the man’s bare spindle legs.
Melodía swung down off Meravellosa. Her body was stiff. She was an expert horsewoman, but days of hard riding had taken toll.
“Well, Jaume’s no pacifist,” she said quietly, hitching Meravellosa in the shade. The mare dunked her muzzle eagerly in the water and began to slurp it up.
Even indomitable Pilar showed signs of road-weariness. She was a beat slow dismounting. Melodía was already detaching the pack-ambler’s lead from her saddle by the time Pilar swung a long leg over the saddle and dropped to the ground.
The two women hitched their animals to weathered granite posts and approached the gate.
“Who might you be?” asked the male sentry, who had a moustache waxed into ridiculous spikes. His manner showed slightly nervous curiosity more than wariness, much less stern authority.
“I’m Melodía Delgao.”
“Melo—the P-princess? The Emperor’s daughter? Really?”
The female sentry’s dark eyes narrowed in her broad, brown face. She looked to Melodía like a fellow Spañola. Which was not unexpected on a major trade route through a province that bordered Spaña as well as Ovda.
“Maybe,” she said, “maybe not. Don’t be so credulous, Philemon.”
“It’s all right, Raúla,” a mellifluous masculine baritone said through the opening gateway. “These are guests. They are expected.”
A tall man appeared in the entryway to a small courtyard beyond the wall, with a much-shorter woman by his side.
“You are Eldest Brother Bogardus?” she asked. She had read about him, of course—he was a controversial figure in the Empire these days, to say nothing of a professed acolyte of the philosophies of her own estranged lover, Jaume. He was, as advertised, a handsome man of mature years, in his eighties, per report, with clear grey eyes and square-cut iron-grey hair hanging just past the corners of a square jaw. He looked more like the erstwhile warrior he was said to be than the former priest of Maia he acknowledged being. Despite the name his own saturnine coloring suggested Spañol roots to her.
Most of all it was the sheer presence that beat from him like heat from a forge. Who else could he be, than the master of the Garden of Beauty and Truth, and by extension, allegedly of the entire County? She shut her mind to thoughts of her own Jaume. Too much depended on the outcome of this interview to blunder into the maelstrom of grief and loss and rage—mostly self-directed—those thoughts would lead her to.
“I am,” he said, smiling.
Melodía did wonder just how he knew of their coming. But only briefly. It seemed only right that so masterful a man would know everything that happened in his domain. Even if Providence was still technically ruled by Count Étienne, she had no doubt who was in charge.
“La Princesa Imperial?” his companion asked. She was striking in her own right, once Melodía could break her eyes from the magnet of Bogardus’s face: slim and pale in a simple gown of the same silver white as her hair, which she wore drawn severely back from a face of sculpted, high-cheekboned beauty. Her eyes were a strange purple, and fixed on her intently.
“No princess here,” Melodía answered. “An exile, rather. A weary traveler and her companion, seeking sanctuary. And your teachings, if you’ll share them with us.”
She shook her head. “I must warn you, if you shelter us, you risk retribution from the Empire.”
The head-toss of disdain with which the purple-eyed woman responded dispelled any doubts Melodía might have harbored that she was a true grande. She knew the hauteur trained into blue bloods virtually from birth. And more to the point, could recognize when it was faked.
“We’re not afraid of the Empire here,” the woman said.
“This is Sister Violette,” Bogardus said to Melodía, “a member or our Council of Master Gardeners. And your companion?”
He finally transferred the beacon of his smile to Pilar, who stood half a step behind Melodía’s left shoulder.
Melodía glanced back at her maid, who wore the studiedly neutral servant’s expression she knew so well. She looked back with a smile of her own.
“Pilar,” she said. “My good friend.”
Bogardus nodded, then took both newcomers firmly by the shoulders.
“Sister Melodía, Sister Pilar,” he said, “welcome home.”
* * *
“I’m over the moon,” said Rob, who was over the moon.
Hands on hips, he stood in the road above the farm, watching the dinosaurs approach like houses walking. Their vast frilled heads swung in time to their steps.
Three-horns, he was thinking, and he had to think loudly to drown out the pulse that hammered in his ears. Fighting three-horns from Ovda itself. Six of them, Mother Maia, six!
They were beautiful. And then again, they weren’t. It was nothing for Rob to be split in two contradictory parts. He was lucky when it wasn’t more.
There was no question the Triceratops looked bad. Their tan sides, streaked with darker brown from spines down, were sunken from their journey through the high Shield passes. At least two showed signs of lameness. Such things were to be expected from rapid forced travel up and down steep paths with little forage or water. They could also be signs of something worse. Only careful inspection, and possibly time, would reveal which.
One bull sported a broken brow horn. Rob saw it was the horny sheath, not the bone core, that was broken, meaning it would eventually grow back. In the meantime it would be remedied by one of the sharpened iron caps the monsters were customarily equipped with for battle anyway.
So, roughly worn though they were by travel, the six Triceratops were the most beautiful things Rob had ever seen. So far as he was concerned, they were the true lords of battle: the real dinosaur lords. And in mere moments I’ll have my hands on one for the first time in my life, he thought. It’s enough to make a dinosaur master ten years in the grave hop up and dance a jig.
He glanced at Karyl, who stood beside him with arms folded across his chest, holding his staff in his left hand. The midmorning breeze stirred the topknot that hung across the unbound hair at the back of his head. Rob expected him to make some disparaging remark about Rob’s ill-concealed enthusiasm.
Instead Karyl�
�s face hung grey and slack behind his beard, and moisture actually glittered in his dark eyes.
The sight hit Rob like a belly punch. Ho, what thing is this? he wondered. I thought he’d look the way I feel, like a child seeing his Creation Day presents spread out beneath the tree.
Karyl lowered his face—and Rob cursed himself for being a witling. Can’t you see your own hand in front of your nose? he thought. He’s mourning the men and women and monsters he lost at the Hassling.
A normal man would have missed the power and prestige that had been stolen from him that day, in the middle of the blood-reddened river—in no small part, through the actions of Rob himself, though Karyl blamed Imperial treachery delivered by the hand of the Emp’s pet hero, Count Jaume dels Flors. But Rob had long since given over thinking of Karyl Vladevich Bogomirskiy as normal.
And when Karyl looked up at the nearing beasts again, the beginnings of a smile showed on a face more recognizably his own.
A rider straddled each three-horn’s neck behind its big bone frill. Ovdan, by their dark skin and black hair and eyes, small men and women wearing long jackets against what to them was lowland chill. Pacing the herd beside the elevated road came the lesser figure of Zhubin the spike-frilled hornface, with Gaétan aboard. The young man’s broad face showed a broad smile despite the sling that immobilized his left arm, to keep him from tearing his recently healed chest wound through overexertion.
Gaétan nudged his mount into a stiff trot to draw ahead of its colossal cousins. Rob winced. Zhubin had a similar gait to Little Nell’s, and her trot always felt like getting kicked repeatedly in the tailbone by a very large man wearing very heavy boots. It can’t feel good in his chest, that, he thought.
Gaétan’s smile faltered. But not from pain, it seemed.
“Do you like them?” he asked tentatively.
Karyl looked at Rob and cocked a brow. “They’ll want a keen inspection first,” Rob said gruffly. Then he grinned.
