by Victor Milán
Karyl started to walk away, briskly as if just risen from a sound night’s sleep. But now Rob felt something else sitting in his stomach like a plateful of broken glass.
“How much of it did you contrive?” he called to Karyl’s back.
Karyl turned. “How much of which?”
Rob held out an open hand, palm up. “All of it. Since we got to the bloody place, perhaps. The downs as well as the ups. Even the Blueflowers goat-fuck, and our trial for our lives.” He shook his head. “All your wizard swordplay and your fine tactics can blind a man to the fact that you’re the master strategist, above all. So, my legendary hero—how much did you plan?”
“We’ve been luckier than any human has a right to expect,” Karyl said, “and far luckier than we deserve. On the whole—far less than all, but something over half. That’s fair to say.”
Rob felt his stomach clench. “Why?”
“I was hired to do a job,” Karyl said. “Is it any different for dinosaur masters? Our employers are in many ways a more difficult opponent than the enemy.”
“Oh, aye,” Rob said, laughing harshly despite the ache. “Your boss you have with you always.”
“Precisely. They hire us to perform certain tasks. At some point we inevitably have to choose whether to carry out those tasks, or try to please them.”
“True enough. So then?”
“We were brought in to get Providence to defend itself despite itself. We’ve done so. I have given it the best chance of success it’s within my power to. As have you.”
Rob stared. The edges of the broken glass stayed sharp.
“If it consoles you at all,” Karyl said, “I had no inkling the Princess would do act as she did. A mind like hers, brilliant but driven by naïve idealism and untrammeled by sense, is far less predictable than the shrewdest strategist. That makes for a dangerous foe. And a worse ally.”
“So you didn’t—truly, you didn’t—?”
Karyl met his furnace-vent gaze squarely. “I never foresaw the harm that would come to your woman. Nor the rest of the lot. I sacrifice no life unless I have to. Not even annoying Garden Councilors. I was hired to protect them all.”
Rob winched his lips back in something passably a smile. “We were hired to protect.”
“We were. And that’s one of the harshest lessons to learn: you can’t protect everyone. No matter how good you are. No matter how hard you try.”
To Rob’s amazement his voice clotted, as if from emotion. Karyl dropped his gaze.
“No matter how hard I try,” he said softly, “everyone who trusts me, dies of it.”
Rob gripped his shoulder. “It’s only because of you any of us is alive right now.”
Karyl lifted his head. He looked at Rob with almost the eyes of a child, glittering with tears.
“For now, my friend,” he said. “For now.”
After a moment he blinked. His eyes cleared; his shoulders squared.
“And now,” he said, almost gaily, “I’ve got to ride. I’ve an entire county to intimidate, after all.”
Rob watched him stride away until full night swallowed his slight but now-erect figure. He shook his head.
“Who’s madder, then?” Rob asked, of the wind and the dead. “Himself? Or me, for following him?”
Chapter 23
Brincador, Bouncer—Psittacosaurus ordosensis. Bipedal plant-eating dinosaur, 1.5 meters, 14 kilograms, with a short, powerful beak. Distinguished by quill-like plumes. Common Nuevaropan garden pest.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Providence town’s central square bloomed with colors, motions, musics, in early afternoon sunlight gently screened by the clouds. Banners flapped like strips torn from rainbows. Flower petals in lavender, chrome yellow, powder blue, skittered and swirled up around the feet of townsfolk as if joining in their dance. Several competing ensembles performed lively tunes in competition. Though the day was warm the autumn breeze down from the Shield passes hinted with its smell and slight edge of early snow on the cloud-threatening crags.
In the shade of a gaudy temporary awning, Melodía sat by the fountain. Beside her sat Bogardus on the one hand, and Violette on the other. Annoyance pinched the Councilor’s fine features into the aspect of a dried fig.
“—should have consulted us first, I tell you,” she was saying to Bogardus across Melodía as if the younger woman wasn’t there. “Does the Council rule in Providence, or does it not?”
Bogardus smiled placatingly. “We advise, surely,” he said. “Guide with a gardener’s loving hand.”
Melodía wasn’t sure why she was here being feted by the crowd. All I did was bring disaster to these people, she thought, and get my best friend killed. She still alternated bouts of numbness and disconsolate weeping. Right now she felt numb. Mostly. But the other was always there, quivering inside, ready to break forth with neither warning nor apparent provocation.
“Perhaps it’s time for our hands to grow more active,” Violette said. “Time to shape the unruly growth. And prune away the unsightly.”
Something about that tasted bad on the back of Melodía’s tongue. Violette’s faction already seemed too active to her. But the sensation passed with no more than cursory notice. Her thoughts were too active for ready distraction.
“Karyl removed the greatest threat to our people and our Garden,” Bogardus said. “He won a great victory, after all. One that will be commemorated for ages, if the songs sung in the taverns are any indication.”
Rob Korrigan had seen to that already, however much Violette sniffed and harrumphed at such vulgarity pretending to be music. To celebrate his bringing the army home he’d got roaringly drunk crawling the town’s handful of taverns. Although he’d stayed at the farm—and stayed drunk, Melodía heard—the several days since, he’d been furiously writing songs about the miraculous victory of the Hidden Marsh. Other members of the victorious army had carried them into town, where they became instant sensations.
He deals with grief in the ways he knows best, Melodía thought. Why don’t I have solace like that?
But she despised the lack of control drunkenness or herbal overindulgence brought. And despite the tutelage of one of the greatest musicians the modern epoch had produced, she never showed sign of musical aptitude aside from a pleasing singing voice. And there was only so much singing she could do. Especially with her throat worn raw from weeping.
The thought of her lost lover—Did I throw him away as irrevocably as I did Pilar?—jabbed her like a pin and threatened to set off a fresh sobbing fit. She reined herself viciously in: I am a Delgao, a noblewoman, a grande in my own right. I will not disgrace my family and my title by public weakness.
“In fact,” Bogardus said, with a smile that if Melodía hadn’t known him better she would’ve thought was impish, “I believe this latest group is singing one of Master Korrigan’s compositions.”
Glad of the distraction, Melodía paid attention to the words as a gaily costumed group of ’prentices march past with arms linked: “On that field was Hope reborn/And tyrant Guilli got the horn.…”
Violette sniffed more loudly.
“And we oughtn’t forget,” Bogardus said, “that he won substantial treasure when he browbeat Crève Coeur’s heirs and surviving barons into submission. The coffers we’ve depleted to pay for the army and its upkeep overflow with silver once more. Our brave warriors enjoyed a reward, the wounded and the families of the fallen are seen to. Karyl’s even provided relief for those dispossessed by Count Guillaume’s depredations.”
He shook his head. “I greatly admire his resourcefulness as well as his nerve. On top of the plunder gained from the baggage train, to auction off the Countship to the highest bidder? And as a condition of the sale compel the winner, Baroness Antoinette, to agree to pay massive reparations?”
Violette cast her gaze sidelong at Melodía. “Perhaps your father might have something to say about that?”
Mention of the Emperor was like a body
punch, in Melodía’s present state. Words became too curdled in her throat for any to get out.
“The Empire prefers to allow matters of vassalage and succession to sort themselves out on the local level,” Bogardus said smoothly. He seemed to sense the question’s impact on Melodía. He also had long since shown acquaintance with high-level courts. Although Melodía had never seen him at the Imperial one. She would remember, she was sure.
Violette arched a finely lucked brow. “Wasn’t meddling in succession what provoked that nasty little brouhaha in the North, a year or two ago?”
“That involved an Elector,” Bogardus said, “not a mere border count. The Princes’ Party rebelled because they feared the Emperor choosing one of the very people who’d Elect his successor would grant him too much power.”
“But Emperors are always Elected from Torre Delgao. What difference does it make? And who could be so crass as to object if Felipe chose our delightful Melodía to be Empress after him?”
“Offspring can’t succeed a parent directly on the Fangèd Throne,” said Melodía, momentarily roused from her self-pity. For which she felt a twinge of gratitude to the purple-eyed woman. “Anyway, we’re a large familia. It matters to some which branch ascends to the gold and red.”
“Come,” Bogardus said, squeezing Melodía’s arm. The contact was thrilling on her bare arm, even in her current gloom. “We must acknowledge Karyl’s genius. Verging on artistry, if not the thing itself.”
Melodía was not so sunken in despair that she didn’t suspect the Eldest Brother of trying to head off a lengthy disquisition on Imperial dynastic politics. Frankly, she couldn’t blame him. She also wasn’t so self-consumed as not to realize how quickly the details of Delgao intra-family politics could bore an outsider stupid.
“You must, perhaps,” Violette said, crossing her arms pointedly beneath her small breasts. “It’s only money. And he should have insisted Crève Coeur embrace the Garden’s principles and guidance! Why else did we pay him to win this gaudy slaughter these fools are glorifying?”
Melodía frowned. She liked the Councilor, in a mildly guarded way. Certainly she felt a warmth toward her. She was grateful for the acceptance and affection Violette had shown her. And almost foolishly so, to Bogardus as well, for not rejecting her for what she had done in the name of their Garden, and of love.
Somehow, she felt an impulse to defend Karyl. That shocked her into holding back whatever retort had quickly shaped itself into a dart on her tongue before it was launched. She couldn’t despise Karyl anymore for what he stood for—not when he had stood between her and the terrible death she had brought upon Pilar.
How she now felt about him, and whatever he was, she could not say. But what disarmed her vocal weaponry was simply the notion that such a man as Karyl Bogomirskiy could need defending at all.
The apprentices chanted lustily past, no doubt enjoying the day off from their arduous routine as much as they did celebrating their salvation. Melodía turned her head to watch them. As she did she met the sad gaze of the Mayor, his moustaches drooping more pronouncedly than she ever remembered seeing them. He nodded gravely. She nodded back, noblesse oblige, and marveled how the two town guards, male and female, who stood flanking him, with cuirass-cased chests pushed out and chins held as high as if they’d had the slightest thing to do with the victory being celebrated, seemed more like wardens than bodyguards.
She felt Violette’s thin body stiffen beside her. Melodía looked around to see the Councilor lean forward like a tröodon spotting a bouncer in a berry-bush.
Marching toward them was a phalanx of children, several score, ranging from around twenty—the age at which bodies began to visibly ripen into adulthood—to those who could just toddle unassisted. All wore pure white linen gowns. Each carried in its right hand a thistle, symbol of Providence—Melodía had never figured out why it wasn’t a cornucopia or some such; having been raised to the art, she knew heraldry made sense rather less than half the time, and the rest of the time made rather less sense than none at all. In the other hand each child carried a flower, brilliant and gay in scarlet, blue, yellow, white. Their high voices rose in the traditional “Song of Thanksgiving to the Eight” in archaic Spañol.
Hands gripping the arms of her folding wooden chair so tightly the veins stood out blue through milk-white skin, Violette watched the procession go by. Why such interest? Melodía wondered.
According to château gossip, Violette had left two grown children behind when she left the land of her birth, a highborn widow dispossessed by a late husband’s scheming heirs. Unlike her friends Lupe and Fanny back home, who loved to chat gaily about the day politics would at last let them have babies, Melodía didn’t yet see the attraction of spawning. It was a messy, painful business, she knew well enough; and what did you get for all that grunting and screaming? A squirmy, wet-faced bundle of noise and poop. That would, Creators willing, someday grow up into a pest like her little sister. Which, dearly as she loved (and missed) Montse, Montse assuredly was.
Perhaps Violette was feeling the aftershocks of the maternal urge, or missing the presumed grandchildren she might never know—Melodía just had time to think that before homesickness and grief and self-pity rose up in a wet mass to smack her in the face, and she had to snatch out her kerchief and feign a sneezing fit to hide the traitor tears.
* * *
Melodía tossed her head on the satin pillow. Her hands clutched clumps of satin sheets. Violette knelt on Bogardus’s bedchamber floor with her buttocks, white as Eris, the Moon Visible, in the air and her face pressed between Melodía’s wide-spread thighs. After seemingly endless teasing, first of the soft skin of Melodía’s inner thighs, then the lips of her sex, Violette’s tongue had discovered the center of Melodía’s pleasure and now played it like a musical instrument. The tune she played was different from what Jaume might have done—but the pleasure it gave Melodía was no less intense.
It had all happened suddenly, that afternoon when they came back to the Garden villa from the victory parade in Providence town. The three had dined together, quietly, in Bogardus’s chambers—simply but beautifully decorated with sprays of flowers in elegant faces, discreet sculptures, and miniature paintings. That was unusual but seemed natural to her, somehow. Or perhaps that had merely been her relief at not having to face the other members of the Garden she had left alive, whose faces would cause her to reproach herself the more that they were smiling and accepting.
When a new Garden acolyte with respectfully downcast eyes had cleared away the dishes, Violette had stood by Melodía and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. By the time the boy bowed and withdrew with his tray, the Elder Sister was speaking confidentially in her ear.
Melodía could not have said what she had talked about. Because first as if by accident, then with firm purpose, Violette’s lips had touched her cheek. She had not resisted when a hand on her chin turned her face toward the other woman’s.
And when the kiss came to her mouth, she felt herself responding.
She felt weight shift on the bed beside her. She opened her eyes, shock wide in passion, to see Bogardus kneeling over her. Actually what she saw was his cock by low lamplight, dominating her field of vision like a pink obelisk in the flicker of many candles, and his strong face beaming down on her from beyond her eyes’ focus. Love and authority seemed to resonate from his penis. With something like gratitude she reached up to take its hot hardness in her fingers, guide it to her suddenly avid mouth, the salty, meaty taste to her tongue.…
* * *
Falk had her again. His hands were like manacles, hard and huge. His frenzied thrusting felt like a red-hot spear in her bowels. She was helpless, and violated, and would never be free.…
Melodía’s own raptor-scream of outrage and anguish snapped her conscious in the act of sitting violently upright. Long, unbound hair whipped her bare shoulders. She was striking out with one forearm to knock away the faint touch that had wakened her.
Freed me from nightmare, she realized suddenly. The panic began to ebb.
Jasmine-scented evening air blew cool on her bare sweat-drenched skin. By the soft yellow glow of candles in brass bowls she saw Bogardus’s head on the pillow next to her. His right hand was held open and held away from her, where he had evidently pulled it when she reacted so precipitously to his touch.
His face held an expression just the smiling side of neutral. But concern had stamped the corners of his grey eyes with tiny compito feet.
She studied him. Her hair promptly fell forward to either side of her downturned face like curtains, so that the vertical slice of the world including his face was all she could see. It was a soothing sight, dark and strong and square-jawed.
“This isn’t the first time somebody’s wakened screaming beside you,” she said.
“No.”
Deliberately he lowered his hand. He slid it under his own head to meet its mate. His chest rose and fell in a sigh.
“It’s a terrible world, this place we call Paradise,” he said. “I’ve seen so much ugliness. It’s why I decided to dedicate myself to bringing what beauty I could into the world, to counteract the pervasive ugliness I saw.”
That’s what I chose too, she thought, when Violette kissed me this evening. Hunger for intimacy—for sheer human contact—had flooded her. And even as she let herself yield to the woman’s implied request, she had felt defiance.
I won’t let Falk define me anymore. Nor the fear he gave me. My life has fallen to ruin again. But I’m going to start rebuilding by taking it back from him.
Bogardus drew in a deep, deliberative breath. “Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t come arou…”
He stopped the flow midword. His eyelids came down, not quite closing all the way. It seemed to Melodía as if they were trying to shut something in, not vision out.
When his eyes opened they were calm, clear. In a different tone he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
