by Victor Milán
“No.”
She smoothed the loose hair back over her shoulders. After a moment, accepting that they were both awake now, she crossed her legs and sat gazing at her mentor and lover.
“There’s something other than your dream you do want to talk about, though,” he said. “What’s troubling you?”
Forgiveness, she wanted to say. It should come harder. I should be made to pay penance.
But perhaps that was weakness—cowardice. Perhaps she was hoping someone else would exact from her a price less than she was taking on herself.
“I was a fool,” she said.
“You’re young,” he said. “Isn’t that what being young’s all about? If I recall my own youth correctly.…”
She shook him off. “I was desperate when I came here,” she saw. “Lost, and—broken. Desperate.”
“I know.”
“I was like a drowning woman, clutching for something to cling to. Anything. You gave—the Garden gave me that something. I’m still grateful; don’t get me wrong. But—I misjudged. Badly. What I seized on most fiercely, most desperately, was love.”
“Love? We do teach that, yes. A treasured blossom in our Garden.”
She nodded to the edge of convulsively. “Yes. But—I took it for all. The be-all, the end-all. The panacea.”
“Ahh.” He blew a long breath through pursed lips. “I see.”
“It’s a lesson we constantly hear from the Church, growing up,” she said, “especially Maia’s Mother-sectaries. And—well, when I had to leave, when I had to flee for my life and freedom, what saved me then, was love. My sister’s love. The love of friends I didn’t realize loved me half so well. Pilar’s love—”
She choked, then. Squeezing her eyes tight shut, clenching her fists, she willed the sorrow down. Her eyelids were moist when she opened them again and looked at Bogardus.
“Not now,” she said. “I need to say this now. It was the thing that caught my eye. The brightest flower in the whole Garden. So I seized on that.”
“And?”
She scowled so ferociously he raised both brows. “You know what happened,” she grated.
“Yes,” he said sadly. “I do.” Absolon had been his friend of many years, a friendship never touched by their frequent opposition in Council.
She sighed. “So—I’ve learned. Love isn’t all you need. And it doesn’t conquer all. It certainly wasn’t what conquered that bastard worm Guilli!”
He waited a moment—to allow the fury-freshet to pass, she realized.
“So you no longer believe in the power of love?” he asked in carefully neutral tones.
She shook her head. “Not that. I—I may be callow, but I’m not that shallow. I love you. I love my fellow Gardeners. I love my sister Montserrat. I love—I love Jaume.”
It was hard enough to say that. There was one more name, the object of her longest and most devoted love. But she couldn’t bring herself to name person or place, quite now.
“But yes, I see now it isn’t what I called it before—panacea.”
“If nothing else, we can learn,” he said. “Even if that’s not enough to atone for our mistakes. I—I like to think of it as the least we can do for those we’ve wronged, if all else fails: learn to do better the next time.”
She sighed. “I hope—” she said.
She sat upright. “I’ve decided to enlist,” she said.
“Enlist?”
“With the militia,” she said. “When Karyl returns, I want to join him, if he’ll have me. We’ve still got Métairie Brulée and Castaña to deal with. They may be emboldened to act by a belief we weakened ourselves in taking down Count Guillaume.”
He frowned slightly, studying her. She peered hard to try to discern whether what creased his brow was disapproval or merely thoughtfulness. As usual she could see no further than his eyes.
“So, having grown disillusioned with love, you give war a chance?” he asked, not ungently. “Are you sure you’re not overdoing in reaction?”
“No,” she said. “But isn’t that part of finding the Equilibrium the Creators teach us to value above all? Going from one side to the other, from high to low and back? This is what I have to do now. To restore the Equilibrium in myself.”
She took his left hand in both of hers, pressed it first to lips, then cheek. “Please,” she said, despising herself for how lost and little-girl she sounded. “Please tell me it’s all right.”
He sat up. Withdrawing his hand, he put it under her chin and raised her face to his.
“You don’t need my permission to do what you feel is right,” he said. “But you have my blessing.”
He smiled, and she thought to read both joy and pain in the expression.
“I think Sister Violette is right,” he said softly. “It may soon come time to introduce you to the Mysteries. But now—act as you feel best, dear child. And know we love you too.”
Chapter 24
Raptor Irritante, Irritante, Vexer—Velociraptor mongoliensis. Nuevaropan raptor, 2 meters long, 50 centimeters high, 15 kilograms. Commonly kept as a pet, though prone to be quarrelsome. Wild vexer-packs are often pests but pose little threat to humans.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Quietly, the great killer arose from her sleeping-covert in dense brush. She was entering more settled country now: the smell of the tailless two-legs and their four-leg plodders grew stronger every step she advanced. It was getting harder to hide her narrow ten-meter length.
But Allosaurs had been hiding from humans for generations. The knowledge dwelt in the marrow of her light, strong bones.
She stretched. Then she scratched her back on a tree bole with hard-scaled bark, grunting at the sheer pleasure of it. Next she found a stout branch at the proper height and scratched between the hornlike projections in front of her eyes, where she was prone to a particularly persistent itch.
The contact reminded the matadora of her mother scratching her there with her tiny, blunt claws. Her loved, lost, longed-for mother, who looked so insignificant, but whom she knew, deep inside, was tall as the sky and mountain-powerful, and would protect her.
She hungered for her mother almost as fiercely as ever she hungered to feed. Although appetite did not gnaw at her this morning. She had gorged well before her latest sleep.
She thrust her muzzle out of the shade and blinked at late-afternoon sunlight, which lightly stung her scaly skin despite the clouds. As her eyes accustomed to the dazzle she scanned the countryside about her. The terrain was broken, brushy in places, wooded in others. She would keep to such country as much as she could. She was less likely to encounter two-legs here than in the open.
Swinging her toothy face toward evening she saw a figure on a ridge, silhouetted against the distant blue mountains. It was clearly a two-legs despite its shrouded outline and bizarrely peaked head; she knew the creatures could change shapes with their strange sorceries. She knew the figure. It never smelled of two-legs. Try as she might to catch its scent, she never sensed any at all.
But sight of it filled her with warm, sweet certainty, like drinking blood spurting from a fresh kill. She was getting closer to her mother. Somehow she knew, as she always did, that this curious figure was guiding her toward reunion. Toward love and shelter.
When she emerged from cover, she stayed wary. A pack of matadores had worked the area, although by the odors of their urine and dung they had moved on suns before. The grass and bushes and low-sprawling clumps of vegetation held a stronger scent of a late-adolescent male. It hunted solo, no doubt driven from the pack by its mother.
The smell caused her no concern. She’d already met him. Two suns ago he had approached her, alternately sidling up to her, then squaring to confront her with his strength and yawning daggered jaws. A mating dance.
She had not been impressed.
She was half again his size, for one thing. He was strong and quick with youth, to be sure. But she was smart and seasoned.
She had roared to tell him she wasn’t sexually receptive. He advanced as if intending to force the issue. That angered her.
She was especially outraged by the adolescent’s presumption in daring to try to mount her, because he was deformed. His snout had been broken and bent to such an angle that his upper jaw failed to mate properly with the still-straight lower one. He obviously couldn’t even take proper prey, but must scavenge, or live on little bouncers.
Either he had been born that way, and was weak, or had suffered some defeat or accident, and was unworthy. To mate with a mighty hunter such as her, in any event.
Yet she recalled the encounter now with pleasure. In the end the avid adolescent had proven himself worthy of a mighty slayer after all.
He had been delicious, if a touch stringy.
All was well with her world. Turning her face to the slanted sun-rays, she raised her head and made the wooded valley ring with a happy challenge: shiraa!
* * *
“Vexer!”
At the cry, Rob and Karyl turned from the stout piling fence of the three-horns paddock. A young woman had halted her dun pony nearby and swung down from the saddle. Clearly Ovdan, with olive skin and a black topknot sprouting through a brass ring atop her head, she was emphatically built, with broad shoulders and hips, a waist narrow only by comparison. She wore a halter made of some kind of scaly hide, black and brown and shellacked shiny, which might have belonged to a crocodilian of some sort. It had to be padded with something more comfortable, Rob judged, especially considering how heavily freighted it was. She wore a kilt of thinner, softer leather and boots that came almost to her knees. A sword hilt stuck up at an outward angle over either shoulder. A hornbow-case hung by the saddle.
To Rob, her mount, a hammer-headed beast with a roached mane and an evil eye, looked no larger than a big dog. When she’d still been astride it the newcomer had seemed of a size to match it. But when she rolled toward him with the slightly bowlegged gait of someone who spent most of her life on horseback, she seemed at least as tall as he was.
Glancing at his companion, Rob saw something he never thought he’d live to: Karyl Bogomirskiy, the legendary warrior and mystic wanderer, back on his heels and blinking in something very akin to confusion.
“Tir?” he said.
The woman strode up to Karyl and grabbed him around the short ribs. They were bare; despite a cool breeze blowing down from the Shield passes, the noontide sun was warm, and he wore only a hempen kilt and sandals. To Rob’s surprise he saw that, short as Karyl was, he stood perceptibly taller than she. Notwithstanding that, with a bend of the knees and only a token grunt of effort, she hoisted his sandaled feet off the ground in a hug.
“Vexer, you little egg-thief!” she yelled, as the breath oofed out of him. “How in the Old Hell are you?”
Rob caught Karyl’s eye, which seemed to be rolling slightly in a most uncharacteristic manner. “‘Vexer’?” he asked, from the beginnings of a wicked smile.
“A youthful … nickname,” Karyl said, not without a certain difficulty, as the woman returned him to solid ground and let him go. “From the early days of my exile.”
“Little fuck was active as a Velociraptor and twice as pesky, Karyl was,” she said. She spoke Francés with a smoky Ovdan accent. “Always sniffing ’round and asking questions, questions, questions. It bothered some of our warriors. Me, I always knew he’d go great places and do great things.”
She punched him lightly in the ribs. “And you did! Came back to reconquer your fief and have the head off that frightful cow of a Baroness Stechkina who murdered your dad and exiled you, you did. Right out of the storybooks! So what brings you so far from Misty March, cousin?”
“I died.”
She arched a brow. “You’re looking pretty hale for a dead man. I’ll have to hear that story.”
“Long made short,” said Rob, “he misplaced it. He seems to find his current situation preferable, so.” Karyl seemed happy these days, with challenging work at his craft to do. Rob didn’t want to go and stir up painful memories of his betrayal and the destruction of his beloved White River Legion at the Battle of the Hassling. Nor his own role in Karyl’s unprecedented defeat.
Tir whipped around to Rob as if meaning to go for his throat. He actually stepped back.
“And who the fuck do you think you are?” she demanded.
“He thinks he’s Rob Korrigan,” Karyl said, recovering his composure. “He thinks he’s my dinosaur master. And also master of scouts and spies. As it happens he’s good at those things, so I let him go on thinking that.”
He turned to Rob. “The first thing you need to know about my cousin,” he said gravely, “is never to take her seriously.”
“Unless I’m naked or holding a weapon in my hand,” she agreed, grinning as if her tongue didn’t know a word for shame. “Or you can’t see my hand. Which comes to the same thing, often enough. So you’re a spy, are you?”
Rob swept her a bow so ludicrous-low that he brushed the backs of his knuckles on the ground. No easy feat when you’re built like a cask on legs, he thought. Though the somewhat unseemly length of my arms does help.
“And a bard of some small talents, fair lady,” he said, straightening.
“‘Fair lady,’ my apple-ripe ass,” she said. “You’re just overimpressed by the size of my boobs.”
“It’s most impressive they are, for a fact.”
By now a crowd had gathered of people Rob was relatively sure had something else they ought be doing. They seemed quite fascinated by the extravagant newcomer. They were mostly male, mixed with a few no less appreciative women.
She turned back to Karyl. “And maybe he’s better at singing than spying, if the first you knew I was coming was when I reined up a lance-length from you.”
“Don’t let her pique you,” Karyl said to Rob. “She likes that, as you’ve possibly noticed. The pickets clearly thought you were no threat. Anyway, this is an army camp, and a growing one. People come and go all the time.”
“‘No threat’?” she declared in what Rob thought, anyway, was mock outrage. “Perhaps you no longer know me as well as you think, hmm? And why no bodyguards? What if I were an assassin bent on avenging that great fatty Count Guilli?”
“Himself won’t have bodyguards,” Rob said dryly. “Also, if you think your cousin has much to fear from a common or garden hired killer, it’s possible you no longer know him as well as you think.”
She turned and cocked an eyebrow at him. She was older than he first thought, from the lining around her eyes and mouth. Possibly even Karyl’s own seventy or so. Her firm if well-packed build and gusty exuberance made her seem younger than early middle age.
“What’s this? A man who won’t take my shit?” She laughed. “I like that. I can always break them to saddle later, if I decide to keep them.”
“What are you doing here, Tir?” Karyl asked pointedly.
A rangy bay mare pounded up, sweat-patched and panting. The spectators gave her way.
“Captain,” its youthful rider called in a Spañola accent. She was dark, boy-slim, and carried a hunting spear. “There’s a herd of three-horns heading this way across the Town Lord Melchor’s fallow field west of town! Twenty-three of the beasts, with mahouts, an escort of twenty Ovdan horse-bows, and two baggage-wagons.”
“Thank you, Emilia,” Karyl said. “You can get back to patrol.”
As she rode off Karyl smiled and said, “I notice your pony’s still blowing hard, Tir.”
She laughed. She had a gusty laugh, to match the rest of her personality. “So the day a lowlander outrides me is the day I shave my head and start spouting Tianchao-guo philosophy.”
“And who might you be?” Rob asked. “Other than Karyl’s cousin, of course.”
“Me? He told you. I’m Tir.”
“It means ‘arrow’ in Parsi,” Karyl said. “And I’m surprised you left your beasts untended.”
“They’re hardly untended. See wh
y we called him ‘Vexer’? He’s a pain in the tits, and likes himself that way. Meantime, if my men can’t handle any bandits we encounter by themselves I’ll rip their balls off myself. If they’re not too small to see.”
Rob’s mind was moving more slowly than he cared for today. It was hardly surprising: he’d scarcely had a chance to recover from the physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion left over from the Battle of Hidden Marsh. He still had to see to the wounds of their war-dinosaurs, and accommodate the bounty of new monsters the victory had won them.
And reports from his far-flung scouts came in at every hour, day or night: of Métairie Brulée mustering forces to the South, Castaña raiding across the Laughing Water. Each neighbor seemed to be waiting for the other to make the first real move. Karyl needed to know the moment one did so—and better, between the decision to lunge at a putatively weakened Providence, and the act itself.
So it took Rob until just now for the real import of Emilia’s words to hit him.
“Wait,” he said, “three-horns, she said, now? Twenty-three of them? Really?”
Tir laughed again. “A dinosaur master, indeed.”
“Our captain sent a message north with one of our caravans for them,” said Gaétan, who’d shouldered his way through the still-growing throng.
“And who might this be?” Tir almost purred.
“Gaétan,” said Karyl. “Another of my lieutenants. He’s scion of a merchant family that trades extensively with Ovda.”
Tir ran her fingers down Gaétan’s bare chest, tickling across the pale pink pucker of scar left over from the Blueflowers fight.
“Such strapping favorites you choose for yourself, cousin,” she said deep in her throat. “I’d think you’d a lovely taste in men, if I didn’t know your predilections ran firmly in the female direction. So it must really be their martial skills you choose them for. Tedious as that is.”
Gaétan’s green-hazel eyes met Rob’s own. The young man’s cheeks were flushed. Rob felt heat at the roots of his own beard. This she-raptor’s making me blush? he thought in amazement.
