by Victor Milán
“But whoever would send an assassin after the Emperor?” asked Princess Fanny, hefting a feathered dart from a basket.
“No one,” Melodía said crisply as she stalked downrange. “There’s some mistake.”
“Someone’s gone and gotten himself assassinated,” Abi Thélème said.
“But that someone was not my father,” Melodía said, wrenching loose her javelin with unnecessary force.
The morning was early-hot, the sun bright through thin clouds. A long-crested dragon wheeled hopefully overhead. Ballista crews and arbalesters waited on the ramparts to dissuade the monster from trying its luck on the palace grounds.
“It must have been the Trebizons,” Lupe declared with conviction.
Returning to the line, Melodía frowned and angled her head to one side. “The Trebs? Why?”
“It stands to reason,” Lupe announced, as if it did. The Spañola Princess loved intrigues and conspiracies. Which were in no short supply in the Corte Imperial, of course. But the real ones, numerous as they were, were usually too trivial to satisfy her. She was beside herself at having an actual murder on hand.
“All right,” Melodía said, curious despite herself. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “How does it stand to reason?”
“The Trebizons have come to La Merced to petition for your hand in marriage to their Crown Prince Mikael.”
“Who they say weighs two hundred kilos,” said Llurdis. “And never bathes.”
“Eww,” said Fina and Fanny at once.
“Thanks so much for reminding me,” Melodía said. “What’s that got to do with dead men in our apartments?”
“Everyone knows the Trebizons are mad plotters,” Lupe said, “just brimming with stratagems and treacheries. So they sent an assassin to eliminate whoever it is they blame for your father not giving them what they want. ¿Hola? Obvious.”
“That would be me,” Melodía said.
“Well, of course. You’re what they came for.”
“No,” Melodía said with terrible precision. “I mean, the one who stands in their way is me. I am not going to some fever swamp on the Tahmina Sea. Especially not to wed an obese, unwashed Apatosaurus of a Crown Prince.”
“But your father’s the Emperor,” Fina said.
“Did you all drink a potion of grasping the obvious this morning?”
“But, don’t you have to do what he says?”
“You mean you haven’t learned to get your father to say what you want him to?” asked Abi.
Waiting her turn for her next cast, Melodía cocked an eyebrow at her. Clever and cool as Abi was, Melodía would never guess her father was easy for anyone to manipulate. Roger the Spider was Nuevaropa’s most infamous intriguer.
“Papá won’t make me marry anyone I don’t want to,” Melodía said confidently. The Emperor was highly indulgent of his daughters.
When he could be bothered to remember their existence.
Nonetheless she could see why the Trebs persisted in their suit long after its hopelessness should’ve been obvious even to foreigners. Although the Fangèd Throne wasn’t hereditary, an Emperor’s elder daughter held powerful potential to influence policy.
If only, Melodía thought. In any event, she doubted even Nuevaropa’s long-term rival empire was mad enough to imagine assassination could help their suit.
“Perhaps you should set your cap for that new Northerner,” said Lupe. “Terrible form.”
The latter was directed at Llurdis, who had just thrown her dart into the wood post beneath the butt.
“Bitch,” Llurdis said.
“Puta.”
Melodía rolled her eyes.
The Princesa Imperial and her retinue were dressed for exercise, in loincloths with silken bands wound tightly around their breasts for support. Brown or pale, their bodies glistened with sweat from exercise and humid heat.
War was the duty and main occupation of the noble classes. Highborn ladies learned martial arts to be ready to defend their families and themselves. Though the profession of arms was not closed to women in Nuevaropa, it was considered beneath a noblewoman’s station to take the field except in dire necessity. A few women commanded mercenary companies, but almost none commanded household forces.
Naturally quick and strong of body as well as mind, Melodía excelled at most of the combat arts she and her retinue practiced, which didn’t penalize a woman’s relative lack of muscle. She was lethal with javelin and twist-dart, a fine shot with the shortbow, adept with spear, dagger, and short sword and buckler.
At wrestling she could seldom beat Lupe’s snaky wiriness or Llurdis’s power, but both were skilled grapplers who not infrequently defeated boys of similar weight. The pair practiced a lot on each other, usually with little prior notice. They reminded Melodía of cats.
“But why would our Princess even take notice of that new Duke’s strapping muscles and blue eyes?” said Abi archly. “She has her own Jaume, back from the wars.”
“Why should that blind her?” asked Fina. “She’s known him ages and ages.”
Melodía’s throw sailed half a meter over the top of the post that supported the straw-bale butt, to stick in packed white dirt ten meters beyond. “Hold!” cried Fanny, who was taking her turn at range-mistress today.
When Melodía, still fuming, came back with her javelin, her retinue had found a new topic: speculating about a certain dowager countess at court and a handsome page. She shook her head in disgust.
“Oh, don’t be such a wet-mop, Día,” Llurdis said.
“I just don’t understand how you girls can be so preoccupied with such trivia,” she said, “with all these crises besetting the Empire.”
Abi tilted her head so that her long silver-blond hair spilled down a bare shoulder, and gave Melodía a cool blue look.
“Crises always beset the Empire,” she said. “Always have and always will. The Creators set it up that way, my father says.”
“The Creators,” Melodía said with a sniff.
Fashionably agnostic herself, she doubted the Spider said any such thing. Though widely presumed to be a complete atheist, not even Sansamour’s powerful Archduke-Elector would ever dare admit it. The Books of the Law decreed that all forms of worshipping the Eight Creators were righteous. What they didn’t countenance was disbelief.
Roger was also rumored to be a diabolist, having secret commerce with the duende or hada. Or as some called them, the Fae: rogue spirits of the Underworld. Histories recorded a High Holy War between the Eight and their faithful against the hada and their human allies more than half a millennium before; Melodía dismissed them as legends to glorify her family, which had raised the Empire from the War’s ashes. She didn’t believe in devils at all, and didn’t for a heartbeat credit that Abi’s father did.
“I have to learn to rule someday,” she said. “I’ve got to be ready when the time comes to inherit our Duchy. Much as I wish he would, my father can’t live forever.”
“Your multiply-great-grandma Rosamaría has,” Fanny said cheerfully.
La Madrota, Great Mother of the Imperial Delgao family, was approaching her three hundredth birthday. That was remarkable even in a world where, if nothing killed you, you might go on living indefinitely, like a carp.
“What’s the point in fretting over politics, Día?” asked Abi. “You father will never let you near them.”
“I can’t talk to you,” Melodía said. She turned away.
Miffed at having had center stage so long denied them, Lupe and Llurdis started pummeling each other. They fell to the ground, pulling hair and screeching like a pair of tröodons dancing on hot coals.
Huffing annoyance, Melodía looked over to the shade of a cycad-frond lean-to, where Doña Carlota, her watch-raptor, and her fellow dueñas sat sewing colorful feathers together into cloaks and skirts. The dueñas affected not to notice the scuffle. Llurdis and Lupe were just that way.
Doña Meg, Fanny’s dueña, looke
d up and smiled. “Why, Count Jaume,” she said, “what a delightful surprise to see you.”
As many of her gente did, although not her charge, she spoke the Imperial tongue with a defiant Anglés accent.
“And you as well, Doña Margarita,” said that familiar liquid-amber baritone, whose words were lyrics, whose sound, music.
The Anglesa twinkled. She normally disliked having her given name rendered into Spañol. But she could scarcely take exception when it came from the lips of the Empire’s most renowned poet.
“And all of you ladies. Such a bouquet you create, sitting there.”
Melodía clamped her lips. The deft Count Jaume had not specified what kind of bouquet. Melodía had in mind thornbushes, herself.
The dueñas cooed and fluttered themselves with feather fans. Except for Doña Carlota, who affected to disapprove of her charge’s dashing cousin. She sat like a stump, grumping and sewing determinedly.
“And you, gentle ladies,” Jaume said, bowing to Melodía’s retinue.
Melodía still hadn’t turned to face him. She could almost feel his gaze sweep the bare skin of her back, like a rare sunbeam slanting down through a rift in the clouds. She felt her cheeks take fire, knew she was blushing like a jungle-rose, and silently cursed herself.
Jaume greeted each of the ladies-in-waiting in turn. Lupe and Llurdis had even ceased their homoerotic wrestling match and jumped to their feet, where they stood blushing and shuffling in a way that Melodía could not decide whether she found more ridiculous or disgusting. Her Catalan kinswomen put Melodía in mind of a bull nosehorn pawing the ground before a charge.
Melodía still didn’t turn. She wasn’t sure whether she was enjoying the delicious self-torture or was simply embarrassed beyond words by her own transparent emotions. Probably both.
She felt his hands on her bare shoulders then. Her knees sagged.
“Ahem!” Doña Carlota said.
The twin touches rose from Melodía’s skin. Though not without lingering a heartbeat, maddening and delightful.
“And with all due regard to this garden of unparalleled loveliness,” Jaume said, “no flower pleases my eye so much as our Princesa Melodía.”
She turned then, eyes downcast to the dark russet toes of his soft felt boots. She feared that if she looked into that dear and dearly missed face, she’d be unable to keep from throwing herself straightaway into his arms. Or wrapping herself around him like a drowning cat.
And I’d never hear the end of that from the retinue, would I? she thought. Plus the choice words Doña Carlota would have to say.…
A forefinger pressed gently upward beneath her chin. “Something in your eye, cousin dear?”
Her gaze climbed. Jaume’s long-muscled legs were tightly wrapped in gold hose, signifying he was about court business. He wore a fine strider-leather skirt the same russet as his boots, and a loose blouse of cream silk, slashed for ventilation and incidentally revealing glimpses of his ribbed and muscle-corded torso.
Some who saw Jaume only in his finery, or focused overmuch on his renown as poet, minstrel, and philosopher of beauty, thought him soft. She knew from personal experience how mistaken that was.
She tried not to think how badly she wanted to renew that experience. Duty, she reminded herself. Desire has to wait. Again.
At last she let herself look into his face. He winked. Then, gravely, he raised her hand to his lips.
As he kissed it, she heard a scuffle of sandaled feet and an apologetic throat-clearing from somewhere behind him.
With a quirk of a smile and shrug for her alone, Jaume turned to face a youth wearing a harness that bore the Imperial badge: the stylized skull of a Tyrannosaurus imperator, gold on red.
“How may I help you, young sir?” Jaume asked.
“My lord Count,” the lad piped, self-important as a songbird at dawn, “His Imperial Majesty respectfully requests you to wait upon him in his apartment at your earliest pleasure.”
“Indeed,” Jaume said. Even for the Imperial Champion, that meant now.
“Ladies, I must depart.” He pressed Melodía’s hands in both of his. They were long and fine, yet she could feel the swordsman’s calluses upon them. “Doña Carlota, I leave this blossom in your capable hands.”
Carlota mumbled something. Her slab cheeks flushed and she busied herself with her featherwork. She was a bluff countrywoman from Felipe’s Duchy of Los Almendros. She would have sniffed at compliments to her notional beauty; those words had hit their mark.
Jaume gave Melodía another wink and followed the page away into the palace.
From above and behind she heard a terrible descending shriek. It ended in a colossal twang and strangled squawk.
Melodía spun to see the dragon plummeting, great wings trailing limply above. A two-meter bolt transfixed its short, furred body. On the outer wall an engine crew hooted and danced and pumped fists in triumph beside their upraised ballista.
“A la máquina,” breathed Lupe, wide-eyed.
The monster landed with a thump beside an empty cart.
“Take heart, Día,” murmured Abigail Thélème. “You’re not the only one to get shot down diving on your prey.”
Chapter 10
Saltador, Springer—Orodromeus makelai. (In Anglaterra, the smaller Hypsophilodon foxii.) Swift, bipedal herbivorous dinosaur; 2.5 meters long, 45 kilograms. Usually brown spotted white, with white bellies. Timid; adept at hiding. Common farm pests in Nuevaropa. A favored quarry of hunters both human and dinosaurian.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“Don’t call me your lord,” Karyl said.
Puffing more than he cared for, Rob Korrigan led Little Nell up a steep ridge near the eastern border of County Bonnechance. A wide-brimmed hat shaded his eyes from early-afternoon sun. His companion walked ahead of him with hood thrown back and head high, stabbing the white-dirt road with his stick as he walked and generally behaving as if he were alone.
“Why not?” Rob said. “What else should I call you? ‘Hey, you’ seems less than suitable.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“Be that as it may.”
At the crest Rob paused and took off his hat to wipe his brow. Before them the country swept down and away in short grass and cultivated fields, dotted with small hills. In the distance tiny figures trudged behind toylike nosehorns, tilling pale soil. To left and right the ridgeline glowed with yellow and red wildflowers. In the ditchside weeds, a small green-backed bouncer sat on its tail, forelimbs tucked against its yellow breast, regarding them with wide yellow eyes as it munched blossoms in its curved beak. Crested fliers rode thermals overhead.
“In any event,” Karyl said, “I’m certainly not your lord. You’re not a Slavo.”
“I’ve been accused of most known vices and some scarcely imaginable,” Rob said with a laugh. “Justly, for the most part. But never that.”
“I’m not the lord of anyone anymore,” Karyl said. “Not even myself, perhaps.”
He walked on, down the far slope, which was gentler than what they’d just come up. Clucking to Little Nell, Rob followed. He seems devilish composed, he thought, for a man who spent half the night in screaming nightmares. Rob himself was a bit shaky on his pins for want of sleep.
“Now, how can that be?” he asked. “You’re not lord of your own self?”
“I told you. I was killed twice.”
“I saw Hornberg blindside you. What about the other?”
“I fell off the Eye Cliffs with my sword hand bitten off.”
“You’re joking.”
But Karyl clearly wasn’t. His shoulders slumped. His voice dropped so low Rob could barely hear it for the breeze.
“I remember feeling my blood pumping from my veins,” he said, as if to himself. “I felt anger, and frustration. But also anticipation, almost joy. For I knew that soon I could rest.”
“Well? So then what happened?”
“I died.”
“How can th
at be? I see you walking before me. I hear your sandals on the roadway. I smell your sweat. And those Guild bravos felt your solidity, to say nothing of your edge. You’re no phantom. How can you have died?”
“How can I not have? I should have bled to death, or been killed by the fall to the Eye. But instead—nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Something resurrected me. Someone.”
“Who?”
“I’ve no idea. When I came back to myself, if that’s really where I am, I was walking a road in Francia on a bright winter’s day. Already a vagabond jongleur, it seems.”
“There’re worse fates, inasmuch as that’s what I am too, at the moment.” Rob said. “Truly a strange tale, my—Karyl. Might the Fae have saved you, then?”
Karyl made a surprisingly vulgar noise for a blue blood.
“Don’t be so fast to dismiss them!” Rob said. “I’ve seen and known things few mortals have. The Faerie Folk are real. Whether good, or evil as the Church tells us, I can’t say. But trickish as their reputation makes them, and tenfold more.”
“There’s no such thing as the Fae.”
“That’s what you said about magic. Now it’s giving you back the hand you lost—and I must have that story from you before the sun escapes the sky again. How can you still believe so strongly in your disbelief?”
“It’s not giving my hand back.”
“What were those little pink buds I saw on the end of your arm, then, when you changed the dressing?” Karyl’s stump had grown so sensitive he had taken to bandaging it.
“Inflammations. Nothing more.”
“Five of them, so?”
Karyl spat in the dirt. “This discussion grows tiresome.”
Since his companion couldn’t see it, Rob grinned. “All right. Who caught you when you fell, then?”
“Someone,” Karyl repeated. “I can’t shake the feeling that whoever it was who saved me and nursed me back to health—of the body, at least—now regards himself as holding rights of ownership in me. My greatest dread is the moment he chooses to assert them.”
“Why, then, we’ll fight him together, whoever he is!” Rob exclaimed.
