The Dinosaur Princess

by Victor Milán

Behind her, cheering turned to screams.

  * * *

  Shiraa raised her muzzle from the haunch of freshly slaughtered springer that the tailless two-legs who cared for her in her mother’s absence had tossed to mollify her. She smelled their fear: it was her due.

  The wind had changed again. The smell that had set her to angry roaring was stronger now. The smell of him. Her enemy, who had attacked from behind and hurt her and robbed her of her mother for so long.

  Now she also smelled the running water.

  Now she knew where the white monster was.

  Rage! Rage red/black like fire-mountain! Shiraa destroy!

  She barely felt her keelbone shatter the wooden palings as she charged through them.

  Chapter 4

  Tirán Rey, King Tyrant, Tyrant.…—Tyrannosaurus rex. Large, bipedal meat-eating dinosaur; 13 meters long, 7 tonnes. Aphrodite Terra’s largest known and most feared predator; notorious even in Nuevaropa, to which it is not native. Sturdier than Allosaurus. Like the matador, encountered rarely as a war-mount.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  The shrill screams of his dinosaur grooms alerted Rob even before the rising volume of the Allosaurus’s roars made clear what had happened.

  The wind was blowing from the Río Afortunado now. Which meant it also blew directly from Duke Falk’s albino King Tyrant war-dinosaur Snowflake. Whom Rob had personally seen strip a chunk of meat as big as his own thigh from the shoulder of Shiraa, in the middle of the Hassling. Just an eyeblink before Falk’s axe dented in Karyl’s helmet—and seemingly his skull.

  “Oh fuck me,” he groaned, and started to run.

  Between the hill and the drawn-up armies. Directly into the monster’s path.

  * * *

  “The monster’s loose!” Melodía heard someone scream.

  At once Jaume thrust her behind him. She felt first relief, then guilt for it.

  I’ve proved myself in battle! But going up against a nine-meter matadora in full howling rage was a prospect that all but dissolved her bones.

  She wasn’t alone in that fear. From the way courtiers—even some wearing battle-worn armor—bolted screaming down the slope of the hill, Melodía first thought Shiraa was heading for her father—and for her. But then she saw the creature bounding forward on her two mighty hind legs past the base of Le Boule, between the round hill and its loaf-shaped companion to the south, La Miche, lean its black-on-tawny-striped body horizontal to the ground. She turned right, between La Miche and Karyl’s phalanx of Triceratops. Who began to toss their signature three-horned heads and bellow belligerently.

  Shiraa ignored them. She raced straight for the river. Where Melodía realized Falk’s war-mount, Snowflake, was likewise penned. The albino Tyrannosaurus was roaring back defiance.

  Directly into the charging monster’s path stepped a single, slight figure: Karyl.

  And another, burlier and bandy-legged, came running up right behind.

  * * *

  Even before Rob reached him, he heard Karyl say, “Enough. You don’t need to be here.”

  Rob stopped. He slumped. Even the sight of the tonne and a half of rage and teeth bearing down at the gallop didn’t hit him as hard as the rejection he heard in those words.

  But he held his ground. I’ll yield to neither dinosaur nor noble. A dinosaur master doesn’t!

  * * *

  Jaume started forward. Without even glancing his way, the Emperor held out a hand to stop him.

  “Stand your ground,” Felipe said. Jaume frowned but obeyed.

  “Arbalests!” Falk was shouting. “Bring crossbows and shoot the monster down!”

  “Are you crazy?” Felipe yelled. “The Angel’s Bane? She’s the greatest hero of all!”

  “Wait, my friend,” Jaume told the Alemán.

  * * *

  Though it hit her like a horse’s kick to hear her lover call her rapist friend, what Melodía felt was mostly fear on Karyl’s behalf. Yes, the matadora was his pet—bonded permanently to him when he was the first living being Shiraa saw when she hatched, though he was drenched in the blood of her mother, whom he had just slaughtered. Yes, the creature had crossed most of the continent to rescue him—and the Empire—at the literal last second by snapping the Grey Angel Raguel in half in her giant jaws.

  But she was still a monster, and furious. And Karyl just a man—not even a large one, who stood, unflinching, facing the avalanche of flesh and fangs.

  “No!” he called when she came within ten meters. He raised a peremptory hand. “Stop.”

  Shiraa rocked back, put her tail down, and plowed a furrow in the hard-tramped soil, trying to halt her 1,500 kilograms’ mass from a full killing charge. She came to a stop, centimeters away from crushing the puny lone human. And no doubt the only slightly less puny one behind him.

  “Bad Shiraa!”

  The Allosaurus emitted a call between a groan and a chirp. To Melodía’s amazement, it sounded plaintive.

  The slayer pressed the tip of the dinosaur’s lethal meter-long muzzle into the turf at Karyl’s feet. And she whimpered.

  Karyl stood a moment gazing sternly down at her. Melodía saw the monster roll her scarlet eye to look up at him beneath the short horn-like flange in front of it.

  Shaking his head, Karyl knelt. He scratched a sensitive nostril, murmuring to her in unfamiliar liquid syllables Melodía took for Parso, the language of his mother’s people, with whom he’d spent a great deal of time during his exile from the Misty March. Shiraa raised her head slightly. He reached to scratch beneath one brow-horn.

  Shiraa trilled and nuzzled him lovingly.

  “Aww,” Melodía said.

  The armies of the Empire erupted in the day’s loudest applause.

  * * *

  “Highness.”

  Melodía snapped awake. Her tent was dark except for the yellow-orange quavering of an oil lamp.

  A young oval face peered in the flap of her simple canvas tent, lit orange by the lantern the woman held in front of her.

  “Emilia,” she said. Slowly, she laid her talwar in its sheath back on the hemp rug beside her pallet.

  A longtime light rider, Emilia was a short, skinny Spañola who rode a bay mare. Like many of the scouts, not just jinetes but woods-runners as well, she had chosen to stay with the Short-Haired Horse Captain—not so short-haired anymore—helping her father and his commanders sort out the horrendous disaster left behind by Raguel’s Crusade. Even with the mostly highly capable help of a slew of newly struck or promoted nobles, like Karyl, it was proving to be a surprisingly brutal job. Melodía wasn’t sure when enough of the job would be done that her father could return to turn the Imperial Army home and release the army back into its component formations.

  Keeping it orderly was likewise proving a demanding task. But Jaume and his Companions, the pitiful handful remaining, formed of a couple of new aspirants who had distinguished themselves among their Ordinary heavy-cavalry auxiliaries, were performing wonders in that role. So, too, was her enemy. I have to admit it, she thought. If Karyl taught me one thing—if he taught me anything—it’s that underestimating your enemy can be fatal.

  She reflected how much she’d miss the life she’d led with the Army of Providence and then the Fugitive Legion. For all its brutal and horrifying moments, she belonged, and had an importance she’d actually earned by merit and actions. But reconciliation to her father, and the legal clearing of her name, meant she had to go back and serve as Princess once again.

  Duty to family overrode all.

  Belatedly, she registered the concern on the young woman’s face. “What is it?” she asked, feeling alarm spread within her like flames on spilled oil.

  Emilia’s eyebrows came together, and her mouth quivered briefly, as if she were fighting back tears. “Your father wants to see you, Captain. It’s urgent.”

  The night air slipping in around the jinete’s sturdy form along with the sounds of crickets was cool but didn’t raise plucke
d-scratcher bumps on her bare skin. Since time counted, Melodía was answering her father’s summons naked, the way she slept.

  Slipping her feet into light sandals, she followed Emilia’s small beacon out and across the few steps to the full-size silken pavilion her father’s servants insisted on pitching for him every night, despite his insistence that a common soldier’s tent such as the one his daughter occupied was good enough for him. Ferny ground cover crunched softly beneath nosehorn leather soles, raising a piney scent. The Imperial Army had shifted camp a kilometer west, halfway to the actual village of Canterville. Whose inhabitants had largely returned.

  She didn’t really need the illumination. The night sky was clear, and a waning Eris shone blue-white and large above the eastern wooded hills toward which it sank. It’s not as if I haven’t gotten used to finding my way in darker nights than this, over trickier terrain, she thought.

  A paltry handful of oil lamps lit the sitting-chamber into which Emilia, bowing, led Melodía. The bow itself alarmed her. The light riders were an informal bunch, who accepted her guidance not because of rank, and far less because of her exalted birth, but because she was good at her job and cared about them.

  Jaume was already pacing, naked as well. He held Beauty’s Mirror by its sheath. Felipe sat half in shadow, his bearded chin sunk to his chest, his ginger-furred belly overhanging his thighs.

  Jaume stepped to Melodía and embraced her with his left arm. “Querida.” She was too concerned to feel arousal at the touch of his bare skin on hers.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Her father didn’t raise his head. But he lifted the right hand that hung futilely beside his camp stool. It clutched a piece of parchment.

  “The most terrible thing has happened, mi amor,” he said. “A rider from La Merced brings news that your sister Montserrat has been kidnapped by the emissaries from Trebizon.”

  Chapter 5

  Compito.…—Compsognathus longipes. A small, fuzzy-feathered, meat-eating dinosaur; 1 kilogram, 1 meter long. Native to Alemania but common throughout the Empire, and indeed on many continents of Paradise, apparently introduced by traders and travelers as pets or simply stowaways. Sly and shy, it feeds on tiny animals such as lizards, frogs, and mice.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  THE EMPIRE OF NUEVAROPA, FRANCIA, DUCHY OF THE BORDERLANDS, BARONY OF TERTRE HERBEUX

  “Well, at least they wiped,” Rob said, detouring at the last possible moment around a torn-out page of a book, which was smudged with an unfortunately recognizable brown stain. “At least some of them, some of the time. Not a thing a body would expect from Hordelings.”

  Other debris, moister and less identifiable, squelched beneath his thick hornface-hide boot soles.

  “I hope my new baronial salary’s enough to pay for a new pair of boots, then,” he said sourly. “I’m burning these the moment we get out of here.”

  “I’d burn the whole damn thing down and start over,” said the woman knight with the longsword at her hip who accompanied them.

  The room was well lit with morning sun pouring in from the west and—fortunately—airy from high, narrow windows. It was a study of sorts in the west-wing annex built onto the original stone keep. It had been the seat of the barony belonging to the man Rob and Karyl knew as Town Lord Melchor. Who, having joined and served Raguel, apparently of his own free will, had become a hunted outlaw.

  And this is the reward his semidivine master dealt him, Rob thought. His lips pulled back at the ends and compressed up under his nose in a grimace resembling a smile. Can’t say the Grey Angels lack all sense of justice. They’re wanting proportion, though.

  Rob Korrigan had seen the sort of vandalism inflicted on dwellings by hostile occupiers before, usually fueled by herb and alcohol. He also suspected the sprees of seemingly capricious destruction reflected the resentment the lesser, who made up the bulk of any army, felt against the greater, who of course were the ones who lived in manse and castle, squatting on the masses’ necks. Not that bucketheads ever held back from bad behavior against their own kind, or their property, when the pretext offered.

  But I’ve never seen the like of this. With his aesthete’s sense, housed in a somewhat brutish body—though the lasses sometimes claimed to find him fair of face, not always for pecuniary reasons, or so his vanity told him—Rob thought what he saw here was an expression of mindless destructiveness. Albeit guided by malignant purpose.

  And what better description of a Grey Angel Crusade could you compose, then, he thought, even if you had Bella’s own gift of a silver pen like the pretty Prince Jaume, rather than a nib carved from a bouncer’s ass-plume and dipped in ale-mud, like Rob Korrigan, Baron of Nowhere Yet by the Grace of Emperor Felipe and his iron whim.

  “He knew how to do all right by himself, did our erstwhile Baron Melchor,” he said. “For a plausible and treacherous little oiled toad of a man. He had surrounded himself with beauty: art, some evidently ancient, in painted canvas, murals, silken screens, and woven-feather hangings; stained glass; excellently wrought furniture; and, to Rob’s surprise, an abundance of books and scrolls.

  And now it was all gone to wreck. Smashed, slashed, splintered, strewn, and, by the smell lingering after several weeks since the Horde had moved on West, thoroughly bepissed.

  Even the ceiling had been vandalized: blunt stalactites of flung shit spattered the painting that adorned its dome of a white-robed fat woman, her grey complexion suggesting she’d passed to the wrong side of the border between life and death, being hoisted by a squadron of bizarre naked winged pink babies—surely no part of the Creators’ Canon—up a starry black sky toward a stylized blank-black circle at the apex representing the Creators’ legendary abode, the Moon Invisible. At least Raguel’s malice, or anyway His gift of organization, hadn’t been up to the task of mustering ladders or scaffolds to do a proper job of effacing all human-caused beauty. Though Rob had to credit the Hordelings for zeal.

  Neither that nor the occasional piles of human shit on the once-fine floor, mostly now ant-eaten to oddly architectural slumped ruins, was what most disturbed Rob. Or, it seemed, the others.

  “Look at this,” said young Tristan, the new captain of the light riders, now that the Princess had taken her hacked-off wine-red hair and cinnamon skin back off with her daddy, where she doubtless belonged. The brown-haired young man stood with his right hand hovering tentatively by a painted wall and his left firmly gripping the pommel of his arming-sword.

  The mural had been—something. Hints of naked men and women gamboling amid stylized greenery remained, a glimpse of water with an abnormally large galley bird taking up most of it, and no one showing the least distress or even awareness that, in the background, a Long-crested Dragon grounded on short back legs and wing-knuckles was skewering a screaming man with its long beak. It could be smut, or allegory, or both; none were uncommon.

  Rob couldn’t tell, because it had mostly been effaced. Great sheets of the plaster had somehow been broken from the wall, taking the paint with them. Parts had been chipped with spears or farm implements, or smeared with the Hordelings’ favorite medium, their own shit.

  But what had the normally dark and hale-looking jinete captain pallid green and visibly working his jaws to hold in puke was the gouges in the plasters in the unmistakable pattern of human fingernails—that turned to five tracks of blood.

  “When I was Voyvod of Misty March,” said Karyl, standing at midroom, “I tried my best to discourage arts, music, dance, and pleasure itself as conducive to destructive passions. And in any event frivolous.”

  He drew in a deep breath and sighed it out through pursed dark-bearded lips. Which always struck Rob as oddly sensuous for a man who looked like the craziest of self-denying Life-to-Come ascetics. Though he no longer dressed like one, in a simple hooded hemp-sack robe, the way he had when Rob first found him, busking, penniless, and sword handless, thousands of others’ lives ago in the small village of Protector
-de-Feu.

  Instead, he dressed as he had since the Army of Providence that Rob had helped him raise first went to war with Crève Coeur: like Tristan, in typical light-rider’s garb of light shirt beneath a light springer-skin jerkin, dark trousers, and high-topped boots, with a belt for knife and sword. He wore his hair as he often did, long grey-shot locks in back hanging free to his collar, the hair on his crown caught in a sort of topknot hanging over it. Rob had learned the curious style was favored among certain of the more barbarous Ovdan mounted-nomad tribes. Who were the man’s own cousins, after all.

  “Had I seen the likes of this,” Karyl said, with an economical gesture that still somehow took in the whole scope of devastation, “I’d have rethought my policies. It’s as if all these things were the purest expressions of humanness and put Raguel in a fury to eradicate them through his slaves.”

  “That’s why I suggest burning it,” the knight said in her heavily Spañol-inflected Francés.

  At 178 centimeters, she towered over Karyl and had five centimeters on Rob, who liked to think of his as the height of the common man. Slender, with black hair that she wore cut to her earlobes, the Castañera had been part of the army with which Count Raúl invaded Providence to take advantage of its defenders’ retreat from the eruption of the Grey Angel Crusade. Sadly for them, they found themselves facing not Karyl’s Militia but the bulk of Raguel’s Horde. Mora Selena de Árbolquebrada had been one of a handful of knights to escape.

  Now she belonged to what Rob supposed he’d have to get used to calling the Army of the Borderlands. Though, more to the point, she seemed to have grafted herself straight onto Karyl’s hip. Not that Rob could blame him for allowing it. He didn’t exactly find her hard to look at, even if a tad small-breasted for his tastes, perhaps overfond of dressing in black and with a perpetual haunted look in her dark eyes.

  He found it hard even to resent her rather cavalier suggestion for dealing with his own new house, though, as he looked around semi-surreptitiously for something to wipe his boot against. Nothing like seeing the limbs wrenched off your liege lord, and the meat scooped out and devoured by eager Hordelings as if he was a giant screaming crawfish, to knock out all the foolishness about chivalry and glory reading the romances put in you.