by Victor Milán
“Beg pardon, Colonel?”
“Our fugitive Princess. Melodía. Though I suppose we’re all a legion of fugitives now.”
Rob laughed. “Truth to tell, I hardly think of her as that at all anymore. Everyone calls her the Short-Haired Horse Captain now. I guess I do too.”
“What about the job she does for you?”
Rob laughed. “She’s a marvel, and I don’t lie. She’s taken to the light horse like a great-crested dragon to the air. And they to her. Spoiled princess or not, there’s nothing at all, no matter how dangerous, dirty, or arduous, she’ll ask her troop to do that she doesn’t jump to do herself. If anything she’s a bit too heedless of her own safety. And that works wholly to her favor with the sort of mad things who are Travelers, or become jinetes.”
Karyl nodded briskly. “What would you say to giving her your light-horse, then?”
“Beg pardon?” Rob said again.
“Put her in command of all mounted scouts.”
“The little Princess? You can’t be serious?”
Karyl cocked a brow at him.
“Think back on what you just said, my friend. It seems to me you made her case most compellingly.”
“Huh,” Rob grunted. “Ah. Well. So I did. And given they all clamor to ride with her, even after she lost so many of them fighting to keep the horde off our backsides, I’d say she has the lot in her well-bred palm already.”
“Splendid. Give her the news yourself.”
“Gladly, Lord. Gladly indeed.”
Something about the way Karyl continued to look at him held him longer.
“What will you do now?” Karyl asked.
Rob laughed. “Find a rousing song circle and some beer, get me inside the one and the other inside of me, soonest. Then off to bed to snatch what poor rest I can before some messenger lout awakens me to the latest catastrophe.”
“Ah,” Karyl said. “I—wish I had your easy facility with others.”
“What on Paradise can you mean, man? You’ve wandered the length and breadth of Aphrodite Terra, rubbed elbows with paupers and emperors. What’s a bunch of your own people?”
Especially ones who’d throw themselves in molten lava if you so much as crooked your little finger, he added mentally.
“I have. I’ve even passed time with rogues like Travelers and dinosaur masters. But easy camaraderie—” He shook his head. “I seem to lack that gift.”
“Gift? It’s the same gift as falling backward drunk off a rock. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens. Come on. Join me. You’ll be welcome, and that’s an evil understatement, so; your men and women think you float two meters in the air and glow all on your own, and that’s plain fact.”
“I’d be like a matador peering in the window at a banquet. Not for me, I fear. You go and enjoy.”
“You, fear?” Rob scoffed.
“I fear,” Karyl said. “More than I hope you ever know.”
He turned and walked away. Rob thought him the loneliest thing he’d ever seen.
Chapter 33
Hogar, Home, Old Home—When they were done making Paradise, and found it good, the Creators brought humans, their Five Friends, and certain useful crops and herbs here from the world we call Home. Ancient accounts teach us it is a strange place. It is cold, and we would feel heavier there, and find the air much thinner. The year is 1.6 times as long as ours. We must admire the fortitude of our ancestors in dwelling on such an inhospitable world, and always praise the Creators for bringing us to our true Paradise!
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“All these kids in the procession wore white,” Little Pigeon said between horror-sized bites of a meat pie. “They all had candles. They all looked … funny. Some had frozen faces, some looked crazy-happy.”
In the shade of an ancient spreading oak, the child sat on a camp stool at one end of a heavy table of well-polished walnut. Scouts had found it tipped in a ditch up the High Road from Belle Perspective, where the army continued to rest, recover, and assimilate the volunteers who kept streaming in to join. Nobody knew whether it had been looted from some abandoned manor, or carried by its fleeing rightful owners until they saw fit to abandon it. Rob couldn’t quite fit his mind around why anyone would dream of lugging the great brute along in the first place.
At that, it was easier than shaping his mind to fit the tale his former chief spy in Providence town unfurled.
“There were like forty of them, walking in pairs. The oldest were just shy of fully grown—twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. The youngest could barely toddle. I was hiding out in Mare’s Alley next to the old counting-house when I saw them march down Peacock Walk. I wondered what was going on, so I followed them.”
Little Pigeon had arrived in early afternoon on a farm wagon with ten other children piled into the bed. When Karyl heard his first uncharacteristically halting words about what he’d witnessed in the province’s capital—Rob was thinking of the androgynous child as “he” today—Karyl had convened an immediate council of war.
“I didn’t know what was happening—it all seemed just a lark, at first. But then I started feeling like a weight pressing on my mind. Like a hand pushing me to join the parade.
“They went from house to house down the street. At each door a child would knock. When the door opened, the child demanded the householders let them in to look for signs of sin.”
“This was just children?” asked Melodía. Since she’d been named field captain of all the light-horse no one questioned her right to sit in council. Not that Rob thought anybody’d incline to, since the tribute she’d wrung out of Métairie Brulée had begun to roll in.
“No. They had some adults along too. Like, I don’t know, fatty-herders or something. If somebody resisted letting the kids in, they dealt with it pretty mean. Some of the grown-ups walked as if they were asleep. But they pounced quick as vexers if anybody pushed back.”
“How long are we going to waste listening to these childish fantasies?” demanded Garamond, who’d been hitting the ale a little hard this morning.
Baron Côme had his elbows on the table and he pressed either side of chin to prop up his face. He cocked a brow at the mercenary man-at-arms.
“We’re up against a Grey Angel Crusade, here, Luc,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but that makes me uncomfortable calling anything ‘fantasy’ anymore. I want to hear what he says. Uh—her. Whichever. Anything that might keep the horde from peeling and eating me like a shrimp, the way they did Count Raúl, I’m interested in.”
“I’m listening,” Karyl said directly to Petit Pigeon. “What happened when the children entered a house?”
“I couldn’t really see. I was trying to hang in the shadows. Not as if anybody was looking around or anything. Stuff they found they didn’t like they passed outside. It got carried off and thrown on the big bonfire in the Old Market Square. Like I said, anybody resisted got beaten down pretty hard. But that wasn’t the worst. That was when we came to this house—nice house it was too. Simon and his wife Mathi, the silk sellers, lived there. Their youngest daughter Nicole accused her elder sister Muriel of sin. Muriel wasn’t even twenty yet, but what they did to her—”
Little Pigeon looked at Rob with black eyes brimming with tears. “Do I have to tell that part, Master Rob? I don’t want to. I so don’t want to.”
Rob glanced to Karyl, who shook his head once. “No,” Rob said gently, letting relief hum in his voice. “You don’t have to tell any more about that.”
Melodía went to kneel by the child, to wipe his eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief.
“Who did these bad things?” Gaétan asked. As usual since their escape Jeannette haunted his shoulder silently from behind. “Not the children, surely?”
“Uh-huh.” Little Pigeon nodded. “But it was the preachers who told them what to do.”
“Preachers?” Rob said. “Who were these, now?”
“Two of t
hem. A man and a woman, both stiff necks from that Garden Council. They were encouraging the kids, spouting all that crazy-talk the Gardeners have been shouting all over town for weeks. Self-denial, purity, pruning the world of wickedness, on and on. That kinda shit.”
“‘Pruning,’” echoed Melodía faintly.
“Weeks, you said,” Karyl said.
“Oh, yes. It got really bad when the Princess went over to the army. They got all upset. As if scared they were losing ground. Their sermons started getting shriller and fiercer.”
Rob frowned at Melodía. She shook her head. “I never knew anything about this,” she said. “Bogardus and Sister Violette were pleased when I told them I wanted to join you.”
She seemed to deflate. “Acted pleased. I guess.”
“So why didn’t you tell us all this, then?” Rob asked the child.
His eyes got huge. “But I did, Master Rob! I did too!”
Rob rocked back on his own salvaged milking-stool. “Did you, for a fact? How could I’ve missed it?”
“Reports go astray,” Karyl said. “You’ve seen that often enough by now. Probably you disregarded such reports—I confess I might have done. With Castaña pressing against the border like a titan on a village fence, and Célestine lurking in the weeds awaiting her chance to pounce, our employer’s noisy rhetoric was the last thing on our minds.”
He sighed. “After all, it was a foregone conclusion they’d betray us.”
Rob frowned again. It came to him to wonder if his friend’s very fatalism on the subject might have hindered them getting a trifle more warning of catastrophe rushing down on them like a volcano’s glowing cloud.
“It’s all right, Little Pigeon,” he said. “You did your best. What happened next?”
“I ran away. Nobody noticed me. Nobody followed me, anyway. They couldn’t stay with me in the alleys if they did. Especially not the adults. Adults are stupid and clumsy.”
Gaétan had risen and begun to pace. He was too full of frustrated energy, barely contained rage and grief and the Lady of the Mirror knew what else crackling inside him like static in a fleece cloth, to sit still for any length of time.
“So this Angel … controlled them all?” he asked.
The child shook his mop of black hair, which looked to Rob as if he haggled it off with a dagger whenever it bothered him. Which was no doubt the case.
“No,” he said. “I never saw any Angel. Everybody was talking about him, though. Some of them were so scared they could barely stand up. Others seemed … all happy, I guess. Excited.”
Rob cocked a brow at Melodía. Her cinnamon skin looked overlaid with ash.
“I hid out in this place I know,” Petit Pigeon went on. “Stayed there three days. Lived on scraps I stole from busted-open houses. Lots of the people didn’t even seem to care about stuff like eating. I saw … things. Horrible things. They kept the bonfire burning all the time in the Square. It smelled awful. I could see … people in it, all burned up and black and all.”
Élodie turned away, gagging.
“The Old Market was always full of people, all listening to that silver-haired lady from the Garden. The real hoity-toity one, used to be some kind of noble.”
“Violette,” Melodía said, in a tone that suggested spitting out a bite of rotten meat.
“Finally I figured things were just too crazy, and not gonna get better. By then I’d pulled in some other kids I found wandering. Some of them had managed to get away from the crazies, some hid out all along. We snuck out by night. By then I heard you guys had hit the road south. So we followed you. It was pretty tough; the crazy people’re everywhere, eating up all they can and burning the rest. But we’re pretty good scroungers, and sly. And here we are.”
“You didn’t see the Angel,” Melodía said, picking words as if they burned her fingers. “But I think you felt his power touch you, when you were watching that children’s parade. I felt it too, just a little. It was—terrifying. How did you manage to keep free?”
Little Pigeon shook his head. “It was like it was trying to own me. Nobody owns me but me. So I made it stop. Which it did when I ran away from the parade. I was ready to fight like a cornered alley cat if anybody tried to stop me. But nobody noticed I was gone.”
“So the horde’s begun moving south in force?” Karyl asked.
“Oh, yes.” The child nodded emphatically. “They can move wicked fast when they want to. You don’t want to hang out around here too long. Believe me, you don’t.”
“You’re right.” Karyl leaned back. He looked troubled. The child picked up on it right away.
“Did I say something wrong, Lord?”
“What? No. Not at all. You’ve done very well indeed. What can we do for you?”
“Well, feed me, for a start.” He stuffed the last of his meat pie in his mouth and brushed crumbs from his hands. “Well, more. I’m starving. My friends are too. And—and if you could let us stay with you, please? We won’t make no trouble. Won’t steal or nothin’.”
“I doubt that,” Rob said. The child gave him a stricken look. He chuckled.
“I’m counting on you to keep the theft petty and the mischief minimal, my boy.”
Little Pigeon drew himself up indignantly. “I’m a girl,” he said.
“Oh. Well. Of course you are, lass. Any rate, take your friends ’round to the kitchen tents and tell them I told them to feed you all you can hold. We’ll find something useful for you and your friends to do.”
Little Pigeon jumped up and hugged him. To Rob’s surprise his—her—cheeks were wet. “Thank you, Master Rob! And you, Lord Karyl! Thank you!”
She set off at a brisk scuttle across the green and lavender ground cover. Garamond glared after her. He clacked his pewter mug down on the table and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“Are we an army or a rolling charity?” he demanded. “Do you mean to take in every rag-tag starveling that wanders in, Colonel?”
“If they swear to follow my rules and serve as we tell them to,” Karyl said, “yes. I do.”
“Sentiment?” Melodía asked. Rob thought her more surprised at the fearful king tyrant Karyl showing compassion, than objecting herself. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a pretty face, he thought. Well, I am that that, surely.
“By no means. We can’t run forever. We’ll have to fight—certainly the horde, all too likely the Empire. We’ll need every pair of hands we can muster then.”
“But—children and untrained peasants?” Côme said. “I’m all for saving those we can. But they’re not going to be of much use in battle, surely?”
Karyl smiled. “I can use them.”
Côme raised his brows, pulled his chin up and the corners of his mouth down, in an almost-comical look of surprise. Another noble, Rob reflected, might’ve taken immediate and violent exception to Karyl’s flat contradiction.
Of course any grande who responded that way would be doing very well indeed to live long enough to feel his own steel clear its sheath. Côme was a formidable fighter even for one of his class. Karyl was … unique.
But there was a reason Karyl had set the displaced Baron to command his dinosaur knights. His often deliberate clowning notwithstanding, Côme was no fool. Scarcely a buckethead at all, really.
He rubbed his chin and nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll happily learn the trick of using them, then.”
Karyl stood up sharply.
“Very well. The horde’s following us now. We’ve got to move with a purpose. Ladies, gentlemen: you know your tasks. Do them.”
* * *
Screams grabbed Rob by the scruff and yanked him up from the depths of sleep.
Dressed only in a soft linen loincloth, he tumbled from his tent. He had his axe Wanda in hand. At once he felt self-conscious about it.
I’ll not be needing you after all, love, he thought. I know that sound.
As he expected the cries issued from the humble tent next to Rob’s and no larger than it
.
He grabbed a passing arm. “Steady,” he said to the wide-eyed look its owner, a woman dressed like him and carrying a dirk, gave him. “Himself is having his bad dreams. It’s that and nothing more. Pass the word, there’s a love: there’s no threat to the camp. Only nightmares.”
“Nightmares? But it sounds like a man being eaten by a matador!” she said.
She must be a newcomer, Rob thought. We’ve plenty of those, and more every day.
He tipped his head and listened. “Close, aye. But not altogether. Now—away with you!”
They had marched a few hours southwest along La Rue Imperial, then halted to laager in for the night. Now the whole camp was roused. Men and women jumped up from beside fires or poured from tents, ready to make their final stand against the whole of the Grey Angel horde.
But Rob heard older hands, veterans who’d joined in early days, already spreading the message had given the mostly naked woman: “Relax. It’s just the voyvod’s nightmares.” Behind Karyl’s back they called him by his outlandish noble title, Slavo, for a warlord who ruled a March.
They remembered such dreams from before the first time they ambushed a Crève Coeur raiding party, back even before the Blueflowers. Once action began, the nightmares stopped.
What worried Rob, who’d endured Karyl’s screaming dreams and night-fears and bouts of black depression far longer than any soul in the refugee army, was the question of why they’d commenced again.
As he walked through the camp helping pouring oil on troubled water he heard a greybeard who’d joined the army in Métairie Brulée addressing a rapt circle of listeners.
“The Fae caught our lord when he fell from the cliff with a mortal wound,” he said, “and bore him to the Land Below. There they saved his life and healed his hurts.”
He shook his hoary head. “But it’s a terrible price they exact. One he ain’t done payin’, yet. But he pays in pieces, each night in dreams.”
That went right down Rob’s spine, hitting every vertebra.
“I thought nobody remembered what happened to them in the Venusberg,” a young Castañera said.
“Why d’you think it haunts him when he sleeps? That’s when the bodies buried deep in your mind and soul get up and walk around.”