by Victor Milán
The closest thing to compassion she saw gleamed in the eyes of Falk von Hornberg, which matched the royal blue of the tunic he wore tonight. She looked away quickly. She was not prepared to deal with sympathy from him.
Pío peered intently at her. The skin around his eyes was as grey and wrinkled as the scales around a thunder-titan’s.
You arrogant old reptile! she thought with a blood-hot rush of sudden anger. You think you’re going to intimidate me into backing away from the truth? She slammed back her half-full goblet of the golden wine of Trebizon.
“You heard right, your Holiness,” she said. She knew how to make her voice blare like a trumpet, and she did. “I love my father. But he’s made a horrible mistake waging war against his own people. The time has come to heal the Imperio, not gash it with fresh wounds!”
Courtiers uttered theatric gasps. Pío blinked slowly. His cheeks colored.
Melodía glared at her father as if this were all his doing. He was sitting with a chunk of coarse brown bread in his hand, looking completely befuddled.
Mondragón cleared his throat. “Holy Father of us all,” he said, “she’s only a child. She doesn’t really know what she’s saying.”
“I most certainly do!” Melodía shouted, jumping to her feet. She could feel the delicious malice in the murmur that rose with her.
Angrily she marched the length of the table. As she passed him, Gonzalo favored her with a smug little V of a smile in his obsessively trimmed goatee. She shot him the finger, and so departed her father’s hall and glittering company.
* * *
“You certainly kicked over the hornet’s nest with your little outburst at dinner tonight, Día.” Somehow Abigail Thélème made the spike-frill mask she wore, spun together from beaded blue and silver glass rods, look delicate. “Why didn’t you just spit in the Pope’s eye and preach Fae-worship while you were at it?”
“I hardly think that’s a tactful thing to say, under the circumstances,” said Princess Fanny. Her half mask had the likeness of a regal carrack-bird, with a dark green crest and pearly cheeks.
“I’m political, not tactful,” Abi drawled. “You’ve confused me with your mother.”
“My mum’s quite political, really, in her jovial, pink-cheeked Anglysh way.”
Prince Harry’s festival hall was every bit as huge and grand as his great hall, and considerably better lit. The better to make the costumes sparkle, and bring their million colors alive.
Or masks, anyway: this was un gran baile de máscaras, conducted in strict accordance with the latest La Merced fad. Which, Abi assured Melodía’s ladies, as usual followed the Francés capital Lumière by two years, faithful as clockwork. All must wear masks, with prizes to be awarded at the end of the night for the most beautiful, the most ornate, the most amusing. Garb was supposed to be modest, so as not to detract from the masks.
Of course, modest was a relative term. Both skin and ostentation were on plentiful display, Melodía saw.
The chamber was packed with gaudy celebrants, although the servants, well experienced, showed no difficulty sliding among them like eels through seaweed. Looking around, Melodía saw a number of figures she recognized readily despite their hidden faces.
Not far away from the patch of wall where she and her retinue congregated, she spotted Falk’s brute bulk. The Duke wore a black tunic, hose with one leg white and the other deep blue, and a black bird-mask with open toothy beak. Melodía supposed it was intended to be his totemic falcon, but as far as she was concerned it looked like a crow.
As usual, he was attended by a flock of the young bravos, small-holding knights and second sons, who had descended on the city in the wake of Felipe’s declaration of war on Terraroja. Frustrated at having arrived too late to join the Army of Correction, they continued to flutter around the court, hoping for a chance for glory or at least trouble. Falk’s dark radiance drew them like moths.
Currently they orbited him at a wary distance. Falk was arguing heatedly with one of the servants, a beanpole with immense hands and lank hair of indeterminate color. By the rules of the ball, the attendants went masked as well. Whereas most contented themselves with simple dominos, this man wore one fashioned in the startlingly lifelike likeness of a dull-plumed horror.
Melodía let her eyes slide across more masks: of dinosaurs and sea serpents, of persons historical and legendary, of fabulous and no doubt mythical animals drawn from The Bestiary of Old Home. She spotted Mondragón’s tall, gaunt form, hard to mistake even if he hadn’t been wearing his usual black-and-brown robes. Even the Chief Minister’s toothy plesiosaur mask, clearly modeled on the stuffed one hung in the banquet hall that once gave young Melodía nightmares, looked dour.
Where Mondragón was, Melodía’s father was nearby. Sure enough, there among the dancers the somewhat portly and none-too-tall Emperor showed a brisk and not-badly turned leg alongside a much stouter Anglaterrana duchess who was visiting Prince Heriberto. Her white gown made her look like a paper lantern topped with a pale-green mask of the Creator Maris, inhumanly beautiful and maned with wild blue-green seaweed. Felipe’s mask was the tan brindled with dark brown likeness of Hercules, his beloved great dinosaur-hound, fatally gored by a wild nosehorn on a hunt a few years before.
As the band struck up a brisk canario, Josefina came stumping up to protest, “But, Melodía, why aren’t you wearing a mask?”
“It’s the best mask of all,” Melodía said brittlely.
The scion of the Principality of the Tyrant’s Jaw herself had on a translucent white human mask painted with what struck Melodía as a look of hideous glee. “Fina,” Abi told her, “I worry about you sometimes.”
“That’s not even original, Día,” Guadalupe said.
Her voice echoed off the hollow underside of her sackbut half mask. Jewels surrounded the eyeholes and gleamed in lines up its long back-sweeping crest. In keeping with the night’s rules, she wore a plain green gown, but splashed in yellow, evidently to suggest the dinosaur’s coloration. It put Melodía more in mind of a run-in with an incontinent Parasaurolophus than the animal itself, but she knew her mood was jaundiced.
Llurdis pushed up beside Lupe to jab her in the ribs with a thumb. “That’s impertinent!”
Melodía stared at her Catalan kinswoman openmouthed. Not content with a mere round-crested Corythosaurus mask in pale blue and rose, she had on an entire duckbill costume, complete with a meter-long padded tail that imperiled all those who happened near. Cutouts in the bulbous body let her ample bare breasts hang through. Glued-on circles of sapphires outlined the nipples. Aside from being in what Melodía found shockingly bad taste, the gemstones’ color didn’t suit Llurdis at all.
Melodía looked away to see the servant walk away from Falk, haughty as an archbishop. Falk stood glaring after him through his falcon eyes, clenching and unclenching black-gloved fists. One of his hangers-on, who wore the semblance of the ancient stage character Emphyrio, made a sly-voiced suggestion that Falk should have knocked the impertinent fellow down.
Before Melodía could catch the Duke’s response, Lupe turned and gave her friend’s false flank a shove. It flexed with a blooping sound. Telar knows what it’s made of, Melodía thought.
“Leave off!” Lupe snarled.
Llurdis struck Lupe’s shoulder with the heel of her palm. “Don’t hit me!”
Lupe punched furiously but ineffectually at the boat-hull hadrosaur torso. It went bloop, bloop. Llurdis slapped at her hands.
“Bitch!” Llurdis said.
“Sow!”
“¡Puta!”
Melodía’s stare turned from shocked disbelief to fury. The pair showed every sign of being about to launch one of their full-blown wrestling/lovemaking bouts, out here in front of Melodía’s father, the gods, and everybody.
“They’re like a pair of cats, really,” Fanny murmured.
“Ladies,” Melodía hissed, “I’m this far from having some husky menservants grab the both of you, spank
you, and throw you out on your stinging pink asses.”
“Really?” Lupe said.
“You wouldn’t dare!” puffed Llurdis.
“Girls,” Abi said cheerfully. That itself was a warning as loud as a temple bell rung after midnight. “You may have noticed our Imperial mistress is feeling a bit testy tonight, yes? Tread warily.”
Melodía gave her a glare. Then she jumped as she felt a strong, warm pressure enfold her left biceps.
She spun to find the Duke of Hornberg looming over her like a cliff. “You look like you could use a rescue,” he said.
She yanked her arm away. “I can rescue myself, thank you kindly, your Grace.” She shot him a withering glare. He failed to wither.
“May I steal you for this dance, then?” he asked as lightly as his basement-baritone voice and guttural Northern accent would allow.
“Well,” Melodía heard herself saying, “just this one.”
Chapter 29
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
“Imagine those brigands, so close to our city!” Rob heard a woman say shrilly as he and Karyl entered the Garden villa’s dining hall. His heart headed promptly toward his boots.
He still had no clear idea how many members—or plants, whatever you’d call them—the Garden boasted. Right now he judged there were maybe sixty dining in the big hall. On the dais sat the seven Master Gardeners of the Council and Bogardus. Rob didn’t know whether Bogardus was considered part of the Council or not.
Not that I care, he thought as he looked around for a nice inconspicuous place to sit and eat. So long as we get paid regularly in good silver from the erstwhile Count’s coffers.
“Ah, Voyvod, Master Rob,” Bogardus said in his best preacher’s voice as he rose from his central place. “Come and join us, my friends.”
“Yes,” said Sister Violette from his right side. “Join us.” She sounded less welcoming.
“Nicked again,” Rob said under his breath. Karyl strode toward the front of the hall with head high, the same way he approached everything. Rob followed, all but scuffling his soles like a truant schoolboy.
At a sign from Bogardus several Gardeners vacated seats from the table nearest the dais to make room for the two. “So that’s how the land lies,” Rob said. “No seats at the high table for the great captain and his dinosaur master.”
“We’re hirelings,” said Karyl, unfazed.
“I did not forget that.”
As he sat, Rob polled the Council with his eyes. Violette sat smiling with her somewhat wide and thin-lipped mouth, while her namesake eyes suggested her meal would be greatly improved by the sight of Rob’s and Karyl’s livers roasting together on a spit. Of the rest, Rob had learned that Absolon, Longeau, and a woman named Nia were her allies. Iliane and Cuget didn’t much care for Violette and didn’t much care to hide it. Out of the whole bouquet arranged behind the high table, only a man named Telesphore and Bogardus didn’t look at the newcomers as if they’d stepped in fresh dogshit right outside the dining room.
A Gardener on steward duty came up behind Karyl and Rob to pour them each a mug of wine. Rob smelled honeysuckle. His appreciative eyes took in the swell of a hip in a thin burgundy gown, then slid up a willowy torso.
To meet the smiling green eyes of his chestnut-haired beauty of that first evening in the garden. “I’m Jeannette,” she said.
“I’m Rob.”
“I know.”
She sashayed away before he could utter the various gallantries that were jostling each other to escape his mouth. I admire a girl who knows how to sashay, he told himself, watching the fascinating interplay of her left buttock with her right. They put him in mind of two puppies in a pillowcase. It’s a lost art in our crass and caviling age, it is.
Above them the Councilors were twittering at each other. “They’ll be carrying us off to the slave markets next,” Longeau declared. “It’s a scandal.”
“Indeed it is,” Violette said, pitching her voice to carry.
Rob looked up to see her smiling down on him. Now her expression suggested the benign regard of a Black River boarcroc who’d just spied a plump fatty calf.
“Ah yes,” she said. “And here sit our costly mercenaries, swilling our wine and preparing to gorge their gullets on the produce of our Garden. One might ask what they’re doing to protect us?”
“What we came to do, madame,” Karyl answered calmly, setting down his mug and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Teaching your people to defend themselves.”
“Teaching?” demanded Longeau, his voice throbbing with outrage. It throbbed a bit too much to be genuine, as Rob, a master of the spurious, was quick to detect. “Teaching? When marauders pillage almost within sight of our city towers?”
A tall, bulk-bodied man with dark hair cut square above a sagging oblong face, Longeau was another so-called town lord. His barony, Rob gathered, lay near the border with Castaña and the Spañol frontier.
Rob smelled honeysuckle again, and hot bread and warm spices. Jeannette was back, serving them a fresh-baked loaf in a basket and plates of roast-nosehorn slices with vegetables cooked in savory sauce. She smiled at Rob again before vanishing into the kitchen.
“In fairness,” said Cuget, a middle-sized man who had a head round as a catapult ball and lank yellow hair, “you should do something to stop them.”
“You overestimate what the two of us can do,” Karyl said.
“You could fight for us!” Longeau said.
“I noticed you weren’t present at the training grounds today, lord,” Karyl said. He looked around a suddenly silent room. “In fact I don’t recall seeing any of you. Except for young Lucas the painter.”
Red-faced, Longeau mumbled something about his health and pressing engagements.
“You’ve begun training our defense forces?” asked Bogardus. He knew the answer, of course. But he wanted to make sure the rest of the Garden heard it.
“Yes,” Karyl said. He knew the game, and was willing enough to play along.
“And they will be ready to protect us soon?”
“They need time to train, but yes.”
Bogardus smiled broadly. “Splendid. Then let us dine, and drink, and listen to music, and speak of beautiful things.”
Not all the Councilors looked best pleased at that. But Violette gave a pretty little shrug and turned to chat with Longeau. The other Councilors returned to their meals, conversing in less strident tones and not looking at the two hired champions.
Rob emptied his cup. “This won’t end well,” he said to Karyl.
“It’s a mercenary job,” Karyl said. “They don’t end well. You should know that by now.”
“You’re a regular Sister Sunshine, you are.”
Karyl ignored him.
Honeysuckle scent seemed to fill Rob’s head. Jeannette had leaned down to refill his mug. He raised a brow and took the opportunity to look down the conveniently sagging front of her gown.
“When you’re done here,” she whispered, “meet me in the garden where we first met.”
She was gone. Elusive as a butterfly, she is, Rob thought, picking up his mug and sipping reflectively.
Still, doomed though the job may be, the evening could well be looking up.
* * *
It was their third dance.
Elbows interlinked, Melodía and Duke Falk paced the stately steps of a pavane. Two lively dances in a row had preceded it, a galliard and a vuelta. During the latter, Falk ha
d put both big hands around her waist and hoisted her in the air as if she were Montserrat. That took her by surprise. He was a husky lad, to be sure. But at 176 centimeters, she wasn’t small, and her slender frame was well muscled.
His broken arm had healed quickly. At least, he showed no sign it still pained him.
Melodía’s sides and forehead ran with sweat. She was glad she hadn’t worn a mask.
Faces fanciful and fantastic were turned to watch them dance. Doña Carlota stood by a wall, radiating disapproval through her black domino. Melodía knew she’d hear all about this later.
Uncharacteristically, her ladies-in-waiting ignored the swarm of swains, mostly Falk’s hangers-on, that buzzed around them like mosquitoes. Instead they stood, stared, and talked sidewise at one another.
That’s not a good sign, Melodía thought. And: Let them. Let them all scorch their eyeballs on me dancing with Jaume’s rival!
“Those two,” Falk said, nodding his beautiful block of a head as he raised a knee and pointed a toe. “The nosehorn and the tyrant. They stare at you more avidly than all the rest. Do they desire you?”
She laughed. It must have sounded a bit wild. She felt him recoil slightly.
“Yes. But not the way you’re thinking. And that’s not just a tyrant. See? Red and gold? That’s an imperial tyrant.”
“Like the one slain by the esteemed progenitor of your line.”
He certainly talks like an Alemán, she thought. “That’s what the official story says. Although I doubt there was ever any such thing.”
“But the Fangèd Throne is made from its skull!”
“I’m pretty sure the Fangèd Throne is made out of plaster, actually,” she said. “Anyway, it’s at best a major faux pas for anybody not the Emperor, his bodyguards, or his family to wear the gold and scarlet. His immediate family. That upstart tyrant there is none other than my cousin Gonzalo. He doesn’t lust after my cinnamon-skinned young body, at least so far as I know. He lusts to recruit me to his sordid little schemes to discredit my father.”