by Victor Milán
Your multiple-great-grandmother Rosamaría is three hundred years old! she thought. I have every prospect of living as long. If boredom doesn’t kill me first.
She opened her mouth to launch what she already knew was a doomed assault on the ramparts of his shiny new resolve. But he was already striding away.
“But, Majesty—” Mondragón began as he followed his master.
Felipe waved a hand at him without bothering to glance back.
“We’ve been down this road again and again, my friend. Why take the trouble of assembling such a splendid instrument, and placing it in the hands of an acknowledged master, only to disassemble it after first use—when there remains a world of good it might yet do for the Imperio?”
Before his Chief Minister could answer him—futilely, of course—he paused to say a few low, fond words to Montse and tousle her blond dreadlocks. Which she hated with a passion, and only suffered now because she starved for their father’s attention as greatly as her older sister did. Then he marched grandly on out the door, Mondragón still scuttling behind.
The other attendants and patrons of the library barely glanced up; he had made it redundantly clear that he wanted no undue ceremony or fuss made over him in this his own home. And he was a frequent visitor here on his own—as much as that would surprise strangers to the court, not least certain members of Torre Delgao, who saw him as nothing more than a bumptious nobody.
Melodía sighed like a thunder-titan in the rain.
“Highness,” Pilar said softly, “feel gently about your father. He—”
For an instant Melodía remembered two little girls, and a different morning long ago spent braiding each other’s hair and piling it into fanciful shapes—Melodía’s in the likeness of the frill and horn of a Styracosaurus, Pilar’s in the much more modest likeness of a tricornio—and then laughing and chasing butterflies in one of the Firefly Palace’s numberless enclosed gardens. Then duty slammed over the scene like a portcullis.
Class distinctions, after all, had been handed down by the Creators themselves. Melodía might not believe in the gods. But she believed in order—and her family’s primacy, which depended on it.
“You are in no position to criticize the Emperor in any way,” she said brusquely. She swept past her servant toward the door her father had left by. But not quickly enough to escape the look of hurt her words stamped into those jade-green eyes, that not even the practiced immobility of the gitana’s features could hide.
As Melodía passed, Montserrat didn’t even look up, so quickly had she gotten engrossed in her book again. Melodía twitched a smile when she recognized it—A Child’s First Book of Sieges: Lavishly Illustrated; Feat. Eyewitness Accounts of the Most Atrocious and Lamentable Intakings. One of Montse’s favorites.
“Your Highness,” a voice said from between her and the door.
As if my day wasn’t spoiled enough. She recognized the remarkably deep and no less remarkably unctuous voice of the chief of the delegation from Trebizon—the one that had been pestering her father for months to promise her hand in marriage to their appalling tallow-tub of a Prince.
He stood waiting with his two fellow emissaries. His head was shaven and crowned with a splendid high cylindrical hat. His beard was black, precise, and oiled. Like the two women with him his eyes were outlined far too dramatically in kohl. Like them he dressed with no regard for the afternoon’s heat, draped neck to toes in heavy flowing robes of black, or cloth so dark they appeared to be, worked through with silver threads and the occasional flash of gemstones, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, or amethysts. Melodía didn’t know whether it was because of a higher degree of prudery among the Trebs than prevailed here in their rival empire, or simply because the relatively temperate La Merced seemed cool after the Black River Delta swamps.
“May we trouble you for a moment of your time?”
“By no means,” she said. “Archbishop Akakios. Megaduchess Paraskeve. Megaduchess Anastasia.”
Nodding to each in turn she plowed on by, heedless to their entreaties as a treetopper strolling through a village would be to the occupants’ screams as it trampled their houses. They smelled of far too much essence or incense: a cacophony of odors.
A fourth member of the embassy stood squarely blocking the point-arched doorway: a slim, elegant man of Melodía’s own height, with a fine grey eyes and hair and full beard of the same shade. He wore a doublet of grey velvet, scarcely cooler than his associates’ garb but marginally more fashionable, over silver hose.
“Count Dragos,” she said coolly.
He clapped his hand to the jeweled but eminently serviceable hilt of the spadataliana, or rapier, he wore by his hip. Her heart jumped, and she briefly wished she’d permitted a pair of Scarlet Tyrants to accompany her, instead of curtly dismissing them.
But the Count, who was cut from a much different fabric from his associates, only bowed smoothly as he stepped aside to clear her path.
“The Princess looks most lovely today,” he murmured in his curiously accented Spañol.
“I do,” she said, and went out.
* * *
Countess Terraroja was a sturdy woman with a silvered blond braid wrapped around her head. She rode sidesaddle on a white palfrey, which had been fashionable a century before. Jaume didn’t care much about fashion. The beauty he adored might change or fade. Would change and fade, with time and season. But not with fancy.
A similarly mounted maid and a handful of mail-armored horsemen followed Condesa Terraroja. By their seats Jaume recognized them as house-soldiers, mounted infantry rather than cavalry trained to fight on horseback. They carried neither shield nor spear, but wore swords scabbarded over tabards bearing the white and red Terraroja arms.
Their faces and postures betrayed great apprehension. But also a kind of resolution. Should Jaume intend treachery, and violate the parley-flag, they would die. Clearly they knew it. Just as clearly they were determined to exact a cost if it came to that.
The countess reined in ten meters from where Jaume stood in the road. Her maid and a soldier dismounted and bustled forward to help her. Before they got to her the Countess dismounted on her own.
She showed no fear, of Jaume, his Companions, or the army all around them. Don Leopoldo surely doesn’t live up to this one, thought Jaume. Which I suppose is just as well for the Empire.
The Countess approached. For the space of a few breaths she stood gazing into Jaume’s eyes. Sadness and defiance walked across her square, handsome face by turns.
She hiked up her long skirts and dropped to her knees on the crushed pumice road. “I abase myself before you, Lord Constable,” she said. Her accent, like her features and coloring, suggested she was Alemanan.
“No need for that, señora,” he said. “Please stand up. Our complaints lay with your husband. We have resolved them.”
She rose to stand stiffly upright. She had probably never been a conventionally pretty woman. But Jaume found the strength in her face and posture beautiful in itself.
“Not altogether,” she said. “I’m here to plead for his life.”
The Count lay bound in a tent under guard by Ordinaries. He’d had the wit to maintain a dignified and stony silence. Which at the least spared his breath and his captors’ ears.
“His ultimate fate rests in His Imperial Majesty’s hands,” Jaume said.
“You carry the High Justice. You could order him hanged. I beg you for the chance to plead his case before the Fangèd Throne.”
“Why shouldn’t Don Jaume hang him?” asked Manfredo.
Jaume’s face tightened. It wasn’t really the Taliano’s turn to speak here. But by rule any Companion could speak his mind without penalty.
“His crimes are plain, and merit nothing better.”
The Countess’s blue eyes flared. After a few heartbeats of furnace glare, under which the red-haired Taliano refused to melt, she turned and gestured to the red stone castle on its red stone crag.
“If you spare Leopoldo for trial by the Emperor, I’ll surrender both keep and town. Otherwise”—she shook her head haughtily and jutted her strong chin—“I will resist you as stoutly as my husband would have.”
“More so, I’d guess,” said Florian softly from behind Jaume.
Jaume turned and raised a reproving eyebrow. Florian held up a hand. “Sorry.”
Jaume winked at him. He thought the same.
“If you surrender,” he told the Countess, “I offer general amnesty, to you, your retinue, your servants, the common folk, and the common soldiers. I can’t promise anything concerning your husband’s vassals, however.”
Her lip curled. “You can do what you like with them,” she said, “with my blessing.”
Jaume smiled. “I’m pleased to accept your offer, then, Condesa Terraroja. I give you the thanks of the Empire.”
She smiled, if bleakly, and started to return to the horse her sweating soldier held. Then she stopped and turned back.
“One more thing, my lord,” she said, almost shyly. “I know I’ve no right to ask, but … might I have my husband back? Until you’re ready to carry him off to trial?”
The Companions protested behind him, and not just the hyper-legalistic Manfredo.
“He has to give his parole not to escape,” he said.
“He will.”
“And you must give yours not to permit nor aid his escape in any way. And you know what it will mean if he does.”
He spoke softly, gently even. He did not reckon this woman as fool enough to mistake that for weakness.
She nodded. “Ban of outlawry. Attainder. We forfeit everything: land, titles, lives. I have two daughters, Lord Constable. We have two daughters. They’re lovely girls, not a bit like their father—although I love him, scapegrace as he is. I won’t have them turned to animals that every hand is free to hunt. I give you my word, as a mother as well as a countess, Leopoldo shall not escape.”
“Manfredo,” Jaume said, glancing back at the knight who stood behind his right shoulder, “see to releasing our captive into the Countess’s custody, if you please.”
Manfredo’s beautiful face knotted in a decidedly unbeautiful scowl. “Captain—”
Jaume turned fully and laid a hand on Manfredo’s flaring shoulder armor. The sun-hot metal stung a palm raw and bruised from haft and hilt.
He looked into the Taliano’s eyes and smiled until Manfredo dropped his gaze. “Very well,” Manfredo said.
“You are a good man, my friend,” said Jaume.
Chapter 38
Segador chistoso, Ridiculous Reaper—Therizinosaurus cheloniformis. A large, bipedal, mostly herbivorous beaked dinosaur from Ruybrasil; 10 meters long, 5 tonnes. Possesses large, brightly colored feathers prized throughout Aphrodite Terra. Most Nuevaropans consider their usual description—short-legged, swag-bellied, possessing terrifying foreclaws a meter or more long—a ludicrous invention.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Light though they were, hood and cloak stifled Falk, Herzog von Hornberg as he rode his rented horse through early-evening woods several kilometers inland from the Firefly Palace. Spring had come to the Principality of the Tyrant’s Jaw. While seasonal variations were even less noticeable here on this tropical coast than inland, the weather had grown warmer.
He endured. Any knight was trained to do so from earliest adolescence. And of course, Falk had forced himself to learn to endure more than most. Not that it was ever enough to please his mother.
Not that anything ever was.
The locals called these el Bosque Salvaje, the Savage Woods, although they weren’t a bit more savage than anyplace else on the Tyrant’s Head. To be sure, you might get gored by a surly nosehorn, or rent limb from limb by a wild raptor-pack. What was special about that?
He suspected these decadent Mercedes, urban creatures to the core, distrusted nature and stayed as clear of it as they could. Still, he wasn’t enjoying the natural way sweat sluiced down his broad face, stung his eyes, tickled down his sides to soak the felt-lined leather sword belt and silk loincloth beneath his cloak.
How inconspicuous can I be, with my size and noble bearing? A blue blood, a knight especially, carried himself differently from any other beast that walked Nuevaropa. And everyone raised on the Tyrant’s Head knew the look.
He also didn’t know why it had been necessary to rent a horse at a dodgy livery in town, instead of borrowing one of the fine mounts freely available in Prince Harry’s—Heriberto’s—stables. But Bergdahl insisted on it, as he had the hood.
Falk wasn’t sure the man wasn’t just toying with him. But he had done as Bergdahl insisted. As always.
In the underbrush around him, the insect choir began its preliminary voice exercises for the night to come. The setting sun pushed Falk and his mount’s shadow well ahead of them along the shell-paved path as the bay trotted briskly west through a tunnel of overarching limbs. The air smelled of day-warm dust and fallen leaves.
Falk sniffed the tangy woodsmoke of the roadhouse’s cookshack and the savory aromas of meat roasting over coals and open flames long before he turned a bend and the establishment came into sight. His stomach growled. A whole roast scratcher capon, a rack of barbecued fatty ribs with sweet-hot sauce, and to wash all down a liter mug of the house’s famous beer would go a long way to setting him right.
If only something would still the butterflies in his stomach. In his mind he could hear Bergdahl sneer: Why so timid, your Grace? You could take out these fops you’re meeting with fists alone. And his mother saying, You’re a smart boy, Falk. Why do you always act so stupid?
He shook his head like a horse trying to chase a fly from its ear.
Of course I’m afraid, he thought by way of rebuttal. If the wrong people spot me, I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for. His scarcely healed forearm twinged at the thought.
Not to mention that trifling thing, my head.
The Nosehorn Bull at Bay was a solid sprawl of fieldstone, a single story with a roof of green-painted cypress shakes. Its sign was imposing, a placard a good three meters long, hung by bronze chains from a stout tree-trunk frame. It luridly depicted the titular beast—a splendid dinosaur, with extravagant yellow-and-black eyespots on its frill, and gore dripping from its horn—confronting a quartet of mounted huntsmen with spears and a pack of snarling green horrors. The outcome seemed considerably in doubt.
Falk nodded approval to himself when he halted his horse by a polished green-granite post and dismounted. He liked to see a thing well done.
He tethered his gelding to the greened-bronze ring hung from the post. Half a dozen horses were hitched to similar posts near the stone channel, fed from a nearby stream, that ran in front of the roadhouse. Striders pecked and clucked in a pen. You couldn’t leave the ruffed riding-dinosaurs tied for any length of time. They were so highly strung they’d panic and break a leg or scrawny neck.
Stepping up onto the little stone bridge over the watering-channel, Falk tossed a few copper centimos to the skinny girl in a black smock, thong sandals, and shallow-cone hat who squatted by the door, to give his mount a handful of oats. It was a small act of rebellion: he could hear his mother and his servant deride him for his soft heart and head, coddling someone else’s nag. Anyway, Falk regarded pointless cruelty as indulgence, a giving in to weakness.
Inside, the air was thick with the smoke of several kinds of pipe-stuffing, the dull reek of spilled beer, and the sounds of roistering. The publican seemed to expect him. Her manner was obsequious even though she had the face of an ancient granite statue and the proportions of a good oak gate. With his hood up he towered over her by a good sixty centimeters, but he doubted an innkeeper as seasoned as she looked to be was intimidated by mere size.
Down a stone-walled hallway, a door that clearly led to a proverbial back room opened promptly to a rap of the hostess’s brawl-scarred knuckles. An aristocratic face appeared. It unwrapped itself from around a look of annoyed d
isdain when its owner saw Falk looming behind the woman.
Without a glance at the publican, the man who opened the door pressed a coin into her palm. He was slight of stature, carried himself like a scratcher cock, and had a head that looked the more outsized for sitting on a white ruff like an egg in a cup.
“You’ve come,” he said. At least he had wit not to blurt out an incriminating your Grace into a public hallway. From the look of him it pained him not to be able to drop such an exalted title. “Excellent. Please come in.”
He bowed Falk into the room. It was larger than Falk expected. Woven-feather panels lined the walls. Like the sign, they were worked with surprising skill.
Three men sat at a table set with pitchers, mugs, and bowls of fruit. One man was as bulky and oddly proportioned as the fabled Therizinosaurus, or ridiculous reaper, of distant Ruybrasil, an immense two-legged herbivorous dinosaur with a swag belly and sickle claws a meter long. Another was your standard Spañol courtier, lean, with waxed moustaches.
“… hear how you Delgaos always call Felipe ‘that bastard of a Ramírez,’” the third man at the table was saying. He was only a little larger than the man who was just now shutting the door and feverishly waving for him to shut up. “Well, let me tell you something, gentlemen: if he kicks his family off the top of the heap with his mad antics, he’ll take Torre Ramírez down with it.”
And he smiled insouciantly at Falk.
The first man bustled forward as if afraid he might be late to something.
“I am Gonzalo Delgao,” he said to Falk, who knew it. “This is my brother Benedicto—”
The Therizinosaurus smiled shyly, despite the fact he was at least as big as Falk.
“—our brother-in-law Don René Alarcón—” The courtier. “—and our dear ally, Mor Augusto Manorquín, who comes of a cadet house of Tower Ramírez.”
The last was the vehement and irrepressible speaker. He reminded Falk of a ferret, sleek and slender. Though clearly nowhere near as circumspect.