by Victor Milán
“Someone fight me, Fae eat your souls!” he screamed. “There must be some man of birth to face me!”
Rob was glad to see there were few feathered darts and arrows jutting from the duckbill’s green-streaked orange hide. The shortbows could only hurt the thing by hitting an eye, and Karyl had impressed upon the woods-runners how badly he didn’t want the thing hurt. Or at least impressed Stéphanie, who harbored a savage grievance against the Brokenhearts. Which was enough: no one with his wits wanted to get crosswise of her. Meanwhile Gaétan and his arbalesters had justified Karyl’s faith in them by not shooting the sackbut with weapons that could harm it.
The duckbill was a fortune walking on two big legs. If they captured it alive, Karyl could sell it and share out a handsome prize with all. But Rob knew he had a greater gain in mind. The Empire was full of dinosaur knights who had lost their mounts and couldn’t afford a replacement. They’d coming flocking for a chance to obtain a new war-hadrosaur in exchange for a year’s service. Having shown he could take the beasts from Count Guillaume’s vassals, Karyl could probably get some to sign on to fight as cavalry or even armored infantry in hopes of winning a new mount in battle.
Karyl rode back along the trail, keeping above the scrum. Rob followed. The knight kept thrashing about and yelling shrill challenges. The stink of blood and ripped guts beat up from the road like heat from a forge.
“Why don’t you just shoot the bugger off his sackbut and be done with it?” Rob asked. “Or let Gaétan be about it. Surely you don’t mean to go sword to sword with a man on dinosaur-back?”
Seeing a mounted, thus putatively noble, foeman come into view, the Crève Coeur knight pointed his sword at Karyl.
“I challenge you to meet me blade to blade as a man of honor,” he cried.
“Whether I’m a man of honor or not is immaterial,” Karyl replied. “You’re just a bandit.”
To the volunteers he called, “Get him off the monster. Use nooses or poles. Don’t get hurt, and for Maris’s sake don’t hurt the duckbill.”
“What do we do with him then?” shouted Guat, whose face was a carnival horror mask of blood. Whose, Rob didn’t know.
“Whatever you wish.”
The knight stared at Karyl, slack-jawed as if the Voyvod had lapsed into his native Slavo. The militiamen cheered and jeered. Someone threw a loop of rope at the knight’s face. He batted it away. Others incautiously ran forward to try to pull him down by hand. He sworded one in the face and his sackbut trod another into the roadway, squeezing a last scream from bursting lungs that momentarily overrode the dinosaur’s fanfares of alarm. The mob jumped back.
They started throwing sticks and head-sized rocks at the knight. These bounced harmlessly from armor or shield, or were swatted down with his sword. Emeric and his sister, who was as tall as he was, ran up behind the duckbill carrying a burly four-meter branch with a forked end. They hooked the knight smartly under his right armpit and levered him sideways out of his saddle.
He landed with a ringing thud that made Rob wince. The peasant army fell on him with a single feral howl of glee.
“How can you let this happen?” Rob demanded of Karyl as green-enameled plate armor rang to the blows of clubs and the chink of spear-tips. “He’s a nobleman!”
“He’s a criminal. He’s the guiltiest of all. Whatever crimes the others committed or contemplated, they did by his command. Besides, I thought you hated blue bloods.”
Rob opened his mouth. For once he could find no words to shape with it. He did hate blue bloods. He held a vengeance of his own against them. And yet, and yet—it felt wrong to stand by and let one be lynched by his lessers like this.
Face burning, feeling a strange and nameless disgust surging within, he turned Nell right about and rode her away at a trot, down to the road, and back toward the village they had saved.
But he couldn’t outride the knight’s screams.
Chapter 41
Telar, Laventosa, Windy, La Tejedora de Sueños, Dreamweaver—Duchess of the Creators: Xun ☴ (Wind)—The Oldest Daughter. Represents Fabrication and destruction, artisans, sleep and dreams, forests, and Wind. Also birds and fliers. Known for her vigor. Aspect: a woman with long, kinky gold hair in a green-trimmed white gown, working a loom as a long-crested dragon soars above her. Sacred Animal: long-crested dragon. Color: green. Symbol: a golden loom.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“Feeling better?” Karyl asked Rob sardonically as a beautiful, strongly curved blond woman looped a flower wreath around the dinosaur master’s neck from his right. They marched side by side past the fountain in the central plaza, leading the survivors of what everyone now called the Battle of Whispering Woods on a triumphal procession through Providence town.
The woman beamed up at Rob. He could barely help noticing she had on nothing but a colorful strand or two of blossoms, none too carefully arranged. Public nudity was less common up here by the Shields, where cold winds occasionally blew down from perpetually snow-sheathed peaks even in high summer.
“It’ll do for getting along with,” Rob said as a stout peasant woman, fortunately wearing more normal country garb, held her grandson up to plant a kiss on his bearded cheek. Then in Anglysh: “Faugh, the little blighter’s been at the taffy! He’s got it all in my beard, the little shi—yes, madame, a lovely child. May he bear you many equally lovely great-grandchildren.”
Happy holidaymakers lined the Brokenheart Highway, the north road from Crève Coeur to Providence town, to welcome the returning heroes home. They cheered, banged tin drums, and blew lustily on whistles and paper horns. The noise would certainly have hurt the cultured ears of the Garden Councilors, had any of them been anywhere to be seen.
* * *
Two days after the battle, the bad taste lingered in Rob Korrigan’s mouth. His dreams had not been pleasant. The Brokenheart knight, he’d learned, had died as badly as Rob’s fears foretold, crushed by degrees as his steel carapace was slowly beaten in.
Rob’s mind knew the man deserved as much, and probably worse. He’d led his merry crew toward pillage, house burning, torture, mutilation, and rape, enslavement and murder: all the filthy pleasures the rulers of this world loved to wallow in when they felt they had license. Rob’s belly didn’t buy it, though.
A handful of foot soldiers and two horsemen had broken through and fled toward Crève Coeur. Given how much of the way ran through Telar’s Wood, and how many and vindictive were Emeric’s folk, Rob was none too sure they’d gotten away.
The militia took six shield men prisoner, all injured. Karyl had them stripped of all but loincloths and the improvised crutches that two men needed to walk. He ordered them set free, and told them to take themselves back across the Lisette by fastest route, or die.
One made the mistake of protesting that the woods were full of raptor-packs.
“Wild raptors, you mean?” Stéphanie the woods-runner had asked with lye-and-honey sweetness. “Not like the tame packs you set on us, to rip us apart for sport?”
The captives cringed away in unconcealed terror. She was a good 180 centimeters tall and built like her brother, leanly muscular. She was also formidably armed, with bow and quiver slung over bare brown shoulder, a single-edged knife as long as a short sword at her hip, and a spear with a wickedly sharp leaf-shaped head, that could be used for slashing as well as thrusting. She had an alarming tendency to gesticulate with it.
The prisoners, Rob thought, feared none of those things as much as her rage. She seethed with elemental fury, so intense and pure that Rob felt if she sprayed it on you, it might melt your face off.
She had been a notable beauty once, he reckoned. Then Crève Coeur Rangers hunting woods-runners, whose pinprick ambushes had till now been the closest thing to effective resistance the raiders met, caught her. They raped her, carved her face up with a hunting knife, and would have tortured her to death had not Emeric led a small group of forest folk to her rescue.
>
The volunteers guarding the captives, or just standing and gawking, stared at Stéphanie with scarcely less horror than the Brokenhearts did. Clearly, they feared her almost as much. But shock at her words was seeping into their expressions as well.
“Oh, yes,” she told them. “Guilli and his nobles love to see their pets take human prey.”
And then nothing would serve but that poor Rob step in to remind the now-outraged militiamen that Karyl had ordered the prisoners be released unharmed. He always got the dirty jobs.
And in the end, it wasn’t as if Lord Karyl made those unhappy lads trudge home through the forest empty-handed. He gave them the knight’s head in a sack, its features frozen in a most disconcerting mask, to take home to Count Guillaume as a token of his regard.
* * *
Something bonked Rob on the forehead. It snapped him out of his uneasy rolling reverie and back to the present parade.
Brawler’s reflex had already caused him to snatch the missile. “Gods damn it!” he yelped as pain pierced his palm.
He found he was holding a gorgeous purple rose. Bogardus’s wasn’t the only garden in Providence town, nor his acolytes the only skilled gardeners. Unfortunately whoever had grown, or at least harvested, this flower hadn’t thought to strip its thorns.
“They love you so much,” said a woman by his side, “their enthusiasm gets the better of them, sometimes.”
He glanced at her and his eyes went wide.
I’ve let myself get too damned tired, if I’m oblivious of a beautiful naked woman walking right next to me.
It was the blond woman in the flower strands. Rob recognized her now from a brief meeting in the banquet hall. She was a Gardener—Nathalie, he thought her name was.
He scratched his neck. Fatigue made him uncharacteristically blunt. “What are they so worked up about? It’s not as if we didn’t lose anybody.”
A dozen volunteers had been injured, seven killed. Losing nearly a fifth of your total force like that was usually enough to break even professional soldiers.
But it wasn’t pay that moved our people, he thought, nor the lust for futile glory. It was fear for their homes, their loved ones, and themselves—and revenge for the hurts already done them.
“But you won,” Nathalie said, her blue eyes shining. “In the past the knights have killed us and killed us, and there was nothing we could do. You’ve shown us they can be stopped, you and Captain Karyl and all the rest!”
And that was just how Karyl wanted it: an easy victory, to hearten the volunteers and rouse the people of Providence to the banner. It seemed cold, somehow. Even to the likes of Rob.
No one wanted to hear that. Not the militia, nor the cheering crowds. And least of all delectable nude Nathalie. So Rob held back his ever-eager tongue—as had become a terrible habit, since he linked his fate to Karyl’s.
He pasted his best jongleur’s smile back on and waved to the throng. He knew the value of an audience, did Rob, and how fleeting its applause. He meant to savor it while he could.
All of it.
And her a pacifist and all. So it’s true what I hear, that victory makes strange bedfellows.
* * *
The moment Karyl and Rob got the militia back to camp at Séverin farm they set to work growing and shaping it. For four days, half a week, it seemed Lady Fortune or the Fae favored them.
Rob still sweated and hated the quartermaster’s duties. But Gaétan had scared up a few clerks from his family warehouses to take part of the load off Rob’s shoulders. He was trying to recruit a cousin who, he said, was a wizard at provisioning as well as a master accountant. Though a small woman, and unmartial as a dormouse, she could face down the rowdiest drovers drunkenly demanding a raise, and the most supercilious blue blood sneering at the notion of paying bills due commoners, and never flinch. If she agreed, she’d take the job over completely.
Gaétan himself, experienced at recruiting and commanding caravan guards, proved a natural at training raw recruits. He got help from an unlikely source: two Gardeners who had been house-shields for Count Étienne before he converted. They confided to Rob that they’d joined mostly for the easy sex with pretty boys and girls. Yet they were truly drawn to Bogardus’s philosophy—and, somewhat paradoxically, to his inspiration, Jaume, who after all had been winning campaigns when both of them were stealing apples out of orchards with their boyhood friends.
Now they were bored and itching for action. Also they chafed that, as two of the most menial-born members of the supposedly egalitarian Garden, they found themselves doing the most menial tasks. And one expressed discomfort at a dogmatic bent he claimed to see growing in the Garden, or at least the Council.
Frankly, their concerns struck Rob as uncommonly dainty for a noble’s paid enforcers. But they were Providentials, and thus contrary. They did know their weapons, and were good at passing their skills along.
Karyl still hadn’t found a new dinosaur knight to ride the duckbill they’d captured. But it was early days yet; word would get around, and one would turn up. Meanwhile Rob doted on his new sackbut, a biddable if slightly skittish female whom he named Brigid. He’d never admit it to the lads and lasses assigned him as grooms, much less to Karyl, but tending to a real war-hadrosaur made him feel fully a dinosaur master again.
The militia now had a leavening of trained fighters. Providence’s northern barons didn’t dare leave their fief for fear that bold Count Guilli would snap them up. Not wanting to miss out on any more loot or glory—and taking to heart Karyl’s warning, via Bogardus, about what to expect if they didn’t help defend the province—they had sent contingents of their mailed house-archers and shields, each duly commanded by a spare relation.
Better, two authentic dinosaur lords had joined the militia: Baron Travise de les Clairières and Baron Ismaël of Fond-Étang. But while each came with a duckbill and full panoply, they brought no warriors, just arming-squires and servants. Les Clairières, from western Providence near Métairie Brulée, and Fond-Étang, from south along the Lisette, feared their neighboring magnates too much to weaken their home defenses further.
Still, war-dinosaurs were war-dinosaurs. They gave the militia much-needed muscle. They also gave Rob two new chicks to take happily beneath his wing.
And all the while recruits streamed steadily in, from town, from country, and even woods-runners—some of whom spoke with strange accents. The woods-runners lacked any regard for borders; they considered all of Telar’s Wood, which spanned Nuevaropa from Slavia and Alemania to Spaña near the coast of the Océano Aino, their home. They constituted a loose, nomadic tribe, culture, or even sect.
One that traditionally didn’t get along with the “sitting-folk” on the great forest’s fringes, neither farmers nor townspeople. But the camaraderie among those who had fought at the Whispering Woods had done a lot to allay mistrust in both directions. Eager to help, now that Karyl had demonstrated both his intent and his ability to harm their hated enemies, the woods-runners were rapidly learning to cooperate with Rob’s small but flamboyant squadron of mounted scouts. Mixed teams of woods-runners and jinetes were already starting to spoil the Crève Coeur Rangers’ nasty human-hunting sport.
Curiously, only a few volunteers trickled in from the east. The locals assured Karyl that that was to be expected. Hard against the mountains, that country was higher, drier, and more sparsely settled than the rest of Providence. Its folk had a reputation for aloofness. They could afford it, Rob reckoned, having the rest of the province to buffer them from their unfriendly neighbors, and the high Shields to discourage raiders from Ovda, with whom peace had prevailed in this district for a generation anyway.
So things went. For a blissful while. But Rob of all men should have remembered how Fortune, or the Fae, were fickle.
* * *
It was a fine day they picked to remind him.
The sun was a blinding-bright spot in a white sheet of cloud as he walked across a practice field bustling with mostl
y purposeful activity. The midmorning heat oppressed him far less than it would have on the coast. The air was dry, though the ground, trampled almost bare by hooves and the feet of men and monsters, was still damp from last night’s rain. The moisture had settled the dust, and brought the surrounding grass and midsummer flowers on so strongly that their clean sweet smells masked those of sweat, wet leather, and dinosaur farts.
Sometimes.
Rob was wearing buskins, loincloth, a short brown feather cape to shield his shoulders, and a broad cone-shaped straw peasant’s hat. He’d just come from overseeing dust baths for the militia’s three fine hadrosaurs. It was a tricky process, since the monsters loved it and participated with heedless enthusiasm. Now he was heading across the stream to look in on the crossbow practice taking place by the woods, and make sure the troops had enough untipped quarrels.
Rob, who thought mostly in Anglysh, was amusing himself with the very notion there might possibly be a shortage of “quarrels” when so many Providential men and women were thrown together, when someone fell into step beside him.
He tensed. You’ve got little to fear in the middle of your own armed camp, he told himself. Although with recruits and provisions coming in all the time, it would be no great feat for an assassin to slip in unnoted. Count Guilli hardly seemed the type to hire the Brotherhood of Reconciliation, if only because he enjoyed doing the dirty so much himself. After the Whispering Woods, Rob couldn’t afford to grow too complacent, lest he find out how it felt to have a wavy-bladed dagger sunk to the hilt in a favorite kidney.
But it was only a boy from town, who had a random thatch of straight black hair and was grubby, gangly, dressed in a torn linen smock, barefoot, and one of his spies. His name was Timothée. He was barely twenty-one, if that, and at that painfully sprouting stage when a body grew like bamboo, seemingly centimeters a day.
“The Council’s coming,” Timothée said. “It’s like a parade. They’ve got the mayor and the Town Guard and a band and everything.”