The Dinosaur Lords (61 page)

The dray stood parked in a clearing among tall hardwood trees. The nosehorn’s feed bucket had been removed. It grazed on low, feathery ferns with lavender underparts, which gave off a scent of mint when crushed.

Early sunlight slanted down to the clearing through fine clouds. Plate-sized blossoms—bright yellow and streaked from the centers with crimson, orange, or pale violet—decked the undergrowth surrounding the glade. Speckle-faced bouncers peeked from among them. Forest-gliders soared between lower branches, and fliers chirped from the higher ones.

Montserrat hit Melod
í
a and almost toppled her into the heaped shit. She clung to her elder sister with startling strength, weeping wildly. Melod
í
a found herself sobbing almost uncontrollably as well.

“Perhaps you’d like to climb out of the crap, D
í
a?” Abi said. “I mean, if you’re happy up there…”

Gently Melod
í
a disentangled her sister. Josefina Serena and Princess Frances of Anglaterra helped the two down to the turf. Pilar scrambled lithely after.

Melod
í
a looked down at herself. “Fanny, I—” she began, ineffectually batting at clumps of mostly dried dung that clung to her coarse robe.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Fanny embraced her.

“I was afraid—”

“I wasn’t—”

“I know.”

Something nudged Melod
í
a from behind. She heard a whicker, felt a soft exhalation of warm breath on the back of her head. She turned to find herself staring up the flared nostrils of her mare, Meravellosa.

“Maia!” she cried, hugging the horse around the neck. Looking past her she saw a pretty white mare and a strapping bay gelding with a homely bent-nosed face and its back piled high with baggage tethered nearby.

“I love you all,” she told her friends with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Thank you so much for saving me. But you shouldn’t have done it. What were you all
thinking
?”

Montse shook back her ropes of hair. “I ordered everybody to do it! It’s all my fault. They can punish me if they want to.”

“This one’s a fighter, D
í
a,” Abigail Th
é
l
è
me said. “It isn’t true, of course. We all did it because we wanted to.”

“Who thought this up? Was it you, Abigail?”

“I admit I helped flesh out the plot. But I can’t claim much credit. Your sister and that servant wench of yours cooked it all up between them. Amateurish, but worthy of Sansamour withal.”

Melod
í
a turned to the guilty pair in amazement. Pilar calmly met her gaze.

“Your sister’s much beloved among the servants,” she said. “For her they’d do almost anything.”

Not for me, I notice,
Melod
í
a thought. “And you?”

Pilar smiled and reached up to pluck a twig from the hair over Melod
í
a’s forehead. “We grew up together, Princess. Remember?”

Melod
í
a felt her lips compress.
Maybe I didn’t,
she thought.

“We didn’t have any trouble on the way,” Abi Th
é
l
è
me said. She sounded almost disappointed. “But we’ve got no way of knowing when your disappearance will be detected. Maybe it already has been. You two need to get away from here in a hurry.”

Fear for her friends, and Pilar, and Claudia, and the other servants who must have aided her escape, hit Melod
í
a hard enough to make her sway.

“Really, D
í
a,” Fanny said encouragingly, “the fact that we’re working together with your sister should give us all immunity. It’ll all be written off as a lark by foolish girls who’ve heard too many ballads of Companions’ derring-do.”

“Your father better not try to punish us,” Fina said, frowning fiercely. “Nor my daddy’s servants either. He’d find himself out on the street right quick!”

Melod
í
a’s stomach clenched. “Don’t be too sure,” she said.

Do I have to go back, to save my brave foolish sister and my brave, foolish friends? Lady Bella, please spare me that!

“D
í
a,” Fanny said, “we’ll be fine.”

“Keep a special eye on Falk. He’s dangerous. He—I believe he’s behind all this.”

“We figured that out on our own,” Abi said dryly. “Too late to help. I—let’s just say I let everybody down.”

Even in her seethe of fear and hope, Melod
í
a couldn’t help wondering if this was the first time she’d ever heard Abi sound
uncertain
.

Another thought almost drove her to her knees. “
Pap
á
,
” she whispered.

How much did he know? How much does he know? Does he know what that bastard did to me last night?

She didn’t dare think about that now. Maybe ever. If she had an “ever.”

Someone took her hands. “Melod
í
a, your father loves you,” Fanny said. “We don’t know everything that’s going on.”

She drew in a deep breath and opened her eyes.

“Very well. I need to get away, if I’m going to.” She frowned as the obvious question slapped her in the face. “But—where?”

“Providence,” Fanny said. “Where else?

Fina gasped theatrically. “But that’s where the Grey Angel Emerged!”

“It’s still best,” Fanny said. “They follow Jaume’s philosophies there, after all. If anyone’s going to welcome her, it’ll be the Garden of Beauty and Truth.”

Mention of Jaume stuck another dagger in Melod
í
a’s soul. What this news would do to him she couldn’t imagine.
After I was too proud to say good-bye, or even return his letters.…

“Fanny’s right,” Abi said, sounding just the slightest bit surprised. Melod
í
a judged the cool Sansamour scion too canny to be taken in by Fanny’s fluff-head act, but she doubtless considered the Anglesa a hopeless amateur at intrigue. Which most intriguers this side of Trebizon were, next to Abi. “If the Providentials don’t actively oppose Church and Throne, they’re certainly not in awe of either. They might well be willing to defy the Empire by sheltering a fugitive.”

She paused, scowled, and exhaled through bared teeth.

“Or maybe they’ll see you as the perfect coin to buy their way back into your father’s good graces. I’m afraid the only choices we have to offer you range from bad to worse, Melod
í
a.”

No,
Melod
í
a thought.
Not worst.

“Providence it is,” she said. “I’ll just have to take my least-bad choice. And do the … the best I can to get by.” Her voice faltered.

Montse hugged her again fiercely. “Don’t sell yourself short, D
í
a!” she cried. “And stop taking Pilar for granted!”

Melod
í
a looked down at her sister in surprise. She smiled.

“I have,” she said. Pilar stood nearby. Melod
í
a reached out to take her hand. Lifting it to her lips she kissed it, then let it go.

“Be well, Pilar. I’ll miss you.”

“How?” her servant asked. “Inasmuch as I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t!”

“Try and stop me.” Pilar smiled. But her tone didn’t joke.

“But—”

“Be realistic, D
í
a,” Fanny said. “You can’t go all the way to Providence by yourself. It’ll be hard enough for the two of you.”

“But—I can hire guards.”

“You don’t dare,” Abi said. “Too much risk they’ll recognize you. Your father can pay them more to drag you back than you can pay them not to. Anyway, if you don’t take the girl, I’ll be happy to hire her. She shows a lot of promise. I can use someone with that kind of enterprise and courage.”

“No! I’ll go with Melod
í
a if I have to follow her like a lost dog.”

Given Abigail Th
é
l
è
me’s customary aristocratic chill, Melod
í
a expected her to take offense at such summary refusal from a mere maidservant. She showed no sign of doing so. Melod
í
a’s friend—and whatever else she was, Abi had proven truly that—was a deeper pool than she’d ever realized.

Like all my little circle,
she realized with a shock.
Everyone but me. Evidently I’m the shallow one.

Still, she teetered on the edge of ordering Pilar to stay behind. And found she couldn’t. To do so would be to cut herself off from everything she’d known.

“I don’t have the words,” she said. “I’ve got more and truer friends than I ever imagined—and the best sister in the world.”

She tousled Montse’s hair. “And now, when I finally understand that, I have to leave you all.”

She turned to Pilar. “Except you. Of course you’ll come with me. If you’re truly willing, after the way I’ve treated you for so long.”

“Of course, Melod
í
a dear.”

It came to her to ask why.
I
don’t have time,
she thought.

Then she faced the truth.
I don’t have the courage. Not yet.

Everyone cried and laughed as she hugged and kissed her sister and friends most thoroughly. Then she mounted Meravellosa. Pilar climbed aboard the white rouncy. And turning their faces away from La Merced, the Corte Imperial, and the lives they had known, the two young women rode north at the best speed their packhorse could sustain.

*   *   *

“Hey, minstrel-man,” a voice called through the ceaseless rain.

Through mud and downpour the defeated army trudged back toward Providence town. In front of all trudged Rob Korrigan, leading Little Nell by a rope. His slouch hat had slumped until the brim was a sort of sad, sodden skirt around his head. He wore only a linen breechcloth; the downpour had already defeated his best oiled-linen rain cape. He went barefoot because the shin-deep mud would’ve sucked boots or buskins off his feet into oblivion.

He might have ridden the hook-horn, since his baggage was following on a cart. But he felt the need for some sort, any sort, of activity. Despite the bone weariness weighing him down like plate armor made of lead, bizarre energy filled him. It gave his mind no rest, and thus wouldn’t allow his body any. He had to do
something,
he felt, or burst into flame.

He looked back. Behind Nell a female nosehorn pulled a hemp-canvas-covered wagon full of wounded. A house-soldier who’d picked the badge of allegiance from the front of his sodden tabard with his dirk walked beside it.

The big, blunt, streaming face grinned. “Give us a song.”

A few paces beyond the soldier, Rob spotted Karyl aboard Asal. Karyl’s headaches and nightmares had all but vanished once he began building the militia. Rob—who had forgiven him for abandoning the wounded, having simmered down enough to conceive of the alternative—had feared its shattering defeat would bring them slamming back.

Instead Karyl was more alive than Rob had seen him: constantly
here
or
there
without seeming to have moved through the space between, urging along, soothing, scathing, solving problems, and always keeping the army together and moving away from the enemy.

Which, Rob’s scouts informed them, pursued. But at a leisurely pace, to allow the wagonloads of luxuries and whores that Nuevaropan nobles always insisted on dragging on campaign with them to keep up. A brisk pursuit, of course, would have meant that Karyl’s brilliant fight to cover the Providence militia’s retreat had done nothing but defer their destruction. Baron Salvateur, or more likely his master Count Guillaume, held the Providentials in such contempt they thought them unworthy of the exertion.

Rob wouldn’t call Karyl
happy
. If nothing else the fallen voyvod was far too consummate the military professional ever to be made happy by defeat. But it had clearly energized him.

It’s the very challenge of the thing keeping the man alive,
Rob realized.
I only hope his craving for a task worthy of his mettle doesn’t get us all killed.

But no, that wasn’t likely and he knew it. Karyl’s pride was woven far too deeply into saving what the town lords’ debacle had left of the army to let him fail. Rob found that altogether reassuring.

Now Karyl caught Rob’s eye. Rob glimpsed a flash of teeth through beard and rain.

It’s also reassuring that himself is mortal enough to descend to inviting me to admire his cleverness,
he thought.
Or so I suppose
. He wondered if Karyl had picked up the sleight of using shills from the town lords, those sleek, perfidious bastards, or had known the thing himself all along.

Others, drovers and soldiers, took up the call: “A song! Give us a song.”

Rob grinned back.

“Very well,” he said.

To give himself a moment to gather his thoughts—and a respite from this fucking mud—he swung aboard Nell’s back. She swung her heavy head, flinging water from her frill, and sighed.

Rob turned around backward. The hook-horn knew how to follow the road as well as he did. He sucked in a deep breath of cool air, from which the downpour had rinsed all smell except its own. He began:

“Now hear me sing,

“Of a wondrous thing,

“When men and women, though their birth was base,

“Nevertheless still dared to face

“The iron knights of Brokenheart,

“That day on Blueflowers field.”

He paused. Then the ambulance driver, a woman who shared a build and apparent temperament with her stodgily sturdy dray beast, began to clap and cry, “More! More!”

“Don’t stop there, man!” the erstwhile house-shield called.

Behind him, Karyl nodded once. Then was gone, trotting back along the road’s edge, to find the next task that needed doing.

The refrain had come to Rob by then. He sang out lustily:

“And though the field, the knights held at last

“The blood they bled