The Dinosaur Knights (22 page)

The creature reared up in surprise. Its crest rose again. Then it thrust its head forward and screeched again.

It meant to shock her into momentary immobility—then strike. Instead she shrieked back, wordless and raging. It might be futile defiance, but it was born of a fury as terrible as anything that made the horror's heart race.

The pack-leader sprang. Its jaws opened wide to snap off Melodía's face.

 

Part Three

Redemption

Chapter 17

Corredor de Bosque
, Woods-runner,
Coureur de Bois
—
A nomadic people who range freely in Telar's Wood in the eastern part of the Empire of Nuevaropa, professing no allegiance to kingdom or county. Skilled trackers, hunters, and archers, the woods-runners tend to be at odds with townsfolk and farmers, whom they disdain as “sitting-folk.” Woods-runners regard the “sitting-folk” as arbitrary and mean, and the “sitting-folk” despise the woods-runners as thieves, each with some justice.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

The horror pack leader's open mouth looked huge as castle gates rimmed with swords. Inside it glared bright red and yellow.

Something buzzed past Melodía's left ear like an angry wasp as big as a firefly. She heard
impact
.

The raptor twisted in midleap. Feathers stood out from its arms and body. It dropped, shrieking, two meters away, and rolled almost to her feet.

She stared down at it, not comprehending what had just happened, and why those long, narrow jaws were snapping at a black shaft sticking from its throat instead of on her face.

Something grabbed her arm and yanked her backward so violently she almost fell over. As she did the horror's leg slashed out. The black killing claw scythed air scant centimeters from her belly.

“Don't just stand there!” someone shouted in her ear. “Did you want that thing to gut you?”

Melodía turned her head. A young woman dressed in leather held her. She had an oval face and yellow braids hanging from a browned-iron cap.

“Maybe,” she said. She had lost the feeling of reality.

Then more flying things hummed past to either side of the two young women, and reality returned abruptly, snapped back in place by the shrieking and kicking and blood-arcs as more arrows hit the horrors feeding on Pilar's corpse. And not just horrors: a green clad Ranger huntsman fell howling and clutching at his bare belly.

The Crève Coeur hunting party had halted thirty meters back to get a good view of the sport as the pack took Pilar. Guilli stared at the horror now lying dead in front of Melodía with a face mottled and swelling in grief and rage.

“Léonide!” he cried. “My old, my brave!”

The young knight at his right started to draw his sword. “Brigands!” he shouted. “To ar—”

Another black shaft struck his right eye, beneath a square-cut brown bang. His shout cut off and he slumped from the saddle like a bag half-full of laundry.

The hunting party's horses reared and screamed alarm. Another bold young buckethead got his longsword free and charged forward at the archers, male and female, who had suddenly materialized to either side of Melodía as if out of the plowed ground.

A chestnut horse dashed as if to meet him. Instead its rider, a young woman armored like Melodía's rescuer in a light nosehorn leather jack, wheeled the mare broadside to the knight. A twist-dart flew from her hand, spinning as the thong wrapped around its feathered shaft unwound. It struck him in the center of his unarmed chest. He went backward over his grey's cruppers.

A quicker-thinking pair of retainers grabbed their count's reins and turned his horse to flee the ambush. No arrows sought him out.

A man half a head shorter than Melodía stepped up by her side. He drew a heavy recurved hornbow to his ear, loosed. A black arrow struck the temple of one of the nobles who were trying to get their liege out of there.

The archer was Karyl Bogomirskiy, dressed in his usual plain, dark robe with his hair in a topknot.

“Shoot him!” Melodía shrieked. “Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him! Guillaume's right in front of you! Why aren't you shooting him?”

He looked at her with an eye cold as a lizard's. “Guilli I can beat,” he said. “Salvateur's actually good.”

Guillaume seemed reluctant to quit the field. Eyes rolling, his mare was tossing her head, neighing and sidestepping as the knight pulled the reins one way and her rider another. An arrow hit her white rump. As the Providence scouts and woods-runners laughed, she squealed and took off like a startled bouncer at a dead run back toward the Crève Coeur encampment.

A burly figure trudged past Melodía. It was Rob Korrigan, bearded chin sunk to breastbone and glancing neither left nor right. He walked straight to where Pilar lay. He held his long-hafted dinosaur master's axe in his right hand.

A pair of adolescent blue horrors, bolder than their elders or just stupider, had crept back out of the weeds to snatch a few more mouthfuls of meat from the still-warm body of their victim. One turned to face Rob as he approached. It hissed a warning.

He split its face with a viper-strike blow of his axe. The other lunged for him. He smashed in the side of its skull with the back of his axe-head.

Ignoring the two flopping, dying raptors he stopped and looked down at Pilar.

*   *   *

Rob Korrigan had seen many terrible things. Too many to think it was a good idea to look at what the horror pack had done to his lover.

But he made himself do so.

His vision snapped down to a tube. He wasn't aware of his knees giving way until they jarred against the ground.

He managed just to turn his head aside to avoid defiling Pilar's body with his puke.

*   *   *

Someone laid a hand on Melodía's shoulder. She spun, feeling tears fly off her cheeks but with her knife at the ready. She almost recoiled from what she saw.

A woman stood beside her, taller than she was, dressed in a loincloth and a green scrap wound tightly about her breasts. She had a quiver full of green-fletched arrows slung over her shoulder and a shortbow in her hand. The green and brown paint streaked across her face couldn't mask the hideous knife-scarring beneath.

But Stéphanie's green-flecked amber eyes were gentle, as was her husky contralto voice.

“You were very brave,” she said. “You faced the horrors with nothing but a knife, and never flinched.”

Tears flooded Melodía's eyes. They stung like scalding water.

“Not so brave as she was.” She nodded toward Pilar.

“No,” the woods-runner. “But then, who is?”

She turned and went back to the woods. Her friend's final words floated to the surface of Melodía's mind:
“The Fae set me to watch over you, Princess. May they protect you now.”

Melodía didn't believe the Fae—the hada—existed. Any more than she did Grey Angels. Nor the Creators themselves, for that matter.

But the Church taught that they existed—and were demons, enemies of the gods. Could Melodía's lifelong companion, her long-neglected friend, really have been a devil-worshipper?

She gave her life for me
, Melodía thought.
Would a demon-lover do that?

She shook her head.
The only thing that matters is that she was truly my friend. And I let her die
.

The horsewoman who had killed the Crève Coeur knight with her dart rode up leading his horse by the reins.

“Come along, Princess,” said the woman who had yanked her away from the horror's death-kick. “We have to go. Guilli won't dawdle any longer than it takes to rally a hundred of his knights before howling back after us with blood in his eye. We're firing the field, but that won't keep him long, as pissed as he is.”

Melodía heard crackling and smelled smoke. The breeze wasn't stiff but perceptibly blowing back across the field. The weeds were too green to burn readily. The grain-stalks weren't.

She heard moans and cries from out in the weeds, where injured Rangers lay. No one seemed inclined to go and give them final mercy before the slow-moving flames reached them.

Neither did she.

She looked at her rescuer. “Name?” she croaked. Her throat suddenly felt as dry as kiln-fired clay.

“Pardon, Highness?”

“What's your name?” she managed to say. “Please.”

“Valérie.”

“Thank you, Valérie,” she said.

Hands helped boost her into the saddle of the dead noble's bay. Her years of training and experience as an equestrienne took over. No matter how fast the Providence raiding-party fled Count Guillaume's vengeance, she could keep pace and keep the saddle without conscious thought.

Which was good, because as they set off back through the woods Melodía sank at once into a black abyss of sorrow so profound it swallowed even self-reproach.

*   *   *

Rob's thoughts were black, his heart a lump of lead. He sat his borrowed marchadora in even more sacklike style than usual.

The rescue party rode homeward between ripe-grain fields at an easy walk. Scouts hung back to keep an eye on Guillaume—as they had since the instant he rode into the ford across the Lisette heading east. Even armored in just their shirts his men-at-arms weren't liable to ride as fast as the light horse did. Especially after woods-runners had feathered one or two smartly in shoot-and-go ambushes.

“Are you all right?” asked Karyl, who rode beside him on Asal.

After a moment, Rob stirred himself to lift his chin fractionally from his clavicle. “She was just a girl.” His voice grated like a rusty hinge.

Karyl said nothing.

Rob continued to ride. Karyl kept saying nothing. At last Rob growled.

“Damn you,” he said.

“That's redundant, I suspect.”

“And you claim you aren't good at manipulating others.”

“I am good at getting results,” Karyl said. “Until I fail horribly, and bring death and devastation to all those around me. Keep that in mind, my friend: if you continue to ride at my side, there's only more misery and loss, and worse, ahead.”

But those words no more penetrated Rob's gloom than rain the feathers on a galley-bird's back.

He sucked in a long breath.

“When I was young,” Rob said, “I had a sister. Alys was her name. She was older than I by a year and a half. She looked out for me when I was a lad. Whenever my stupid tongue got the rest of me in trouble she came to my defense. And far too often that was, for I had even less sense in those days than I do now.

“She was sweet as well as clever, was Alys. And beautiful as a newborn day. There were no feathers she couldn't smooth, no matter how her scapegrace younger brother ruffled them. Everyone loved her.

“Came a twilight, when I was nineteen and she was twenty-four. I remember it all too clearly. We'd parked the wagons for the night, unhitched our nosehorns and set them to graze. A party of four nobles arrived at our caravan, riding striders. Young bucks, the lot, scarcely older than Alys. They'd been out hunting. And drinking freely, that was clear. Their young buckethead blood ran hot.

“Short story made shorter: they saw my sister. They fancied her. They took her.”

He had to squeeze his eyes shut.
I don't know why I don't want Himself to see my tears
, he thought,
but that I do not
.

“They dumped her back by the camp in the wee hours of the morning,” he said. “For the brag of it, I suppose. She was … they'd used her. Badly. She was bleeding.…”

He sighed.

“Bleeding from everywhere was my angel, Alys, my sister dear. And her face all bruised and puffy. Even her nose was broken. She looked me in the eye and said, ‘Rob, don't mourn me, please. Find your own beauty in life.'”

They rode a while longer, their horses' hooves clopping out of synchronization. They entered a pine-wood where green- and yellow-feathered climbers chased each other screeching through boughs. The men and women who rode behind stayed oddly silent, their earlier exhilaration subdued by reaction and late-afternoon heat.

“What really happened?” Karyl asked.

“She died thrashing and moaning and never spoke a coherent word that anybody heard,” Rob snarled. “What d'you think happened?”

He turned and spat into the brush by the path, where green flies clustered on the body of a small dead thing.

“The rest, though, that was true as Creators' Word, in every syllable,” Rob said. “You've no reason to credit that, I know. I've told you many a tall tale of my past, and I'm going to do again. But that was real. That's how it happened with my sister. I loved her, failed her, and lost her. To the stinking nobles.”

He shuddered with the effort of holding down the passion that grew huge inside him. “And now I've gone and done it again.”