The Dinosaur Lords (46 page)

“But why are you wasting such a glorious afternoon rusticated here among musty books, my child?” Felipe asked.

“I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the history of the Empire and la Familia,” she said dryly, “in order to better perform my duty toward both.”

She wore emerald silk trunks and plain brown buskins. Her maid, Pilar, who stood nearby, silently helpful, had wound her hair into braids and pinned it up in an intricate arrangement with beads and a feather or two. It looked fancier than it was. It was mostly meant to keep her hair off her neck.

Felipe tutted and shook his head. “You’ll get worry lines from all this studying.”

“I did take on many of the duties of running Los Almendros when my mother died,” she reminded him.

Instantly she regretted doing so. The loss of his adored Marisol remained an open wound for him. And the fact that Melod
í
a’s mother had died giving birth to Montse—who likewise sat nearby, poring intently over a vast open book of her own—didn’t make it feel better.

But today’s good mood was invincible. He only beamed.

“And a splendid job you did too, Melod
í
a. But now we’ve a fine seneschal in place to take care of our home duchy. You’re the Emperor’s daughter, girl. You’ve got no worries.”

She scowled. “Nor duties either.”

He laughed as if that was the grandest joke he’d heard this week, and clapped her on the bare brown shoulder.

“Indeed, indeed. So why not enjoy life while you’re young? Though I do regret to report that you must delay your upcoming betrothal and nuptials with Jaume for a while longer.”

That made her mash her lips together till she felt them stick out like a morion’s bill. It wasn’t as if she had
openly
announced the rupture between her and Jaume. But it
was
as if everybody else in the bloody palace knew about it. She hadn’t tried to hide it, certainly.

Then again, had she ordered her servants to paint it in red letters a third of a meter high on the wall of his bedroom, he still might not have gotten the message. The Emperor didn’t take hints, even if delivered on the beak of a war-hammer. And he was especially deaf and blind to tidings he didn’t care for.

Then it hit her she was being the same.

“Wait, why? What do you mean, ‘delay longer’?”

“Why, only that I have hit upon the splendid notion of sending our young champion on to bring other upstart grandes into line. Once he’s finished with the reduction of Terraroja, that is. But that’s certain as the sun’s rising in the west, and not that much further off, surely.”

“You can’t be serious!” she said, jumping to her feet.

He smiled fondly and patted her arm.

“So wonderful talking with you,
mi hija,
” Felipe said, patting her on the arm. “Do try to lighten up a little and enjoy your life. It’s so fleeting.”

Your multiple-great-grandmother Rosamar
í
a 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—” Mondrag
ó
n 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, Mondrag
ó
n 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.

Melod
í
a sighed like a thunder-titan in the rain.

“Highness,” Pilar said softly, “feel gently about your father. He—”

For an instant Melod
í
a remembered two little girls, and a different morning long ago spent braiding each other’s hair and piling it into fanciful shapes—Melod
í
a’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. Melod
í
a 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 Melod
í
a passed, Montserrat didn’t even look up, so quickly had she gotten engrossed in her book again. Melod
í
a 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. Melod
í
a 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 Melod
í
a’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 Spa
ñ
ol.

“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, se
ñ
ora,” 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 Fang
è
d 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.