The Dinosaur Lords (51 page)

The volunteers guarding the captives, or just standing and gawking, stared at St
é
phanie 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 S
é
verin 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 Ga
é
tan 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.

Ga
é
tan 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
É
tienne 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 Clairi
è
res and Baron Isma
ë
l of Fond-
É
tang. But while each came with a duckbill and full panoply, they brought no warriors, just arming-squires and servants. Les Clairi
è
res, from western Providence near M
é
tairie Brul
é
e, and Fond-
É
tang, 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 Spa
ñ
a near the coast of the Oc
é
ano 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 Cr
è
ve 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 mostly 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 Timoth
é
e. 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,” Timoth
é
e said. “It’s like a parade. They’ve got the mayor and the Town Guard and a band and everything.”

Rob winced. Between Little Pigeon, the horse-scouts, and the woods-runners, little went on in Providence town or its environs that he didn’t know about. But the Garden villa’s stone walls so far defied all his prying. Not even Jeannette—for whom his ardor had cooled somewhat, since he found out who her brother was—nor the normally complaisant Nathalie would whisper a single tale out of school. Little Pigeon’s spies could only have figured out what was afoot after the procession set out.

“You’ve done well,” he told the boy. “Thanks. Run off to the commissary and get some food.”

Rob turned right back toward the farmhouse. Off by some outbuildings, Karyl was walking Lucas through longsword counter-and-attack techniques using tree limbs as weapons. Both men were stripped to the waist.

Rob frowned, mostly at himself. For all his many duties, Karyl was devoting a lot of attention to the painter. Rob wasn’t sure why that bothered him, but it did.

Karyl raised his stick to the level of his forehead, “point” forward. Sweat plastered Lucas’s almost-white hair to a forehead fisted in concentration as he painstakingly mimicked every movement. The tip of his tongue stuck out of his mouth. He’d become even more fanatical about sword practice since he’d gotten a taste of battle.

“Karyl,” Rob called as he approached. “Our lives are about to get interesting again.”

Karyl lowered his stick. “Enough for now,” he told Lucas. “Remember, spiritual development is as important to your training as physical techniques are. Skill without self-mastery is hollow. A set of clever tricks, no more.”

It was as if shutters closed behind Lucas’s blue eyes. As it always was when Karyl talked to him that way. And as always Rob thought to see Karyl’s shoulders slump ever so slightly, and a look of pain pass over his fine, ascetic features.

*   *   *

The procession was nearly as grand as Timoth
é
e described it, though Rob thought it a bit of a stretch to call a pair of female Garden acolytes beating a drum and tootling a fife a “band.” Bogardus strode resolutely in the lead, and close on his flanks came Ludovic with his lugubrious moustache and Sister Violette, looking surprisingly good in white silk robes and smiling in a way Rob thought couldn’t possibly bode well. Bogardus’s strong oblong face said neither yea nor nay. Which came as no surprise: he’d been a priest, and was now a politician.

Half a dozen Town Guards brought up the rear, slouching in breastplates-and-backs still slightly shiny from the grease they’d been packed in. An unprepossessing lot, they consisted of skinny young men and stoutish older ones. They had their morions pushed back on their heads and toted their halberds haphazardly over their shoulders. Rob had never seen them do much, and couldn’t imagine what they might be meant to do here.

Behind Violette walked her crony Longeau, tall and somewhat ungainly, smirking most fatuously.

“Great news,” he called. “Thanks to your notable victory, the Council has decided to order you back into the field at once, to defeat our foes for good and all. I shall join you. In a strictly advisory capacity, of course.”

“We’re nowhere near ready,” Karyl said, drying his hands of sweat on a twist of straw.

“You said an army was never ready,” Sister Violette said. “But you won.”

Yannic, Melchor, and Percil came up to exchange hearty forearm-clasps with Longeau. “He’s a town lord too, you know,” said Ga
é
tan at Rob’s elbow. “Longeau. He’s well off, though he didn’t buy his patent like Percil.”

“We have to wait,” Karyl said, speaking straight to Bogardus. “Our numbers are increasing. The volunteers are learning rapidly. But we still can’t face a real army in the field.”