The Gypsy King

by Maureen Fergus

  A shrill, horsey squeal jolted her out of her reverie. Opening her eyes, Persephone saw a broken-down old nag by the name of Fleet careening across the yard toward her, whinnying with heartfelt joy and rudely bashing other creatures aside in his haste to reach her. She laughed aloud and was just about to turn her pockets inside out to prove to Fleet that she was not hiding a treat within when a shadow passed over the yard, sending the chickens running in all directions, squawking and flapping their wings in panic.

  The hawk circled the yard once before swooping down to settle on Persephone’s shoulder.

  “Ivan,” she smiled.

  The hawk looked down at her with a haughty expression on his proud face, as though thoroughly offended by the fact that his lowly perch had had the temerity to address him.

  “I’ve asked you before not to scare the chickens,” Persephone reminded.

  If hawks could sniff and roll their eyes, Ivan would have done both. As it was, he had to settle for gently digging his talons into Persephone’s shoulder and pointedly looking away from her.

  “Well, anyway, it’s nice to see you,” she said.

  At this, Ivan screamed and took flight once more.

  “Troublemaker!” she called after him, as she watched a thoroughly terrified chicken run headfirst into a fence post.

  Like Cur, Ivan had found her a couple of years back. He’d obviously been trained for the hunt by some young lord—though not trained well enough to return to his master on command, apparently.

  Smiling at the thought that Ivan had broken free from those who’d thought to master him, Persephone tossed a handful of grain to the traumatized chickens, scrounged a piece of cut turnip for Fleet (who noisily gobbled it down without once taking his adoring eyes off her), then headed back into the barn to milk the other cow, muck the stalls, tend to the other horses and slop the ill-tempered old sow. When she was finished there, she fetched enough water to last for the rest of the day and then headed out into the garden. In spite of her various aches and pains, she managed to pass a rather pleasant few hours hoeing and weeding and thinning out the weaker plants to make room for the stronger ones. Eventually, however, the owner appeared in the doorway of the thatch-roofed cottage, calling for her to come make his supper.

  “I’ll be right there,” she called back. Rising to her feet, she lifted the chain of her leg irons and picked her way out of the bean garden, taking care not to damage any of the tender young shoots as she passed. Then she walked down to the stream, rolled up her sleeves and knelt to wash. The cool water felt good on her dusty hands, and she sighed with contentment as she examined for the thousandth time the vivid scar that criss-crossed the outside of her left arm almost to the elbow. She’d always thought of it as her “whiplash scar” because it reminded her of the lash marks left by a whip, but Cookie used to say that it looked as though it had been caused by a burn of some kind—probably inflicted when Persephone was but a tiny infant. Cookie had railed against the monster who’d inflicted it, but Persephone had always believed, inexplicably, that the scar had been given to her for good reason, by someone who’d loved her very much, and so she’d cherished it as a gift.

  Sitting back on her heels now, she twisted her wild, dark hair into a loose coil, tossed it over her shoulders and leaned forward to wash her face. At the sight of her own reflection, she hesitated. It occurred to her suddenly that this was what the young thief had seen last night—well, this less the faint bruise around the eye, that is. Leaning even closer to the water—so close that the tip of her nose got wet—Persephone stared into her own thickly lashed violet eyes, then let her gaze wander over the delicate curves of her face. Idly, she wondered if she was pretty, wondered if—

  “My supper!” bellowed the owner from up the hill.

  Startled, Persephone plunged her hands beneath the surface of the stream, obliterating her reflection. Hurriedly splashing some water on her face, she rubbed it dry with her grubby apron and scrambled up the hill as best she could in her leg irons. Ducking into the owner’s cottage, she silently set to work. After boiling the potatoes, draining them and setting them on the hearth to keep warm, she skinned, bound and spit Lord Pirate, hung him over the fire and set a pan beneath him to catch the drippings for gravy. As she crouched at the hearth, turning the spit and sweating from the heat of the flames, she was aware of the eyes of the owner on her whipped back, but she ignored them. Instead, she smiled again at the thought that Ivan had broken free from those who’d thought to master him—and she dreamt of escaping those who thought to master her. Someday, she promised herself, as Lord Pirate sizzled merrily and her empty stomach growled, someday I will—

  KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

  Persephone was so startled by the sound that she’d knocked over the pan of drippings, spun to her feet and reached through the torn pocket of her shift for the dagger at her thigh almost before she realized what she was doing. Luckily, the owner didn’t notice any of this, having accidentally toppled backward in his chair at the sound of the knocks.

  Crawling out from under the table on his hands and knees like the pig he was, he wrinkled his nose at Persephone and whispered, “Who could it be?”

  Persephone had no idea who it could be. The owner’s farm was at least a day’s ride from the nearest well-travelled route, so unexpected visitors were as rare as snow in June. “I expect it is soldiers sent by the Regent to turn you out so that the farm can be given to one more elevated than yourself,” she whispered back promptly. “Changing times, you know.”

  The owner scowled and huffed and shook his head, but Persephone was pleased to see that she’d unnerved him.

  Another round of impatient knocks unnerved him further. With an undignified squeak of terror, he scrambled to his feet. “Well, don’t just stand there, girl,” he hissed. “Answer the door!”

  Persephone hesitated for only a moment. Then, with the hand in her torn pocket firmly clutching the hilt of her unsheathed dagger and her belly steeled to gut the unexpected visitor at the first sign of trouble, she walked over to the door, flung it open and gasped to find the laughing chicken thief standing before her dressed like a gentleman of means.

  And no longer laughing.

  THREE

  MANY MILES AWAY, at the southernmost tip of the kingdom, in a sumptuously appointed room in a splendid seaside castle, a man slouched before a blazing fire.

  He didn’t slouch because he was tired or lazy or old— he slouched because his cruelly twisted back made it impossible for him to sit straight and tall like other men. It also made it impossible for him to square his thin, uneven shoulders, throw out his wasted chest and hold his head high with ease. Sometimes, if he drew upon every last drop of his formidable willpower, he could temporarily keep from bending his neck and bobbing his head like a turkey vulture, but after only a short while the strain of doing so made him want to scream in agony. This was particularly true if he was trying to walk at the same time, for the legs that protruded from beneath the hem of his luxurious, fur-trimmed robe were crooked and withered. One crumpled foot turned in—the result of a near-fatal childhood illness—and one leg was considerably shorter than the other. Together, these deformities accounted for his awkward, lurching gait, which was so utterly lacking in dignity.

  Far worse than any of these things, however, was the fact that above this ruin of a body, two fathomless eyes stared out from a shockingly handsome face. Eternally youthful and framed by hair as thick and dark and glossy as a sable pelt, it was a face that radiated power and magnetism, a constant reminder to all that the man would have been perfect—a man among men, lusted after by women, admired by all!—if only the body had fulfilled the promise of the face.

  The slouching man was the Regent Mordecai: the power behind the Erok throne. The visionary who’d conquered the four lesser tribes to bring all of Glyndoria under Erok rule; the man who could only have been more powerful if he’d been king.

  The high-backed chair in which he sat was grand enou
gh to be a throne and the well-worn cushion upon which he sat had been painstakingly embroidered by the long-dead queen herself in the final days of her confinement. She’d intended the cushion as a gift for the child that grew within her belly—a child got upon her by a fat, spoiled tyrant old enough to be her grandfather when she was hardly more than a child herself.

  Mordecai’s face abruptly clouded over as he harkened back to that fateful night the queen had given birth. It cleared just as abruptly, however, when he recalled how decisively he’d acted and how helpful she’d been to expire of childbed fever before he’d been forced to silence her himself.

  Smiling at how neatly things had fallen into place in the ensuing years, Mordecai dismissed the past as inconsequential and once more turned his thoughts toward the all-important coming Council meeting. As he reviewed his strategy for the thousandth time, he lifted his bony hand and began petting the strange, still creature that lay in his lap. Seeing the movement, one of the liveried servants who stood against the wall took a hesitant step forward, a questioning look on his face. Without taking his eyes from the fire, Mordecai waved him away impatiently. Instantly, the servant melted back into the shadows and resumed staring straight ahead and trying not to shiver. The room was cold—icy, even—but Mordecai had ever been impervious to both the cold and to the discomfort of his inferiors.

  Suddenly, he heard the sound of running feet in the hallway outside, followed by a brisk knock at the door.

  “Come,” he said.

  At once, the door flew open and a member of his personal guard announced that a messenger had arrived.

  “Send him in,” ordered Mordecai, wincing slightly as he tried to sit up straighter.

  The guard bellowed the order to enter and the next instant a breathless, bedraggled man with the look and bearing of an ordinary foot soldier stumbled into the room. Snatching the cap from his head, he clutched it to his heaving breast and dropped to one knee.

  “My Lord Regent,” he murmured, bowing his head.

  “Yes, yes,” muttered Mordecai as he sourly eyed the breadth of the man’s shoulders. “You have news?”

  “Yes, Your Grace!” cried the man. “I have ridden all the way from the southern edge of the Great Forest! Four days and nights without rest, changing horses whenever—”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” snapped Mordecai. “Was the lowborn revolt stamped out?”

  “It was, my lord,” said the soldier, bobbing his head, “even though it was the biggest one yet, by my reckoning. Ignorant, ungrateful wretches, they were—why, when General Murdock offered those who’d been turned off their land a chance to join the next transport of lowborns being shipped north to work the sheep farms in the foothills of the Mountains of Khan, they jeered him! Jeered him—General Murdock himself!” exclaimed the soldier, as though he still couldn’t believe it.

  “And how did General Murdock respond?” asked Mordecai, smiling slightly in anticipation of the answer.

  “He invited the rebel leaders to share their grievances over a sizzling joint of beef,” said the soldier. “Gave them his word of honour that no harm would befall them, and when the ingrates suggested that the General’s word alone was an insufficient guarantee of their safety, he offered as hostages his two finest lieutenants.”

  Clever, thought Mordecai. “Go on,” he said softly.

  “The leaders came, then. They were wary at first, but the General greeted them as equals and sat them at his own table and poured their wine with his own hand, and as the night wore on they grew comfortable and began to speak freely. Then,” continued the soldier, dropping his voice a notch, “nigh about midnight, when the evening had descended into shouts of drunken laughter and lustily sung refrains, General Murdock invited the rebel leaders to take a view of the night sky from the topmost tower of the castle. The boldest among them leapt from his seat, threw his filthy arm about the General’s shoulders and bellowed for him to lead the way. General Murdock threw back his head and laughed, and when they reached the top of the tower, he shoved the man to his death.” Here, the soldier paused. “The others were quickly overcome.”

  “And their families?”

  “Barricaded inside their shelters and burned alive, my lord,” said the soldier, faltering for the first time. “Even … even the children. The screaming was … terrible. And then there was silence.”

  Without warning, Mordecai’s ears were filled with the shrill, long-ago screams of another family being burned alive. Clapping his hands over his ears, he ground his teeth together and waited for the terrible sounds to fade. When at last they did, he dropped his hands to his lap and raggedly asked after the General’s lieutenants.

  “Torn to pieces by the mob,” said the soldier. “General Murdock answered by hanging the first hundred lowborn men who crossed his path, selling their widows into servitude and transporting their children to the Mines of Torodania.”

  Mordecai nodded, well pleased. In spite of his best efforts to educate them otherwise, some Erok lowborns continued to believe that they had some right to the air they breathed and the land upon which their families had squatted for centuries. Likewise, some surviving members of the conquered tribes continued to resist Erok rule in spite of having seen their way of life destroyed and their populations decimated through massacre, marginalization and enslavement.

  Luckily, General Murdock—that shining example of all that a New Man should be—had always proven himself singularly adept at handling the problems caused by such troublemakers.

  Of course, Mordecai saw no need to share his satisfaction with the able-bodied wretch who yet knelt before him, so he merely muttered, “I’d have hanged a thousand,” and asked when he could expect to receive the valuable prisoner whose delivery had been delayed by the need to put down the revolt.

  “Oh, uh, well, I’m not exactly sure, Your Grace,” said the soldier uncomfortably. “See, um, the night after the hangings someone set fire to the General’s tent. Normally, o’course, an intruder wouldn’t have been able to get within a cat’s throw of the General’s tent without losing some vital piece of his filthy, good-for-nothing person. But … but on this particular night … well, uh, for s-some reason the sentries … they, uh—”

  “Stop this foolish babbling or I will have you beheaded!” bellowed Mordecai. “Tell me what happened to the sentries!”

  “They fell asleep!” blurted the soldier with a spasm of fear. “All of them, all at once! And what a strange sleep it was—after failing to detect liquor on their breath, the duty sergeant kicked my younger brother nearly to death trying to revive him, to no avail. He and his fellow sentries were as dead to this world as … well, as the dead! And when they awoke the next day they were sick enough to wish they were dead. And that is all I know!”

  By the flickering glow of the fire’s light, Mordecai stared at the soldier in silence for so long that the blood drained from the man’s face and the chill of the room penetrated his core.

  “I see,” said Mordecai at length. “So am I to understand that you and the other men will be delayed in delivering my prisoner to me due to the need to bury the charred remains of your general?”

  “N-no,” stammered the soldier. “General Murdock escaped the fire unharmed.”

  “Ah,” crooned Mordecai. “Then you will be delayed owing to the need to soothe and care for your dear, sick brother and the other negligent sentries?”

  Mutely, the soldier shook his head.

  Mordecai gripped the arms of his throne-like chair and leaned forward as far as his twisted back would allow. “Then tell me,” he said in a dangerously soft voice. “What … is the cause … of the delay?”

  “Sabotage!” cried the soldier, who was, by this point, visibly quaking. “While we were busy trying to rescue the General and douse the first fire, the scoundrels who’d set it stole through the camp setting other fires. By the time we realized what was happening, half the camp was ablaze! Such was the chaos that the filthy ne’er-do-we
lls were able to lurk undetected for some time afterward, slicing our tacking to ribbons, stealing weapons, destroying food stores and somehow ensuring that every last one of our supply wagons was fed to the inferno. And—forgive me, Your Grace, for this is the very worst of it—by the time anyone thought to check on the prisoner, he was gone!”

  For a long moment, Mordecai said nothing, only eyed the soldier malevolently, as though he was personally responsible for the disaster.

  “Forgive me, Your Grace,” repeated the soldier in a pleading voice.

  Instead of answering him, Mordecai nodded in the direction of one of the liveried servants pressed against the wall. Instantly, the man strode forward and, without a flicker of expression on his face, dealt the soldier a vicious blow—the kind of blow that Mordecai himself would have dealt if he’d been able. The soldier—who didn’t lift so much as a finger to defend himself—was knocked backward by the force of it. When the soldier was finally able to drag himself back into a kneeling position, Mordecai was pleased to see that the blow had knocked out the man’s two front teeth.

  “This news displeases me,” he said, smiling broadly to display his own perfect teeth. “I dislike excuses and I grow tired of hearing them. Lately, I can’t seem to turn around without finding myself subjected to the insufferable babblings of some untried New Man who has failed in his duties.” Mordecai steepled his fingers and frowned as though thinking hard. “I cannot believe that after all these years General Murdock has suddenly grown incompetent, so I am forced to conclude that the men under his command are the problem. Perhaps my problem would be solved if I sent General Murdock different men—and shipped you, your brother and the other incompetents onward to the mines.”