The Gypsy King

by Maureen Fergus

  At this, the soldier grew even paler—so pale that the blood that continued to stream from his ruined mouth looked as red as rubies by contrast. “No, Your Grace, please,” he gasped, his voice garbled both by the blood and by the loss of teeth. “My battalion is already tracking the scoundrels responsible for the theft of the prisoner, and I swear to you that we’ll find them. And when we do, we’ll take them apart piece by piece and deliver the prisoner here to you in Parthania or die trying!”

  Beneath the brittle veneer of bravado and shining optimism, the man’s terror was clearly visible, and the air was thick with the smell of it. Mordecai was seized by a sudden urge to have the wretch beaten to death for being such a cowardly waste of a healthy body, but he forced himself to resist the temptation.

  It had already been a long day, after all, and if he overexerted himself with entertainment tonight, he would pay dearly for it tomorrow.

  “Oh, stop your snivelling,” he finally muttered, “or it will be you who is taken apart piece by piece. Return to General Murdock and tell him that if the scoundrels turn out to be kinsmen of the prisoner and he manages to slaughter them all, I will pay double the normal rate for the proof of his accomplishment,” said Mordecai as he absently resumed petting the collection of glossy human scalps that lay in his lap.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” gulped the soldier. “I’ll leave at first light.”

  “You’ll leave now,” said Mordecai, pulling his warm robe tighter about his thin shoulders.

  The soldier—who was wet, hungry, bleeding and exhausted from having ridden four days without rest—staggered to his feet, bowed and murmured, “Yes, Your Grace.”

  Mordecai said nothing. The soldier lingered in awkward silence for a moment or two longer until he was certain that a formal dismissal was not forthcoming, then he pulled on his cap and fled the room.

  After the soldier had departed, Mordecai slouched low in his chair and let his head fall forward in order to relieve the strain on his aching neck.

  Then, in a sudden fit of fury, he flung the collection of human scalps into the fire. As he watched it writhe and twist in the flames, he cursed the loss of the prisoner whose dungeon accommodations had been prepared for a fortnight, ever since Mordecai had first learned that a family of Gypsies had been discovered masquerading as Erok lowborns in one of the northern prefectures. The report he’d received on the matter had said that only a single member of the family still lived—a child too young to have yet taken the mark of his tribe. The mark had been plain to see on the stripped corpses of his parents and older siblings, however, so when General Murdock arrived in the village, he’d paid the family’s neighbours handsomely for their scalps and set out to bring the child—a boy—back to Mordecai so that he could attempt to tap into the fabled healing power of the child’s blood.

  Now the child was gone, and while it was possible that lowborns had attacked the camp in retaliation for the hangings, the “strange sleep” described by the soldier smacked of Gypsy trickery. Moreover, Gypsies alone had a reason for wanting to save the child.

  Gypsies.

  Oh, how Mordecai hated the Gypsies.

  Though they were sly, they were not as sly as the repulsive little Gorgishmen of the west, the former lords of the Mines of Torodania who now toiled as slaves deep within the mines’ dark and dangerous shafts. Nor were they as uncouth and stubborn as the hulking Khan of the mountains with their long, dirty hair and the stink of their precious woolly sheep ever upon them. And they certainly weren’t as despicably meek as the Marinese, who, after having delivered a handful of their most gifted artisans into slavery each year in exchange for the rest of them being left in peace, had eventually abandoned their ancestral village on the eastern seaboard without a fight anyway.

  No, the reason Mordecai hated the Gypsies was that every last one of them was blessed with preternatural health and vitality—that and the fact that their long-dead clansman Balthazar had refused to tell him the location of the healing Pool of Genezing.

  Like every child in Glyndoria, Mordecai had grown up hearing some version of the legend of the pool. On frigid winter nights as he’d huddled, shivering and neglected, in the corner of the filthy lowborn shack in which he’d been born, he’d often listened to his mother tell his stronger, better-loved brothers how the Gypsies believed their kind had once lived a settled life in a beautiful paradise in which there existed a miraculous pool whose waters could cure any ill. How the Gypsies would supposedly be living there yet if one among them had not spilled the blood of a trusted companion at the water’s edge, tainting the pool and causing it to dry up; how they’d been a wandering people ever since, an echo of the healing power of the pool coursing through their veins—and burning in their hearts, the belief that their sacred pool would one day reappear.

  Though most people thought the legend was nothing but a story dreamt up by the proud Gypsies to set themselves above the other tribes, Mordecai had always clung to the secret hope that it was something more. And that is why, once he’d grown to manhood, settled old grievances and, against all odds, clawed his way into King Malthusius’s glittering inner circle, he’d begun kidnapping Gypsies in order to question them about it. Over and over they’d told him—first in terrified babbles, then in wailing screams—that while their kind almost always survived infancy and thrived thereafter, the heartiness that allowed them to withstand the illnesses that cut down others was nothing they could control or put to other uses. Incensed and certain that they were holding out on him, Mordecai had eventually turned to seeking answers within their flesh and blood itself, and while he’d found the blood of the very young to have certain rejuvenating qualities and the ability to speed the healing of minor flesh wounds, he’d never found a way to harness this power to cure his own great and terrible deformities.

  Then came the day that the mercurial old Erok king decided to invite the four other tribes of Glyndoria to send ambassadors to Parthania so that the tribes might come to know one another better and thus see trade and relations among them improved. The Gypsy ambassador Balthazar had been the first to arrive and the first to settle into the unimaginable luxury of the imperial palace. For years, Mordecai had done his best to befriend the big, bluff Gypsy in the hope that as a tribesman of some prominence he might know something about the healing pool that the others had not. But Balthazar’s response to these overtures of friendship had been decidedly lukewarm and then, one day—in front of the entire court!—he’d loudly told Mordecai to go away and to stop pestering him.

  To stop pestering him!

  Even now, the memory filled Mordecai with a murderous rage.

  So murderous, in fact, that Mordecai might very well have done something foolish if, not long after uttering those fateful words, Balthazar had not disappeared late one night after drunkenly commandeering a ship and sailing away to points unknown. Mordecai had prayed that Balthazar was drowned or dead—or, better yet, fatally wounded, in terrible pain and too weak to beat off the carrion birds that sought to get an early start on dinner. And as the days slipped by without any sign of the Gypsy ambassador, it had begun to seem that Mordecai’s dark prayers had been answered.

  Eventually, a grieving King Malthusius had announced that a small, private funeral service would be held to honour his dear, lost Gypsy brother. The service had to be delayed owing to a terrible storm that blew in from the sea, battering the imperial capital with torrential rains and fierce winds. After raging for three days, the storm had finally abated on the morning of the fourth day. Before the service could move forward, however, a wet and muddy—but euphoric!—Balthazar had bounded into the palace courtyard. At first he’d refused to say where he’d been, but eventually he’d broken down and excitedly confessed that he’d discovered the reborn healing Pool of Genezing! In carefully evasive terms, he’d described how he’d journeyed far across the water, suffered a shipwreck and made it to shore only to soon thereafter find himself chased by a great, frothing beast into a place of
nightmares. He’d told how the beast had chased him through the darkness without tiring—indeed, how it had seemed to gather strength and fury with each passing second. With flailing arms, he’d pantomimed how, in his haste to escape the monster, he’d stumbled and suffered a terrible fall.

  His voice dropping to a dramatic whisper, he’d explained how he’d landed upon a bed of jagged rock at the very edge of a glowing pool. How he’d cried out in agony as his shattered, bleeding body had slowly toppled into the pool; how he’d slipped beneath the glowing surface believing that he’d breathed his last.…

  And how the waters of the pool had instantly healed his catastrophic wounds and restored him to perfect health.

  At first, Malthusius and the other tribal leaders had been skeptical, for Balthazar was a renowned storyteller. But after Balthazar had shown them the torn, bloodstained doublet he’d been wearing at the time of his fall and the faint but unmistakable scars across his back where his flesh had been pierced by the sharp rocks upon which he’d purportedly landed, some among them had begun to wonder if he wasn’t telling the truth after all.

  Mordecai hadn’t wondered if Balthazar was telling the truth—he’d known that Balthazar was telling the truth. He had felt it in the very marrow of his frail bones. His twisted back and withered limbs had tingled with the knowledge of it; he had hardly been able to breathe for the excitement of it! The Pool of Genezing had sprung up once more. It was out there somewhere and Balthazar knew where it was. All he, Mordecai, had to do to become well and whole himself was to convince Balthazar to lead him to it.

  But Balthazar would not be convinced. He informed Mordecai—as he informed King Malthusius and all others who sought to know the location of the pool—that the healing pool was sacred to his people. He said that while he could not imagine any of them wishing to live by its water’s edge given its present location, until he’d met with his tribal council and figured out just what they should do about it, he would not reveal its whereabouts to anyone else, not even upon pain of death.

  Seeing that Balthazar would not be persuaded by reasonable means, a seething Mordecai had set about trying to convince the Erok king to put the Gypsy ambassador’s bold declaration to the test.

  As it turned out, it had taken almost nothing to turn Malthusius against Balthazar and the rest of the useless Gypsies—just a few carefully chosen words hinting that Gypsy trickery had somehow rendered all of Malthusius’s previous wives barren and the thinly veiled suggestion that Balthazar intended to use the powers of the pool to become richer and more powerful than Malthusius himself. With dizzying swiftness, brotherly love had turned to hate, Balthazar and anyone he may have confided in had been arrested, and the round-up and slaughter of the Gypsies had begun.

  Balthazar had gotten down on his knees in the filth of the dungeon and begged Malthusius to stop the killing. Like the liar he was, he swore that his silly story about the beast, the fall and the pool had never been anything more than that: a silly story. It was a lie he stuck to right up until the moment of his rather gruesome demise, but it hadn’t made a whit of difference. Malthusius had continued the indiscriminate slaughter of the Gypsies out of anger, resentment and fear that they knew of a magical healing pool that could topple him from his throne. Indeed, such was his paranoia that Mordecai had eventually been able to convince him to withdraw the hand of friendship from the other tribes and begin persecuting them as well.

  About a year later, Malthusius had died—agonizingly, of slow poison, no doubt wishing with every fibre of his being that he’d kept his dear Gypsy brother alive on the off chance that he had found the pool and might be persuaded to procure a vial of its waters to save a dying friend. After the king was gone, Mordecai had redoubled efforts to wipe out the Gypsies when it became apparent that Balthazar had not had the chance to reveal the location of the healing pool to any of them.

  In the fifteen years since, though consumed with the demands of running the kingdom—stamping out the last of the Gypsies, quelling the lowborns, controlling the tribes, currying the favour of the nobles, managing the king—Mordecai had never stopped seeking the pool.

  And though he’d never found any sign of it, and though he often despaired of ever being well and whole, on the balance, the Fates had served him well.

  He’d risen from the foulest gutters in Parthania to stand behind the throne of the infant king whose days had been numbered from the moment of his birth.

  He was but a single Council meeting away from greater glory still.

  Nothing could stop him now.

  FOUR

  FINDING HERSELF FACE TO FACE with the thief again so shocked Persephone that she did something she’d never done before in her life: she let the dagger slip from her fingers. It fell to the hard-packed dirt floor at her feet and spun toward the thief.

  “What was that?” barked the owner, striding forward now that it was clear that the unexpected visitor posed no immediate threat.

  “What was what?” asked the thief in a slightly baffled—but deeply cultured—voice.

  Deftly placing his gleaming black boot lengthwise over top of the dagger so that it was hidden from sight, he looked at Persephone in a way that made her feel completely exposed, as though he’d once again caught her wearing nothing but her nightshift. Scowling slightly, she began to shut the door on him. He put out a hand to stop her even as the owner shouldered her to one side so hard that she stumbled. Jerking the door wide again, the owner scanned the ground in search of whatever it was that had made the noise he’d heard. When he saw nothing, he planted his fists on his hips, puffed out his chest and glared at the thief. The thief stared back, one eyebrow raised in the perfect imitation of a gentleman unused to being challenged by his inferiors.

  Instead of using the standoff as an opportunity to develop a strategy to deal with this most unexpected and precarious of situations, Persephone found herself studying the thief. He was taller than she remembered and even more finely muscled. Handsomer, too—if one cared about such things—with blue eyes that seemed almost too beautiful for his face and a wide, sensuous mouth. The long, unkempt hair from the night before had been brushed as smooth as the rippling curls would permit and secured in a pigtail at the nape of his neck by a bejewelled clasp. Persephone briefly gloated to see the spot on his cheek where her dagger had nicked him the night before, until she noted with a flash of irritation that it gave him a rather dashing air. All in all, he looked so fine, standing there in the doorway of the house where she cleaned out the chamber pot full of piss each morning, that Persephone had a sudden urge to tell him that she thought he looked like a pompous, overstuffed peacock, just to see what his reaction would be.

  Before she could succumb to temptation, however, the owner cracked under the pressure of being stared down by a supposed nobleman. Releasing the air from his lungs with an audible whoosh, he allowed his chest to deflate and dropped his hands from his hips.

  The thief acknowledged his capitulation with an elegant nod of his head. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, plucking at the tips of a pair of fine riding gloves that didn’t quite seem to fit him. “I am Lord Damon Bothwell of the Ragorian Prefecture.”

  At this, Persephone laughed aloud.

  “Shut up, you insolent brat!” shouted the owner, rounding on her at once. He shook a dirty fist in her face before anxiously turning back to the thief. “Lazy, useless good-for-nothing has a mouth on her the likes of which you’ve never seen. You’d think a slave born and bred would know her place, wouldn’t you, m’lord?”

  “I would indeed,” said the thief, giving Persephone a penetrating look, which she pointedly ignored.

  “Yes, well, not this one,” whined the owner. He faked a swipe at Persephone, who didn’t even flinch. “You see? You see that? No respect. I tell you, this one is more trouble than she’s worth.”

  “Is that so?” said the thief. “Well, in that case, we have much to discuss.”

  Something about his words—and
the way he said them—caused Persephone’s heart to give a sudden lurch.

  “Yeah?” said the owner, sucking at a piece of old meat caught between his rotting teeth. “How’s that?”

  The thief—“Lord Bothwell”—looked mildly offended. “I’m afraid I am not in the habit of conducting business on doorsteps, sir.”

  Slack-jawed, the owner looked blankly at him until comprehension hit him like a hoof to the side of the head. “Oh!” he cried. “’Course you’re not, ’course you’re not!” He glared at Persephone as though the gross breach of etiquette had been her fault. “Well? Don’t just stand there! Go draw two tankards of ale and set out some bread and cheese for Lord Bothwell and me!”

  Persephone hesitated. She didn’t believe for one single moment that this scoundrel in the fancy doublet was a lord from a distant prefecture. He was a thief and a liar, and he was up to something, and it almost certainly had something to do with her, and whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be good. Moreover, the very idea that she should have to lay out food and drink for him—the one she had bested!—well, it was enough to make her want to—

  “Go!” bellowed the owner. Raising his hand, he was about to cuff her when the thief’s hand shot out and grabbed his grimy wrist, holding it fast.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” demanded the owner in amazement, wincing slightly.

  “Holding your wrist,” replied the thief in the tone of voice most people reserved for children and idiots. “You see, I’d rather you didn’t strike her.”

  “You’d rather … you’d rather,” spluttered the owner indignantly, trying to yank his arm away. “She’s my slave— what’s it to you if I strike her?”

  “If you’ll allow me to come into your house and sup with you, I believe I’ll be able to provide you with all the answers you’re looking for,” said the thief smoothly.

  At this, Persephone’s heart gave another wild lurch. What answers did the thief have? What answers could he possibly have? Things were moving too quickly for her. She needed time to think—to figure out what the thief was up to and to decide how much danger she was in. To weigh the risk of blurting out that “Lord Bothwell” was, in fact, the chicken thief from the previous night against the risk that he’d reveal that she’d handed over the chicken of her own free will. Her accusation would see him imprisoned or executed; his accusation would, at the very least, see her beaten and her dog drowned.