The Gypsy King

by Maureen Fergus

  “You might think that is all I need to know, but it is not,” said Cairn. “For you see, whoever you are, your presence here on this night is a complication the magnitude of which you cannot even begin to imagine.”

  “I see,” said Persephone as she felt a trickle of perspiration snake down her back. “Well, release my dog and my horse and order your people to stand aside, and I will leave at once so that your evening may continue … uncomplicated.”

  An agitated murmur rose up from the crowd. Cairn cocked her head to one side and gave Persephone the kind of look one might give a favourite chicken just prior to wringing its neck. Sympathetic, but resolute. “That is a most generous offer,” she murmured, “but I think we both know that is impossible.”

  “I don’t see why it should be so,” blurted Persephone, uncrossing her arms so that she could slip her hand through the hole in her pocket and take hold of her dagger. “I never meant to cause trouble. I didn’t even want to come here! If you feel a need to exact revenge on anyone for the complications caused by my presence here on this night, exact it on your Azriel. I tried to get away from him, but he is most infernally persistent, and after he cornered me in the hot spring—I’ll not go into details but suffice it to say that he walked dangerously close to the line of ungentlemanly behaviour—well, after that we ran into soldier trouble, and then he went and got himself shot with an arrow and—”

  “You could have left him to die of poison,” Cairn pointed out.

  “Well, yes, I suppose I could have,” said Persephone in a slightly exasperated voice, “but I really cannot believe that you would punish me now for failing to do so.”

  “No, of course we wouldn’t,” agreed Cairn. “On the contrary, we would ask you to remain here as our honoured guest.”

  “And if I don’t want to remain here as your honoured guest?” asked Persephone, gripping her dagger a little tighter.

  “Then you will remain here as something other than our honoured guest,” said Cairn softly.

  When Persephone withdrew her dagger to show that she was not inclined to remain as either, Cairn leaned forward and murmured something to the red-headed Gypsy and another man. Persephone watched with the darting, glittering eyes of cornered prey, and when the men turned toward her—as she’d known they would— she began making gutting motions in their direction. Unfortunately, they were not the least bit intimidated by her ferocious display. With humiliating ease, they stripped her of her weapons, escorted her across the clearing, opened the door of a small, thatch-roofed hut and deposited her inside. Frightened and furious, Persephone pivoted on one foot and was about to hurl herself against the closing door when she heard a noise directly behind her. Heart in her throat, she dropped to a crouch, spun around with her fists raised high and came face to face with—

  Herself.

  Time froze. Everything froze.

  Her hair, her brow, her eyes, her nose, her chin.

  THUD … THUD … THUD.…

  Someone’s heart was beating unnaturally loudly, but whose?

  Persephone’s? The Other Persephone’s?

  It was impossible to say.

  Or was it?

  Perhaps it was not one heart beating unnaturally loudly at all, but rather two hearts beating in perfect unison.

  For some reason, the thought made the real Persephone shudder.

  No, not the “real” Persephone, she corrected herself wildly, the only Persephone!

  Slowly, she straightened up from her crouch, made a sign to ward off evil and whispered, “Who—or what—are you?”

  The Other Persephone (for Persephone simply could not stop thinking of her in this way) whispered back, “I am a girl. Who—or what—are you?”

  “I am also a girl,” said Persephone in a hushed voice.

  “A girl who looks like me,” said the Other Persephone in a similarly hushed voice.

  Persephone nodded, then inhaled sharply as a breathtaking possibility occurred to her. “Do you think … is there any chance that … that we are twins?” she asked.

  The Other Persephone shook her head. “We do not look that alike—your features are finer than mine, and I see that your ears do not stick out at all whereas mine are like a pair of open barn doors. And besides, the women who attended my birth were such frightful gossips that I assure you that I and every other person in the village would’ve heard if a second infant had been born that night and later spirited away to parts unknown.”

  “Oh,” said Persephone, trying not to sound disappointed. “Well, then, perhaps we are sisters?”

  The Other Persephone shook her head again. “I’d have heard if my parents had had and lost another child,” she said. Frowning, she reached out and gave Persephone’s hand a sympathetic squeeze. “From your questions, am I to understand that you know nothing of your origins because you were orphaned as an infant?”

  “I was enslaved as an infant,” replied Persephone, pulling her hand away.

  “Oh,” murmured the Other Persephone, flushing. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Persephone brusquely, “for someday very soon I shall have my freedom, you may depend upon it.” Then, wanting to change the subject, she said, “What is your name, anyway? I am tired of thinking of you as the Other Persephone.”

  The girl smiled. “I am enjoying thinking of you as the Other Rachel,” she said. “It makes me feel as though I am not really alone in the world, after all.”

  Persephone noted a faint but unmistakable echo of pain in the girl’s words but did not press to know its source. Instead she said, “So that is your name? Rachel?”

  “Yes,” said the girl, tucking a lock of dark hair behind one decidedly stuck-out ear. “I come from the Marinese village of Syon on the northeastern coast.”

  “You’re Marinese?” said Persephone in surprise, having thought that all members of that tribe were fair skinned and flaxen haired.

  “Of course not,” smiled Rachel. “I’m Erok; the lowborns of my ancestral village in the south were transported north when I was a small child. After the Marinese relocated to the Island of Ru, the Erok nobility who took up residence in their village needed household servants, fishermen, dock workers and the like.”

  “And how long have you been here?” asked Persephone, gesturing to the little hut in which they stood.

  “Since about mid-winter,” replied Rachel. “One morning, a beautiful noblewoman approached me as I scrounged for scraps behind the fishmonger’s stall. She offered me a position as a lady’s maid at her husband’s great estate in the country. I should have suspected something was amiss—after all, I was filthy, starving and stinking of fish—hardly what the average noblewoman looks for in a lady’s maid—but I’d been so lonesome since my parents died and I was so worn down by the struggle to survive that I fairly leapt at the prospect of daily bread and a safe place to lay my head at night. Of course, as it turned out, the woman who’d approached me was not a noblewoman, and she did not have a husband or a great estate. She was a Gypsy and she brought me here.”

  “Did she tell you why she’d done so?” asked Persephone, leaning closer.

  Rachel shook her head. “She said only that her people had been searching for me and that my destiny would be revealed to me in time.”

  “The Gypsy rascal who persuaded me to bring him here told me much the same thing,” said Persephone, whose heart clenched unexpectedly at the thought that the “rascal” might even now be dead of poison. “Do you have any idea what they meant by it?”

  “No, but I gathered I was meant to find out this night,” said Rachel.

  As if on cue, the wild Gypsy music started up once more.

  Persephone shivered. “Well, do you think they mean us harm?” she asked.

  Before Rachel could reply, the door of the hut banged open. Instinctively, Persephone jumped in front of her doppelganger and reached for her dagger.

  “I got your little knife, remember?” boomed the red-haired giant, seeing t
he movement.

  “I remember,” scowled Persephone. “What do you want?”

  In response, the giant stepped aside to reveal a very small child. He was hardly more than a baby, with firm, rosy cheeks and a head full of downy curls. In his pudgy arms, he carried a loaf of dark bread that was almost as big as he was.

  “Me and Tiny brung you thupper!” he shouted, toppling over backward in his excitement.

  Persephone watched blankly as the little boy laboriously hauled himself to his feet, toddled over to where she stood and proudly laid the loaf of bread at her feet.

  “Do you like hare thtew?” he asked, beaming up at her.

  “What? Oh. Uh, yes,” she stammered. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the red-haired giant—Tiny—set two mugs, two bowls, one jug and a good-sized copper cauldron on the floor just inside the door.

  “Hareth gotth four feetth,” said the child, holding up three fingers.

  “Yes, they do,” agreed Persephone distractedly. “But the thing is—”

  “Thum of them gotth thpotth on their fur.”

  “Spots on their fur … yes,” nodded Persephone, trying not to sound impatient. “But what I want your tribesman to tell me is—”

  “Eat your supper,” boomed Tiny as he stepped forward, scooped up the child, tucked him under one meaty arm and turned to leave. “The hour for questions—and answers— fast approaches. Honoured guest or no, you’ll just have to be patient until then.”

  Persephone looked past him through the open hut door. Outside, twilight was rapidly giving way to night. She could see Gypsies in faded finery excitedly seating themselves around a roaring bonfire; she could see drummers drumming and beautiful girls with bells at their wrists and ankles leaping and twirling.

  And she could see the Gypsy woman Cairn sitting silent and straight-backed with her leather canister in one hand and a gleaming dagger in the other.

  Slowly, Persephone brought her gaze back to Tiny’s big face.

  “Very well,” she said placidly as she picked up the loaf of bread and tore off a chunk. “I’ll be patient until then.”

  THIRTEEN

  I THOUGHT YOU SAID ‘VERY WELL’!” whispered Rachel in alarm as she watched Persephone hurriedly tear more chunks of bread off the loaf and stuff them into her pockets. “I thought you said ‘I’ll be patient until then’!”

  “I lied,” said Persephone tersely. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

  The sudden clash of cymbals made them both jump.

  “Why?” cried Rachel, wringing her hands. “We’ve no proof that the Gypsies mean us harm!”

  “None except for the fact that the Gypsies kidnapped us without explanation, the fact that they consider me a complication and the fact that the woman who appears to be their leader currently awaits us with knife in hand.”

  Rachel brought her knuckles to her lips. “But … but if they truly mean us harm, why would they trouble themselves to shelter and feed us?” she asked desperately as the cymbals clashed again and again.

  “Why does one shelter and feed a calf or a pig?” said Persephone in a hard voice.

  Rachel bleated with fear. Then, without warning, she flung her arms around Persephone and hugged her hard. “I’m so afraid!” she whispered. “But if you really think we should go, we’ll go. Just tell me what you want me to do!”

  For a moment, Persephone was so taken aback by the unexpected feel of warm, friendly arms holding her close that she could hardly breathe, let alone speak. At length, however, she awkwardly untangled herself from Rachel’s clinging embrace, told the trembling girl the plan and made her promise not to follow until she’d heard the allclear signal.

  Then, turning toward the back wall of the hut, Persephone started to climb, digging her fingers and toes into the cracks between the logs. When she reached the ceiling she began digging her way through the thick thatching. At length, her head popped free; a bit more wiggling and the rest of her was free. After pausing just long enough to take a deep breath of the crisp, fragrant breeze that blew out of the forest, she slowly began sliding to the bottom of the roof so that she wouldn’t have so far to jump. Just as she was about to leap for the ground, however, she noticed a shadowy figure standing motionless by the wall of the hut. With a muffled yelp, she twisted around onto her stomach and desperately clawed for a handful of thatching to stop her fall. It was too late for that, however, and the next thing Persephone knew she was on the ground in an ungainly heap with her skirt up around her ears.

  Grunting and flopping around, she yanked down her skirt, jumped to her feet, gamely raised her fists and looked for the shadowy figure, but even as she did so, she found herself pushed up against the hut with both wrists pinned above her head. She immediately tried to drive her knee into the groin of her captor. He managed to evade her (though just barely) then staggered forward so that she had no room to try again—so that she couldn’t squirm or even move without feeling some part of her brush up against some part of him. Persephone felt, rather than saw, him dip his head toward hers and she was about to throw her own head forward in the hope of smashing his nose with her forehead when an unsteady—but infinitely warm and familiar—voice murmured, “I see that you still have the grace and poise of a natural dancer, Persephone.”

  Her heart leapt into her throat even as her knees went weak with relief. “And I see that you still have the irksome habit of showing up in the dead of night unannounced and unwelcome, Azriel,” she said coolly. “Feeling better, are we?”

  “Yes,” he said, “the healers’ antidote is wondrously effective, though I admit that I’m still rather weak.”

  “And rather hot,” she added distractedly as her skin began to tingle in response to the waves of heat that radiated off every part of him.

  “Rather hot?” he echoed.

  Persephone could hear the smile in his voice. “I meant feverish,” she said as she tried without success to jerk her hands free of his grasp. “Why are you here, Azriel?”

  “Two reasons,” he said, grunting softly as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “First, I wanted to prevent your inevitable escape attempt as I did not wish to spend the better part of tomorrow collecting the pieces of you and Rachel that had been strewn about by the ravenous night beasts of the forest.”

  From inside the hut there came a small whimper.

  “Second,” continued Azriel, who was wheezing ever so slightly, “Cairn wanted me to prepare you for what you will see and hear when you join my people at the fire this night.”

  On the far side of the clearing, the throbbing drumbeat, cymbal clashes and rhythmic jingle of ankle bells were joined by the breathy, haunting sounds of a whistle pipe. The strange music made Persephone’s blood run so hot and so fast that she wanted to slap Azriel hard across the face and kiss him hard on the mouth, all at the same time.

  “Azriel,” she whispered, “Cairn said my presence here was a complication. Is it because your people need a girl who looks like me—but only one girl who looks like me?”

  “Yes,” he whispered as he slowly released her hands but made no move to step away. “The night I met you I told you I’d been looking for you for as long as I could remember. We’d all been searching, and when Fayla discovered Rachel scavenging for scraps behind the fishmonger’s stall, we thought we’d found her. But then after I met you and saw how dauntless you were, I started to believe that you were the girl—”

  “What girl?”

  “The girl at the heart of a prophecy made long ago,” replied Azriel, leaning against the wall of the hut as though for support. “A prophecy made by the last surviving Gypsy Seer—an old woman murdered fifteen years ago this very night.”

  On the other side of the wall, Persephone could sense Rachel holding her breath, and she found that she, herself, was also hardly daring to breathe. “And what exactly did this prophecy say, Azriel?” she asked.

  “That there would be a great Gypsy King whose coming would unite the five
tribes of Glyndoria and set things to right for all people,” he said, his voice tinged with excitement. “And that a girl who looks like you—and Rachel—would have something to do with bringing this king to power. And that just maybe this king was meant to rediscover the Pool of Genezing and see my people safely settled by its waters’ edge once more!”

  For a moment, Persephone could only stare at Azriel, indignation swelling in her breast at the fact that her whole world had been turned upside down on account of a ridiculous tribal fantasy.

  “So,” she finally said, “this is the reason you kidnapped Rachel and dragged me halfway across Glyndoria?”

  “Persephone—”

  Pressing her palms against Azriel’s burning chest, she shoved him away with such force that in his weakened state, he actually staggered backward a few steps. “You had no right,” she said flatly. “Moreover, it makes no sense at all. Rachel and I are both penniless orphans— how could either of us ever play the kingmaker? And how could a Gypsy ever rule Glyndoria? The Erok have all but conquered the land, and the Erok nobility would never bow to a Gypsy King. Never! Neither would any of the other three tribes! And as for the healing Pool of Genezing—well, everyone knows it is the stuff of fairytales.”

  “It is not the stuff of fairytales!” exclaimed Azriel as he grabbed her wrist and did his best to pull her close once more. “It is real and a Gypsy King will come and tonight we will finally find out what part you—or Rachel—will play in bringing him to power.”

  “Oh?” said Persephone, managing to sound sarcastic in spite of her sudden breathlessness. “And will you also find out which of us is expected to do this impossible thing?”

  “I … I don’t think so—I think we are meant to decide for ourselves.”

  “And how will you decide?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what will you do with the girl who is not the one you seek?”

  “I … don’t know that, either.”