The Gypsy King (4 page)

Persephone stared after the owner as he stormed across the yard and into the thatch-roofed cottage. Her face throbbed where he'd hit her, but she was savagely pleased for having said what she had.

“He thinks he's so much better than me, but he's just a lowborn thug who was raised up because he'll do things that would turn a decent man's stomach,” she muttered some minutes later. “Beating, burning, kidnapping, murdering, stealing, ravishing—I tell you, Mrs. Foster, I may be ill bred and ignorant but when that pig signed up for the Regent's New Man army he sold his soul to the
devil
!”

Mrs. Foster was so surprised to hear this that she mooed.

“It's true!” insisted Persephone as she leaned her forehead against Mrs. Foster's warm flank and continued
to milk her. “They say the Regent Mordecai is the very devil himself—horribly deformed, with a hunched, twisted back, withered, gnarled limbs and soul to match.” She paused her milking to demonstrate the meaning of the phrase “gnarled limbs” to a couple of goats who had wandered over to listen to the story. “My Cookie told me all sorts of stories about him. You remember me telling you about Cookie, don't you, Mrs. Foster? She was the cook at the manor belonging to the merchant who owned me when I was very young. Well, Cookie always said that the things the Regent ordered his New Men to do were
nothing
compared to the things he himself had done. You'd think that such a great man would leave torture to his underlings, but Cookie said her cousin's husband's sister by his father's third wife—his half-sister, really—knew a man who mucked the royal stables at the palace in the imperial capital. And he said that the Regent
often
descended into the dungeon to take care of business himself. This man even saw
children
delivered to the dungeon—delivered but never released. And Cookie always said it was surely no coincidence that old King Malthusius died within
weeks
of appointing Mordecai Regent of the unborn prince—now our young King Finnius. Nor did she think it a coincidence that the queen died within
days
of delivering her child and that all who attended the birth later disappeared. All but the Regent, that is.…”

Mrs. Foster shifted restlessly, as though, dead monarchs and mysterious disappearances notwithstanding, she'd begun to find Persephone's chatter a bit of a bore.

Admonishing the cow for her ill-bred, ignorant
behaviour, Persephone stripped the last of the creamy milk from Mrs. Foster's teats, slipped the rope from around her neck and gave her a push in the direction of the barnyard.

“You, too,” she said to the goats, shooing them out of the barn.

As she followed them to the threshold of the open barn door, Persephone let her mind drift back to life at the merchant's manor house. To the long, hard days spent scrubbing floors and scouring pots; to the long, cold nights spent serving the merchant and his companions as they gambled and drank. To the sound of them shouting about how fine it was to see the lowborn rabble finally being put to good use and the Gypsies being put in their place; to the sight of them laughing at tales of Khan warriors fighting to the death to save their beloved sheep and ugly little Gorgishmen trying to wheedle their way out of imprisonment in the mines that once belonged to them. Closing her eyes, Persephone saw the gentle smile of the sad, old Marinese artisan who'd taught her to swim and throw a knife, and she felt Cookie's warm, plump arms holding her close. And she remembered how she'd believed that life at the manor would go on forever, how she'd never dreamt that one day her world would be torn apart by a toss of the dice—

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

M
ANY 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 enough 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.