The Gypsy King (6 page)

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

F
INDING 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.