The Rebellion (16 page)

I took a deep shuddering breath and looked down at the gypsy. There seemed no connection between the tempestuous,
desperate will I had encountered inside her mind and this passive form.

“She had locked a memory behind a wall of forgetting, but it was leaking all over the place. She was trying to die so as to escape it. Roland’s seal slowed her down, but she broke through. I was testing the wall, but I had neglected to erect a separating shield around myself. Our minds merged.” Kella’s eyes widened. “And?”

“I relived the memory she was trying to escape. The Herder we rescued her from had tortured and killed her bondmate in front of her to make her tell him the name of some Twentyfamilies gypsy. She refused to speak. When her bondmate died, she was convinced she had betrayed him.” I felt a surge of sorrow for the loss of a man I had never known, a residue of the accidental joining. “She thinks if she had talked, he would have lived.” I shook my head sadly.

“But the man was on the verge of death before they brought her in. I don’t think he even knew what was happening.”

The healer was ashen. “Monsters,” she whispered. “They are monsters to be capable of such barbarism.” Kella bent to draw the covers up around the gypsy. Abruptly, I remembered the odd sideways shunt that had hurled me into the depths of the gypsy’s mind and into one of the racial memories that Maryon said arose occasionally from the mindstream like bubbles. The memory was already blurred at the edges like a dream, and even as I groped for detail, it dissolved.

But I did remember one thing. There had been something in the dream about the Reichler Clinic.

I shook my head. The foray into the gypsy’s mind had drained me, and my wits drifted with weariness. The previous day and night seemed to have been going on for years.

Kella washed the scratches Maruman had inflicted,
worrying all the while about her treatment of him.

“He will understand,” I said. We went into the kitchen, and I took a poker and stirred to life the embers of the previous night’s fire.

“Domick told me you met with Brydda last night,” Kella said, hanging up a jug of mead to warm.

I nodded. Domick had spoken little on the journey back to the safe house, furious at the lack of faith Rushton had demonstrated in sending me to speak with Brydda directly. And though Brydda had accepted the blame for the lack of news, I still felt uneasy with Domick since seeing how much he had changed.

“Greetings, ElspethInnle.” Maruman was sitting under the table, his yellow eye glinting. “I am glad you did not take the longsleep.”

“You saved me.”

“Of course,” he sent complacently. “Maruman guards the dreamtrails.”

“Elspeth?” Kella prompted, unaware of my exchange with the cat.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I said surely there is no hurry to return the gypsy to her people, now that she has wakened. You will be able to wait until she recovers completely.”

I sighed. “It is more complicated than that. I did not want to worry you, but Maryon has futuretold that we must return the gypsy to her people in a matter of days. Otherwise, Obernewtyn may be in great peril.”

She was aghast. “But that is impossible!”

“I meant to ask Brydda about the best way to do it, but I didn’t get the chance. I’ll find a way.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Kella. “You cannot move
her. Her system has undergone a terrible shock, and she was already weak. She needs to be allowed to rest.…”

“There is no time,” I snapped.

“Then she has even less time, for you will kill her if you move her in the next couple of days.” There was a deep crease between the healer’s eyebrows. “Does she have no rights of her own, Elspeth? Is Obernewtyn more important than her life?”

I bit my lip in sudden shame. I had not thought of the gypsy at all, only of myself and Obernewtyn. I felt sick. “You are right,” I said. “I will not move her until you say it is safe. But, Lud, pray it is soon.”

Kella’s face softened. “I did not mean to criticize you. After all, it is not for yourself but for Obernewtyn that you fear.” I flushed but held my tongue. “In any case, you cannot return her until you find her people. That is your task, and mine is to heal her. I’ll do my very best to have her well enough to be shifted before the days are up,” she vowed, squeezing my hand.

Just then, Dragon came in, and I was glad of the distraction. Her face and hands were unusually clean and her hair roughly braided. Her beauty struck me anew, and from Kella’s expression, she felt the same.

“Hungry,” Dragon said.

My stomach chimed in agreement. Kella laughed and rose to carve some slices of bread and cheese. My mouth watered as she toasted them; then for a time there was silence as we ate. Kella did not join us but fed crumbs of cheese to Maruman as an apology. He sent to me that he felt no ill will for the slap she had administered, but he accepted her offerings with feline fastidiousness, seeing she needed the reassurance.

“Good,” Dragon announced at last, patting her distended stomach. Then she gave me an anxious look. “Dragon stay?”

“I suppose you must, but you’re an awful nuisance,” I sighed.

“Nuisance,” she echoed with an identical sigh.

I stifled a grin and put my arm around her. “Dragon, I’m going to let you stay, but only if you promise to do exactly as you are told.”

“Promise,” she agreed after some thought. “Promise and stay.”

“Is Domick still asleep?” I asked Kella.

At once the strained look returned to her eyes. “He went early to the Councilcourt.”

I nodded and looked into the fire, reflecting on his behavior at The Good Egg. Kella would be a great deal more worried if she understood more about what Domick did when he was not with her.

I wondered how the healer, with her horror of torture, would respond to the knowledge that people thought her bondmate a Council torturer. My own wild fear, that the rumors had been true, now seemed absurd in light of what I’d seen in the gypsy’s memory. No Misfit could stoop to that, not even a coercer.

Then Ariel’s lovely, vicious face floated into my mind, giving lie to that certainty. But I thrust it away. Domick was no Ariel.

Only then did it occur to me that Domick had still not told me what he did now at the Councilcourt.

12

“D
O
YOU UNDERSTAND
me/ElspethInnle, who stands before you?” I sent, framing the thought carefully.

The bird tilted its head and eyed me, but I could sense no thought from it other than an instinct to eat and a subliminal memory of flight that filled me with restlessness.

“Well? Are you buying the creature or communing with it?” the stallholder demanded.

Resignedly, I handed him a coin, and he passed over the cage. “You must be starting up a breeding pen with all them birds you keep buying. Store them in your wagon, do you, boy?”

I took the cage and turned away, ignoring him.

“You found one?” Kella whispered eagerly, coming over from another stall.

I shook my head. “I can’t get any sense out of it.”

The healer stared at me. “Oh, Elspeth! Are we going to free this one like all the others?”

“What else?” I asked in a disgruntled voice.

Brydda’s suggestion of using a bird as a messenger had seemed a marvelous one. It was always easier to communicate with tamed or partly tame animals, so I had decided to search the numerous markets for a captive bird that would agree to carry a message to Obernewtyn. This search would
also give me the opportunity to randomly probe a large number of people for information about gypsies.

I found an astonishing amount of Herder-induced superstition and wild surmise but very little real information. Landfolk despised all gypsies but hated and envied the Twentyfamilies with a passion that surprised me.

Kella had accompanied me to the market to replenish her supply of herbs, leaving a disgruntled Matthew to watch Dragon and the gypsy, but she had lingered, drawn into my search for a messenger bird. In many ways, she was of more use here than I, for I had quickly discovered that the birds available in the market were not sentient in the way that Maruman or Gahltha were; they used a mode of communication closer to empathy than farseeking. I was able to receive only the vaguest images from their minds. Kella was able to use her slight secondary empathic ability to muster some response from them, but it hadn’t been enough to convey what we needed.

Those few who were able to comprehend farsought speech seemed to have no grasp of time and had very short attention spans.

However, having felt, even dimly, a bird’s longing for freedom, I had not been able to leave it caged. So far, I had purchased fifteen of the wretched creatures and set them free, running our store of coin dangerously low.

Kella made a strangled noise, and I thought it a sign of frustration.

Then I realized she was trying not to laugh.

I sighed, wondering why I was still trying, when it had been perfectly obvious for some time that the idea was doomed. After trying so many, I was beginning to believe that
the Agyllians had the only avian minds capable of full communication with humans.

“I’m sorry for laughing,” she said contritely.

“It’s good to hear laughter,” I said. “It helps me to forget Maryon’s deadline and that I must make some reply to Brydda, when he comes, as to whether I will meet with the other rebel leaders. Since these birds will not lend themselves as messengers to carry word to Obernewtyn, I will have to make the decision myself.”

“Domick will have sent a message off this morning,” Kella said.

“Nevertheless, it will take too long to arrive to give me any direction. I will be back at Obernewtyn by the time it gets there.”

And perhaps I will return only to die before the next Days of Rain
. The thought crept insidiously into my mind.

I wished I’d had the chance to tell Brydda about the gypsy and ask his advice. Lud only knew how long it would take him to call on the safe house. I racked my brain for some sensible way to find the gypsy’s people, but nothing came to me other than finding out where they set their wagons up in the city and going among them. The other obvious alternative was to have Kella waken the gypsy again so I could ask her. But I was reluctant to do that. I still felt a twinge of shame at the selfishness of my attitude toward the gypsy. Let her waken when she would.

Maneuvering the cage through the market throng, I noticed a ragged gypsy lad trying to sell something to a stallholder; a halfbreed, as evidenced by his poverty, the lad was clearly receiving short shrift from the trader and departed finally with a doleful expression.

If I could coerce some general information out of this gypsy about his people, I would be able to face any number of them without quaking in my boots for fear that I was about to give myself away as an impostor. It was odd how blithely I had gone about pretending to be a gypsy, when I thought I knew all that needed knowing about them. Now, awareness of my ignorance terrified me. Swiftly, I shaped a light probe and sent it after the lad.

The probe slid away from his mind, blocked by a natural shield.

“Damn,” I muttered, withdrawing.

The Teknoguildmaster, Garth, had a theory that normal people were developing unconscious shields that keep us from reading them. Even back in my days in the orphan homes, I had known there were unTalented people with natural mindshields that kept me out or mind sensitivity that warned them if they were being read.

I did not like the idea that such natural defenses were developing in response to and alongside our own abilities. Not just because it would make our work more difficult, but because it would put paid to the theory that Talented Misfits were simply the next step in human evolution. It would mean instead that we were simply
one
strand in human evolution and the unTalents another. That practically brought us back to the Herder theory that Misfits were mutant deviations from “true” humanity.

“The poor thing,” Kella murmured, her eyes following the gypsy lad. “They are not allowed to farm or settle, and no one wants to buy from them. No wonder they take to thievery. What else are they supposed to do?”