The Rebellion (30 page)

“There’s nothing to discuss,” I snapped.

He gave me an amused look and shrugged. “Very well.”

His tone was so meek that I was instantly suspicious. “Sit down and I will prepare what is needed,” he murmured. I sat, watching warily as he went over and reached into a trunk set on the side of Maire’s rig. He came back with a woven box somewhat smaller than the healer’s box of potions and sat opposite me. Opening it, he withdrew a series of sharp spikes and some little glass bulbs of color.

“Where are the brushes?” I demanded.

“Brushes?” The gypsy gave me an innocent look, but the flames reflected in his eyes danced.

“The … the brushes you use to paint the design on. And what are those?” I pointed to the sharp little skewers laid out neatly alongside the box.

“They are needles; I use them to apply the design,” the gypsy said, attaching a spike deftly to the top of a bulb of color. “The picture is created by a series of tiny stabs, which
allows the color to seep beneath the skin and set. First I prick out an outline of the design, and then I fill in the color. Usually the process is carried out over many days, but since you want the whole thing at once, it will take the entire night.”

I felt foolish and angry. “You did not tell me—”

His eyebrows lifted. “No? It must be because you did not want to be told anything. Traditionally, the designs are marked onto Twentyfamilies gypsies when we are swaddled babes and too small to be afraid.”

I bridled. “I’m not afraid. What are you doing?”

“Putting them away,” he said calmly.

I took a deep, shaky breath and did not speak until I was certain my voice would be steady. “Not before you keep your promise.” I pulled up the sleeve on my shirt and held out my arm.

He stared at me, for once apparently bereft of witticisms.

“Well?” I snapped, angry because I was beginning to feel sick with apprehension. “If it is going to take all night, you had better get started.”

“You want me to use these on you?” He held up one of the sharp spikes.

I nodded, not trusting to the firmness of my voice.

His eyes glimmered, and slowly he again took out the bottles and needles.

I swallowed a great lump of terror and looked away from the needles into flames that seemed to shudder with fear.

“In the Beforetime, it was called a
tattoo,
” Swallow said. There was no mockery in his voice or his eyes now, but I would not have cared if he had sneered openly at me.

My arm felt as if it were on fire. Some obscure pride had made me endure the pain rather than sealing it away behind
a mental net. The individual pricks had not been so terrible, but now my arm felt as if it had been savaged by a hive of virulent bees. Only the strange, long story he had told me as he worked had helped me bear it. Contrary to common gossip, Swallow said the gypsies had come from the sea, led by one who had vanished when they reached the Land. And though the story had taken hours to tell, I sensed there was much left unsaid.

Swallow passed his arm across his forehead, wiping away beads of sweat. For a moment, our eyes met; then he bent over his design again. I tensed involuntarily, expecting another endless series of needles, but he released me almost at once.

“It is done. Of course, you won’t see the full effect until the scabs form and fall away.”

Then he gave me such a queer, searching look that I felt uncomfortable. I glanced down for the first time, and a wave of nausea struck me at the sight of the raw and swollen welts.

What have I done
? I thought in dismay.

“Maire!” Swallow called, dropping the needles into a pot of water suspended above the fire. I took a deep, steadying breath. The stars had faded. It was the second night in a row I had been awake to see the dawn.

He moved to the wagon again and rapped on its side. “Maire! Wake up. It is done.”

The gypsy healer had called us a pair of fools before stumping off to her bed. “It offends her sense of fitness,” Swallow had said, his eyes gleaming with mischief.

Maire emerged from the wagon, dressed in day clothes and wearing a full apron. She ignored my arm and looked critically into my face. After a moment, she shook her head.

“It is madness. Well, let me see.”

I held my arm out obediently, hoping she would apply some more of her miraculous salve, but instead she only mixed me a foul potion to drink.

Swallow laughed at my expression. “The cure is worse than the ill when Maire is displeased.”

She gave him a scathing look and bent to examine the tattoo. “It is a good job, though I would as soon not add to his conceit by saying so.”

Swallow grinned, then his eyes turned back to me and narrowed into the same discomfortingly searching gaze. He rose. “And now to complete the process, an honorary toast offered by the D’rekta. I am not he, but I will do, as the heir apparent.”

Maire gave him an astonished look as he crossed to the wagon and climbed inside. After a moment, she took a bottle from her basket and sprinkled a sweet-scented powder onto the tattoo; then she bandaged it carefully and instructed me to leave it untouched for some days.

“What is a D’rekta?” I asked when she was done.

Maire gave me a haughty stare, and for a minute her resemblance to Swallow was startling. “The leader of the Twentyfamilies. Each D’rekta is the eldest blood descendant of the first, who led our people from the lost lands. The present D’rekta is Swallow’s father, but there is little love and much duty between them.…”

Swallow returned carrying a small box—not a woven container this time, but a box made from wood and carved in the same wondrously intricate style as the wagon itself.

“The making of the Twentyfamilies mark is generally toasted by the D’rekta,” he said. He opened the box and removed a jeweled goblet from its velvety recess. It was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen, all streaked with iridescent
green and purple and globs of shimmering gold. If this was a sample of Twentyfamilies tithe ware, I did not wonder that the Council would keep their pact.

He took out a small corked vial made of the same dazzling material, unstoppered it, poured a measure of the liquid it contained into the goblet, and raised it to me. “I am for you, as you are for me.”

He drank, and I heard Maire’s indrawn breath when he refilled the glass and offered it to me.

“No!” Maire said in an outraged voice. “You make mockery of the ancient promises.”

He looked at her, his face deadly serious. “There is no mockery in what I do, Maire.”

The old woman glared. “Have you gone mad? She is not Twentyfamilies. Nor is she even a gypsy despite all her talk. Indeed, we know nothing of her other than that she saved Iriny. For that I thank her, but she is no part of our destiny.”

Swallow took the healer’s withered hand with a tenderness that made a nonsense of their bickering. “Trust me, Maire. She may not be a gypsy, but she is part of the ancient promises.”

Her face sagged with shock. “But how can this be …?”

“What is all this?” I demanded, but they ignored me, seeming to commune or to pit their wills in some silent way.

The old woman broke away first. “So,” she said in a subdued tone.

Again Swallow offered the goblet to me. “Drink.”

I shook my head. “Not until I know what I am drinking and what it means. I won’t be bound by something I don’t understand.”

The gypsy’s dark eyes bored into mine, but I met his look,
and at last he set the goblet down. “The toast I offered is an oath of fealty to the ancient Twentyfamilies promises, by those whose fate is bound up in them. As is yours.”

“I know nothing of these promises. And, as you have said, I am no gypsy. What could they possibly have to do with me?”

“I will tell you,” he said with a queer fierceness. “This night I have done a thing”—he gestured at my arm tattoo—“that, were it known to my father, would see me hunted to death by my own kind. Anyone seeing it on you and discovering you were an impostor will know a Twentyfamilies made it, for no other has the secret. That will end the truce between the Council and my people. If you are captured and tortured, you will speak of it and of me and Maire, and again our lives would be worth nothing. Nor the lives of my people, for we will be forced to settle and become part of this Land.”

I shook my head impatiently. “If giving me this was such a terrible thing, why didn’t you just refuse?”

“It was the reward you named for returning Iriny.”

“Even so, you might have refused.”

“It was a promise,” he said sternly.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Your people are supposed not to break Council lore or have anything to do with those who do. What is Iriny to you that you would risk so much for her?”

“She is my half sister,” he answered flatly. “Before my father bonded with my mother, and before he was D’rekta, he loved a halfbreed gypsy. She who bore Iriny. It mattered not with whom he bonded, since he had an older sister who was to inherit the D’rektaship. But when she broke her neck in a fall, my father was forced by duty to set Iriny’s mother aside and choose
a Twentyfamilies woman so that he could have a pureblood child. He chose a Twentyfamilies cousin to Iriny’s mother, and I am their son.”

Again there was a flash of that deep bitterness in his eyes. “ ‘Swallow’ is not my formal name but a pet name I was given as a child by Iriny.”

I blinked, suddenly convinced that Swallow was the Twentyfamilies gypsy the Herder in Guanette had wanted Iriny to name. I resisted the urge to warn him, for how would I explain knowing it? Let Iriny tell him when she woke.

“My daughter bonded with the D’rekta, but there was no love between them,” Maire said.

I stared from one of them to the other. “He is your grandson, then?”

Maire wrinkled her nose, seeming to recover her equilibrium.

Swallow gave a hard-edged laugh. “There is too much division among our people. When I am D’rekta, I will dissolve the Great Divide. The answer to the halfbreed problem is not to sunder ourselves from them but to make them understand why we must remain separate from Landfolk. When I am D’rekta, any gypsy who swears fealty to the ancient promises will be one of us, whether they be purebloods or no. But until that time, I must appear dutiful and seem to believe in tradition. It is only as Swallow that I am free to help Iriny and, through her, the halfbreeds.”

“Swallow is the name you take on when you are among the halfbreeds!”

He nodded. “I help them as best I can. Unfortunately, my sister does not confine her good works to halfbreeds, hence her plight in Guanette. Landfolk are not overgrateful to those
who aid them. I warned her, but Iriny does not care about her safety.”

“You do?” retorted Maire. “And do not speak ill of Iriny. She is an angel.”

“She was almost a dead angel,” Swallow said.

“How did you know we had her? Iriny, I mean,” I asked curiously.

Swallow’s dark eyes glimmered with amusement. “The day you rescued her in Guanette, I was the archer in the trees.”

My mouth fell open. “You! But Matthew said your hair was white. At least …”

He grinned. “A little flour ages a man dreadfully. I heard Iriny and Caldeko had been taken, and I came to help them as Swallow. I was too late for Caldeko, but I was determined to save Iriny, even at the cost of my identity or my very life—for, regardless of the Great Divide, she is blood kin and I love her. I was in the trees waiting for the chance to arrow that Herder when you walked out of nowhere claiming to be her sister.”

I felt myself flush. “It was all I could think of.…”

“Do not mistake me. When you spirited Iriny from Guanette, you saved me having to reveal myself. That was the first debt I owed. Then you healed her and brought her here. Even the Twentyfamilies sacred mark did not seem too great a price for all of that.”

Swallow’s eyes shifted to where Gahltha stood in the wagon traces.

“That day in Guanette, I saw a horse come to you, though you made no sign, nor did you call to it that I could hear. It knelt at your side as if to pay you homage and received
Iriny’s body gently. And when you mounted and were struck by the knife, it traveled from the village without letting you or Iriny fall. That seemed surpassing strange and an omen of some force to me.

“I rode directly to Sutrium, for I had to be present at the Council tithe, and my absence would be cause for dangerous questions. I thought you would follow and let it be known about the greens that you had Iriny.

“When no one came, I began to wonder if you were a gypsy after all. In retrospect, there were discrepancies—the things you had said to the Herder and your behavior—but I could not begin to imagine who would choose to mask herself as one of the most despised creatures in all the Land, for so the unlucky halfbreeds style themselves.”

I kept my expression still and polite.

“The only answer I could come up with was one who had a greater secret to hide,” Swallow said.

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