As the man warbled loudly and tunelessly in an effort to educate the child with the voice of an angel, Persephone turned to Azriel and was about to despair that they had no key when Azriel knelt down, pulled a thin metal file from the folds of his robe and began purposefully poking it into the lock.
“I’m a thief, remember?” he said, grinning up at her.
“I remember,” she said, grinning back at him until a noise from a nearby corridor wiped the grin off her face.
As the lock fell open, Azriel—who’d obviously heard the noise, too—jumped to his feet and muttered, “I think it would be a good idea for us to hurry, don’t you?”
Persephone did not waste time answering but instead shoved open the door and stepped inside. The room was low ceilinged, stiflingly hot and bathed in the glow of a fire that crackled as though fed by the demons of hell itself. Near one wall, in a hanging cage much like the corpsestuffed one she’d seen earlier, there slumped a small, yellowy creature that Persephone immediately recognized as a Gorgishman. Chained to another wall was a gaunt but enormous (and enormously hairy) man who glared at her with such defiance that she immediately guessed him to be one of the bloodthirsty, mountain-dwelling Khan. Pushed into the darkest corner of the room, past a dusty blond skeleton, beyond a bloodstained butcher block and several trays of gruesome-looking implements, was a small rectangular cage.
And in the cage was a thin, dirty, badly frightened little boy.
Without a word, Persephone crossed the room, grabbed the key from a nearby hook, unlocked the cage and reached for the child, who promptly bit her as hard as he could.
She snatched her hand back with a grunt and a scowl.
“What do you think you’re doing?” demanded the Khan in alarm, his dark eyes bulging beneath his bushy eyebrows as he watched Azriel fling open the trapdoor in the floor near the butcher block.
“I think we’re fetching the boy out of this place,” replied Azriel, dumping the last of the bread in his sack into the water below.
“Why?” barked the Khan, straining against his chains as he watched Persephone drag the squirming, kicking child out of the cage and hurry across the room with him. “Who is he to you?”
“He is my tribesman,” replied Azriel, holding wide the mouth of the now-empty bread sack. “What concern is it of yours? Who is he to you?”
“He is my friend,” rumbled the Khan.
CLANG.
Persephone, Azriel and the Khan all jerked their heads toward the sound of a door slamming shut in some distant corridor.
Distant, but not distant enough.
“That would be the Regent, come to play his little games,” said the Khan with renewed alarm. “If you truly mean to fetch the boy out of this place, Gypsy, you’d best do it now.” And then, to the child: “Mateo! Mateo, listen to me—you must stop your squirming, lad. You are making an unseemly spectacle of yourself and besides, these two are Gypsies come to free you.”
“I’m not a Gypsy,” clarified Persephone, who was struggling to stuff the boy’s kicking legs into the mouth of the sack.
In response to this news, Mateo bit her again.
CLANG.
“But I am,” said Azriel, with an involuntary glance over his shoulder. Yanking up his robe, he tugged down the waistband of his breeches just enough to reveal a dark-blue, tear-shaped tattoo upon his hip: the Mark of the Gypsies.
At the sight of it, the child sagged in Persephone’s arms. Quick as a wink, she slipped him into the sack and told him to be as still as he could be and to not make a sound no matter what happened.
“Pretend you are bread,” advised Azriel.
With a tiny smile, the child nodded and huddled himself into a loaf.
CLANG.
“For the love of strong sheep, go!” begged the Khan, frantically jerking his hairy head toward the door as though this encouragement might speed them on their way.
“We will,” said Azriel. “Only—we cannot afford to leave behind witnesses.”
Persephone’s mouth dropped open in horror.
The Khan looked surprised and not surprised. “I understand,” he said gruffly, lifting his chin.
“I don’t think you do,” said Azriel. Using his metal file, he swiftly unlocked the big man’s fetters and also the door of the hanging cage.
CLANG!
TAP, TAP, TAP.…
“Those would be the footfalls of the henchman Murdock, who must have come along for the fun,” informed the Khan, falling away from the wall and stumbling only briefly before finding his footing. “And unless I’m very much mistaken—and I’m not, for we Khan never are—he and his master are almost here!”
“Can you make it through the trapdoor?” asked Azriel, swinging the “bread” sack over his shoulder, grabbing Persephone by the hand and starting for the door.
“Aye,” nodded the big man as he unsteadily pulled open the door of the hanging cage, reached inside and grabbed the hissing creature by the scruff of his hairless neck. “And I’ll take this surly little sneak with me when I go. Good luck, Gypsy.”
“And to you,” said Azriel over his shoulder.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
“Go!”
FORTY
PERSEPHONE AND AZRIEL made it out of the stifling room but were too late to escape the corridor.
As luck would have it, however, the big Khan had been mistaken after all, and rather than the Regent and his henchman, Persephone and Azriel found themselves shuffling past a pair of guards who took no notice of them except to shout at them to get on with their miserable task. Bobbing their hooded heads in compliance, Azriel shuffled faster, with Persephone right behind him, shielding the “loaf of bread” lest one of the guards decide to use the pike to check the contents of the sack.
Neither of them did.
Nor did any of the other guards they encountered as they made their way through the dank, dark corridors. And with each step she took, Persephone found herself feeling a little more hopeful that she, Azriel and the child might actually escape with their lives.
Then, as they turned the final corner and were headed for the winding staircase that would lead them back up into the land of the living, Persephone saw the legs of two men descending the staircase toward them.
The legs of one man were strong and sturdy.
The legs of the other were withered and bent.
The Regent and his henchman had come to play their little games, after all.
Realizing that she, Azriel and the “loaf of bread” stood directly in the path the two monsters would take as they made their way to the stifling—but now-empty—room, Persephone grabbed Azriel’s arm and dragged him into the shadowed doorway of a nearby cell. As she shrank against the ancient iron door, it miraculously gave way. Hastily, she and Azriel ducked inside and eased the door shut behind them.
Barely a moment later, the Regent and his general were in the corridor.
And then they were walking past the spot where Persephone and Azriel stood as silent and still as death in the flickering torchlight that shone through the tiny, barred window.
And then they were gone.
Weak with relief and unable to believe that they’d actually escaped undetected, Persephone stepped back to give Azriel space to open the door. Instead of meeting up with solid ground, however, her foot met with nothing at all. With a gasp, she started to fall. Luckily, she didn’t have far to go, and by the time she’d twisted around so that she could use her hands to break her fall, she’d already landed with a grunt in a shallow puddle of evil-smelling water.
“Are you all right?” whispered Azriel, carefully setting down the burlap sack before hurrying over to her.
“Yes,” she replied. Pushing herself to her knees, she rolled up her dripping sleeves and dried her hands off on the front of her smock. She was about to get to her feet when she happened to notice the corpse propped up against the wall directly before her.
She’d been an old woman in life; or at least, th
is place had made her old. Her filthy body was a mess of sores, her dead lips puckered grotesquely around a toothless hole of a mouth and what was left of her thin, grey hair hung limply around her cadaverous face.
Persephone shuddered and was about to turn away when the corpse blinked.
Then, without warning, it lunged forward and clamped its cold, bony hand around Persephone’s damp wrist. Persephone opened her mouth to scream but before she could, Azriel put his hand over her mouth.
“She’s alive,” he hissed.
The corpse—or rather, the woman—blinked at Persephone again.
Then she smiled broadly—a rather gruesome sight given that all she had to show were blackened gums. “The old Gypsy Seer told me …,” she began faintly, before stopping as though she was too exhausted to go on.
At these words, Persephone felt a jolt of superstitious dread so powerful that she tore her wrist from the old woman’s grip and would have bolted from the room if Azriel hadn’t been crouched behind her, blocking her way.
“What did the old Gypsy Seer tell you?” he asked eagerly. Leaning forward, he picked up the poor woman’s withered hand and gave it a squeeze in the hope of reviving her. “What did she tell you?”
Slowly, her milky eyes shifted to Azriel’s blue ones. “That I would lay eyes upon the true heir to the Erok throne one last time before I died,” she whispered.
Persephone recoiled in disbelief at what she was hearing but Azriel leaned even farther forward, so far forward that Persephone could feel his full weight upon her back.
His handsome face was only inches from the old woman’s ruined one. “What do you mean?” he asked breathlessly. “What are you saying?”
Jerking her withered hand from Azriel’s grasp, she clutched his arm and whispered, “I am saying that the lost royal twin has come home at last.”
Then, as though the desire to set eyes upon the true heir of the Erok throne was the only thing that had kept her soul tethered to this world, her eyes rolled into the back of her head, her withered hand slipped from Azriel’s arm and she slumped over into the fetid pile of straw.
Dead.
FORTY-ONE
NEITHER PERSEPHONE NOR AZRIEL spoke until they were out of the dungeon and back in the relative safety of her chambers, where they intended to quickly change into disguises that would offer them a better chance of escaping the city unmolested.
“What do you think she meant by her words?” murmured Azriel as he helped Mateo out of the burlap sack.
“Nothing,” lied Persephone.
With trembling hands, she poured a goblet of watered wine for the boy and filled a plate with food while Azriel set an embroidered cushion upon one of the great dining chairs and hoisted Mateo up to sit upon it.
“Eat,” he told the boy, ruffling his hair.
Wordlessly, the traumatized, half-starved child picked up a piece of cold roast venison with one grimy hand and a hunk of soft cheese with the other, crammed them both into his mouth and then reached for the watered wine.
After absently admonishing him to slow down, Azriel took Persephone by the elbow, propelled her over to a spot by the fire so that they could speak privately and said, “The old woman spoke of a lost royal twin, Persephone— of the rightful heir to the Erok throne.”
“Words,” she said with an airy wave of her hand.
“Words spoken by a Gypsy Seer,” said Azriel.
“Maybe spoken by a Gypsy Seer,” corrected Persephone.
She turned away from him then, so that she would not have to see the look in his eyes. She knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that it was no coincidence that he couldn’t remember his life before the Gypsy camp, no coincidence that Ivan had swooped down with the dead pigeon clutched in his talons at the very moment the Gypsies all looked up, no coincidence that the message the dead pigeon had carried had directed them to Parthania, no coincidence that Azriel had seen Mateo captured but had been unable to save him out on the street. He was thinking that the Fates had led them down into that dungeon not so they could rescue Mateo but so that they could find the old woman.
And he was thinking that if the old woman’s remarkable dying utterances were to be believed, then little Mateo was not the Gypsy King—
He was.
Persephone watched him now as he strode back and forth before the fire, trying so hard to be objective about what he already believed in his heart to be true.
“I mean, everyone knows that something untoward happened the night the queen gave birth,” he reasoned, half to himself. “People thought that perhaps her child had been strangled or born dead and replaced with a changeling of the Regent’s choosing but what if they had it wrong? What if the queen’s son—King Finnius—was born alive and yet lived and … and—”
“And so did his elder twin?” broke in Persephone. “Because to be the rightful heir to the Erok throne, you’d have to have been born first, you know.”
“I know,” said Azriel, flushing to hear her give voice to his outrageous thoughts. “I also know that you think I’m grasping at straws, and perhaps you are right. After all, even if the old woman had been told by a Seer that she would lay eyes upon the rightful heir to the throne, how could she possibly have known that I am he?”
Though Persephone wanted to slap him and shout that there was no way she could have known, she knew that if she did that he would think her so stubbornly single-minded that any hope she might have of eventually making him listen to reason would be lost. So instead of slapping and shouting, she shrugged and said, “I suppose you resemble the king. You are both tall, you both have blue eyes and you are both of a similar build.”
“Yes, but there must be a thousand men who have those same features,” said Azriel.
“That is true,” said Persephone quickly.
“Of course, there is this,” said Azriel, holding aloft his partially amputated finger. “The old woman mentioned the Gypsy Seer and the twin only after I clamped my hand over your mouth to keep you from screaming.”
Persephone stared at his finger for a long moment before reaching up and touching the scarred tip of it. “I … I suppose it is possible that someone cut off your finger to mark you so that those who knew of your existence would be able to recognize you as the lost twin,” she said reluctantly, knowing that this was what he was thinking.
“Yes,” agreed Azriel with feigned indifference. “But the wound was still bleeding when I arrived at the Gypsy camp all those years ago.”
“Perhaps they’d only just mutilated you,” said Persephone, stating the obvious. “Perhaps someone had kept you in hiding in the years following your birth and had to get rid of you in a hurry.”
“But why leave me with Gypsies?”
“Can you imagine a better place to hide an unwanted royal twin than among the reviled Gypsies?” snorted Persephone. “Who would ever think of looking for you there?”
“But why get rid of me in the first place?” pressed Azriel. “If I was, indeed, the first-born twin, why not keep me and get rid of the younger twin?”
“I don’t know!” said Persephone impatiently. “Perhaps the Regent chose to keep the weaker twin in the hope that he would die in infancy. Perhaps he believed that if the weaker twin died in infancy, he’d be able to step in and fill the power vacuum created by the empty throne.”
“But if—”
“Enough ‘buts,’ Azriel!” exclaimed Persephone. She’d shown herself at least willing to entertain the possibility that he was the Gypsy King; it was time to make him listen to reason.
“You are right,” he agreed with sudden fire, before she could speak a single word of reason. “The time for talk—and action—will come later, once we’ve reunited with Cairn and the others and shared with them what has been revealed to us this night. As planned, we must leave Parthania at once and—”
“No,” said Persephone before she could stop herself. “Not ‘we.’”
Azriel went very still. “What do you mea
n ‘not we’?” he asked.
Though Persephone should have been prepared for this moment, she was not. Looking up into Azriel’s very blue eyes, she felt the weight of the decision she was about to make pressing down upon her heart. “I followed the path you and your people put before me, Azriel, and … it would appear that I have found the Gypsy King,” she said faintly. “Now I must find my own path.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Why not?” asked Persephone in a half-joking voice. “Because I am your slave?”
“My slave?” said Azriel incredulously. “My slave?” he repeated. With fumbling fingers, he reached inside his robe, pulled out the key to her old fetters and pressed it into the palm of her hand. Wrapping his fingers tight around hers, he forced her fingers to close around the key and then pressed her closed hand against his beating heart. “Don’t you know?” he asked hoarsely. “Don’t you know? You’ve never been my slave, Persephone. You’ve never been mine, but by the gods, since the first moment I laid eyes upon you, I have been yours. You cannot leave me because I need you—and because … because I love you.”
Persephone tried to shrink away from him. “No.…”
“Yes!” he said fiercely.
And then, before she could utter another word of protest, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her so deeply and with such passion that her knees turned to water, her head began to spin and she felt as though she were falling into an abyss from which there was no escape.
Slowly, her fingers uncurled and the key to the fetters dropped to the ground with a clink. Even more slowly, Azriel finished kissing her and pulled his head back just far enough to look into her eyes.
“Don’t you know that our paths are as one, Persephone?” he whispered. “Can’t you see that? If Cairn and the others agree that I am … the one, then I will need you more than I ever did before—and that is saying a great deal, given the fact that I did not think I could live without you before. Say you won’t leave me. Please. Say you’ll stand by me and I will see to it that you will never be alone or frightened again.”
The Gypsy King Page 31