The Gypsy King (47 page)

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, this 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

N
EITHER 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 mean ‘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.”

Persephone said nothing for a long moment. Then she bowed her head and whispered, “Do you promise?”

“I promise,” he said fervently. “Will you come with me?”

Persephone bit her lip and nodded wordlessly.

“Do
you
promise?” he asked.

With a tremulous smile, she looked up, leaned forward and gently pressed her mouth against his. “I promise,” she lied.

If anyone had pointed out to Persephone the irony of the fact that she knew Azriel intended to hold to his promise when she had no intention of holding to hers, she'd have once again told them she had no choice in the matter.