The Rebellion Page 5

  This was exhausting, because the probe had to be densely focused to produce even the slightest physical force, but anger gave me additional determination, and in a short time, the tie snapped with an audible twang.

  The lout on top of the load gave a bellow as he and the wood crashed to the ground.

  A second after, a streak of lightning split the sky. People looked up fearfully, ever mindful that this might be a firestorm. But it began to rain, and it was not the burning rain of a firestorm.

  The lout got to his feet, red-faced with embarrassment, and flayed the mare viciously. She was so exhausted that she barely flinched under the onslaught.

  “Get out of my way,” I said insolently, pushing Gahltha forward to distract him. I blinked to clear the rain from my lashes.

  “Halfbreed trash!” he yelled. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “Then do something of your own will,” I rejoined promptly. “Show us you can move your fat bum as fast as you flap your lips.”

  He stepped forward, lifting his stick to strike me, but Gahltha snorted and reared, pawing the air. The youth cried out in fright and cowered back.

  Thunder cracked again and lightning slashed above, shedding an eerie light on the motley crowd as the rain gathered force. The storm created a mental static that interfered with my Talent. I concentrated hard and prayed it would not get any worse.

  “What’s going on back here?” demanded the gate soldierguard, striding back along the line.

  “The stupid horse lost its load,” the lout blustered. “Then that gypsy tried to set his horse on me. Savage brute of a thing.”

  “T’was the lightning affrighted him,” I said, lowering my voice.

  “He overloaded the mare and the ropes broke,” a woman said, spurred by a coercive prompt. I did not want the soldierguard to focus his attention too specifically on me.

  “Look at the poor thing,” another woman shouted after a mental prod. Then she blinked and looked startled with herself.

  “It’s a wonder it didn’t keel over in the very path,” someone else growled of his own accord.

  “And what if it did?” the lout demanded truculently. “It’s my property. I’ll kill it right now if I feel like it.” I felt Jaygar’s anger like the sun on my back.

  “Do that and you’ll be fined,” the soldierguard snapped.

  “Fined?” he squawked. “I’ve a right to do what I want to my own horse.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do to the beast, just so long as its corpse don’t clutter up the way. Now get this mess out of the road. Load it to one side and be quick about it.”

  Muttering and cursing, the lout dragged on the mare’s bridle to shift her onto the grass verge and began to move the wood. She stared out unseeingly, her eyes like dusty pebbles.

  “Greetings, littlesistermind,” I sent.

  She blinked and turned her dull gaze to me.

  “This funaga is cruel to you,” I continued.

  “All your kind are so. Your blood is curdled with cruelty.” Her mental voice was infused with a dreamy kind of hopelessness. She didn’t seem surprised to have a human talking to her. Perhaps she thought she was hallucinating.

  “Not all funaga are this way,” I sent, but the mare was silent with disbelief or lethargy. I sighed, thinking this was not the moment to convert her. “If you hate this funaga, why not run free?”

  “Funaga are everywhere. The wind spawns them. If not this one, another would own me,” she sent without bitterness. “When I take the longsleep, I will run free.”

  Beastspeaking was often difficult to understand, because sometimes animals used words differently than we did. Equines called sleep the “shortsleep” and death the “longsleep,” believing the two states to be related.

  I shook the wetness from my face and licked my lips. The rain tasted sweet and cold.

  “If there were a barud for freerunning in thiswaking, would you dare to run? Could you escape?”

  “There is no such place,” the mare sent flatly.

  “Littlesistermind, I tell you such a place does exist, and if you go there, you may run free and nevermore wear the coldmetal in your lips.”

  “Abarud with no funaga? That is as likely as skyfire without its roar.” The flash of cynicism told me not all of the spirit had been beaten out of her.

  “There are funaga,” I admitted. “But these have the power to speak with beastminds, as I do. And none of them thinks of owning or breaking or hurting. They think of equines as brother/sisterminds.”

  She showed her disbelief again. I asked Gahltha and Jaygar to speak to her mind and convince her. Only when the black horse came close and showed her the false bit did she believe, and then she listened carefully as he described a route that would bring her to Obernewtyn.

  The lout glared at me. “Get that black demon away from my horse, halfbreed.”

  I shrugged and drew Gahltha away at once, resigned to the knowledge that he would remember me when the mare disappeared. I sent to her, warning her to be careful she was not followed when she escaped from her human masters. “Run safe, littlesistermind, and perhaps we will meet again in thiswaking.”

  “I am called Faraf,” the mare sent. “And I swear this will be so: nevermore shall I curse the funaga as one, for I know now that some burn with the heartfire.”

  My eyes pricked with sudden startled tears, for the mare had paid me a great compliment. Beastlegend told of a heart that burns eternally with the souls of all beasts who die or are yet to be born. This shared heart symbolizes the harmony between beasts, no matter what their physical form or how they prey on one another.

  Beasts excluded humans from this cycle of harmony, believing they have no true soul. This offered an explanation for humankind’s terror of death and their desire to dominate.

  In implying that I shared the heartfire of beasts, the little mare was naming me her equal and the bearer of a true soul.

  I felt my spirits lift, for the rescue of the gypsy and the exchange with the mare reminded me that no matter what Atthis or Maryon or Gahltha thought, I was the mistress of my own life.

  We had drawn almost level with the gate now. In front of us, the soldierguards were checking the soggy papers of a jack.

  “Ye’ll be lucky to find buyers for that lot,” one of the soldierguards told the green-clad trader. “No one’s got much coin these days, an’ them that has coin wants exotics from Sador or lavish trinkets from the Twentyfamilies. Even with the Herders sayin’ it’s all Lud-curst.” I was surprised at the accent, for most soldierguards came from lowlander stock. I also wondered what sort of trader a Twentyfamilies was. I did not know what the word meant, but I was sure I had heard it before, and recently.

  “We’re away next,” Matthew sent.

  I saw that he was nervous. “Remember, don’t be apologetic or humble. It isn’t the gypsy way, and it will seem odd.”

  The Farseeker ward had been on plenty of expeditions, but this was his first visit to the lowlands. It was one thing to fool a highland villager and another entirely to lie barefaced to hardened soldierguards.

  “There may nowt be humble gypsies, but there’s plenty of silent, surly ones,” he said. “I’ll be one of them, an’ you can do th’ talkin’, same as ye did when we was caught by Henry Druid that time.”

  Henry Druid was a rebel Herder who had disappeared after being driven from the Faction for refusing to destroy his collection of Beforetime books. On a previous expedition, we had stumbled onto his secret camp, but it had since been destroyed by a firestorm, the Druid and his people killed or scattered.

  “My talking didn’t stop them taking us prisoners,” I pointed out. Gahltha twitched, as if reproaching my inattention. The soldierguards had finished with the jack and were waving him through the gates. I noticed a man staring at Gahltha and realized the rain had washed away the dirt I had rubbed into his coat. Even at his most unkempt, the black horse had always been magnificent to look at. More than once, there
had been trouble on expeditions because someone had coveted him. I had gotten into the habit of daubing his coat with filth as a safeguard.

  I sent a swift message to him as the soldierguard gestured for us to come forward. Gahltha’s smooth gait became an uneven, lopsided lurch, his head drooped low, and I was amused to hear him wheezing loudly as if his wind were gone.

  My amusement faded as the soldierguard reached up for my papers, for the other with the highland accent had turned to the wagon and bade Matthew pull the curtains open. We had decided to pretend there were only two of us, just in case the Guanette incident had been reported and they were looking for an injured gypsy. If either moved to examine the rig, I would have to coerce them.

  My heart leapt into my throat as the highland soldierguard climbed onto the running board and peered inside the cabin.

  “Nothing to trade?” the other soldierguard asked me.

  “Some beads and braiding,” I said, trying to pay attention.

  The soldierguard sneered. “No market for low-quality halfbreed work.”

  I shrugged, riveted to the wagon. One step farther and the other soldierguard could not help but see the gypsy. But there was a loud hiss and the man fell back in fright.

  “What’s that? Some sort of fangcat?” he demanded of Matthew.

  “It … it’s injured,” the farseeker stammered.

  “Looks like it needs knockin’ on th’ head,” the highlander growled, drawing out a short-sword.

  “Perhaps, but it is said Lud curses them who hurt cats,” Matthew said in a desperately sinister voice.

  He had gauged it well. The soldierguard was a highlander and fortunately was as superstitious as the best of them. He backed away hastily, letting his sword drop.

  At that moment, the light rain became a drenching torrent, and with a curse, the soldierguard examining my papers thrust them unceremoniously into my hand and reminded me that gypsies had to report to the Councilcourt for an extension of permit if we stayed more than a sevenday.

  “We won’t be here more,” I said, hoping that was true.

  “You did well,” I told Matthew when we had been passed through the gate. “Maruman says to thank you for preventing the man from knocking him on the head.”

  “Thank Lud for Maruman,” he said fervently. “Another step an’ that soldierguard would’ve seen th’ gypsy.”

  In a few minutes, we had reached the outer rim of the labyrinth of narrow streets that was the city center of Sutrium. Dwellings here were built right up against one another, often with no more than a single dividing wall to separate them, and had steeply thatched roofs that hung in shaggy fringes over doors and windows. Most were several floors high, which meant the streets weaving through them were shadowy and cold, seldom touched by the sun’s rays. But there were gaps, too, where nothing stood. I saw several before their significance struck me: They marked where dwellings had been burned. In some places a whole row of houses had been burned, while in others a single house had been razed and those on either side left untouched.

  “ ’Tis ice-cold out.” Matthew shivered. “Feels like wintertime rather than the Days of Rain.”

  “Better to be cold here,” I said, turning my attention back to the road. “Stops us getting comfortable and careless.”

  “I dinna think there’s much danger of that,” Matthew said. “Besides, I was nowt thinkin’ of myself.” He jerked his head toward the wagon’s cabin.

  “Look there,” I interrupted, pointing to a striped awning. “Just as Domick described it.”

  “Were we supposed to turn left or right now?”

  “West toward the Suggredoon. That would make it right.” I hope, I thought.

  Responding to my mental directive, Jaygar veered away from the main road down the next right-turning side street. It proved to be a narrow lane lined with workshops and frowsy, dilapidated apartments. Even in the rain it stank of urine and refuse.

  Without warning, a window opened and a bucket of swill was hurled across the stones.

  A little farther on, a man opened a door and stared out at us. He bore the scarring of a plague survivor.

  The plague had erupted the previous year in Aborium or Morganna, spreading rapidly to Sutrium and all the other populous coastal cities and killing one in three who contracted it.

  In the aftermath of the disease, there had been almost no one to work the farms, and this had resulted in terrible shortages that had seen hundreds starve. The shortages continued, as many of the farms still lay abandoned and unproductive.

  Uneasily, I realized that meant there was little to sell in cities other than information. The sooner we located the safe house and got off the street the better.

  We came around the corner and groaned at the sight of the sea, a seething gray mass in the rain. “We should have turned left back there,” I said. I was surprised when my senses detected powerful static from the direction of the water. There had to be something nearby tainted with holocaust poisons, I thought.

  Gahltha turned around so that I could direct Jaygar in maneuvering the cumbersome wagon from behind. I opened my mouth to speak to Matthew and almost bit my tongue off when Gahltha suddenly leapt forward and galloped at a breakneck pace back along the lane. I managed to keep my seat thanks to our mountain rides, but I almost flew straight over his head onto the cobbles when he came to an abrupt halt and swung sideways, facing into a short dead-end street.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. Then I faltered, feeling the panicky shift in my mind that could mean only one thing.

  Someone was tampering with my thoughts!

  The alien probe sensed my awareness and fled from my mind. As an immediate consequence, I could see what I had been prevented from seeing sooner.

  Crouched in the middle of the alley was Dragon, dripping wet and staring up at me with defiance and fear.

  6

  “WHAT DO YE mean ye followed us?” Matthew shouted.

  Dragon backed away from his fury into the corner of the wagon, bumping the bedshelves. The blankets fell from the gypsy’s face; I was startled anew by her pallor.

  “Have ye any idea how worried they’ll be at Obernewtyn when they find ye missin’?” Matthew raged aloud, for Dragon’s formidable and instinctive mindshield made farseeking her nearly impossible.

  “Keep your voice down,” I snapped.

  We had climbed inside the wagon. It got us out of the rain, but it was hardly the safest place for a screaming argument.

  “Did ye hear—” Matthew began wildly.

  “I would have to be deaf not to,” I interrupted in a cold, quiet voice. “Whatever Dragon did or didn’t do is not going to matter a damn if someone calls the soldierguards on us for causing a disturbance.”

  The empath-coercer gave me a mutinous look. “Dragon come, too,” she said.

  Even dirty and wet, her glorious mop of red curls dangling in rattails, she was still incredibly lovely in the wagon’s lantern light. I prayed we were not the only ones she coerced out of seeing her. Once seen, Dragon would not be easily forgotten.

  What puzzled me was how she had followed us. We had made good time to make it to Sutrium in a day, so she could not have kept up on foot. She must have been in the wagon the entire time.

  “Won’t go back,” she added mulishly, as if she feared she had not been clear enough.

  Since there was no question of simply sending her back, I might have reassured her, but she must not be allowed to think she had won.

  “This is a bad thing you have done, Dragon,” I said sternly. “I am very angry. Dameon will be terribly worried about you.”

  Dragon adored the gentle Empath guildmaster who had taken her under his wing. With a stricken look, she burst into noisy tears and choked out that she had left a message with Louis Larkin to say she had gone to visit some of her animal friends. That mollified me slightly, for no one would worry overmuch to begin with. At least she had not gone away completely heedless of the trouble it wou
ld cause. Everyone would assume she was sulking over our departure for a little while, and since she had fended for herself alone for most of her life, no one would think of finding her and forcing her back to Obernewtyn too soon. But we would have to send a message back as soon as possible.

  Dragon was staring at me with a woebegone expression. I put my arms around her thin shoulders with a sigh, knowing there was no use in trying to treat her as if she were any other disobedient novice. Despite her beauty and incredible illusion-making Talent, only the thinnest veneer of ordinary human behavior lay over the wild, half-starved waif I had coaxed from the Beforetime ruins outside Aborium.

  And the truth was, had I not been so preoccupied with my own thoughts, I would have felt her clumsy coercive manipulations and sent her back long before we had reached Sutrium.

  “Surely yer nowt goin’ to let her gan away wi’ this?” Matthew demanded.

  “No, I’m going to turn her over to the soldierguards to teach her a lesson,” I said sarcastically, wondering at the extent of his reaction. Did he think I would blame him for her presence simply because she’d grown attached to him? “What’s done is done. Now let’s move.”

  Dragon promptly turned her head and stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Enough,” I said firmly. “Lud knows how many tales will be told tomorrow about a gypsy wagon lurking in a side street. I think we have done enough to get ourselves noticed. Now let’s find the safe house. Get the wagon turned around, Matthew.”

  The farseeker obeyed begrudgingly. Dragon’s eyes were huge with apprehension when I turned to face her. “Not go back,” she begged. “I won’t send you back,” I promised. “We’re going to the safe house now to see Kella. You remember Kella?” Dragon’s eyes warmed and she nodded eagerly. “Good. Now you must be very quiet or else the soldierguards will stop us. Can you do that?”