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learned that a family of Gypsies had been discovered masquerading as Erok lowborns in one of the northern prefectures. The report he’d received on the matter had said that only a single member of the family still lived—a child too young to have yet taken the mark of his tribe. The mark had been plain to see on the stripped corpses of his parents and older siblings, however, so when General Murdock arrived in the village, he’d paid the family’s neighbours handsomely for their scalps and set out to bring thechild—a boy—back to Mordecai so that he could attempt to tap into the fabled healing power of the child’s blood.
    Now the child was gone, and while it was possible that lowborns had attacked the camp in retaliation for the hangings, the “strange sleep” described by the soldier smacked of Gypsy trickery. Moreover, Gypsies alone had a reason for wanting to save the child.
    Gypsies.
    Oh, how Mordecai hated the Gypsies.
    Though they were sly, they were not as sly as the repulsive little Gorgishmen of the west, the former lords of the Mines of Torodania who now toiled as slaves deep within the mines’ dark and dangerous shafts. Nor were they as uncouth and stubborn as the hulking Khan of the mountains with their long, dirty hair and the stink of their precious woolly sheep ever upon them. And they certainly weren’t as despicably meek as the Marinese, who, after having delivered a handful of their most gifted artisans into slavery each year in exchange for the rest of them being left in peace, had eventually abandoned their ancestral village on the eastern seaboard without a fight anyway.
    No, the reason Mordecai hated the Gypsies was that every last one of them was blessed with preternatural health and vitality—that and the fact that their long-dead clansman Balthazar had refused to tell him the location of the healing Pool of Genezing.
    Like every child in Glyndoria, Mordecai had grown up hearing some version of the legend of the pool. On frigid winter nights as he’d huddled, shivering and neglected, in the corner of the filthy lowborn shack in which he’d beenborn, he’d often listened to his mother tell his stronger, better-loved brothers how the Gypsies believed their kind had once lived a settled life in a beautiful paradise in which there existed a miraculous pool whose waters could cure any ill. How the Gypsies would supposedly be living there yet if one among them had not spilled the blood of a trusted companion at the water’s edge, tainting the pool and causing it to dry up; how they’d been a wandering people ever since, an echo of the healing power of the pool coursing through their veins—and burning in their hearts, the belief that their sacred pool would one day reappear.
    Though most people thought the legend was nothing but a story dreamt up by the proud Gypsies to set themselves above the other tribes, Mordecai had always clung to the secret hope that it was something more. And that is why, once he’d grown to manhood, settled old grievances and, against all odds, clawed his way into King Malthusius’s glittering inner circle, he’d begun kidnapping Gypsies in order to question them about it. Over and over they’d told him—first in terrified babbles, then in wailing screams—that while their kind almost always survived infancy and thrived thereafter, the heartiness that allowed them to withstand the illnesses that cut down others was nothing they could control or put to other uses. Incensed and certain that they were holding out on him, Mordecai had eventually turned to seeking answers within their flesh and blood itself, and while he’d found the blood of the very young to have certain rejuvenating qualities and the ability to speed the healing of minor flesh wounds,he’d never found a way to harness this power to cure his own great and terrible deformities.
    Then came the day that the mercurial