Free The Rebellion by Isobelle Carmody Page A

any surprise at seeing us in the safe house, it was not evident.
    As a coercer, Domick had possessed that guild’s characteristic aggression, but his love for Kella had seemed to temper his intensity. I could not begin to imagine what had happened to turn him into this hard-faced man.
    “Has something gone wrong at Obernewtyn?” he asked in a voice as even and emotionless as his expression.
    “That is a harsh greeting for old friends,” Kella scolded him gaily, and I saw that she had not mentioned his transformation because she did not perceive it. It seemed that love was truly blind.
    Domick exerted himself to produce a semblance of liveliness.“Kella is right. Forgive my abruptness. It has been a bad night, but it is good to see you both.” He smiled, but his eyes remained remote, and again I found myself wishing for empathy—this time to tell me what seethed under the stoniness of his face.
    The coercer removed his oiled cloak, and I saw the tension in his movements as he crossed to hang it on a peg beside the fire. Sitting down, he reminded me of a spring coiling tight for a hard recoil. Maruman watched him, then hissed and sprang from my lap to prowl about the room.
    “You have chosen a bad time to visit,” Domick said, glancing up to indicate the rain thundering down on the roof.
    “Needs must,” I said.
    He gave me a swift look. “Need?”
    For the second time that night, I told the story of the rescue of the gypsy, and of our decision to return her to her people when Roland could not heal her.
    “It was a risky thing for you to have gone in alone to face the Herder,” Domick reproved. “Those villagers might have killed you at once.”
    “Not with th’ gypsy shootin’ arrows at them from th’ trees,” Matthew said gleefully. “Besides, we could hardly leave her to burn, now, could we?”
    An odd expression flitted over the coercer’s face. “Sometimes you have to endure a lesser evil in dealing with a greater one.”
    Kella stared fixedly into the fire, as if disengaging herself from the conversation, but Matthew was openly indignant.
    “Ye mean we should have left her? I doubt she’d call that a lesser evil!”
    Domick shrugged. “If you had been caught, it would not have helped her, and it may well have done great, evenirreparable, damage to our cause. Which, then, would be the greater evil? To let an unknown woman die, or to intervene and see your friends perish for it?”
    “We got her free, didn’t we? An’ we weren’t caught,” Matthew returned stubbornly. “If we thought like you, we’d nowt even have tried.
There’s
evil fer ye. Nowt even tryin’ to fix somethin’ that’s wrong.”
    “You are naive,” Domick said dismissively. “If the woman is as sick as you say, there is every likelihood she will die despite your help.”
    Matthew flushed. “Meybe I am naive, but rather that than bein’ someone with ice fer blood an’ a clever tongue an’ shifty brain instead of a heart!”
    They stared at one another for a moment; then Domick relaxed back into his seat. “And is that the reason you have come to Sutrium, Elspeth? To take an irrelevant gypsy back to her people?”
    I suppressed a surge of anger at his callousness and the temptation to tell him what Maryon had futuretold about this “irrelevant” gypsy. But with the woman so near death, there was enough urgency without piling the burden of a portentous vision on their heads.
    “I would also like to see Brydda Llewellyn,” I said mildly. “Maybe he could suggest some safe way to locate her people.”
    “I am not sure there is any way that is safe,” Domick said. “Is she a halfbreed? I suppose she must be,” he answered himself.
    “I think so. Yes,” I added more positively, remembering the Herder had called her that. “Does it make a difference?”
    Both Kella and the coercer nodded.
    “A Twentyfamilies gypsy would not break the Council lore forbidding healing,” Domick