Gemma Silvestre's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The first payment bought Gemma a month. It did not buy her gems. She stood in the drifting house at dawn and looked at seven empty benches. Her students had tools. They had the Mirrorstone on her chest to guide them. But a jeweler needs rough stone to cut, and Gemma had used her last practice gems the day before. The lesson had stalled before the children finished it. No stones meant no cut gems. No cut gems meant no coin for Edna. The clock was already ticking against her. She went outside to think. A panda the size of a barn door stood at the edge of the clearing. Polka dots covered him. He held two ice cream cones that did not melt in the warm air. Patches Sweetberry traveled the realm handing out sweets, and Gemma had met him once at a crossroads. He did not smile now. He watched a hippo in a red ruffled dress sweep her arms through the air, over and over. "That is Carmen," Patches said. "She dances. She is looking for a stone too. So am I." He said nothing more. With Patches, the silence was the news. Carmen stopped mid-sweep. "Six years of this arm work," she said. "My teacher still looks away when he praises me." She studied the Mirrorstone on Gemma's chest. The glass sharpened. In it, Carmen saw her own face, steady and sure, not the doubting one she carried. She went very still. "That stone tells the truth," she said. "I would pay to feel like that face." Gemma's mind caught. People would pay to see themselves clearly. But she needed stones, not more buyers. She said so plainly. "I have a school and no gems. My students cannot practice. If they cannot practice, I lose everything by month's end." Patches set down one cone. "I know where rough gems lie," he said. "Three years I carried a preservation spell across the realm. I have seen the mountain crofts and the river beds. Stones sit in those places by the sackful. Nobody cuts them. They do not know how." He paused. "I will show you the places. I ask one thing. Teach the ones who have nothing. Children who cannot taste. People who look away from mirrors." Gemma understood the trade. Not a gift. A promise. "Agreed," she said. "Bring me the crofters and the river folk. I will teach any of them." They ate first. Carmen had brought a golden salmon casserole, its crust split and dripping. The students came out and shared it at the benches. Over the meal, Patches drew a map on a board. He marked three sites. Mountain crofters with buckets of raw stone. River families who sieved gems from gravel and threw them back. A valley where quartz broke loose after every rain. The plan was simple and it worked. Patches went ahead with his cones and his easy way. He told the crofters and the river folk about the silver fox lady who could turn their useless pebbles into charms the healers paid for. They came. They came with sacks. In exchange for lessons, they brought Gemma a steady haul of rough gems. One family would bring stones each week. Another the week after. The supply never ran dry again. Carmen stayed to learn. She set a dull stone on the bench and cut her first facet. She looked into the Mirrorstone and saw the steady face again. "My braceo is not finished," she said. "But this I can do." She did not look away. The first full lesson ran from dawn past dark. Seven students became twenty. Crofter children cut quartz. River folk shaped river stones into charms. The healers bought every piece. At month's end Gemma carried a heavy purse to the crossroads and set it on Edna's ledger. Edna wrote the number. The debt shrank. She wrote it again the next month, and the next. A year on, the drifting house still floated above Birchrot, but it held a true school now. Gemma walked the rows of benches in her gem-covered dress, the Mirrorstone cool against her chest. Children who once could not taste or could not hope bent over their stones and cut them clean. Patches handed out cones at the door. Carmen swept her arms through the braceo in the clearing, finished at last. The crofters and river folk kept the gems coming, week after week. Gemma had opened the finest jeweler's school Birchrot had ever seen, and the stones to feed it would never run out.