Sapphira Gemweaver's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

By noon her apprentices were back at their stools, polishing garnet as if nothing had taken them. Sapphira crossed the workyard to her shop. The building stood finished at the front of the lot, timber and stained glass, ivy already climbing the porch beams. Lanterns hung from the eaves, unlit. Fifty-seven days on the list, and the sign above the door read her name in painted letters. Inside, the display cases were empty. She had rings and pendants enough to fill them, but nothing that would stop a wealthy stranger on the street. She stood in the doorway and did the math. Nightbloom had six other jewelers within a short walk. Two of them served the palace. A shop opened without a centerpiece to draw the eye would open to no one. She needed one piece large enough to pull the rich down her lane, and she needed it before the wood of the counters lost its new smell. She went out to the forge platform and laid her scrap tray on the runed table. Ruby, tourmaline, jade, a spray of small sapphires, three cut emeralds she had saved for a commission that never came. Not enough. Not for what she meant to build. She thought of hiring out for stones and dismissed the cost. Then she thought of the beetle. The Gemwing lived in the rotted stump behind her woodpile. She had left it there the winter before, when she found it half-drowned in a rain barrel. Its shell grew small stones as it fed. She had never harvested from it. Now she carried a cloth and knelt at the stump and coaxed it out with a smear of honey. It climbed onto her palm, shell bright with new growth. She pinched the ripe stones free one at a time. The beetle did not flinch. When she was done she had a handful of gems no jeweler in the city could match for color. She worked two days at the forge. She chose granite again, because granite had already proved it would hold her heat. She carved a standing witch, taller than the one that broke the sprite's song, and she set every stone the beetle had given her into the robe and the hat and the base. She cut runes for welcome, for trust, for a room that felt safe to open a purse in. She fused each gem at the temperature only she used. When the figure cooled it stood in the front window of the shop, one hand raised, eyes closed. By the third morning a small crowd had gathered on her lane. A woman in silk stepped inside and asked the price of the pendant at the witch's throat. Sapphira named a number. The woman paid it. By dusk two more buyers had come. Then a man in a gray cloak stopped at her window. He did not come in. He studied the idol a long time, and then he turned and walked back the way he had come.