Sapphira Gemweaver's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

By the end of the week the front room stayed busy from open to close. Sapphira sold three rings, a pair of earrings, and a garnet cuff to a merchant's wife. Then a footman in palace livery came to the door. He looked at the counters, at the apprentices, at the open floor, and asked where a lady might be measured in private. Sapphira had no answer. The footman bowed and said his mistress would send word. He did not come back that day. She stood in the shop after closing and saw the problem plain. The stone witch pulled people in from the lane. The stained glass and the lanterns held them at the window. But once inside, every eye in the room could see every finger and every throat. No woman with a title would let a stranger watch her try a necklace. Fifty-three days on the list. Six other jewelers in the city, and two of them already served the palace behind curtained doors. She walked the shop and measured with a string. The back wall held a storeroom she used for crates. She pulled the crates out onto the workyard that night. By lamplight she and her two steadiest apprentices tore down the shelves and swept the boards clean. The room was small but square. A door, a window high in the wall, four walls of good timber. She worked the next two days at the forge platform. She built a fitting cabinet from oak and stained glass, tall as a man, with a hinged panel that opened to a padded bench and a mirror. She set small stones along the frame, cut from the beetle's shell that morning, and burned runes into the wood for quiet and for trust. She fused each gem at her own heat so none would fall. She hung a velvet curtain across the storeroom door and set a brass bell on the counter for the front. On the third morning a carriage stopped at her lane. A woman in a hooded cloak came in with two guards. She did not give a name. Sapphira rang the bell, sent the apprentices to the yard, and led the woman past the curtain. The woman opened a pouch and poured six loose stones onto the bench. She wanted a collar, she said, for a wedding no one would announce. Sapphira named a price and a date. The woman paid half in gold and left by a side gate the guards had already found. By dusk two more veiled clients had come and gone. Sapphira wrote the commissions in her book. Then she looked at the list of stones the first woman had left, and at the seal pressed into the wax of the deposit purse, and understood she had taken work the crown would not want done.