Sapphira Gemweaver's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Sapphira spread the six stones from the hooded woman's pouch across her forge table. She sorted them by weight and by fire. Two garnets, a pale sapphire, a chipped topaz, and two clouded quartz. None of them belonged on a royal throat. The wax seal from the deposit purse sat beside them, pressed clean with the crown's mark. Fifty days left on her list. A wedding collar without a center stone was no collar at all. She wrote the client a short note asking for one more stone, worthy of the piece. The answer came back within the hour by the same silent footman. There was no more coin, no more time, and no more stones. The client had brought what she could steal from her own jewel box without being noticed. The rest was Sapphira's problem to solve. Sapphira went to the back yard and lifted the lid off a wooden crate lined with damp moss. The jeweled beetle climbed onto her palm and turned its shell to the lamp. She had already harvested from it once for the stone witch in her front room. She had promised herself she would let it rest a full season. She broke that promise now. She fed it honey and crushed mica and waited while the shell brightened. By midnight a single gem pushed up through the beetle's back, larger than any it had grown before. The stone came out deep blue, cut clean by its own growth, heavy as a plum. She set it beside the client's six stones. Next to it, the pale sapphire looked like glass. She worked the rest of the night at the forge. She laid the blue stone at the center of the collar and ringed it with the client's garnets and quartz. She brought the metal up past the heat other jewelers used. The gems sank into the silver and fused. When she lifted the collar from the block, nothing rattled and nothing shifted. It held as one piece. At dawn she carried the finished collar through the velvet curtain and locked it in the cabinet behind the fitting mirror. The apprentices came in and swept the front. A veiled client rang the bell for a bracelet fitting. Sapphira served her, took the deposit, and wrote it in the book. The shop ran as it should. She went back to the yard at noon. The beetle lay on its side in the moss, shell dull, legs curled. It was not dead, but it would grow no more stones for her. She closed the crate and stood with her hand on the lid. The collar was finished. The center stone was the last she would ever pull from the creature that had built her shop. She had spent something she could not replace to keep a secret she was not sure she wanted to keep.