As Good as Gold (2 page)

Her heart sank. Surely this was not the fate Alishandra had in mind for her. Daywen drew in a ragged breath and swallowed, hoping to open the tightness that suddenly gripped her throat. She turned to Lachlan, approaching as far as the gate in front of his shop, but no closer.

“Lachlan,” she said, her voice quivering ever so slightly. “Would you marry me?”

He studied her for a moment, then sucked his teeth. “Ye be funning me, lassie?”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“Shame,” he said, turning away from her. “I’d hate tae break your heart. I dinnae want tae marry ya.” He made some sort of stifled noise, and his shoulders heaved once.

A furious heat suffused Daywen’s cheeks. Her chest began to shake and her feet, fueled by her shame, pulled her away from the gate and sent her fleeing down the street.

****

The door to the blacksmith shop opened and Bel MacEuros came out after having stabled his horse within. His green eyes studied the figure fleeing away down the road. It seemed familiar. Then his gaze caught the face of his cousin Lachlan twisted until tears sprang from the smith’s eyes. “What ails you?”

Then Lachlan burst into belly laughter. He wiped his face with a finger, leaving a streak of black under an eye. “A silly goose of a girl. Dinnae ken if you’d ever met John Athalia’s youngest lass, but that was she. Can ye believe she just proposed marriage to me?” Lachlan let his laughter go with a satisfied sigh. “I should nae be laughing; she looks tae be following in her sister’s footsteps.”

Bel came forward and leaned on the gate. The figure of the woman turned a corner and was gone. What an odd piece of deja vu. “Oh? What do you mean?”

Lachlan shook his head sadly and joined his cousin. “Llannyn Athalia was a fair enough lass, then she got strange, almost overnight. Became obsessed with finding a husband. Must ha’ had her heart broken, for she went all strange one day. Some say it’s bad blood, others say it be a curse.”

A curse. That was something Bel understood very well. “Could ha’ been.” But then there was this other Athalia girl. “What’s her name? The younger, I mean.”

“Daywen.”

“Ne’er met her.” So why did he feel like he had?

Lachlan shook his head sadly. “Whate’er affected Llannyn looks tae be affecting Daywen as well.”

Ah well. The girl was gone, and judging Lachlan’s reaction, she probably wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. On to other business. “Now tell me, where would I find this old gypsy woman who deals with gold?”

****

As Bel travelled through the forest, he turned what Lachlan said over in his mind. Alishandra Orona, gypsy woman, dealt in many things that weren’t exactly considered above board. He said she worked spells and potions for those who asked. He also said that she insisted on being paid in gold for her services. She also dealt with stolen goods.

Therefore, she seemed to be the first logical person to go to concerning his gold.

When he found the garish wagon, he pounded on the door, then waited some distance.

“I know who ye are, Belenus MacEuros, Eamonn’s son.” Alishandra’s voice made Bel jump. He spun around, dagger half out of its sheath while she stepped out from among the trees.

The gypsy woman--she was not the old crone he’d expected--sashayed forward, one hand at her hip, the other tucked behind her back. “There be no business for ye here.”

Bel resheathed his dagger, but did not remove his hand from the hilt. “Neither you nor I can say that until after we have words.”

She shrugged.

“I’m looking for something,” he stated.

“Aye,” she said, as she began to pace around him. “I know about ye, gold-hunter. Ye not be getting any from me this day.”

The thought had crossed his mind, but only briefly. For all her strange and foreign ways, Alishandra was still quite human. He did not make it a business to steal gold from his fellow man. “Aye,” he continued, with caution. “I be looking for gold, but gold that rightfully belongs tae me.”

She shrugged again. “I have no gold that belongs to ye.”

“My gold was stolen.”

“Ye’r gold is always stolen. I can not think of any mode of employment available to the likes of ye that would pay ye in gold. Ye are no pirate, nor are ye a lord. The only job left is thief.”

A frown creased Bel’s forehead. Her words were true enough. He held out his hands in what he hoped appeared a disarming manner. “You must understand. The gold I possessed was cursed. I wouldn’t want that to fall upon the unwary.”

“The gold was not cursed!” she insisted. “I would ha’ known.”

“Ah ha!” he shouted, pointing his finger at her. Her eyes shifted in a way that let him know she did know something about it.

“Ye’r issue is not with me, but the thief. Take it up with her, if ye can find her.” She took a step back, then another.

Bel rolled his eyes. He already knew the thief was female. “Where can I find her?”

“Why, back in town, of course. I could wish ye luck, but I have no desire to because ye’ve annoyed me. Don’t come looking for me again,” she said in parting as she moved back among the trees.

****

Bel returned to town in frustration. If it was in the hands of the old gypsy woman, so be it. He had no desire to warn her about what followed in its wake.

But what if it wasn’t in her hands? What if she just verified it curse-free for the thief? The poor thief wouldn’t realize what was in store for her.

Thief or no, he couldn’t leave her ignorant. If he could get the gold back from her and dispose of it properly, then all would be well with the world. But if he couldn’t, or she’d scattered it about the community, things would happen. Unseelie things.

Hmmm, he thought as he meandered through town. How much of a coincidence would it be if Daywen turned out to be the thief? Something prickled in the back of his mind.

At best, she was. If not, perhaps she would know who the other young women were about town. At worst...

Well, it wasn’t his fault the gold was stolen. Yes, he missed it terribly, but at least the trouble that followed such fey gold would bypass him now.

He hoped.

For the first time in his career, he’d stolen--unwittingly, of course--from a creature that had no problems with running water. Bel didn’t discover this fact until after he’d landed in Glasgow. He stayed the night in an inn, then the next morning, discovered a squat little gnome sitting on his mare’s back.

“Ich habe meine Goldmünzen zurück jetzt,” it said. It had come looking for its gold. Gnomes were lords of the underground, and jealous guardians of their treasure. It had bypassed the protection of running water by burrowing under it.

Bel had fled. No doubt the gnome would find him soon.

Unless it had found the lady thief first.

****

“Belenus! My dear lad.” In her small yet comfortable cottage, Bel’s mother sat by a crackling fire. As her son stood in the doorway, hat in hand, coin in pocket, she held out her arms to him for an embrace. Bel indulged his mother, allowing her the affection of a woman for her only child. “You’ve come back,” she said.

Bel looked around. This was not the home of his childhood, nor did he wish it to be. The cottage had been a gift to her after he’d turned his first profit. Built of sturdy walls, with a good wooden floor and thickly thatched roof, it had been quite a change from the dirt floored, one-room hovel they lived in during his childhood. He didn’t miss it one bit.

“I wish you would come to visit more often,” she said as she settled her old bones in her rocking chair. “And,” she added, as he dropped a bag of silver into her lap, “not just to give me money.”

“I have so much now,” he said. “Who am I going to spend it on but you?”

“Find a wife,” she said bluntly.

Bel stared into the flames of the fire. A wife? He remembered how much his parents adored each other, and him, despite the poverty they lived in.

Bel also knew it wasn’t always like that. He remembered his mother’s tales of his clueless father, who she pursued for years through famine and war and brief moments of prosperity. She could have married another, but she only wanted him.

In the end, she resorted to desperation. She had acquired a faerie from a gypsy woman, and through its magic, convinced her only love to marry her.

His mother had found true love. Now she sought it for her son.

“It’s not the same,” he tried to explain.

“Don’t wait, son, like your father did. If it wasn’t for the faerie, we might never have been married.” Her voice dropped into wistful tones. “I wish we had more time together. We might have had more than one son.”

Bel laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder. His mother put her gnarled hand on his and patted it as if it was he who needed comfort.

Perhaps it was for the best he was an only child. Bel remembered his poverty-ridden childhood. “We couldn’t have fed another mouth.” Only after the words slipped from his lips did he realize he’d spoken aloud.

“What price would you put on love?” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “That was my choice: have the money to feed mouths that would never be born, or bear the mouths where there was no money to feed. I still say I got the better bargain.” She jabbed a finger in his direction. “You have the money. You can afford a wife.

“I mean it, Belenus Doran Eamonn MacEuros. You’re not getting any younger. Soon no lassie of marriageable age will look at you.

“Wait too long, and you will be lucky if she can bear you any bairns.”

“I’m not yet thirty, myself.”

“And how old will your wife be?”

Must he think upon this now? “I’m sure I can find one young enough to bear me many sons--daughters too. I’m certainly rich enough that a woman would forgive my great age.”

His mother snorted her disapproval. “And if you were poor? Would she look upon you then?”

Bel frowned as he tried to figure some argument that would please his mother, but she continued.

“Then again,” she said, as she gave the teapot on the table at her side a poke and a sniff, “if you were poor, you wouldn’t be traipsing all over the known world. You’d be staying put and working the earth and you’d be there for her every night.

“And then you know you’d have love, boy.” She lifted the pot, only the slightest of grimaces betraying the pain of her hands.

Bel rescued the pot and poured for them both. If he did have a wife, there would be someone who could be here for his mother, to help her and ease her burdens. He knew she was too proud to hire someone to help about the house. “If I did, would you that I bring her to live here?”

“Goodness, no!” his mother retorted. “She needs a house of her own.” She set her teacup down with a tink. “You’ve given me enough money I could purchase a very fine home for you. All you need to do is find a good, strong lass to put there.”

“No,” he protested. “That money is for you.”

“It’s far too much for my needs.”

“Nonsense. Anyhow, I didn’t bring you as much this time. I had a little robbery this morning. Some young woman lifted my saddlebags and made off with a substantial amount of gold.”

His mother’s eyes narrowed. “Gold, did you say?”

He gave her another one of his shrugs.

“It wasn’t by chance a hundred pieces, was it?”

Bel sat up. “How did you know?”

His mother turned from him, waving her hand dismissively. “Let her keep it.”

“I can’t. That gold is--” Cursed? Fey? Stolen?

“You can easily afford it,” she scolded. “Let her have it, and spare her the agony of poverty.”

“She certainly didn’t look impoverished. She was well-nourished enough to outrun me.”

With a speed he didn’t expect, his mother reached over and slapped him hard on his hand.

“Ow!” he exclaimed, shaking away the pain. “What was that for?”

“That’s for being a greedy, selfish, ignorant lout. You’re just as oblivious as your father.”

“That girl didn’t steal my gold because she’s in love with me.”

“But she’s in love with someone.”

“How do you figure that?”

His mother lifted her teacup and took a long sip, refusing to answer his question.

“Mother?”

“Do you know why we lived poor?” she said in a low voice. “Do you know why we farmed and worked so hard yet could barely afford to feed ourselves?”

Bel had wondered about that from time to time.

She drew in a breath before offering her confession. “I had put myself, and therefore my future husband, into a heavy debt.” She weighed her next words, not sure which ones to choose. “I’d grown impatient with your father. I’d told him I loved him. I’d done all those things girls do for boys when they love them. I even tried to seduce him. In the end, after a plot of mine to get him drunk and drag him to the altar failed, I turned to the final resort left me.

“I went to the gypsy woman. For a price, she gave me the Enchanted Faerie. It worked.

“But I owed her. To pay her exorbitant price, I had to borrow a great deal of money.”

Bel sat rapt in his chair, his teacup forgotten between his fingers. He’d not heard this part of the story before.

“Your father and I spent the next ten years paying it back, but we succeeded.

“Then we had one glorious week, free from all bond. We’d never felt so good. And then...”

Bel bowed his head. And then... and then his father had died, once the debt that his wife had taken upon herself to win the hand of the man she loved had been cleared.

His mother shook her finger at him again. “That young woman has stolen your gold as the price of love. And don’t you dare try to get it back from her. You forget about that gold, you wish her well, whoever she is, and you go on your merry way.”

He sighed. If only he could tell her the whole truth about the gold. “It’s not that simple.”

“It is that simple!” she said, her fist coming down on the arm of the rocking chair. She ignored what no doubt was pain. “And as for you, you are a fine, strapping lad who would make some woman a good husband.

“I don’t know what it’s like in those furrin lands you do your business in, but here, a good man is scarce. Wars, illnesses, all manner of bad luck has deprived us of enough eligible young men. You wouldn’t believe what some of these young lasses go through to find true love.”