The Jewel and Her Lapidary (4 page)

Nal narrowed her eyes. “You risk her life as well as yours.”

Sima shook her head again. “To do otherwise would destroy me. As it destroyed my father.”
As you destroyed him,
she thought.

Despair,
whispered the small gems scattered on the floor.

Nal growled, “Find a way around your vows, or you will both die like your fathers.” Her boots struck the moonstone, scratched it raw. Sima looked up in time to see a glimmer of fear behind the anger in the commander’s eyes before the guards dragged Sima to the pit.

Sima recoiled at the thought of more time among the dry bones and echoes of the palace in her ears. But the guards did not hesitate as Nal looked on. They wrapped a long rope around Sima’s chest. Her spine scraped the cold walls and her armpits ached as they sent her down again. Her ears rang with the sound of the grate sliding shut and locking this time. The distant echoes of Lin’s weeping.

Sima’s shoe brushed something soft, then slipped on a bloody robe. She stifled a cry. The morning light shone through the grate, revealing the ancient boneyard’s base. Sima’s foot rested on her father’s robe, beside his broken body.

If she began screaming now, she thought, she might not be able to stop.

* * *

Lin untangled the platinum chains from around her feet and scrambled away from the soft pile of cloth she’d landed on. She smelled dried blood and fluids and, beneath it, an edge of rot. She heard a rat skitter away as a dislodged finger bone clattered to the floor.

A Jewel does not cry.

Slowly Lin moved toward a heavy body splayed on the ground. To where a bare foot held an obscene angle. The tumble had freed it from heavily embroidered purple robes and soft shoes plucked of their jewels. She rested her hand on her father’s ankle, seeing it clearly: cold and stiff. Gone.

No one was coming to help, not from the Eastern Seas or any of the kingdoms. No one knew what had happened.

She bit back a sob. She could find her brothers’ and sisters’ bodies in the pit. She could lie down among them and die here. She could end the Jeweled Valley kingdom and thwart Nal that way.

But if she did that, the valley’s people would be enslaved by the army. Forced to work the mines until Nal found more gems. If Lin lived, she might help the people, somehow. And her father had cared more about the people than anything else.

Lin tried to lift her hand, to pull away from the dead. Her body resisted. “Let me go, then,” she whispered. “Let me lead them.”

She found she could stand. Her chains still hung heavy on her, but as she rose away from her father’s corpse, she began to think of all the lessons she’d learned hiding behind curtains and at doorways. She might not know how to fight like a Jewel, but she knew enough to form her own plan. She would need to best the Western Mountains commander.

Tomorrow Nal would force Lin to marry a child and gain herself a kingdom. She would search until the cabochon was found, then use it. Unless, Lin thought. Unless there was a way to bind Nal, to make her choose differently.

She could offer Commander Nal a different gem, dug from one of the old skulls in the pit. Or perhaps she could find a silent one, something she and Sima had missed in their previous search. She could offer that. Lie about its powers. Lin had heard such tactics discussed over the price of mail and baubles sent beyond the valley. Of prices for gemstones with the valley’s mystique, but, due to cut or disposition, without their power.

If there wasn’t a suitable gem, Lin thought, she could fall back on her original plan: resistance. Nal was the usurper. Lin was the Jewel. Perhaps, in time, her actions—and her horrible, hot, chafing veil—might inspire the people of the valley to rebel against their captors.

Perhaps Lin could live with that. Especially with Sima by her side. And especially if Nal did not have the Star Cabochon.

The kingdom is your setting. You are its light.

She looked at her father’s waxen face then, at the long stretch of his body. It was up to her, now.

She would be the valley’s Jewel, no matter the cost.

From the other side of the pit, she heard commotion. Sima scrambled against the wall as she was lowered into the pit. She had refused Nal too.

The lapidary had always been at her side. Lin breathed relief. She would remain so. Even now, as the light’s angle changed and the pit grew dim and the echoes of the dead swelled in Lin’s ears.

* * *

A lapidary protects their Jewel.

“Come away, Lin,” Sima said. Her Jewel stared unblinking at her father’s corpse and did not respond. Sima found a corner clear of bones and steered Lin toward it.

Commander Nal called to them from above, “Your baubles and trinkets are worthless, lapidary.” A rain of the smallest lesser gems pelted Sima and hit Lin’s veil with hard sounds. “None of them do anything.” Opals and topaz littered the floor, kept from breaking by their settings. Sima noticed Nal had not tossed down the emeralds and sapphires.

Still, she did not respond. She did not look up.

“Next time, it won’t be gems I pour through this grate. You will have better answers for me in the morning,” Nal said, then walked away, her heels loud above them. Her retreat was followed by sounds of the army clearing the hall, headed for softer quarters. Then nothing beyond the whispers of topaz and opal.
Despair.
Loss.

They tugged at her mind, trying to break it. But the gems were bound, still. And Sima still had two vows. She would not let them tempt her to set them free.

“Can you hear them, Highness?” Sima asked. Lin shook her head. That was a blessing.

Sima’s father’s blue cloak had fallen from his body. She’d picked it up from the ground and kneaded it in her hands now. No more gems hidden in seams or pockets. Sima kept her eye on the bodies as she folded the cloak for Lin.

“We are the kingdom now,” Lin whispered as the links of her platinum veil rattled against the stone walls of their prison. Then she laughed. “Nal thought we would be easy.”

“The valley made chain mail and baubles, Highness. Not fighters,” Sima said. “Without the great gems to protect us, Nal is right.”

In the shadows that her eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to, Sima saw Lin’s head dip under the weight of her veil. She knew so well the sharp angles of Lin’s cheekbones, the soft curve of her ear. These were features that demanded a fine gold diadem linked to a thin nose ring, to draw the eye down to the lips. Not heavy chains.

“If I were a proper lapidary,” Sima began, remembering what Lin had said to Nal.

“Your father was a proper lapidary,” Lin countered, before she pressed her hands to her lips.

“He could hear gems, and control them. He mastered the art of binding; he could cut new gems. All of this made him powerful and greedy for more. But without his vows, he was no lapidary.” Sima choked the words out. “As for me? I abandoned you, then failed to run away. I am no better at my vows.”

Lin looked at Sima, holding her gaze. “You kept your vows. You did not betray me.” She stroked Sima’s hair. The platinum chains jangled as her hand moved.

With her words, the gems were silenced. Sima breathed relief.
A l
apidary obeys
their
Jewel.

When she was three, she’d heard the gems for the first time and her father had celebrated, showering the court with garnets and carnelian. She’d clawed her ears bloody until her father had given her the first vow. Had taken the voices away with heat and metal. “Only lapidaries can hear the gems, though all are compelled to obey. Only lapidaries can speak the gems,” he’d praised her, cautiously. More bands followed against the endless barrage of whispers from the valley’s gems. She’d traced her vows until her fingers ached.
A lapidary must. A l
apidary must not.

She’d learned to bind weak gems with metal bands, quieting them. She’d set them and taught them to whisper small hopes, to reflect her intent, not amplify her fears. She’d learned to draw a bead of solder along a join with heat. But the greater gems had refused to answer her or obey. Father had smoothed her hair so when she’d failed to invoke a gem, though his hands trembled. “The greater gems ignore you,” he’d said, “because you fear them. You have no reason to fear them. A setting stills a gem’s wildness. Your vows protect you from their whispers. With a great gem in an expert bezel, you can bind a kingdom, or destroy it.”

Sima had tried harder. But when the king betrothed the youngest Jewel, the last of his children, to a son of the Eastern Seas, Sima’s father smiled. “He won’t send a powerful lapidary to a seaside court. There is hope for you.”

Now, as her doubts flared, the opals and topaz on the pit floor muttered
Escape. Despair.

When Lin finally laid her head on the blue cloak, Sima rose and crossed the damp pit to tend the bodies. Soon, the king lay in as much state as Sima could give him, his arms crossed, his body wrapped in purple. The terrible burns on his mouth, Sima covered with a strip of cloth torn from her own gown. He’d choked and clawed at his throat as the burning poison concealed in his wine had ended him. Had ended the kingdom. Aqua fortis: alumen from the mountains. Used by lapidaries to separate valley diamonds from their mineral cloaks.

A lapidary must not betray their Jewel.

She turned to stand over her father’s body. All angles and shards now. Her anger surged. How could he do this to the court? To her?

He’d shouted curses and horrors from the moment he’d betrayed the king and unbound the Star Cabochon, Sima realized. Shouted more as he broke the other major gems, before he let Sima and Lin out of the pit. He’d babbled the plan at them as he’d climbed the steps up the wall, words tumbling from his mouth like water over river rocks. But he hadn’t made a single sound when he fell.

He, whose pride was his ability to speak. Who had screamed and struggled for control, arguing with the gems, once his vows had broken. He had fallen silent, his jaw locked tight before he died.

Sima reached her fingers out to touch her father’s mouth. It was dry as paper in the damp pit. She pulled on his lip, pressing down until his jaw parted. On her father’s swollen tongue, the Star Cabochon sparkled red and wild. Sima gasped and shut the dead man’s mouth before the stone could whisper her mad too.

Her father’s skull, Sima realized, was what held the Star Cabochon quiet now. Kept her from going mad with its demands. Her hands shook at the thought. How they needed that gem. But could she bind it? And if she did manage that, could she command it?

Sima reached into her sleeve and groaned. Her tools were in her cloak, which Nal had taken.

A l
apidary is never without their tools.

She touched her father’s sleeve. Felt the hidden pocket. Loosed an inner tie. His stash of files, cutters, needle pliers, the small bezel wires and the large, the tiny strike-torch—the trust of a Jeweled Valley lapidary—unrolled onto the floor.

She looked at her father’s closed mouth one last time.
A l
apidary obeys Jewel first, gem second.

Then she whispered her vows over and over to deaden the voice of the ruby. She pried the gem from her father’s mouth. She wrapped it as fast as her fingers would allow in a low bezel.

The six-armed star, a titanium dioxide flaw made radiant by what surrounded it, began to glow within the ruby.

It whispered
Power.
It sang
Control.
Sima’s mind spun with images of herself on the amber throne.

She worked faster, singing to drown the gem’s voice. She laced thicker platinum wire to form a claw bezel. Pressed that tight over the gem. Soldered it down. The star dimmed when she wrapped the claws, six of them, over its white arms. When she finished, Sima was drenched in sweat. Her head pounded. And she held the Star Cabochon in her palm.

She raised her head to find Lin standing beside her. She hadn’t heard the Jewel’s chains, she’d been so focused on the gem.

“That is beautiful work,” Lin said, staring at the gem and at the body of the royal lapidary. She turned and searched Sima’s face. “Can you command it?”

“I don’t know. I have only tried to bind it.”
To quiet it.
Sima thought she saw a flicker of worry cross Lin’s face. “I do not want to risk betraying you. The cabochon will ask me to, if I am not strong enough. It wants its freedom.”

“I know you will not betray me now,” Lin said. “But I ask one thing before you try to speak the gem.” Her hands traced her veil at her brow, where she wanted the cabochon’s bezel placed. “Solder the joins so that no seams exist. And bring out the lesser gems Nal threw back, too.”

Sima opened her mouth to protest.

“No, Sima,” Lin said quietly. She caught Sima’s hands and held them. “This is my choice. It is what I can do for my kingdom.”

Sima nodded, though her heart ached. She’d keep her vow.

“Jewels belong to the valley. The gems too,” Lin said gently. “Not the other way around. Nal wants the Jewel, the valley, and the gems. She wants to make her son a king. She wants the gems to control the people. I must make her choose.”

A l
apidary who betrays her Jewel is shattered.

Sima remembered her father’s voice causing the cabochon to glow whenever he’d said its name. Such control. Such power. Soon it had glowed all the time. She remembered how her father had sent to the mountains for supplies he needed to cut new stones to strengthen the kingdom. Aqua fortis, muriatic.

“We must use the cabochon against Nal first. To compel her to leave.”
A l
apidary must.
Sima swallowed her fear and gathered the lesser gems from the pit floor, sparkling in their bezels. She sparked the torch and began to solder the chains around the Star Cabochon’s bezel. The veil, which had hung loose, pulled taut against Lin’s back and neck. “Is it too much?” she asked.

“Keep going.”

Sima placed the lesser gems in the chains of Lin’s veil, wherever they fit. She invoked them as best she could. When moonlight sifted through the grate, the set gems whispered: opals spoke of
rebellion;
the topaz of
revenge
. Only the Star Cabochon was silent.