The Jewel and Her Lapidary (7 page)

A lapidary must not—

Sima couldn’t breathe in the vase’s confines. She gestured for Lin to move closer to her, and the exhausted Jewel obeyed. The two pressed together while Sima whispered the stones she knew well, the ones that would answer her when she kept her vows: the opals, the topaz.
Rest.

“Sima, no,” Lin murmured, but in a few minutes she slept, leaning heavily against Sima’s shoulder.

Sima ran her fingers along the platinum chains and found the few rings she knew to be weakest: rings not tied to the cabochon bezel’s tension setting. These she chiseled with her file. She braced Lin’s forehead against her shoulder. Lin slept on.

They could both run, without Remir. The guards had not returned from their post outside the doors. She’d heard loud snoring from beyond the vase.

They could leave the chains and help each other out of the vase. They could scale the palace walls and run for the river. But the cabochon would shatter.

Lapidaries must preserve their Jewels. Lapidaries must protect the gems in their care.

Too many vows had been broken already. The loosed gems would tear Sima’s mind to shreds.

Meanwhile, Nal’s army would pursue Lin. Remir might learn to invoke the gems without rules or bindings. He might make more. This would drive him mad, but the destruction he might cause in the meantime made Sima work even faster. His connection to the gems would outweigh any feeling he had for the people.

Sima slid an arm into the veil, fingers spread wide to brace the chains near the bezel. She hummed to quiet the shatter charms and steadied the most important links with her files, bracing them against solder points and knots. She pushed her foot behind Lin’s, then slipped three small gems from their settings. Even the Jewel didn’t know about these. Lin’s cuffs loosened.

Gems began to whisper as their settings were disturbed.
Revenge.
Peace.
Power.
Sorrow.
Escape.
Sima knew what they offered her. She moved faster to finish what she’d begun.

Gingerly, Sima pulled Lin, still sleeping, from the veil with one hand, while her other arm shook with the effort of bracing the headdress. Her elbow banged the vase’s wall. Her head pulsed with the gems’ demands. Then Sima stepped beneath the veil and lowered the headdress onto her own forehead. The chain mail and the heavy cabochon masked her face. Dear Valley, the weight.

A lapidary must work through pain.

Lin woke when the veil’s burden lifted from her skin. Still groggy, she reached to pull Sima from the garment.

“We’ll take the veil to the caves and hide,” she said. “We will find a way.”

“You must leave the cabochon here, and me with it, Lin,” Sima said. “They will think the lapidary ran away again, not the Jewel. They do not know your face. They will not seek you out.”

“I will no longer be a Jewel.” Lin’s mouth curved into a frown. The gems were silent. The white-jade columns tinted pink with the sunrise.

Sima encouraged her. “You will strengthen your people. You will lead them.”

Lin looked at Sima and began to object. Sima interrupted. “This is my choice. Let me make it.”

Lin nodded, her eyes soft. “To be a lapidary is a greater honor.”

The gems stayed silent.

Sima gave Lin the soft blue dress she’d worn for days. It smelled rank, even from a distance. She removed the torch and the solder wire from the sleeve and began to close the chains in the mail, to tighten the cuffs around her arms. She passed Lin her files and the blue topaz.
Courage.

Lin pushed it back. “This gem is yours.”

Sima swallowed and tightened her fingers around the topaz, then pressed it into a loop of mail near her ear. She passed Lin her cloak and soldered the final loops in the veil. She invoked the gems she’d tucked in Lin’s pocket: the rose topaz for peace, a king’s battle opal for vengeance. Through the chains, Sima glimpsed Lin’s face shining with tears.

Lin adjusted the veil so the bezel rested comfortably against Sima’s forehead. She tucked Sima’s tools into a sleeve.

“Go,” Sima ordered her. She cupped her hands and Lin placed one foot in them. Sima lifted Lin high enough to grip the vase’s edge. She listened as Lin’s footsteps receded toward the guards’ door, hoping that Remir had left it unbolted.

Forget,
she’d whispered to him through the gems.

* * *

Local Walks: The Jewel and Her Lapidary.
A walk to be taken in conjunction with the Variegated Riverbank (p. 29).
A half-mile downriver from the Deaf King, near the entrance to the area’s largest cave, stands a limestone and cobalt formation resembling two joined figures. No more than a meter in height, the formation is said to bring luck and good fortune. According to local guides, a lapidary assigned to each member of the royal family from birth acted as advisor, servant, and jeweler. This is likely a conflation of multiple roles. Other nearby formations
include
the Iron Gauntlet and the Bezel.

. . .
from
A Guide to the Remote River Valleys,
by M.
Lankin
, East
Quadril

* * *

Beyond the wall, the valley slept. A white wisp of smoke rose from a riverman’s cottage in the predawn. Lin crept between the forest’s shadows through the night. The snores of the Mountain guards told her no one saw her passage.

She felt the jewels impelling her onward, to escape, to regain the kingdom. She wondered at what they were saying to cause her so much confidence.

And she felt something else too. Her feet through Sima’s soft shoes, stepping rough across the forest floor and its pointed leaves and nettles. Her heart, urging her into the unknown. Out of the formal setting where Lin had spent her life. She did not know how she would be received anywhere. Or if. She might be caught as a thief or a rogue. Without her robes and finery, she looked like any other young woman. She looked like Sima.

Lin clutched her fist around the gems hidden in the sleeve of her—Sima’s—robe. Her eyes burned and her stomach clenched. Sima.

What had Aba told her? What had her sisters said?
To be a Jewel is a sacrifice of the heart. You must become hardened to the losses.

She didn’t want to become hard. But the valley needed a leader who understood the dangers. There was still danger, from the mountain army and from the valley’s gems—the unmined stones still called from the caverns to some, they caused too much trouble when freed for those who didn’t understand how to control them. Lin would have to devise ways to close the mines, to keep them hidden from the army.

Lin stumbled toward the cottage. She wrapped herself in her cloak and knelt by the small rabbit hutch, until the riverman’s wife nearly tripped over her.

“Who is this?” the riverman’s wife said.

* * *

Sunlight poured in the high windows, making the hall and the assembled court sparkle. Commander Nal addressed the valley’s sole Jewel. “See how your people betray you. They do not love you after all. You will die alone. Your gems will fall into our hands, unencumbered.”

Now came the hardest decision.

Sima said nothing, so her voice could not give Lin away. She did not smile, though no one would see her if she did.
A lapidary must remain resolute at all times.

Nal’s guards lifted a vat of clear muriatic to one side of the vase and a vat of clear aqua fortis to the other. The smell burned Sima’s nose.

“This is your final chance, Jewel.”

Sima heard Remir rise to his feet. She held her breath. She could not put him to sleep now. What would he choose?

“Please,” begged the boy. Sima thought of the words she’d once worn, of teaching Remir to solder, to bind gems with metal. “Please,” the boy said again. “Do what you need to, but get the gems.”

Sima pressed her lips together.

Using iron grapples, the guards poured the vats’ contents into the vase. The combined acids turned orange as they merged at Sima’s feet. A cloud of acrid gas rose and burned her eyes. Beyond the vase’s walls, she heard scrambling. Someone retched.

Sima bit her lip, vowing to stay silent as the Jeweled Valley at dawn. The burn on her arm pulsed with remembered pain. Aqua regia sluiced over the platinum chains. A small gem fell from its setting and clinked to the vase’s base. Lin’s older sister’s rare green topaz: love. An opal: truth. Sima’s eyes could not see it in the cloud. She could hear them singing. Her legs began to buckle. The pain turned her jaw to amber, her ears to opal. The topaz pulsed in her hand as the reign of the valley Jewels ended.

When Sima could bear no more, she snapped the chain mail link she’d filed nearly in half the night before. She felt a crack against her forehead.

Remir shrieked. The edge of his voice softened to a wordless howl.

Yes,
whispered Sima and the gem together.
Go,
Sima whispered.
Freedom,
said the gem.
Yes.

With a noise like a mineshaft collapsing, a scream, and a fire all at once, the Star Cabochon of the Jeweled Valley shattered in its cage.

* * *

“Who are you?” the riverman’s wife repeated, her voice breaking on the last word. She reached for a thick piece of wood. Behind her, the boats still burned.

“Malin,” the girl said, the name gem-hard in her mouth. But her heart softened with each syllable. She would carry both their memories, beyond the castle wall.

The riverman’s wife held out a cautious hand, taking in Malin’s courtier clothing. “You are from the palace.” It was not a question.

“Not anymore.” Malin took the woman’s hand and walked toward the river with her.

Each step farther from the palace echoed with memories and loss. The Jewels. The gems. Sima. The sun rose and they heard a sharp sound, distant and muted. A shattering sound. She bit hard on her lip. Forced herself to stay strong.

Malin let the woman lead her past the burning boats, to a cave mouth where locals once gathered beside a small stone formation. Malin ate a few bites of food with the woman, though it tasted like ash in her mouth. Once night fell, valley men and women joined them. They asked her of news from the palace. She looked at their faces, their bruises and wounds. “The palace is lost. The Jewels are lost.”

She let them weep. Held her own tears back, still, though she was desperate to mourn. That would come later. After the valley was safe. When the people had quieted, she prepared to speak. “Before she died, the last Jewel said we must shut the mines.” She let her words sink in. “We must begin to break the Mountain’s grip, and the gems’ hold on us, from within.”

The men and women who were left of her people began to make plans, their eyes as sharp and shining as gemstones: blue and gold and deepest amber. Malin let them speak to her.

Many thanks to Tor.com for giving this book its proper setting. To my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and to Irene Gallo, for their vision; to Lee Harris, Mordicai
Knode
,
Tommy Arnold, Christine Foltzer, Carl Engle-Laird, and Lauren Hougen.

To Paul Race and to Chris Wagner, who let me mess about with metals, stones, and oxygen-acetylene torches. To Tom Wilde, who won’t let me have an oxygen-acetylene torch in the house but who answers any chemistry question put to him and only then asks, “Why do you want to know?”

To E. Catherine Tobler, Kelly Lagor, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Gerwel, Lauren Teffeau, Alex Shvartsman, Siobhan Carroll, Rachel Winchester, and A. C. Wise, who were all very patient with facets of this story.

To anyone who dreams about the layered histories of a familiar place, or an unfamiliar one, this is for you.

Photograph by Dan Magus

FRAN WILDE
’s acclaimed short stories have appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
and Fact
, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature,
and
Tor.com.
Her first novel,
Updraft,
debuted from Tor in 2015. She’s worked as a science and engineering writer, as a programmer and game developer, as a sailing instructor, and as a jeweler’s assistant. She writes about technology, culture, family, and reading for
GeekMom
,
The Washington Post,
and
SF Signal;
she blogs and podcasts about the intersection of food and fiction for
Cooking
the Books
at franwilde.net. Wilde lives in Pennsylvania with her family. You can sign up for email updates
here
.