The purse he’d left was ten times as heavy as before, full of shining coins. I counted them out into smooth-sided towers, to try and put my mind into order along with them. “We’ll leave,” my mother said. I hadn’t told her what the Staryk had promised, or threatened, but she didn’t like it anyway: an elven lord coming to demand I give him gold. “We’ll go to my father, or farther away,” but I felt sure that wasn’t any good. I hadn’t wanted to believe in the Staryk at all, but now that I couldn’t help it, I didn’t believe there was a place I could run away that he wouldn’t find some way to follow. And if I did, then what? My whole life afraid, looking around for the sound of footfalls in snow?
Anyway, we couldn’t just go. It would mean bribes to cross each border, and a new home wherever we found ourselves in the end, and who knew how they’d treat us when we got there? We’d heard enough stories of what happened to our people in other countries, under kings and bishops who wanted their own debts forgiven, and to fill their purses with confiscated wealth.
So I put the six towers of coins, ten in each, back into the purse, and I sent Wanda for Oleg’s sledge. We drove back to the city that very night, not to lose any of my precious time. “Do you have any more?” Isaac the jeweler demanded the moment he saw me, eagerly, and then he flushed and said, “That is, welcome back,” remembering he had manners.
“Yes, I have more,” I said, and spilled them out on the cloth. “I need to give back sixty gold this time,” I told him.
He was already turning them over with his hands, his face alight with hunger. “I couldn’t remember,” he said, half to himself, and then he heard what I’d said and gawked at me. “I need a little profit for the work that this will take!”
“There’s enough to make ten rings, at ten gold each,” I said.
“I couldn’t sell them all.”
“Yes, you could,” I said. That, I was sure of: if the duke had a ring of fairy silver, every wealthy man and woman in the city needed a ring just like it, right away.
He frowned down over the coins, stirring them with his fingers, and sighed. “I’ll make a necklace, and see what we can get.”
“You really don’t think you can sell ten rings?” I said, surprised, wondering if I was wrong.
“I want to make a necklace,” he said, which didn’t seem very sensible to me, but perhaps he thought it would show his work off and make a name for him. I didn’t really mind as long as I could pay off my Staryk for another week.
“I only have three days,” I said. “Can you do it that quickly?”
He groaned. “Why must you ask for impossibilities?”
“Do those look possible to you?” I said, pointing at the coins, and he couldn’t really argue with that.
I had to sit with him while he worked, and manage the people who came to the stall wanting other things from him; he didn’t want to talk to anyone and be interrupted. Most of them were busy and irritated servants, some of them expecting goods to be finished; they snapped and glared, wanting me to cower, but I met their bluster too and said coolly, “Surely you can see what Master Isaac is working on. I’m sure your mistress or your master wouldn’t wish you to interrupt a patron I cannot name, but who would purchase such a piece,” and I waved to send their eyes over to the worktable, where the full sunlight shone on the silver beneath his hands. Its cold gleam silenced them; they stood staring a little while and then went away, without trying to argue again.
I noticed that Isaac tried to save a few of the coins aside while he worked, as though he wanted to keep them to remember. I thought of asking him for one to keep myself; but it didn’t work. On the morning of the third day, he sighed and took the last of the ones he’d saved and melted it down, and strung a last bit of silver lace upon the design. “It’s done,” he said afterward, and picked it up in his hands: the silver hung over his broad palms like icicles, and we stood looking at it silently together for a while.
“Will you send to the duke?” I asked.
He shook his head and took out a box from his supplies: square and made of carved wood lined with black velvet, and he laid the necklace carefully inside. “No,” he said. “For this, I will go to him. Do you want to come?”
“Can I go and change my dress?” I said, a little doubtfuclass="underline" I didn’t really want the necklace to go so far out of my sight unpurchased, but I was wearing a plain work dress only for sitting in the market all day.
“How far do you live?” he said, just as doubtful.
“My grandfather’s house is only down the street with the ash tree and around the corner,” I said. “Three doors down from the red stables.”
He frowned a moment. “That’s Panov Moshel’s house.”
“That’s my grandfather,” I said, and he looked at me, surprised, and then in a new way I didn’t understand until I was inside, putting on my good dress with the fur and the gold buttons, and I looked down at myself and patted my hair and wondered if I looked well, and then my cheeks prickled with sudden heat. “Do you know Isaac, the jeweler?” I blurted to my grandmother, turning away from the brass mirror.
She peered at me over her spectacles, narrowly. “I’ve met his mother. He’s a respectable young man,” she allowed, after some thought. “Do you want me to put up your hair again?”
So I took a little longer than he would have liked, I suspect, to come back; then we went together to the gates and through the wall around our quarter, and walked into the streets of the city. The houses nearest were mean and low, run-down; but Isaac led me to the wider streets, past an enormous church of gray stone with windows like jewelry themselves, and finally to the enormous mansions of the nobles. I couldn’t help staring at the iron fences wrought into lions and writhing dragons, and the walls covered with vining fruits and flowers sculpted out of stone. I admit I was glad not to be alone when we went through the open gates and up the wide stone steps swept clear of snow.
Isaac spoke to one of the servants. We were taken to a small room to wait: no one offered us anything to drink, or a place to sit, and a manservant stood looking at us with disapproval. I was grateful, though: irritation made me feel less small and less tempted to gawk. Finally the servant who had come to the market last time came in and demanded to know our business. Isaac brought out the box and showed him the necklace; he stared down at it, and then said shortly, “Very well,” and went away again. Half an hour later he reappeared and ordered us to follow him: we were led up back stairs and then abruptly emerged into a hall more sumptuous than anything I had ever seen, the walls hung with tapestries in bright colors and the floor laid with a beautifully patterned rug.
It silenced our feet and led us into a sitting room even more luxurious, where a man in rich clothes and a golden chain sat in an enormous chair covered in velvet at a writing table. I saw the ring of fairy silver on the first finger of his hand, resting on the arm of the chair. He didn’t look down at it, but I noticed he thumbed it around now and again, as though he wanted to make sure it hadn’t vanished from his hand. “All right, let’s see it.”
“Your Grace.” Isaac bowed and showed him the necklace.
The duke stared into the box. His face didn’t change, but he stirred the necklace gently on its bed with one finger, just barely moving the looped lacelike strands of it. He finally drew a breath and let it out again through his nose. “And how much do you ask for it?”
“Your Grace, I cannot sell it for less than a hundred and fifty.”