Threads of Gold (Tales of the Latter Kingdoms Book 6) Read online

  “No, I think not, but I also think he knew he could not press his suit too strongly, or else appear churlish. However, I doubt that I can hold him off for more than a few days.”

  “It may not take that long. Master Jamsden came to speak with me after he had filed his paperwork with the court this afternoon, and he said it sounded as if they may be willing to hear your case as soon as the day after tomorrow.”

  My eyebrows lifted. Yes, I had been told that the court would treat this matter with some urgency, but I had not expected events to move that quickly.

  Tobyn must have noted my surprise, for he went on, “It appears that the justices of the High Court do not have any great opinion of our king. If there is a way to make life more difficult for him while remaining within the bounds of the law, then they will seek it out.”

  I couldn’t help chuckling a little at that revelation. “No wonder he was so incensed. Poor man, he must believe he has no hope of winning.”

  “I would hesitate to call him ‘poor man,’ but yes, he is most likely facing an uphill battle here.”

  Some of the tension seemed to leave Tobyn as he spoke. No doubt it was better for him to be thinking of how we were provoking the king, rather than the unwelcome news that Lord Edmar had asked me to be his wife. Although I dreaded to think what the outcome of my refusal would be, I also felt slightly cheered. Surely Tobyn wouldn’t have seemed quite so incensed if he didn’t have at least the barest beginnings of some sort of feelings for me.

  He had been standing a few paces away from me, while I sat in my chair next to the spinning wheel, but he came closer then. Not for the first time, I breathed in the soft scent of sweet woodruff that seemed to permeate the folds of his cloak. It was a comforting aroma, one that reminded me of my childhood, when my mother had taught me how to use the herb to make sachets for our wardrobes and clothes presses. After she was gone, however, my father did not see the use in wasting valuable space in our kitchen garden for herbs when we could be growing vegetables instead, and so we had not had those sachets for many years.

  “But you, Annora,” Tobyn said. “How are you faring in all this?”

  I lifted my shoulders. “As well as I can. The king blusters, but he has not made any direct threats against me. Probably now he dares not do anything, since Master Jamsden has filed the papers with the court, and they know something of what His Majesty has been up to.” Pausing, I slanted a glance up at Tobyn. As always, I could see nothing of his face. I had begun to wonder whether he wrapped some sort of cloth around his cheeks and jaw in addition to pulling the hood of his cloak so low. Otherwise, shouldn’t I have been able to see something? I went on, “What I cannot understand is why the duke should be willing to sacrifice himself, just to satisfy the king’s greed.”

  “I doubt many men would consider marriage to you to be any sort of a sacrifice,” Tobyn said dryly.

  A rush of warmth went over me at his praise. But I tried to appear unaffected by his words, replying, “I am not so sure about that. However, the duke has always seemed to be a confirmed bachelor. He must be counting on a good deal of the king’s favor by marrying me to keep me from getting away.”

  “Perhaps. Actually, Lord Edmar was married not so long ago, to the daughter of an earl. But her attempts to give him an heir only led to her death, and he did not seem inclined afterward to seek a replacement for her.”

  “So he loved her,” I murmured, experiencing an odd pang of pity. It appeared that even the duke had met with his own share of tragedy.

  “I doubt it was anything quite so romantic,” Tobyn said, his tone laced with sarcasm. “More that he was now free from the marriage which had been arranged for him, and he saw no reason to go rushing back into its bonds. True, he would at some point require an heir for his estates, but that could wait. After all, a man does not have the same restrictions of age in such things as a woman does.”

  Which had never seemed quite fair to me, but then again, so many things about the way the world worked were not fair. So Lord Edmar had enjoyed his time as a bachelor, and only now had decided it was time to give that life up, because he wished to curry favor with the king.

  And he desires to bed you anyway, I thought with some distaste. Why not kill two birds with the same stone?

  “Then I fear he will not be as easy to put off as I had hoped,” I said. My heart sank a little, for somewhere deep inside I had thought that if my suit was successful, and the king thwarted, I would have heard the last of the duke. But I feared that now he might still try to pursue me, and get a mother for his heirs and an easy source of gold in one fell swoop.

  “Perhaps not,” said Tobyn, “but it does no good to concoct misfortunes that may never come to pass. There is always the chance that he will decide you are more trouble than you are worth.”

  At those words, I glanced up at him through my lashes. “Do you think I am so very troublesome?” I inquired.

  It was possible that he smiled, but of course I could not see it. “Not at all, but then, I might have a slightly different perspective on the situation than the duke.” He gestured toward the spinning wheel. “We might as well get on with that.”

  True. Although each evening the process seemed to go a little more quickly, it still took more than an hour for the two of us working together to create the thick knot of gold threads that Lord Edmar came to collect every morning.

  I pulled my chair closer to the wheel, then gathered up some straw. My foot worked at the treadle, and once again the bits of straw were drawn from my fingers and transmuted somewhere along the way to something fine and precious.

  “When did you first learn this?” I asked Tobyn, for he seemed content to watch quietly as I worked. Perhaps he was still brooding over the duke’s unexpected offer of marriage to me. At any rate, it seemed best to speak of something else, something that might shift his thoughts elsewhere.

  “Some ten years ago, when I was not so much older than you are now.”

  Ah, that confirmed one of my suspicions. So he was my senior by a decade. Not that I really cared one way or another. It was still far better than the gap of twenty-odd years that separated Lord Edmar and myself.

  “Did you have someone teach you?”

  A long silence then, so long that I wondered if he did not intend to answer me at all. But, to my surprise, he took one of the side chairs from where it had been placed up against the wall and set it down next to me. This was the first time he had ever done such a thing, and I hoped it was an indication that he intended to share confidences.

  “I did,” he said at last. “My powers began to manifest when I was young, probably around ten. As you can imagine, it was rather terrifying to think of going to retrieve a ball I had dropped, and to suddenly have it spring into my hand, or to begin fumbling for a tinderbox, only to have the candle I’d intended to light illuminate itself, all on its own. To be sure, at first I thought I was going mad, or had been cursed in some way. That seemed to be the only explanation. But then my father hired a new tutor for me, and soon afterward Master Osford began instructing me in much more than merely geography and mathematics.”

  A tutor. So Tobyn’s family must have been of some means. Merchant, like my own? Possibly, but I didn’t want to interrupt his narrative to ask. So I only nodded, and he went on,

  “You see, those few of us who can still practice magic can sense one another. It is difficult to explain how, only that it’s something we can feel, like distant thunder. So when my powers began to awaken, Master Osford knew of this, and came to me as someone my family would never suspect.”

  “Didn’t they notice when you did not make much progress in the more…traditional…subjects?”

  He shifted on his chair, and again I got the impression that he might have smiled beneath the hood. “Oh, Master Osford was quite learned on a variety of topics, and so my studies did not suffer overmuch. What he did see was that I had a particular mastery for manipulating physical objects, and so we focused o
n making that skill stronger. I am not very good at altering the weather, or conjuring illusions, but I can change straw into gold, or send myself from one place to another by mere force of will, or” — and here he fished for something in his pocket — “change a pebble into a flawless ruby.”

  His fingers were curled around what he held, and he opened them, revealing a stone dark as blood sitting on his palm. It caught the light from the candelabras placed around the room like a sanguine blinking eye.

  “For you,” he said simply, then placed it in my free hand, the one that sat idle while my left held the straw that was being fed to the bobbin.

  For such a small thing — perhaps only a little more than an inch across — it felt very heavy in my palm. “I can’t — ” I began, but he shook his head.

  “And why not? It is nothing I took from anyone else, nothing that anyone will miss. It is something I made for you.”

  How could I refuse it, after he had made such a speech? “Thank you,” I said quietly. “It is very beautiful.”

  “You should have beautiful things. Ones that truly belong to you, and which aren’t simply given on loan as a sort of bribe.”

  A bribe. That was precisely what the king had given me — this apartment, the clothes I wore, the earrings I placed in my ears or the necklaces I wore around my throat. They had not been provided out of thanks for the riches I had already given him, but as an inducement for me to keep on spinning the gold.

  “I will treasure it,” I told Tobyn, and he nodded.

  “And you will not have to worry about having a setting to house it in.” He got up from his chair and went to the spinning wheel, then pulled away some of the golden thread I had just spun. His gloved fingers moved in an intricate pattern, and before I could even see what was happening, the fine threads of gold had been fashioned into a setting of cunning detail, with flowers and vines surrounding an opening just the exact size of the ruby he had given me. At the same time, I thought I heard the whisper of a few strange syllables, as if he had murmured the words of a spell while he was creating the setting for the ruby.

  Then he spoke in a more normal tone. “If I may borrow that for a moment?”

  I handed him the ruby, and he took it and slipped it into the setting he had created. A few more golden threads became a shining chain. As I stared up at him, my eyes wide, he came to me and settled the piece around my neck. There was something very intimate about that touch, even though gloves hid his fingers and he did not have to brush my hair aside, as the braid Rashelle had put it in for the night was looped over one shoulder.

  The silence felt very thick in that moment. I knew I should speak, but words seemed to fail me. There was so much I wanted to say to him, but I worried he would think me foolish. After all, we had only known one another for such a very short time, and even then, ours was an acquaintance of a few stolen hours here and there. It was only that I had never before met anyone like him. In truth, I was not sure whether there could be anyone else like him.

  At last I murmured, “It’s exquisite. I will treasure it always.”

  “I am glad it pleases you.” Another of those pauses, and then he said, his tone somewhat lighter, “I fear I have given away my secret. For I am known to some members of the gentry as Slade the jeweler, and that is how they think I support myself. I am sure if they were ever to discover that the jewels they wear had a magical origin, they would not show them off quite so proudly.”

  “Well, I will certainly not tell anyone,” I replied. “Indeed, I now feel doubly grateful, for I am sure your work is very exclusive.”

  I had said this with a teasing note in my voice, but I wondered after I had spoken those words whether he would take them as they were intended. Certainly I did not mean to make light of the beautiful gift he had given me. Yes, the king had provided jewels for me to wear, but none of them were half as lovely as the pendant Tobyn had created.

  “Oh, very exclusive,” he agreed with a slight chuckle. “Why, the ladies of the court must wait at least six months to receive their custom orders from me.”

  “And do you do that merely to torment them, since I just watched you make my pendant in only a minute or so?”

  “I have found that it is better to delay gratification sometimes.” He fell silent then, as if he had said more than he first intended.

  In my life, I had not had much experience of gratification, delayed or otherwise. But since it seemed that we had wandered onto an unintentionally awkward subject, I thought it best to move on and return to the original thread of our conversation. “And this Master Osford? How long was he your tutor?”

  “Until I turned eighteen,” Tobyn replied, relief obvious in his voice. “At that point, he said he had taught me as much as he could, and that the rest of it was up to me, to my own study and practice. His strengths lay more in enchantments of the air and the wind, smoke and fire, and so my own talents diverged from his quite a bit. So he went off, in search of his next pupil, I suppose.”

  “Are there so very many of you?” I asked. “Those born with mage blood, that is.”

  “He seemed to imply that there were more than one might think, but it is very hard to say, since those of us who have these gifts must hide them, or mask them in commonplaces as I do. There are none here in Bodenskell, other than myself, or else I would have sensed their presence. But that does not mean there might not be some up in Daleskeld Province, or down in Willensur by the seacoast. From time to time I have thought that perhaps I should go searching for others with magical blood, but I have always been loath to leave the city. I have ordered my life well enough here, and to go forth from that life is to risk exposure.”

  “I am sorry,” I said then, and he tilted his hooded head at me.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Have I not interrupted that orderly life? You come here to the palace each night and risk being discovered, only to help a girl you did not even know before a few days ago.” I stopped then, and it was my turn to give him a speculative look. “Indeed, how is it you even discovered my predicament? For it was certainly not the sort of thing the king wished to advertise.”

  Tobyn did not reply at once, but went back to his chair and sat down. “No, it was not, but I am always on the alert for anything which might sound as if magic was involved. I have a few…well, informants or spies, for lack of a better word. I ask them to tell me if they hear of anything unusual, and then I investigate further. The story of your father’s boasting at Baron Levender’s birthday gala, and then the appearance of the king’s guard at your house, did not precisely pass unnoticed. So I looked into the matter a little further, and realized that you had been caught in the middle of a terrible lie, and an even more terrible predicament, through no fault of your own.”

  A small pause then, as he seemed to stop and weigh what he should say next. In that moment, I was very conscious of how close he sat to me, how, if either of us shifted just the least amount, our knees might brush against one another. I wished I had the courage to do so, but something seemed to stop me, and I remained still, except for the slight movements of my foot on the treadle to keep the wheel spinning.

  And of course Tobyn did nothing to move closer to me. I thought then of what Master Jamsden had said, of how Tobyn had told him that he had had the pox as a young man, and had been forever scarred by that terrible disease. Did he now think he was unworthy of another’s regard, simply because of a misfortune that was none of his own doing?

  I knew I could not speak of it. For one thing, Master Jamsden had told me the story in confidence. And for another, I’d certainly not had enough encouragement from Tobyn to dare broach such a subject. He certainly had not said or done anything to indicate he had any interest of that sort in me.

  Save when he held you in his arms, I thought, then wanted to shake my head at myself. He had done so to comfort me, and for no other reason.

  It was so quiet that the sound of the spinning wheel whirring away seemed unnaturally lou
d. When Tobyn spoke again, I almost jumped.

  “Master Jamsden would say that I had something of his crusading streak. But I am not one to idly sit by and watch another be treated so unjustly, especially when I possess the skills to do something about it. And so that, Annora, is why I interrupted my so-called ‘orderly life.’ I could have done nothing else, when presented with someone so in need.”

  His words awoke a strange ache in my breast. I could not say precisely what that ache even was, for I had never experienced such a sensation before. I wished I could turn to him and have him put his arms around me again. I wished I had the courage to push back his hood and tell him that whatever he had suffered in the past, it mattered not at all to me, except that I thought it grossly unfair for a man of his courage and strength to be so buffeted by fate.

  Most of all, I wished I could be as noble and as brave as he. Perhaps then I would have the strength to lay my lips on his, and let him know that, while I was not sure I was deserving of his regard, I would do my very best to earn it.

  But because I was a coward, I knew I would do none of those things. My foot continued to pump away at the treadle, and I continued to feed the straw into the shining strands that wrapped themselves around the bobbin. Voice low, I said, “And I thank you for it, Master Slade. Every day, I thank you for what you have done for me. I hope there is some way I can repay you.”

  I allowed the slightest hint of a question to enter my words. Perhaps he would hear that inflection and understand that I wished very much to thank him and repay him. With myself, for I had nothing else to give.

  However, he seemed not to understand, or to ignore what I was attempting to offer. “No repayment is necessary, Annora, except the knowledge that I was able to get you the justice you deserve.”

  “Oh,” I said, my tone flat. Was that truly all he wanted? It seemed I was surrounded by men who wanted something from me — the king, Lord Edmar, my father — and yet the only man I actually desired to give something to apparently would have nothing of it.