Thornlost (Book 3) by Melanie Rawn Read Free Book Online Page B

dreamless sleep with the application of a thornful of blockweed.
    * * *
    “ A mazing, wasn’t it?” Blye remarked the next afternoon. She had returned that rainy morning to Gallantrybanks with her in-laws, though Jed had stayed behind in Hilldrop to supervise the final fittings on Mieka’s refurbished barn. “Lady Jaspiela Highcollar, mixing with the common folk at a country party!”
    “Did she ‘mix’? I never saw her ‘mixing’—in fact, she told me flat out that she hadn’t even spoken to any of Mieka’s neighbors.”
    Cade handed her another glass plate from the set she was preparing for display. Forbidden by Guild rules to make anything hollow, Blye satisfied the inspectors who came round by having all manner of acceptable things for sale in the shop. Plates and platters, candleflats and windowpanes, anything that would legally justify her prosperity. Her real money was in making withies for Touchstone and the Shadowshapers—but the glass twigs were hollow, and thus officially prohibited to her. So these she made in secret. Usually Rikka Ashbottle, Blye’s not-apprentice—because of course only a master crafter could have an apprentice—would be doing this polishing work, but Rikka was out running errands.
    “I imagine Mieka’s neighbors were too overawed to talk to Her Ladyship, but she was there, wasn’t she?” Blye slanted him a smile, dark eyes gleaming beneath a fringe of white-blond hair. She held the plate over a little device made long ago by her father: a glass beaker with a cork to stopper the place where one poured in the water and a thin spout for steam to escape. She could just as easily have used a teakettle, but the beaker was prettier, all swirled about with orange and yellow. Cade had obliged her by calling up a bit of Wizardfire beneath the beaker where it rested atop a steel ring. The steam fogged the glass plate, which she handed to Cade for polishing. This worked on wineglasses, too, but of course she wasn’t allowed to make those. Not officially, anyway.
    “It was a real treat,” Blye continued, “seeing her amongst farmers, blacksmiths, brewers, and such in their go-to-Chapel best.”
    “The working class. It’s escaped her notice that
I’m
working class.”
    She made big, mocking eyes at him. “With all Touchstone’s acclaim? Lord Oakapple’s patronage? Lord Fairwalk? Talks with the Princess? The Highcollar and Blackswan and Mistbind in your blood?”
    “We’re all of us just ordinary working-class gits, Touchstone,” he stated firmly. “Common everyday Gallybankers. What we have is what we earned, not what we inherited.”
    Which had made it remarkably painless to share the inheritance from his grandfather. And that was odd, because he’d been looking forward to it, counting on it, ever since he found out about it years and years ago. Yet here he was, keeping the bulk of it in the bank to provide for his little brother. That it was for Derien made it easy, but while thinking about it this morning, he’d realized that he felt
free
. This was even odder. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way round?
Money
was supposed to be liberating. Not having to worry about how to pay for this and that, being able to afford a fine place to live, servants, good food and excellent drink—wasn’t that supposed to free up one’s time and mind for nobler things? But it also would have set him apart from his partners. And he couldn’t really think of that money ashis, no matter what his grandfather had intended. No, better to live off what he made through his own work.
    He opened his mouth to say something of the sort to Blye—not about transferring the inheritance to Dery, for only he and his mother and Kearney, and possibly his father, would ever know about that—but whatever he’d meant to say vanished when he saw she was scowling at him.
    “
Ordinary?
When have you ever been
ordinary
?”
    Cade had no idea what had prompted the scowl or the sharp tone of voice. “I