Dragonswood by Janet Lee Carey Page B

shining over the wood.
    “Stars are jewels, my mother used to say. Heaven’s treasure free to anyone from prince to peasant if they have eyes to look.”
    I liked his mother for saying that. They were free for anyone who cared to look. No one owned them, yet even as I gazed up I felt the need to capture the heavens on parchment as I drew other things I loved, to hold the vision and keep it with me always—a kind of ownership, I supposed. Perhaps I was not as generous as Garth’s mother.
    “Free to all,” I agreed. “And these jewels can never be stolen.”
    Garth frowned. No doubt he’d been asked to look for the king’s stolen treasure. All woodwards had to scour their sections of Dragonswood. He gripped something in his hand. Seeing my curious look, he spread his fingers. A thin gold chain coiled in his palm with a single pearl on the end.
    A large pearl. “Does it belong to the king?” I whispered. Garth handed it to me. His fingers brushed my palm as he let go. I trembled near him, framed at the window, the fire behind him, darkness outside, and wind. I tried to give the necklace back. “I have never touched anything belonging to the king.”
    His brows went up. “Haven’t you? The dishes here, Tess, the quill you used just now, the chairs by the fire.” He nodded at the chairs behind us with their finely patterned needlework. “The feather beds—”
    “The king slept in our room?”
    “His sons did.”
    “The princes?” I stepped back. Well, that explained the rocking horse at least, though Prince Arden and Bion were grown men in their twenties now.
    “The hunting lodge is not as big as a castle, Tess. Not many slept in these walls. Servants and men-at-arms stayed in the outbuildings beyond the barn.”
    “Why didn’t you put us there?” I accused. “Won’t the king—” I checked myself. “Won’t the princes be angry?”
    He shook his head, smiling a little. “I think not.”
    “Do you know them that well?” I still had the pearl held out. He seemed reluctant to take it back.
    “As well as any boy raised at Pendragon Castle. I am a nobleman’s son, not eldest but a second son, so I was a castle page before I became a knight, and served here as His Majesty’s huntsman.”
    The pearl felt cool and silky. “How did you come by this?” Such a slender gold chain might have been lost under a bed and the huntsman would have opportunity to thieve it, I supposed.
    “You’re quite inquisitive, aren’t you, Tess?”
    He laid his hand across mine, the pearl shelled between our palms. I looked up at his face quite close to mine, then glanced away, dizzy with lack of sleep or too long a journey in the woods or…
    “You think I stole it?”
    My mouth went dry.
    “I didn’t, Tess. It was my mother’s pearl.” His throat sounded thick with emotion, and I guessed his mother was dead. Perhaps the black armband was for her and not for the king as I’d first supposed.
    He took the pearl, closing his hand around it so even the chain was hidden. The night wind from the open window blew my hair against his arm where the sleeve was torn. If it tickled through the tear he did not move to draw his arm away. I could not think what to say to comfort him. I’d nearly lost my mother many times to the perils of childbirth, but each time she’d strengthened and recovered.
    He broke the silence. “Why were you accused of witchcraft, Tess?”
    I looked at the hunched willow by the garden wall. “Why do you want to know that? You’d have turned us in by now if you planned to collect the fee.”
    “There, so now you trust me that far at least,” he said.
    My small shiver made him shut the window. We moved to the fire. Garth pocketed the pearl. The room closed in the way a flower folds its petals at nightfall. We did not take the chairs but stood in the circle of the red glow.
    “You were there in Harrowton that day. I saw you.”
    He nodded.
    “What were you doing so far south of here?”
    “You