Tainted Gold (2 page)

With a gleeful, under-her-breath cackle, Quillen moistened the tip of her index finger on her tongue and drew an imaginary mark in the air. Score one for the underdog, she congratulated herself. She’d finally done it; she’d finally bested Cassil.

Her foe vanquished—for the time being at least—she tripped lightly off the bridge and whistled her way through the Thieves’ Market, a semicircle of craft booths and eateries ringing the gently upsloping hillside. Multicolored triangular flags lifted in the breeze, and pale gray smoke, charcoal-scented, drifted across the straw-colored grass from the direction of the closest brazier, where turkey legs were roasted by the gross.

That was for you, Dad, and you, Mother, she thought as she savored a mental replay of her scene with Cassil. Her mind slid backward in time to the morning he’d evicted them from Granddad McCain’s house. She’d been only seven years old, but she remembered being angry, even though she’d hated the old American Gothic horror her grandfather had built with the lumber fortune he had made before he contracted his fatal case of gold fever. Unfortunately, he had transmitted the disease to his son, who’d mortgaged everything except these twelve acres surrounding the McCain claim to finance his fruitless search for the gold vein his father never found.

“It’s there, Quillen, I can feel it,” her father had told her that morning as he’d helped her pack her dolls. “Someday I’m going to find it, honey, and it’ll be your legacy.”

With the cardboard box of toys in one hand and Quillen in the other, he’d led her out of the house, then past Desmond Cassil, who had his own hair then, thin and sparse though it was. His face was clearly fixed in her memory, and it was the pleasure, the sheer joy of taking she’d seen there, that was the only focus she’d ever been able to find for her anger.

Since that day twenty years ago she’d despised Cassil, not because he’d hurt her, but because he’d taken everything away from her parents except their dignity. How they’d managed to hang on to that between having to move into the big, white Victorian house in town with Grandma Elliot and listening to the whispers about her father, poor Jeff McCain, who hadn’t been quite right in the head since that shell almost got him at Anzio, Quillen still couldn’t understand.

For six years she’d fought every kid in school and in the neighborhood who said her father was crazy. In ninth grade, however, when she realized there was no gold in the mine, that there never had been and never would be, it occurred to her that her peers could be right. In tears then, she’d gone to her mother, who told her that her father wasn’t crazy, he just had a dream.

A dream that had killed him when a shaft in the mine caved in ten years ago. Her mother, losing her own will to live, died soon after. She and Grandma Elliot had converted her house into six apartments, and they had lived there very nicely while Quillen commuted to Colorado Springs and studied for a degree in art. Quillen lived there still, and Grandma Elliot was buried with her parents and Granddad McCain in the private cemetery tucked in the gentle hills behind the mine.

Quillen remembered Cassil’s offer to either move the graves or guarantee their sanctity, and a smirk puckered her mouth as she wandered through the shady, sun-dappled lane that connected the Thieves’ Market and the Gypsy Camp. She’d never yet seen a bulldozer, or a money-hungry businessman for that matter, who understood or respected a word like
sanctity
and a simple, straightforward declaration like, “This is all I have left of my family, why can’t you leave me alone with it?”

A tinny
bong
startled her out of her thoughts, and she looked up to see that she was standing in the midst of the brightly painted caravans that lined the boundaries of the Gypsy Camp. Quillen winced as a ray of sunlight glanced off a swinging, dented brass gong hung from the lowest branch of a scrawny jack pine. The tree grew near the mouth of the Wizard’s Cave, which was no more a cave than the white-bearded, gray-robed old man striking the gong a second time was a wizard.

The dark gash in the flank of the quartz-riddled, granite hill (which in any other state would probably be called a mountain) was the entrance to her grandfather’s mine. The identity of the sorcerer, however, was unknown to her. He was a new performer this year, one Quillen hadn’t met at the orientation meetings. As she moved closer with the people who were taking seats on the hay bales placed in a half-circle before the black iron cauldron suspended over a low, stone-ringed fire, she decided that he had to be seventy-five years old if he was a day, or a top-notch makeup artist. Curious, she raised and rested her right knee on a bale in the back row and watched the wizard as he struck the gong a third time and moved toward the cauldron.

“Greetings to you all!” he called in a strong, vibrant voice. “I am Realgar, student of the great Merlin and inheritor of the secrets of the ancient Druids. I will this morn, for your edification and amazement, show you such wonders and feats of magic as have been deemed safe for the mortal eye to behold!”

Pausing, he bowed humbly, and Quillen grinned. Oh, that’s great, she thought, a medieval necromancer with a Wizard of Oz delivery. He straightened and raised his arms above his head, and his belled sleeves slid back to his elbows. Makeup, definitely makeup, she decided, as the well-defined muscles in his bracelet-clasped forearms flexed.

For the next five minutes she watched him create glittery flame and colored smoke with flash powder flung on the low flame beneath the cauldron, and perform tricks with lengths of rope and interlocking gold rings. He wasn’t a half-bad magician, and the tongue-in-cheek banter he kept up while he performed was remarkably informative. This guy, Quillen concluded, as she listened to his brief description of the methods used by medieval alchemists to turn lead into gold, has done his homework.

She watched for another five minutes, then reluctantly turned away. As enjoyable as his performance was, it was time she got on with her own, but she’d moved no more than three steps from the bale when the wizard’s voice stopped her in her tracks.

“You! Young woman in the green cloak!”

Oh, no, Quillen groaned silently as she pivoted to face him. “I, my lord?” she asked, bobbing a timorous curtsy.

“Yes, yes, you,” he replied, and beckoned her with an impatient wave. “Come forward.”

Oh, well, she thought with a resigned sigh as she started toward him. This couldn’t be any worse than the knife-throwing act she’d been shanghaied into the year before—as the target, of course—or the troupe of jugglers who’d nabbed her out of a crowd the year before that to hurl tenpins past her head.

Fussing with her skirts and feigning a fearful, wary posture, Quillen made her way to the front of the crowd and curtsied. Realgar stood before her, his hands on his hips, a glower on his face, and reached out with his right hand as she rose. His fingers just brushed her earlobe and laced a shiver down her spine as he raised his hand and held aloft two copper coins.

“How did you come by these, mistress?” he demanded, his expression stern as he gave her an upstage wink the audience couldn’t see. “This is a considerable sum for one so lowly born to possess.”

“I know not, my lord!” she gasped, lacing and twisting her fingers as she played along with him. “’Tis witchery, I swear!”

“’Tis thievery,” he countered as he gave his right hand a dismissive wave and the coins disappeared. Clasping his right hand on her left wrist, he tugged her around to face the audience. “Such a crime is punishable by dunking or the stocks. What say you, good people? Which shall it be?”

Oh, no, Quillen groaned again, she’d been wrong—it
was
worse. Unless, she thought, her mind racing as the audience called out their preferences, I can get myself out of this.

“Mercy, my lord, have mercy!” she wailed, falling to her knees and clinging with both hands to his wrist. “The black death took my husband and my children are starving! Please, my lord, I beg you! What will become of my babes?”

From the audience, a chorus of sympathetic murmurs overrode the chant of “Dunk her! Dunk her!” With a quick wag of her eyebrows that challenged the wizard to top that, Quillen glanced up at Realgar’s face. Amusement glinted in his deep blue eyes, and his unyielding expression softened as he drew her to her feet.

“You poor unfortunate creature,” he said, his voice dripping pity. “Good people, what say you? Compassion for the widow or justice for the king’s law?”

Quillen won the loudly shouted vote hands down, and curtsied to the crowd. When the accompanying applause died down, the wizard waved his hands in the air and, with a magic word Quillen didn’t quite catch, materialized two pieces of silver to replace the copper.

“This, good woman, is enough to feed your children for a year,” he said as he put the coins in her hand and closed her fingers around them. “With sufficient extra,” he continued, his bearded mouth quirking mischievously, “to buy a new dress and catch another husband.”

The audience laughed and applauded and rose from their seats as Realgar bowed deeply. Taking Quillen’s hand in his, he bowed again and she did the same as the crowd began to disperse. As she straightened, the smile on her face froze. She saw Desmond Cassil standing in the midst of the audience, his thin mouth curled in a crooked, smug expression.

It’s a smirk, Quillen decided, a surge of anger tightening her throat. A smirk that says I’m-still-here-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it? She started toward him, unmindful of the hand still holding hers.

“Whoa,” Realgar said as he pulled her to a halt and then stepped in front of her. “Don’t rush off until I have a chance—”

“Excuse me.” Quillen tugged her hand free of his and ducked around him.

“—to say thanks,” he went on, moving quickly and blocking her path, “for being such a good sport.”

“You’re welcome.” She dodged him again and caught just a glimpse of Cassil threading his way through the crowd toward the Gypsy Camp before the wizard stepped in front of her a second time.

“I wouldn’t have let them dunk you,” he persisted, trapping her shoulders in his hands. “But I might put you in the stocks myself if you don’t hold still.”

Peeking around his gray-robed arm, Quillen could see no sign of Cassil. She sighed as she looked up at Realgar’s face.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “I thought I saw someone I know.”

“Oh, well then, I’m sorry,” he replied, but the smile on his white-bearded face was anything but contrite. “You sure think fast on your feet.”

“I’m used to it,” she admitted. “I get snookered into things all the time. It’s part of the fun.”

“I’m Tucker Ferris,” he said, loosing her shoulders and offering her his right hand.

“Quillen McCain,” she answered as she shook his hand. “Your makeup is really magnificent. You honestly look like you’re seventy-five years old.”

“Thank you,” he said, half-bowing. “Actually, I’m only seventy-three.”

Quillen laughed, and his whiskered smile spread into a grin that creased the layers of wrinkles around his blue eyes. Releasing her hand, he unfastened his brocade-trimmed cloak and flung it over a nearby boulder as he leaned against the thigh-high chunk of rock and fanned both hands at his face.

“Is your beard getting hot?”

“Very,” he replied, lifting the long, silky hair that lay against his shoulders and fanning it, too, at his face. “Hope I don’t sweat my wrinkles off. They’re a bitch to put on. You know, you were really terrific,” he repeated. “Maybe we could work something up between us. Not for every show, just whenever you have free time. By the way, what do you do around here? I mean, besides loiter in the back of crowds looking so attractive that I kept forgetting where I was in my routine.”

“I’m a tale teller,” she replied, choosing to let the compliment pass.

“No wonder you’re such a great ad-libber. So your time is pretty much your own?”

“Pretty much.”

“How about it then? Want to talk about it over lunch?”

It was a pass—sort of. Though Quillen had no idea what kind of man lived under the white wig and beard, she was rather surprised to find herself seriously considering his invitation.

“Honest,” he assured her, as he drew an imaginary “X” across his chest. “I’m as harmless as I look, although I lied, I’m not really seventy-three, I’m seventy-two.”

Quillen laughed again and he grinned as he pushed up his sleeves. If those are the arms of a seventy-two-year-old man, she thought, I’ll eat my cloak.

“All right,” she agreed, wondering what he looked like under his elaborate makeup. “I’ll meet you here about noon.”

“Great. I’ll look forward to it.”

“Me, too,” Quillen answered, and meant it as she turned away and smiled at him over her shoulder.

Even though she figured Cassil was long gone, Quillen nonetheless searched the Weavers’ Glade, paused in the Children’s Dell long enough to tell two stories, then browsed through the shops in the Guildmaster’s Glen—looking for Cassil, not a bargain. Not that she knew what she’d do if she caught up with him—the festival
was
open to the public—but even giving him a piece of her mind would be satisfying. Of Tucker Ferris the wizard she thought very little, except to wonder where she’d heard the name Realgar before. It had sounded familiar when he’d first said it, yet she couldn’t remember from where. She’d have to ask him about it, she thought as she wormed her way through a knot of people near the scaled-down three-masted clipper permanently anchored in a broad inlet of the creek called the Pirates’ Cove, and heard a preteen girl in braces whine at her father that it was twelve-thirty and couldn’t they
please
have lunch now.