Page 19 of Ties of Legacy

He sighed. “Believe me, I had no desire to become a thief, but what was I supposed to do? I only wanted to take back my own property. Except I couldn’t even do that. The smith sleeps in his smithy every night! And did you get a good look at the size of him?” Elliot shook his head.

“So you were lurking outside the smithy waiting for a chance to rob it. Did it ever occur to you that your presence might have been why the smith never left?” she asked wryly.

Elliot looked up, an arrested expression in his eyes.

“No, to be honest, it didn’t.” He laughed. “Apparently I’m not a very good thief.”

“I did notice that,” Avery said with a grin.

He rolled his eyes. “Why doesn’t that feel like a compliment? It should be one.”

“Did you ask the villagers?” she asked.

Elliot shook his head. “I’m pretty sure they thought I was a desperate customer who was hoping to change the smith’s mind. And, if not, that I intended to camp out there for the full six months. I avoided any proper conversations because I was afraid of accidentally saying something that might tip them off about my true intentions.”

“You looked desperate enough to be planning to camp there for six months,” Avery agreed.

Elliot grimaced. “After a game of Hot and Cold like mine, you would have been, too.”

Avery fell silent. An accident of birth had freed her to travel without any of the difficulty that weighed on Elliot. She had always been thankful to be born to roving merchant parents, but she had rarely felt that relief as strongly as she did while talking to him.

“But if you were wrong about me taking the candelabra,” she said after several moments of silence, “shouldn’t you still be stuck outside the smithy? You said you get sick if you go too far from my cart.”

“Exactly. My symptoms are sure proof that you did take the candelabra.” Elliot paused, his jaw tightening. “Or what’s left of it.”

“What’s left—oh!” Avery turned to look at her cart. “You think he melted down the brass and made it into something else?”

Elliot nodded. “And the process seems to have strengthened the symptoms. If they’d been as bad when the candelabra was first stolen, I would have been too weak to have any chance of tracking it down. I think if the same thing happened again, I might…”

He trailed off, clearly unwilling to say the final word, but Avery could fill it in for him. Die. He was afraid that if he was separated from her cart, he was going to die.

If that was true, she could instantly forgive him for trailing her for days despite her warnings. He must have been terrified.

“But why didn’t you tell me all this as soon as I left the smithy?” she asked. “I’m a merchant, after all. You could have just asked to buy it.”

Elliot sucked in his breath. “Well, yes. That’s obviously what I should have done. It seems quite clear in retrospect. But at the time, I was afraid you would dismiss me as a madman, and I would only succeed at putting you on your guard.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t a totally foolish plan. If it really had been my candelabra—and if it hadn’t been for your unnatural horse—I would have gotten away that first time. Everything would have been fine.”

“For you!” Avery said indignantly. “I know you’re claiming the candelabra is rightfully yours, but I wasn’t the one who stole it from you. I bought it from the smith in good faith.”

“I know that,” Elliot said impatiently. “That’s why I didn’t steal it back from you. I’ve been saying that from the beginning. Surely the amount I left was enough to cover its purchase price at least twice over, if not thrice.”

“What are you talking about?” Avery asked.

Elliot cocked his head and glanced toward the cart. “I left you a pouch of coins! Don’t tell me you didn’t find them?”

Avery bit her lip, not wanting to admit she’d never even looked. He had said he wasn’t a thief, but she’d assumed that was standard blustering. It hadn’t occurred to her to dig through the crate when she had stuffed all the items from the smith back inside.

Elliot grinned, crossing his arms. “No wonder you kept threatening me.”

“I didn’tkeepthreatening you,” Avery protested. “It was only once or twice.”

Elliot laughed. “Oh, right, just a couple of times. Silly of me.”

Avery rolled her eyes and stood up, dusting herself off. “I acted perfectly reasonably in the circumstances. Are you going to continue to make a big deal out of nothing, or are we going to get on with testing?”

Chapter 8

---