Page 11 of Gilded Locks

Grace scanned the tent. It was rather large, with several cabinets displaying raw extracts from mystic deposits. A few shelves and barrels featured baubles embedded with bits of the same extracts. The case in front of her displayed various minerals and rocks, some smooth and glossy, others rough and caked in dirt that smelled like Sherwood Forest after rain.

The mystic tent always made the list of shops to visit, but not, as her brother might wish, to spend the single gold coin their parents had told her to set aside for each of them to buy something fun. The cheapest thing she’d ever seen here cost four gold coins.

No, Grace visited the mystic tent to search for Zerudorn gold.

She pictured the protective ring of ice around the crater in the forest fortress and the fist-sized chunk carved out of it—the ice Mr. Milner had stolen along with the Zerudorn gold he’d enclosed within it.

Grace shuddered as childhood nightmares flickered in her mind. With effort, she banished them.

The bedraggled Mr. Milner, restrained, stumbling to the town square platform. The hangman’s post with a dangling rope noose constructed just for the Rogue.

The fall, the snap, the cheers of a grateful town.

“There were no cheers, fledgling. Only tears and fear,” her parents had said, but the colorful image painted by the mayor-appointed schoolteacher still haunted her.

Poor Mr. Milner, she’d thought—still thought, even though she now knew how he’d betrayed his fellow Protectors by stealing the ice and gold to break into the jail, only to get caught by Sheriff Clairmont, who had been only a patrolman at the time. The ice had never been recovered, and there was no telling howmuch gold had been taken but not used. Only a drop of gold was found on the jail door’s metal handle plate where it had liquified a hole a pinky finger could fit through. Her parents had replaced the plate as a show of serving the public but with the goal of taking the contaminated metal to the forest fortress and tossing it into the golden crater for safety.

Now, Grace searched the case of rocks and gems for what might remain of what Mr Milner had taken. The Zerudorn gold could have ended up anywhere. Buried somewhere nearby or discarded unknowingly with trinkets and trash the mayor had no use for after the Milner family fled. Or it could have been found by a connoisseur of the mystic and bartered or sold, and just maybe, ended up here.

In the case she saw dusty browns and brilliant greens, purples and reds, but not the root-like ropes or globules of gold she was familiar with, and nothing like the cloudy crystalline ice either.

Grace wandered over to short, wide shelves housing vials filled with various liquids, thinking of the first time she’d handled Zerudorn gold.

She and Jonathan were thirteen and condemned to weeks of studying as part of their training. Sun was streaming into the hollow trunk of the enormous major oak protected by old magic.

Jonathan sighed and rubbed at eyes tired from reading. “The gold’s been missing so long, what does it matter anymore?”

Grace pictured the crater ten feet from the major oak. Warped ground covered in shiny, stone-sized bulges of gold with sinewy tendrils twisting and creeping up the sloped walls and snaking around and throughout a single toppled oak tree within the ring of ice. “It’s still a risk.”

“Well, of course.But, don’t you think it would have caused problems by now if it was going to? We don’t even know if Mr. Milner had any more gold than what he used to crack the townhall lock. If it is out there, a generation of Protectors couldn’t find it. If these records are to be believed, at least.” Jonathan thumped the back of his hand against the open two-decade-old journal. “It’s probably on the other side of the continent by now. “

“It could be close, and it could get loose. We can’t give up,” Grace said.

“How are we supposed to contain it if itisloose?We don’t get much mystic ice out this way. And clearly, we need what we have here for that hole.”

Grace frowned. True… but it felt like surrender to abandon what could still be a critical job.

“I just think we could be doing something more than this,” Jonathan said.

Grace tilted her head to the side. Something more. Those words inspired a surge of confidence. Her days felt wasted in this chair. “You’re right. We shouldn’t be sitting here studying. We should be out there, defending the people from someone that’s hurting them now.” Someone like Mayor Nautin.

“Yes!” Jonathan said. “That sounds loads more fun.”

Fun. Yes. It might be fun. But wasn’t the point that it felt like the right thing to do?

In the end, it didn’t matter. They each sat waiting for the other to say more. They were excited by their rebellious ideas, but didn’t know what to do next.

The silence grew awkward.

Grace returned to her studies first. But her focus had evaporated. Why was she studying about containing Zerudorn gold when simply letting it be where it was seemed to be all that was truly necessary?

Grace found her eyes drawn to what looked like an incredibly smooth bit of wood on the tree-wall. It took a few seconds, but finally, her training kicked in. She sensed the illusion cast by award and willed her eyes to adjust. Where she had seen wood, she now saw a shimmer she recognized as a large swath of verdure cloth stretched taut and pinned to the inner trunk.

She was unpinning the cloth before she realized it. With bated breath, she reached for one of the eight acorn-sized pieces of mystic ice encasing Zerudorn gold that the Protectors stored in the major oak for research.

Jonathan snatched a chunk of ice in the space of a single breath. With a yelp, he tossed it frantically between his hands. “Rot and rust, that’s cold!”

“Don’t!” Grace exclaimed, scrambling to her feet. It had to be handled with care. What if the ice shell broke?

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