Tainted Gold Read Free

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