Will doesn’t ask how much it is, and the woman doesn’t offer. For them, it might as well be free. Sam stares in disbelief at the bracelet. The act of buying an object like this without knowing a price is foreign to her. Surely she can’t be allowed to just put it on and take it outside, not without checking a tag. She looks at Will skeptically.
“It’s yours,” he says.
Sam opens it and slides it onto her wrist, where it gleams. Tentatively, she touches the stones, as if unsure whether or not they’re real. Alchemy has made her too sensitive to the authenticity of a thing, as anything can become anything else. But all she senses here are pristine gems, pure in form all the way through.
Will watches her, amused. “Do you approve?” he says.
She turns her wrist this way and that. “How much did this really cost, Will?”
He takes her wrist in his hand and turns it. His thumb slides across where her vein runs. “How much do you like it?” he says.
She thinks of her mother braiding her hair carefully into a crown, weaving ribbons into the strands. Her mother holding a sheet of old fabric up to her as a child, telling her what kind of dress she can make from it, golden light from their barred window searing their silhouettes against the cloth. Her mother painstakingly drawing patterns with a marker, cutting them out, sewing deep into the night. Her mother giving her a dollar at the local church’s yard sale, letting her buy a used stuffed rabbit, smiling as she hugged it to her chest all the way home.
Then she looks at the sparkling bracelet, convinces herself that this beauty is more than that beauty.
“It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever owned,” she says.
“Well.” His hand lingers against her skin for a moment before he finally releases her. “Then it costs more than anything in the world.”
