The dwarf in the middle said nothing. He was holding his stone tightly, not dropping it or losing it, and was concentrating on nothing else but this. The stone was a ruby, roughhewn from the rock and the size of a hen’s egg. It was worth a kingdom when cut and set, and would be easily exchanged for the finest silks of Dorimar. It would not have occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It’s the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.
