Page 1 of By the Horns
One
Gwenna
Dere Ma,
Aspeth is helping me to rite to you. She is teeching me my letters so I can better myself. I am still a repeeter at the guild but we will have recruitment day soon and I hope to be picked as a flegling again. If I can work for the guild I can send money home. I have enclosed a few coins. Please pay someone to rite back and let me know you are well. I love you.
Love, Gwenna
The dead manin the alley is really bothering me.
Not that I killed him, of course. I just know that he’s there, and I can’t tell anyone.
Nor can I tell anyone that I’ve been able to sense the dead lately. I don’t know why. I don’t know how it started. All I know is that if there’s a dead person somewhere nearby, my skin itches and crawls as if a hundred bugs were moving over my body.
It makes it damned impossible to concentrate.
I swipe at the window I’m supposed to be cleaning, hoping no one notices that I’m not truly giving my all. I need to keep my head down and stay out of trouble to remain as a repeater, one of the workers for theRoyal Artifactual Guild. Repeaters have a strange sort of position in the guild. We’re considered “failed” students, but because we’ve been students in the past, we’re also allowed to be first in line when it comes time to sign up with a new guild master for the next year’s training. If I piss off Mistress Umala, though, she’ll drop hints that I’m a bad, lazy employee, and she could ruin my chances to get picked as a fledgling for the next year’s tutelage. True, my best friend is married to a guild master, but I can’t count on Aspeth to grease the wheels for me. I need to earn my place, and as a woman in a male-dominated guild, I need to make doubly sure that my record is impeccable or people will talk.
Focus, I remind myself. Concentrate. Ignore the dead man in the alley and how hard your skin is buzzing because it must be a fresh murder—
A throat clears behind me.
I lower my arm, turning to greet Mistress Umala. She’s an elderly woman with thick coils of white hair atop her head, and she wears a severe, high-necked dress in guild colors, along with a repeater sash at her waist and a second one at her shoulder. She’s not a repeater, though. It’s just part of the uniform. I’m told that she’s a guild member’s widow who decided to take up cleaning to keep her husband’s pension, and now she just makes all of us who clean miserable. I really wanted to like her, because we maids should stick together, but Mistress Umala made it clear from day one that she didn’t think much of me because I’d actually “dared” to try to be in the guild.
“Is there a problem?” she asks, looking down her sharp nose at me. Her skin is so pale that she looks unhealthy, and for a moment, I wonder if she’s the corpse I keep sensing.
I put on my sweetest smile. Only one more month until recruitment day. Then I’ll be free of drudgery. “Why would there be a problem, ma’am?”
She arches one hairy silver brow at me. “You’ve been rubbing that window with a dry rag for ten minutes now.”
I…have? I glance down at the rag in my hand and sure enough, I’ve forgotten to wet it. “Just getting a few of the worst smears taken care of,” I say cheerfully, and rub the window with the rag again as if this is all according to plan. “See?”
“I do not see,” Umala hisses. “All I see is a young woman not doing her job properly.”
Biting back a retort, I keep the smile on my face and take the shit she shovels at me. It’s the servant’s lot in life to smile through their true feelings, to never let their employers know what they’re really thinking or else they’ll get the boot. After years of working as a kitchen girl, and then a maid, I know all about how to look fawning and humble. “I’m very sorry, ma’am. I’ve no wish to be a bother. I’ll finish up this window quickly.”
And then I scratch at my neck and the high-collared uniform I’m wearing, because by the gods, that dead man is going to make me crazed.
I keep on scratching as she harrumphs. “See that you do. And then get the windows on the second floor. They look filthy.”
I nod and bend over to dip my rag in the soapy bucket at my feet. “Of course, ma’am.” One more month. One more mucking month. “Even the rooms with the patients?”
“Absolutely. They deserve clean windows, too.” She turns and sweeps away, the conversation ended.
Now that her back is to me, I make a face at her retreating spine. Bitter old puss. She never rides any of the other repeaters as hard as me, nor any of the women who are employed under her. It’s the fact that I am an actual repeateranda woman that really makes it difficult for her to mask her resentment.
After nearly a year of working as a repeater, I’m used to it.
I turn and clean the window correctly this time, scratching wildly at my skin through my uniform as I do so. The buzz of the dead man’s presence feels as if it is burrowing directly under my flesh, and I wonder if I should say something.
Not to Umala. She already hates me.
I can’t say anything to the guards, either. I notified them about a dead man in an alley last week because I’dfelthim. A second one would be less of a coincidence and would point a finger at me. If they find out that I can feel the presence of the dead…my fledgling career would be over.
Everything would be over.
I scrub the window frantically, trying to distract myself. A song? No.Counting? That won’t help. Reciting guild rules? I can’t remember enough of them. I end up biting the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, but the pain helps me focus. After I get done with these windows, maybe I’ll volunteer to go dust in the archives. That should be far enough away from the guild hospital, where I am currently. And maybe Umala will be pleased with my initiative.
