Page 7 of By the Horns
She huffs, adjusting her oversized spectacles and pushing them back up her nose as she straightens. “I wasn’t expecting you today. You startled me.”
“I see that.” There’s a chair parked across from her desk, but when I pull it out, another cat leaps up and runs away. “Is this a bad time?”
“Of course not. I’m just studying an item before it gets shipped out to Lord Emijar.” Her eyes gleam with excitement. “It’s quite fascinating.”
“It looks like a diaper pin.”
She leans back. “Well…yes. But it’s the glyphs on it that are the interesting part. Even something as small as this has magic attached to it. Do you know what it says?”
I shake my head. I can’t read a lick of Old Prellian.
“This symbol is the one for ‘sickness,’ and the one on the other side of the pin is the symbol for ‘dohren,’ which was the soul. And to the Prellians, the soul was housed in the gut. The interesting thing is that the sickness symbol is inverted, which means that it’s the opposite of sickness—health. And the fact that they’re wishing soul health on a diaper pin means—”
“—that someone’s baby left some truly heinous messes?”
She giggles. “Possibly! Or it could just be a general blessing. I’m looking for duplicates of this particular duo of symbols to cross-reference and see if there are any other symbol pairings like this. But to think—a spell for good digestion on your baby’s diaper. Isn’t thatfascinating?”
Frankly, the most fascinating thing to me is that the Prellians enchanted everything. Even a diaper pin. It means anything found in the network of caverns and tunnels below Vastwarren is likely to be magical in some way, and thus it makes the guild money. “Very interesting. I don’t suppose you have a moment to chat, do you?”
“For a friend? Always.” She beams at me and rubs her nose, leaving a dusty smear there. Her glossy brown hair is pulled into a tight bun at the top of her head, but several strands have slipped free and she looks a frowsy, scattered mess. It makes me happy, though, because Aspeth isdoing what she loves. She’s thriving in the cutthroat guild environment. Married to a Taurian guild master, apprenticing to the head archivist, and surrounded by cats as she studies ancient artifacts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her happier.
Which is why I hate that I keep showing up with bad news.
She blinks owlishly at me. “Is something wrong?”
I nod, a lump in my throat.
Quickly, she sets aside her magnifying glass and the artifact she was studying. A cat wanders over the desk, tail in the air, and she picks it up and moves it to the floor. “What is it?”
I bite my lip, then sit in the chair across from her and lean forward so I can whisper my terrible news. “I found another body today.”
Aspeth—Sparrow—gasps, her ink-stained hand flying to her mouth.“What?”
Hissing, I wave a hand at her. “Quiet! No one else can know!”
She nods and leans in closer. “What do you mean,” she asks, her voice pitched low, “anotherbody?”
“Remember how I told you I felt one the other day? That I was tingly all over? And it only stopped when they moved the dead man out of the alley?” When she nods, I continue, rubbing my arms as if I can still feel the thousands of pinpricks. “Well, I felt another. Worse than before this time. I think I even know how he died. Someone cut his throat in the alley behind the guild hospital.”
Her eyes are huge and unblinking as she stares at me. “Did you tell anyone?”
“No, of course not!”
“Why not?”
It’s frustrating to talk to Aspeth sometimes, because she has a sheltered worldview. As a holder’s daughter and heir for her first thirty years, she just naturally assumes that if you tell someone something, they believe you. Better yet, that you won’t be blamed. She doesn’t see things the way I do. I’ve been a servant all my life, the daughter of another servant. I know what it’s like. I know how when something is missing or wrong, the first ones to be blamed are the staff. “Don’t you think that’d be suspicious? Me, the woman who reported a dead body in the alley last week, suddenly findsanotherdead body inanotheralley?”
“Oh.” She leans back in her chair. “Yes, I suppose that is bad. But we can’t just leave it there.”
“I know.” I twist my hands in my lap. “Trust me, I know. I also don’t know who to tell besides you.”
“It’s obvious,” Aspeth says. “We’ll tell Hawk.”
Her husband. Hawk is the first Taurian to rise to the rank of guild master and is my former teacher, before I flunked due to last year’s mess. Aspeth trusts him wholeheartedly because she loves him and he loves her, but I’m just Aspeth’s old friend. He has no such loyalty to me. How do I know that he won’t choose to tell the guild instead of keep my secret?
But I suppose we must tell someone. I can’t keep working, knowing that there’s a dead man in the alley. Several of the buildings I clean are located close enough that his presence will continue to bother me, and I can’t very well go around attacking every man in sight and begging him to fuck me as a distraction.
I squeeze my thighs together, a pleasant tingle skittering through my body at the thought of the big pale Taurian I dallied with earlier. It had been very nice, a delicious interlude in an otherwise horrible day. Bad judgment on my part, though. I can’t afford to fuck guild artificers or they’ll think I’m trying to get into the guild on my back. Ugh. I’ll have to avoid him in the future if I run into him. Sarya indeed. What was I thinking? “Do we have to tell Hawk I was the one who found it?”
