Page 88 of By the Horns
Her mouth drops open.
“Who’s your contact?” I press, sensing she’s caught off guard. “You’re not working alone. Who’s doing the dirty work?”
“What dirty work?” She shakes her head.
“Murdering—”
“Murdering?!” She gasps, shocked. “Me?! Are you insane?”
“No, but apparently you are.” I lean in close, determined not to be fooled by her false outrage. “Your crew is using students to steal artifacts and then murdering them when they’re no longer of any use. We’ve been keeping tabs on you for a while now. The more you work with us, the easier it’ll be. Right now, though, things are looking very grim for you.”
She shakes her head again, more vigorously this time. “No—you’ve got it all wrong. I’m no thief.”
Another lie. “Then prove to me I’m wrong. Produce the real thief. Are you just passing information on to them? Are they holding something over you and forcing you to work with them?”
“I’m not working withanyone. And I don’t know anything about any of this!”
“Yet you were targeted in the books, remember?Gwenna is a thief.And an item was found in your bag. And now Hemmen’s books aregone. All of this is happening right on your doorstep, and it’s obvious you have a secret you’re keeping. You’re a good liar, but you’re notthatgood.”
Good enough that she’s had me fooled for quite some time, though. I’m fighting back the ache of betrayal, but I want to shout at the unfairness of it all. To think that I was so mucking delighted and relieved to find out that Gwenna and Sarya were the same person all along. That all my problems had been solved. What a joke.
I grab her chin and force her to look up at me. “Tell me your secret.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and her entire body shakes. “I can’t. I’ll be killed if anyone finds out.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. I fight the surge of triumph I feel, because it’s paired with the despairing realization that Gwenna has lied to me all along. “Finds out what?”
She closes her eyes, and then opens them again, resolve on her face. “That…I’m a mancer.”
Forty
Raptor
You’re awhat?”
“I’m a mancer.” Gwenna immediately bursts into tears. “A necromancer. But I don’t want to be! I’m not even trying!”
I don’t think I’ve ever been as baffled as I am now. I was expecting some big confession, some admission that she’d been blackmailed by an old lover or maybe an old coworker into doing nefarious things. Hearing that she thinks she’s a mancer is beyond comprehension. “What do you mean, you’re a mancer? How can you be a mancer?”
She pulls away and wrings her hands, an agitated expression on her face as she paces back and forth in front of me. “It started when we came here to Vastwarren. The first time I went in the tunnels, I picked up a dowsing rod. You know they’re not supposed to actually work, right? That it’s just some silly joke that some masters play on their students? Except this one worked, and it led me right to a dead man holding an artifact. I thought I had done something right. That I’d somehow managed to find an artifact. And then I stole that one and gave it to Aspeth, but that’s the only thing I’ve stolen, I swear.”
I grunt, because I’ve heard the story of this one. Aspeth had one half of a link-ring pair in her possession, and Magpie’s students had found thecompanion to it. The pairing was considered a Greater Artifact find and was confiscated by the guild and sold off.
“But then when I used a dowsing rod again, it led me to another dead person, and I worried that I was doing something wrong.” She paces faster, as if moving quickly can somehow straighten her thoughts. “And then I started to hear them.”
“Hear who?”
“The dead.” She wrings her hands again, staring at the floor as she paces. “At first I thought I was imagining things, that the voices that whispered whenever I passed the graveyard were in my mind. That I was imagining someone calling my name when I was cleaning, only to find out that they’d died yesterday.”
Gwenna turns and faces me.
“A few weeks before recruitment day, I found a dead man in the alley. Or rather…I didn’t find him. He led me to him. I heard him talking. He was frantic. Nothing he said made sense, but he was babbling on and on, and I could hear him no matter where I went in the building, but I couldn’t find him inside. I concentrated, and I got an image of the alley behind the house, where the well was located. I followed the voice and I found…the body. A young man. A repeater.” She bites her lip. “That was the first body.”
“First body,” I echo, not sure what to think of this barrage of information.
She twists her hands frantically and pauses in her pacing to gaze at me. “The second body was the day I pretended to be Sarya.”
I inhale sharply.
