Page 5 of By the Horns (Royal Artifactual Guild #2)

Three

Gwenna

The uncomfortable skin-crawling sensation returns just as I finish the last of the windows.

I all but race out of the building once Umala releases me for the day.

Instead of crossing to the nestmaid quarters where I’ve lived for the last several months, I head deeper into the heart of the city.

The center of Vastwarren belongs to the Royal Artifactual Guild, a three-hundred-year-old guild that specializes in the retrieval of magical artifacts from the ruins of Old Prell far beneath the city.

The guild is rich beyond imagining and controls the very heart of the city, but there are some buildings that even they don’t visit much.

The guild’s archives are practically deserted at this hour, with the young archivist at the front desk brightening as I rush in.

Flycatcher yawns, his face propped up by his fists. “Did you bring me cake today?”

“Not today,” I say apologetically, shutting the door to the library behind me.

Immediately the place feels oppressive despite the magical lighting that illuminates the interior.

It’s the hundreds of tall shelves crammed full of heavy books that go almost up to the ceiling that make the library feel claustrophobic.

This is one of the older buildings in Vastwarren, so the ceiling beams sag and the floors groan with every step, which doesn’t make me feel at ease. “Is Aspeth around?”

“Do you mean Sparrow?” he asks me with a chiding look.

“Right, right. Sparrow.” I grimace. To me, she’ll always be Aspeth, but I know I’m supposed to call her by her guild name now that she’s one of the archivists. “Is Sparrow around?”

“Yes. She’s downstairs.” He straightens, drumming his fingers on the desk. “Bring me some cake next time. I’ll pay you for it.”

The little cakes I’ve been making in my downtime are the only reason I’ve had enough money to send letters home. “When I come back, I promise. I haven’t had a chance to bake today.”

“Next time, then.” He gives me a sulky look and goes back to petting the cat sprawled across the desk. “I’ll log you in as a visitor.”

“Great. Thanks.” I move forward, my skirts swishing against the narrow shelves.

“Need help—”

“I know the way! Thank you!” I head farther in before he can ask me to bake anything else. Bad enough that I spend all my time cleaning. If I get a reputation as a baker, I’m going to find myself back in a kitchen for the rest of my days. Never again. I want bigger things for myself.

Thinking of kitchens makes me walk a little faster through the narrow, packed shelves.

A cat darts out from behind another shelf, nearly tripping me, and I manage to catch myself before I fall flat on my face.

Then I find the circular iron stair that leads down to the lower floors of the archives and head there.

Aspeth’s workstation is easy to find amidst the clutter of books, shelving carts, and boxes of artifacts.

Hers is the desk covered with all the cats.

The archives keep cats around as mousers, but Aspeth is a softhearted sort and started feeding them bits of her lunches, she told me.

Now they all hang about her desk, waiting for handouts or petting.

Today she’s seated at her desk, which is piled high with books and has a lamp on the corner.

Two cats are curled around each other to her right, and another peeks down from a stack of books on her left.

A gray beast with a huge fluffy tail saunters past me as I stand and wait for Aspeth to notice I’m here.

She doesn’t, of course. Aspeth is lost in her research.

Her face is bent over something, a magnifying glass held in one hand.

I clear my throat and she startles, thunking her head with the glass.

One of the cats scrambles away with a yowl, sending papers flying in his wake.

I get a chance to see what she’s studying so intently.

It’s a long, pointy pin the size of a finger, made of gold and with a jewel at the end.

There is a strange glyph on the prominent head of the pin.

“New find?” I ask.

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 that fascinating ?”

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 is doing 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, “ another body?”

“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 finds another dead body in another alley? ”

“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?”