Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 134898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 540(@250wpm)___ 450(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 540(@250wpm)___ 450(@300wpm)
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?”
“Of course not. I’ll come up with…something. Let me think on it for a moment.” Aspeth pulls out a quill and dips it in ink. She pushes aside a cat sprawled on her desk and scratches a note onto a page in front of her. “You’re certain it’s another dead man?”
I rub my neck, thinking of the uncomfortable, uneasy feeling that had moved all over me. “I didn’t go look at him, but…yes. It always feels the same.”
She nods, writing frantically. “Describe your symptoms to me.”
“What? Why?” I just want to forget about the entire thing, not dwell on it.
Aspeth looks up at me, her eyes huge behind her spectacles. “I’m going to search through some of the texts here to see what they mention about such things. When other people have had, ah, the same problems.”
My brows go up. “Problems?”
“Sensing, ah…things they shouldn’t,” she says delicately.
We both know what she’s talking about. It’s something we’ve considered a dozen times before and discarded, but I’m afraid we cannot anymore. “Let’s call it what it is. We think I’m a mancer.”
A magic user. An evil person with secret powers. Mancers were outlawed three hundred years ago, and all of them were put to death. Since then, the guild has risen to power. The only magic allowed now is magic found in artifacts, so the Royal Artifactual Guild retrieves magic doodads from the ancient ruins and sells them for large amounts of coin to the noble holders.
Personal magic should be dead. I should not be a mancer. I can barely even read.
She blinks. “I mean…possibly.”
“I don’t want to be a mancer,” I tell her, twisting my hands in my worn skirt. The anxiety crawling through me is worse than the buzzing feelings earlier. “If they think I am, they’ll burn me in the square!”
“No, they won’t,” Aspeth says confidently. “No one’s been burned as a mancer in a hundred years.”
That’s because no one has been stupid enough to step forward and claim to be a mancer in the last hundred years. I don’t want to be the first. “Aspeth, please. If we keep pointing out dead bodies, someone’s going to become suspicious!”
“I promise you’ll be safe, Gwenna. No one will know it’s you. I just want to find out what I can so we know what to expect. You know I would never say anything to endanger you.”
“Which is why I would really like it if we didn’t bring this up,” I counter. When her expression turns to hurt, I take a deep breath. I force myself to swallow the worried knot in my throat. Aspeth has kept my secrets in the past. I’m just…terrified of what will happen if I’m found out. There’s so much at stake. “Until I can figure out how to make this stop, I’d prefer we say nothing.”