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When Numair could finally breathe again, he laughed, though his bruised throat protested. Full-on raucous laughter, the kind of unhinged noise one would expect from a madman. Which he very well might be.
He swiped the blade she’d dropped from the ground. It was an odd, primitive thing, and he would wager it was made from bone, though human or otherwise, he couldn’t tell. He found himself slipping it into his pocket, a small memento of this moment. Because he’d had a question battering at his head for months, and that blade pressed to his body had finally allowed him to see the answer. The relief coursing through his veins had him nearly high. Not relief that he hadn’t died, but relief that he knew what to do.
He had her to thank for that, for the clarity that had come to him. She would never know it, would never understand it, but in that moment, he was indebted to her. He never left his debts unpaid, but he didn’t have much time to pay this one.
Five days. Not even a week. He had five days to discover what Clare Brighton wanted and find a way to give it to her.
Chapter Seven
The Price of Chasing a Dream
Three days. That was how much time Clare wasted. Three days of watching her two silver coins turn to lesser ones to pay her lodging and buy her food.
She blamed the damn curfew for the necessity, even if she knew she’d have spent the money anyway. She’d made herself a promise that she would never go back, not willingly, and if she knew how to sleep in the streets and survive, well, that was going back.
So she spent the three days exploring Midtown and learning precisely why she couldn’t find another engagement. The Musicians Guild had a stranglehold everywhere from here up to Hightown. The inns wouldn’t hire any musician unaffiliated with them, so non-guild members were relegated to playing in the streets and the outdoor spaces, dependent on whatever meager offerings passersby chose to throw their way. Which from Clare’s observation wasn’t much.
Finally seeing no way around it, she found the guild’s office nearest her inn. The clerk sat just inside, a bored-looking middle-aged man with skin so white Clare wondered if he knew the sun existed. She approached the desk. He was scribbling into a notebook and didn’t look up.
“I’m here to inquire about membership.” The polite words weren’t the ones she wanted to say, but they were the ones she made herself speak.
He pointed to a sheet pinned to the wall beside him without ever bothering to actually look at her. “Rates and information are all here.”
She glared at the sheet, the letters and numbers swirling together in her mind into a useless mess, and willed the Song to actually be helpful. But it was still sulking after her refusal to allow it to help with the man in the alley, and it refused to give her a temporary glimpse into the life of some other person who had known how to read.
She stared at the sheet for another minute anyway, willing the scratchings there to make sense. They didn’t. Her gaze shifted back to the clerk. “Explain it to me.”
He finally looked up from his notebook, disgust on his face. “Fail your way out of primary education, did you?”
Clare smiled. It was her habitual response to almost every situation. If she was sad, she smiled. If she was in pain, she smiled. If something horrified her, she smiled. And if something monumentally pissed her off, she smiled all the sweeter.
It had the effect of making him sit up a little straighter as the brilliance of it washed over him. She’d always had that effect on people when she smiled, even if the end result wasn’t always to her liking.
His gaze wandered over her but he talked, making it abundantly clear that the guild’s aim was not to protect its members from exploitation, but to exploit the members themselves.
Memberships were sold by the month or the year, and varied in cost according to the artist’s talent. The higher one was ranked, the more expensive it was to be ranked. And she suspected if you could string two notes together, where you ranked after that was entirely dependent on your financial state.
At first, she couldn’t understand how the guild continued to function. There couldn’t be that many people who could afford these fees. A monthly membership cost twice the money she’d earned at the Hawk and Scepter, and she’d only earned that rate because she’d demanded the fee that would have gone to the Musicians Guild singer in the first place.
“And if you can’t afford that,” the clerk said, his gaze hovering just south of her collarbones, “you can buy a single-use license.”
When he told her the cost of it, her rage nearly exploded. It wasn’t that the single-use license was outside of the ordinary person’s reach. It was that it was just inside it. And while her grasp on math might be nearly as shaky as her grasp on letters, hours spent each day in the markets had taught her the value of Veralna’s currency. An average person could afford the single-use license and, if they were lucky, they would find an engagement that would pay just enough to cover another one the next day, along with a meal.
By the time you totaled up a month’s worth of fees for doing so, not to mention the labor and the constant uncertainty of making it from one day to the next, the single-use license was nothing short of charging a person to take their money.
A liquid cold spilled through her veins as she listened to the man explain, in bored, precise terms, how much it would cost her to try and live under this system. She saw her life playing out before her, an endless repetitive loop of barely making enough money to buy another temporary license, each time hoping that next time, next time, would be the time that made a difference. The time things changed. The time she’d gained enough of a reputation that someone paid her even a fraction of what she was worth. The time she caught the eye of a patron, or anyone with enough standing to hire her for an engagement that would make her name known.
Each time hoping, but knowing it wouldn’t happen.
“Your guild is a parasite.” The words fell out of her mouth. If she hadn’t been so furious, maybe she wouldn’t have spoken them.
The clerk sneered at her, a deprecating glance that more than said how little he thought of her, and everyone like her. “If you’re worth the license, it’ll pay for itself.”
She laughed. “No, it won’t. It never could. That’s what you count on.” The guild didn’t need to peddle in anything so mundane as drugs, when they could sell hope instead.
The Song finally perked up as it felt the rising tide of her fury. It was ever-hopeful, when she was angry, that she might let it out to play. The tired ache in her bones whispered, Maybe you should.
So she did. “Who runs this guild?” Her words were whips of power that lashed around the man and squeezed.
