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That loneliness would remain.
The darkness of my thoughts haunted me as I used a brush on Iris’s coat. I blew out an aggravated breath. I needed to think of something else—
Listen.
My body suddenly froze. Frowning, I turned and scanned the shadowed aisle of the stables, hearing only the sounds of the other horses and Gerold’s faint snores. My hand tightened on the brush as an acute sense of awareness washed over me. It wasn’t a chill of unease. This was different. The pressure between my shoulders was something else entirely. An intuition that I followed, wherever it led. Or more accurately, it was ademand.
Curious, I walked out of the stall, letting my intuition guide me. I’d learned long ago that I’d get little rest if I actually managed to ignore it, which I was rarely capable of doing.
I walked toward the back of the barn, where the doors were cracked, my steps quiet. Just as I went to push the door open, I heard voices.
“Did you get him?” The muffled words traveled through the wood. The voice sounded familiar. “And you’re sure he’s not one from Primvera you mistook?”
My breath caught. If the “he” they spoke of could’ve been mistaken as someone from Primvera, then they spoke of a Hyhborn and likely a Deminyen, as they didn’t live in lowborn cities but resided in their Courts.
“Because how do you think I knew what he was in the first place? I saw him and I remembered what he was supposed to look like,” another voice answered, and this one I recognized immediately due to his unique, gravelly tone. A guard who went by Mickie, but I knew his actual name was Matthew Laske, and he was . . . well, bad news. He was one of the guards who eagerly aided Hymel when it came to collecting rent. “He’s the one Muriel had us waiting for. I’m sure, Finn.”
Another of Claude’s guards. A young man with dark hair who always smiled whenever I saw him, and it was a nice smile.
I knew I shouldn’t eavesdrop; rarely did anything good come from that. But that’s what I did, because pressure had settled in the space between my shoulder blades and had begun to tingle. I crossed the foot or two to the shared wall and leaned against it. Unsure of why I was compelled to do so or what my intuition was picking up on, I obeyed the urge and listened.
“And on top of him being a spittin’ image of what Muriel said, if he was from Primvera, I doubt he’d be slinkin’ around the Twin Barrels,” Mickie continued, referencing one of the bawdy taverns in Archwood. I’d been there a time or two with Naomi. It was not a place I’d think a Hyhborn would normally spend time in. “Anyway, I took him to Jac’s barn.”
“Are you shittin’ me?” Finn demanded. “You took that thing to his barn? When Jac is off getting sucked and fucked every way from Sunday?”
My brows lifted. I didn’t know of anyone by the name of Muriel, but I did know who Jac was. A blacksmith— the widowed blacksmith who was in line to replace the Baron’s personal smithy. He sometimes stepped in when the Baron’s own fell behind. So did Grady, who had an unbelievable natural knack for forging metal.
“Don’t ya look at me like that,” Mickie growled. “Porter made sure he ain’t waking up anytime soon,” he said, naming the owner of the Twin Barrels. “Served him the house special.” The guard chuckled. “His ass is knocked, and what I put in him will keep him down for the count. He ain’t goin’ anywhere. He’ll be there, ready for us to handle him when Jac is finished havin’ himself a good night in a few hours.”
My stomach hollowed as the tingling between my shoulder blades intensified. Without seeing them, I wouldn’t be able to peer into their thoughts, but my intuition was already filling in the gaps in what they were saying, causing my pulse to pick up.
“Got to admit, I’m damned relieved I was right about him and I didn’t go and kill one of our own,” Mickie said with another raspy laugh. “Porter put enough of the Fool’s Parsley in that whiskey he served that if he was a lowborn, it would’ve dropped his ass dead on the spot, even with one or two sips.”
Fool’s Parsley, also known as hemlock, could do exactly what Mickie claimed depending on the amount ingested.
My heart sank as I held Iris’s brush to my chest, because I knew what was to become of that Hyhborn.
“If ya so worried about him escapin’,” Mickie was saying, “I can head back and put another spike in him.”
Nausea rose sharply. They putspikesin a Hyhborn? Gods, that was . . . that was terrible, but I needed to stop listening and start pretending that I heard nothing. This didn’t involve me.
“We need him alive, remember?” Finn’s voice snapped with impatience. “You put too much of that shit in him, he won’t be of any use to us.”
I didn’t walk away.
“We’ll wait till Jac’s up at dawn,” Finn said. “He knows how to get the word out to Muriel. I got a bottle of some good shit out of the Baron’s cellars.” His voice was fading. “And we’ll head over to Davie’s . . .”
I strained to hear more, but they had moved too far away. I’d heard enough, though. They had captured a Hyhborn, and I could think of only one reason why someone would do something so insanely foolish— to harvest the Hyhborn’spartsfor use in bone magic. My mouth dried. Good gods, I didn’t know that was happening in Archwood, and wasn’t that a terribly naive thing to think? Of course, the shadow market was everywhere, in every city in every territory, blossoming wherever desperation could be found.
I closed my eyes as the tingling between my shoulder blades turned to tension that settled in the muscles lining my spine. None of this was my problem.
But my stomach curdled as I turned and started walking. The pressure moved, settling on my chest, and in my mind, I could hear that annoying voice of mine whisperingI am wrong— that this Hyhborn was my problem. The tension increased, twisting up my stomach even further. And it wasn’t just my problem. It was Archwood’s. The Hyhborn had destroyed entire neighborhoods to ferret out those believed to be involved in bone magic. Cities had been destroyed.
“But it’s notmyproblem,” I whispered. “It’snot.”
But that undeniable urge to intervene— to help this Hyhborn— was as strong as any impression I’d gotten in my life. Maybe even stronger.
“Fuck,” I groaned.
