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 put spikes in 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’s parts for 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 whispering I 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 not my problem,” I whispered. “It’s not.”
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.
Spinning around, I hurried back to Iris’s stall, the hem of my cloak snapping around my boots. Going to the manor wasn’t an option. The Baron would be utterly useless at this time of night, and I didn’t want to involve Grady in this in case things went sideways.
Which was a high likelihood.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I grabbed the bridle off the wall. “Sorry, girl, I know it’s late,” I said as she turned her head, nosing my hand. I gave her a scratch behind the ear and then slipped her bridle on, attaching the reins. “We’ll make this as quick as possible.”
Iris shook her head, and I decided that was an agreement when in reality she was likely showing her annoyance at being interrupted.
I didn’t want to waste time with a saddle, but I wasn’t a good enough rider to go bareback. So I took the minutes to saddle her, double-checking I had it secured correctly, just as Claude had shown me. A five-minute delay was better than a broken neck.