Deepwoods (Book 1) by Honor Raconteur

guildmaster,”
Siobhan couldn’t help but add dryly.
    “We took a vote,” Beirly defended himself mildly.
    “The majority carried,” Grae tacked on with a small grin.
    “Ha ha ha.” She glared at both of them, muttering under her
breath.
    “Although I almost rethought that decision after two
months,” Beirly admitted ruefully to Hammon. “See, we got a guildhall for
cheap, and set up business easily enough. With Grae’s skills, we had a good
number of clients within the first month. We’d barely gotten our feet wet when
she stumbled across a black market and saw Wolf. Siobhan’s always been the sort
to take pity on outcast souls, and after one look at him, she couldn’t leave
him there. So she bought him.”
    Hammon’s eyes crossed. “You bought Wolf?”
    “For fifty-eight kors,” Beirly stated factually. Cocking his
head, he asked rhetorically, “Has he ever paid that back?”
    Siobhan snorted. “I couldn’t begin to tell you. Considering
how often I’ve had to dock his pay or fine him for damages, it’s a miracle he
has any money at all.”
    Beirly waved this away as unimportant. “We thought she was
crazy at first. I mean, who buys a former dark guild mercenary with a missing
hand? Especially one that’s as big as a giant and strong enough to snap your
neck like a chicken’s? But he was so grateful for any show of kindness, I
realized she was right to take him from there. That’s when I thought, if he
just had that hand of his back, he’d be a force to reckon with. We needed a
good fighter in the guild with all the traveling we did. So he and I made a
deal. I’d make him up a hand so he could fight if he promised to stay until we
could find another enforcer to replace him with.”
    “Whoa, whoa, wait!” Siobhan threw up both hands to stop him.
“I never heard about this! When did you two promise that?”
    Those big brown eyes blinked at her. “You didn’t know he
promised me that?”
    “No, I didn’t know!” she responded in exasperation. “When
did he?”
    “Oh, not long after you brought him to the Hall.” Beirly
scratched at his beard and looked thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “Hmmm, a
week or two after? Remember that one squinty-looking man who was trying to
trick us into moving stolen goods to Stott? The one that Wolf squashed flat
when he tried to flee? It was after that.”
    “That happened the first month he was with us,” Siobhan said
faintly. Several memories sorted and flipped themselves in her head, forming a
completely different picture than they once had. “Wait, so when I asked him to
stay on long enough to pay back what I’d spent on him, is that why he
gave me such a funny smile?”
    Beirly gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Don’t know anything about
that.”
    Hammon put his knife down, apparently too engrossed in the
conversation and history of Deepwoods to care about a trivial thing like
eating. “So what happened next?”
    “Sylvie,” Grae said, like a man explaining that a typhoon
had hit.
    Siobhan smothered a laugh, as it rather had been like that.
“You see, the whole incident with the smuggler had taught us a clear lesson. We
didn’t know enough about trade, and I’m not a good trader anyway. None of us
are. So I started looking around for another member, someone that would
understand the business, and give me good guidance. It wasn’t long after that
we found Sylvie. She’d left Orin and come through Converse, looking for a guild
that had a female guildmaster. I suppose she felt it would be safer that way,
or something. Anyway, she heard that I was looking for a tradesman and came to
me. We bonded over a bowl of chocolate strawberries.”
    “And the guild hasn’t been the same since,” Beirly inserted,
eyes crinkling. “She wasn’t too sure what to think of a male-dominated guild
like ours at first—she’s a bad history with men trying to take advantage of
her—but we worked it out with her quick-like. The first day she was out late,
and