me, so I did a little research and discovered that Goldschmidt didn’t have a Pathmaker but it did have the size and demand to support one.”
“So you moved there?” Hammon guessed.
Ah, Hammon must have asked how the guild was first formed. Siobhan silently joined them at the table, serving up a plate of food for herself from the dishes in the middle, and started eating without even trying to interrupt.
“Well, I was set to do that, but I’m bad with people.” Grae gave a self-depreciating smile. “I don’t deal well with strangers, especially. But Siobhan, she’s always been good with people. So I asked her to form a business with me—she’d handle the clients, I’d build the paths.”
Hammon glanced at her.
“I thought it a good business plan,” she said easily. “So I agreed.”
“Right before we left, though, my master warned me that most Pathmakers don’t do well unless they’re part of a guild,” Grae continued. “It’s the protection of belonging to a guild more than anything else. Otherwise people try to pressure you into joining up with their guild, and you end up in a place where you’d rather not be. But it takes at least three people to form a guild, so…”
“So they asked me,” Beirly piped up, stroking his beard in a reminiscent manner. “I’d built myself a carpentry business by that point, and had run it for two years, so I knew more about forming a guild than either of them. It didn’t set right with me, either, sending them off alone to a city that they’d only heard of. I couldn’t convince their parents to talk them out of the idea—they’re both from large families and I think they were just as glad for one less child to feed—so I thought, I’d best go with them. Turns out to be the best decision I ever made.”
“Somehow—mind you, I don’t remember hearing this discussion at all—they talked about it behind my back and nominated me as 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