14. Ronan

W e had a lot of fun learning to make the Bloody Marys. A few of the regulars came in. The ones that started drinking pretty early in the morning. They were very curious as to what we were doing. Lance and Ollie had a much better head for business than I did. I was better at slinging ale.

"What's that you've got there?" Old Man Aimes asked.

Ollie swooped in and turned on the Ollie charm.

"It's a new drink Lance worked up. It's called a Bloody Mary."

"That actual blood?"

Ollie slid the tankard over.

"Not at all, but it'll get you drunker faster than anything here. Want to be our first customer taste tester? It's on the house."

Old Man Aimes was a harmless drunk. He was one of the older Argent kids. His father pulled him into his army and after his body had been broken, had no use for him. It was one of the many reasons we hated the Barons. Guttertown usually took care of him, even if most of us also didn't have a lot.

"Let me get you some stew first," Lance said. "It's pretty bloody strong."

Lance wasn't going to charge him for the stew. He was usually the first person in the Whispering Raven when it opened. They didn't usually charge him unless there were other customers and when they did, it was usually barter. Old Man Aimes's eyes were sparkling.

"You ain't trying to poison me, are ye?"

"Never. You're my favorite customer," Ollie said.

Lance came back with stew and a piece of bread.

"You might want to get some of that in your stomach before you try the drink."

Aimes was rail thin and we could hear his stomach growling when he walked in. He hadn't been in since I started taking a few shifts here, but he did that sometimes. He'd disappear for a bit and turn up, eventually. Aimes had been doing that since we were little.

"You're good kids," Aimes said.

Lance had overfilled his bowl of soup and given him a bigger piece of bread. Aimes was always a little thinner when he was missing. He was probably going to outlive everyone out of spite.

"Where were you this time, Aimes?" Ollie asked.

Aimes walked with a limp and he was half drunk the majority of the time. He was one of the oldest people in Guttertown, but that never stopped him. He wasn't sleeping it off in a piss-filled ditch when he disappeared. Aimes had the same education the rest of Guttertown did, but instead of learning a trade when he got out of school, his father had him cracking heads until he damaged his leg and couldn't learn most trades in Guttertown.

Still, the reason everyone was willing to barter with him and hire him for odd jobs was because of what he got up to when he disappeared. As a former Baron's general, he knew his way around every part of Nestran. He also had respect outside of Guttertown.

Aimes would disappear for a few days and come back with gossip, trade agreements, or some kind of seeds that would help us. It took him a while because he walked and had to take frequent breaks.

"On an adventure, like always. I've been trying to find proof it was the Barons who took the Princess Lisana. They went hard for the shifters, but they never had any motive. The Barons do. They've been trying to breed the Tempris line out of existence and they nearly have. Kidnapping the heir and blaming the shifters is a good way to wipe out any lingering fire magic, seize the throne, and start another war. They've been itching for that since they made me their general."

Only fuckers who weren't going to be fighting and dying in it wanted war. They were happy for the rest of us to die in it, though. We didn't intentionally go into the shifters' lands and they didn't come into ours, but sometimes, we'd meet each other in the space between.

If you made it clear you meant them no harm, they didn't mean you any, either. Which said a lot because the Barons had them kidnapped and tortured for a long time. They knew we weren't all bad, so most of us knew they weren't. Sometimes, we helped each other and then went home and never spoke about it.

No one wanted the Tempris line off the throne except the Barons. King Joron kept them from being completely unreasonable, even if he was mostly powerless. The Barons were dumbasses sometimes, even with their fancy education. The only people who believed their lies were their sycophants.

"Did you find anything?" Lance asked.

None of us would ever lay eyes on the Princess Lisana. Her mother was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in Nestran. Guttertown would just have to take everyone's word for that because we'd never get close enough to the royal family to see any of them. The Barons had zero respect for women but the missing princess was still a better option than the Barons running things unchecked.

"No. But I did pick up something interesting. Someone is picking off wealthy men in Nestran. The Barons think it's the same man, but Inspector Trevils, Leodos, and myself think we are dealing with two different killers."

"What? Really?" Ollie asked. "Trevils was in here the other day. He just mentioned one they are calling The Blight. If anyone asks, the Blight practiced in Guttertown, but they aren't from here."

We just nodded. Ollie only repeated secrets if they were harmless and he only ever told them to us because he knew we weren't going to spread it around. If Ollie was protecting a murderer, he probably had a damned good reason.

"Trevils is brilliant. He's never going to discuss his theories outside of people he trusts until he's totally sure. Leodos and I are inner circle. Trevils hates the Barons just as much as Guttertown does. He always pinpoints the culprit, but he has to give the name to the Barons to do something about it. The Barons don't always send the guard after the right person if it doesn't fit their agenda. He's sick of it."

"What do you know?" Ollie asked.

Ollie seemed really invested in this and he'd better spill later.

"It's definitely two killers. One is meticulous. He's breaking into houses and killing the man of the house without tipping his family off. He's not leaving any evidence, and he's not taking anything. The other is brutal and messy. He's slaughtering everyone in the house, trashing it, and he's stealing a family heirloom as a trophy. The second one is also leaving bloody boot prints all over the place."

"Fuck," Lance said. "They are going to try to pin this on us, aren't they?"

"Not the messy one. They haven't narrowed down the cobbler, but they are expensive boots. The messy one isn't from Guttertown. He's brutal, and he's not sparing the women or children, but it's the other one that's got Trevils and Leodos worried. There's no evidence and no motive they can find. No one they talked to can think of why they were targeted."

I'd bet my left nut fucking Ollie knew why. He might not know who the butcher was, but if he was covering for one of the murderers, he knew exactly who they were and why they were doing this. And he thought their motive was a good one.

"Anyway, that's the drama outside of Guttertown. Trevils is a sly dog, and he hates most everyone. Leodos is helping him, but you know how Leodos feels about Guttertown."

Guttertown felt the same about Leodos. He was the only Baron we liked, and that was because he wasn't a Baron anymore. His family used to experiment on the shifters to find out how to steal their magic. Leodos told them to get fucked and burned their research so they couldn't continue.

He was his father's only son, but Leodos was disinherited and banished to Guttertown with no money. The previous Madame hired him to protect the girls and manage her books, but he didn't stop there. Nah, Leodos went around teaching all the Guttertown businesses to fix their books for when the Barons sent someone to look at them so they could figure out if they wanted to raise taxes because they thought we could afford it.

Yeah, Leodos got called back to the palace to be King Joron's advisor. The Barons hated it and Guttertown missed him, but he left behind a hefty legacy of tax evasion because fuck the Barons.

"The stew was excellent as always. I'm a little suspicious of your new beverage."

"Don't be," I said. "It's delicious and the spirit in it is something Lance has been working on. It's very strong."

"Come on, Aimes," Ollie said with that smile no one could resist. "Have you ever eaten or drunk anything bad in this tavern?"

"Good point," Aimes said.

And with that, he basically guzzled the whole Bloody Mary. Lance and Caitrin would have been gifted alchemists with the right education, but this was Guttertown, so their experiments involved ale and spirits. Lance's last batch hit hard, and that was just me finishing half the tankard Ollie didn't finish.

I think all three of us had our eyes bugging out of our head, but if anyone could handle what was probably Lance's strongest experiment to date, it was Old Man Aimes. He slammed the tankard on the table and whistled.

"Fuck! That is potent. This is going to put the Whispering Raven on the map."

If Old Man Aimes endorsed your booze, that meant everyone in Guttertown was going to love it.

What the fuck were we going to do about the competing serial killers and how did Ollie know one of them?