I held my breath.
The stallion stopped.
Crap. Crap, crap, crap.
I was right by a lantern. He could see me in excruciating detail, everything from my bare feet to the hood of my wet cloak. I didn’t even want to imagine what I smelled like.
“Hold out your hand.”
That voice raised every hair on the back of my neck. He sounded like he ordered people to their death in battle.
Not holding out my hand wasn’t an option. If he cut it off, would it regenerate, or would I have to kill myself to regrow it? Would it regrow at all? If I died again, would I come back to life or was it a limited-number-of-times kind of thing . . .
“Your hand.”
Damn it.
A hard clump blocked my throat. I swallowed and raised my right hand.
I don’t want to die again. Please no.
A cold weight fell into my fingers. He’d dropped a handful of coins into my palm.
“Get off the street and buy some shoes.”
What?
Villain started forward. The riders passed me. The cart rolled by into the night. The hoofbeats scattered down the street, receding.
I stared at the money in my hand. A large silver coin, about the size of a silver dollar—a noma—and two copper coins that had to be dens. My memory informed me in a detached mechanical way that each noma equaled one hundred copper dens, and each den equaled four quarters. A quarter would buy me a pint of cheap ale, a den would buy me a young chicken, and a noma would buy me a weaned calf. Thank you, numerous rereads.
The fear slowly melted away. The last echoes of it drained out of me into the night.
The Sleepless Duke had given me money. The actual, in the flesh, Ramond vi Everard had handed me coins.
Oh my god.
Okay, that was cool beyond all reason. Entirely too much excitement, very scary, but so freaking cool. I shivered. Wow. Okay, I needed to get where I was going now before anything else happened.
I backtracked, counting the side streets. One. Two.
Here it was, a house with a blue door on the corner of a side street, marked by twin lanterns with a small red flower painted on the glass. Squire Way. Found it.
I ducked into the side street. It wound, twisting left, then right, then left again. I followed it. As long as I didn’t take any turns, it would get me to my destination.
I would need to pay an entrance fee. The question was, how much? The door charge wasn’t a means of making money, it was proof of one’s ability to pay. The real fees would be spent inside. For prominent people, the door charge would be nothing. For me, it would be a serious amount of money, and the prices in Rellas didn’t always make sense by modern standards. In this world, cows and fish were relatively cheap, and books and soap were hellishly expensive. Offering too little would be insulting, offering too much would brand me a sucker. I had to find the middle ground.
I didn’t even know how much money I had.
I crossed a street.
Another.
Average daily wages for an unskilled laborer were about two dens. An experienced mercenary made five or six. Would ten dens be enough?
I squeezed Everard’s coins in my hand. He’d given me a whole noma. It wasn’t much money for him, but for a woman without shoes or underwear, it was a huge amount. It would have been better to put it into my bag, but then I wouldn’t know which money was his. I wanted to wait until I could look at it. Kair Toren had beaten me down, but the coins in my hand were proof that kindness existed. Someone in this awful city had been nice to me, and good things did happen here. It was hope in my fingers.
That was so random. If you had asked me which of the characters in the novel were the most likely to hand a coin to a beggar, Everard would be near the bottom of that list. In the books he was a rare presence, an ominous power that both fueled Sauven’s mental illness and held it in check from afar. Whenever he appeared, someone was going to die.
