Against the back wall of the shepherd shelter, the bounty hunter let out a long, wet groan and shifted his bound wrists in his lap.
“Name’s Fesk,” he muttered, squinting through the tallow smoke at Ysabet as she rinsed her linen rag in the warm tin kettle. “Just Fesk, out of the low timber-wash. Look, lady—I didn’t write that priest’s paper, and I wasn’t looking to kill four women in the dark. I’ve got a wife with the marsh-cough down in Reed Hollow and three little ones eating boiled bark-flour this autumn. A man sees three hundred silver nailed to a post, he doesn’t ask church riddles.”
Chaska, who was kneeling beside the pile of confiscated gear from Fesk’s belt, picked up his heavy drawstrings pouch and untied the leather neck. She tipped it upside down onto a flat slate slab.
Out rolled four silver temple advance-coins, a brass tinderbox, and a dozen eight-sided counters of polished white ivory inlaid with red lacquer pips—the high-table markers from the copper-syndicate gaming halls in Kesh, each one worth a winter’s flour for a family of four.
Chaska tapped one of the ivory counters with her thumbnail. It gave a bright, expensive clink. “Your kids eat ivory down in Reed Hollow, Fesk, or do they boil the red paint off first?”
