For three seconds nobody in the Grand Hall moved except the steam curling off Cale’s tin mug.
The fifty heavy silver coins lay scattered across the grey limestone bench between Sella Rusk’s knee and Cale’s brass pocket-scales. They were handsome pieces in a grim, square-shouldered way—stamped from thick blanks of northern mountain silver before the Crown mints began cutting thirty percent copper into the southern shillings—and the recessed iron punch of the black sun in the center of each face looked as sharp as if the armory die had struck it yesterday morning.
Yet Cale held his right hand pulled back against his damp wool ribs, his ink-stained fingers curled inward toward his palm.
“What is the matter with them?” Tessa Dene demanded, tapping the flat of her salvage fingernail against the nearest crown so it rang with a clear, high ping that lingered in the rafters. “Bite one if you don’t trust the ring! That’s pure shaft silver, not a tin washer in the pile. Even Rella down at the apothecary stall took two of them for bitter-root and linen bandages without reaching for her acid bottle, once she wiped the soot out of the grooves.”
“Rella doesn’t have to send her tally-sheets to the district exchequer every Friday,” Cale said. His voice had lost all its nervous flutter; it was quiet, tight, and entirely grim. Without touching the metal, he leaned two inches closer to the bench and pointed with the horn tip of his dry pen-holder at…
