Chapter 4: What My Head Was Worth

"Fifty crowns," I said. "You'll never see a copper of it."

Erwan raised his eyebrows. "Your brother's a prince. Princes find money."

"My brother owes the River Lord nine thousand crowns," I said. "The Counting House stopped his allowance at midsummer."

"He has a seal and a smile and nothing in his purse."

"Then he borrows it."

"From the River Lord," I said. "And he takes it back out of your hide the first time you sell him a cart of wool."

Some of the bandits laughed.

Erwan didn't.

Gwenn banged her stick on the cart wheel.

"Not in the yard," she said. "Anything decided in the yard gets decided by whoever shouts loudest. In the hall."

The hall of Penhal had half a roof.

The other half was sky, and snow had drifted under it against the old lord's table.

The three hundred crowded into the dry half with the forty.

Somebody built a fire in a hearth big enough to stand in.

They put me at the head of the table because there was nowhere else to put me.

Erwan sat on the end of it with one boot on the bench.

"So," he said. "If not fifty crowns, what are you offering?"

"A pardon for forty men," I said. "By name."

He laughed out loud. "From the father who gave you a ruin for supper?"

"From the Spring Court," I said.

I looked down the table so they could all hear me.

"If I walk into the Great Hall alive on the first day of spring, I win a bet before the whole court," I said.

"A king who's just watched his son lose likes to look generous," I said.

"I'll ask for your pardons there, out loud, where he can't say no without looking small."

"And if he says no anyway?" Erwan asked.

"Then I come home, and when they hang you, they hang me beside you," I said. "My name will be on the same list."