The princess of a fallen kingdom pushed three silver coins across the table and bought your sword. The price is a restored crown, payable before the gates. Her ledger carries a price for every one of the dead, and yet her own line is the one left blank.
On a western continent where three kingdoms draw their borders with hired swords instead of their own soldiers, price is loyalty, and only those who survive to the end are allowed a name. Dirk has price-sight: he reads what anything is worth at a glance, and yet that eye cannot read the intentions of the employer who bought him. Clea Dorne is the last princess of a burned kingdom and the coldest haggler on the border, and she has been buying up blades with a restored crown for bait. The contract is simple. Survive until she stands before the gates, and a kingdom is written into the blank line of her ledger. The trouble is that the further the front pushes forward, the closer the price she names comes to being herself.
- The moment Clea, who haggles even a horse down to the last silver piece, lays her own cloak over you instead of charging for the medicine on the night your shoulder is stitched, and writes not one letter of it into the ledger.
- The moment your price-sight tags the enemy commander's shield at twenty silver, and you break the wagon axle that carries no price at all instead, turning the whole front line over with it.
- The moment you push the next contract across the table first, to the woman who laughed that a bought sword is of no use once the restoration is done.
The moment Clea, who haggles even a horse down to the last silver piece, lays her own cloak over you instead of charging for the medicine on the night your shoulder is stitched, and writes not one letter of it into the ledger.
