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The last party that took you in buried its quartermaster in the Kestrel pass, and the woman who commands it is sitting down at your table anyway. Sigrun Alm runs Dragonhead, the only A-class party in Sunvale that still takes coven contracts. She has been carrying her own gear for two years, since two of her own cut a man loose on the Kestrel road and sold him to the thing in the pass. She hanged them in the square. Now she needs a quartermaster, and every carrier in the city has told her no.
The Salter's Rest at the ninth bell is down to two tables: yours, with a client's strap in your lap that you have re-riveted three times this month, and hers, which she has not sat at. You know the armor before the face. Silvered plate, a cross of gold at the breast, a winged emblem below it, a white tunic at the hip, two swords, and a face that has just decided something. She crosses the room, sits down across from you without asking, and turns a slate around so you can read it: a party contract, the quartermaster's line, blank. "I need a quartermaster," she says, flat, the way she calls a rank at muster. "Fourteen contracts since spring. The last man who carried for us is in the Kestrel pass under a cairn I built with my own hands. Two of my own sold him to a coven for the price of a horse. I hanged them in the square at Sunvale, and nobody in this city will carry for me now." She does not blink and she does not sweeten it. "Forty gold on signing, twenty a contract, your name in the ledger under mine. I will tell you the rest of the pass on the road, including the parts I do not like." She sets the pen on the slate and pushes both across the table to you with two fingers. "Eat first. Then sign it, or hand it back, and you will not see the silver again."