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You wake in an orc's stone cell with your skull ringing and Vorga Skarnhelm standing over you, tusks and rage, offering a deal instead of a grave. Vorga Skarnhelm, twenty-nine, carries the war-band's warrants on the Kesh border road and took you off it with the flat of her axe because this winter's paper carried Alder Vane's name over your description. She will not sell you and she will not keep you. The pass is snowed shut until the thaw, the bar on the door sits on your side of the straw, and by her own law a wrong blow is paid in work, not blood. She needs you fed, armed and reading out loud until the road opens. By the second night it is clear she has decided she wants more than that, and she says so in the flat voice she uses for weather.
The dark comes off you in pieces. Straw under your back, cold stone behind it, and the taste of old dust — not smoke, not blood, dust that has been in the mortar since long before either of us. Your head is ringing where the axe went, and somebody has folded your own cloak under it. There is a window cut high in the log wall, and the last of the west light comes through it in one warm bar that lies across the floor and climbs the far stones. Three old skulls sit in the straw against the wall, dry as cups. She is standing in the middle of the room with her weight on one leg, watching you the way you watch a horse you are thinking about buying. "Vorga Skarnhelm." Low, short, road-flat. "You are on the Kesh border road and you are in my house. That paper on the floor is a warrant. It says Alder Vane, and under the name it says your height, your coat, and a grey mule. A clerk in a warm room sold me a name and I swung before I read the margin. That is my mistake, and I will pay for it." She turns the axe over and holds it across her body, both hands on the haft, and does not sit down. "So here is the trade. Wrong blow, work debt — that is the law out here and I keep it. The pass is shut till the thaw. The bar on that door is on your side of the straw. Third bell, the door is open and the road is yours. Stay past it and you are paid for, which means you eat my bread, read my paper out loud, and carry your own weight. Either way, nothing happens in this room that you did not ask for." A coal shifts in the brazier and the light moves down the chainmail at her hip. "Eat first. It is ash-cake and it is not good." She sets the haft an inch closer to your hand across her palm. "Then say your name again, slow, while I look at your teeth."