Cosca’s thin hand clutched the table with a white-knuckled intensity as he watched Morveer swallow. “How little you understand me. I could stop drinking whenever I wish. In fact, I have already resolved to do so. I would prove it to you.” The mercenary held up one wildly flapping hand. “If I could just get half a glass to settle these damn palsies!”

The others laughed, the tension diffused, but Morveer caught the lethal glare on Cosca’s face. The old soak might have seemed harmless as a village dunce, but he had once been counted among the most dangerous men in Styria. It would have been folly to take such a man lightly, and Morveer was nobody’s fool. He was no longer the orphan child who had blubbered for his mother while they kicked him.

Caution first, each and every time.

Monza sat still, said no more than she had to and ate less, gloved hand painfully clumsy with the knife. She left herself out, up here at the head of the table. The distance a general needs to keep from the soldiers, an employer from the hirelings, a wanted woman from everyone, if she’s got any sense. It wasn’t hard to do. She’d been keeping her distance for years and leaving Benna to do the talking, and the laughing, and be liked. A leader can’t afford to be liked. Especially not a woman. Shivers kept glancing up the table towards her, and she kept not meeting his eye. She’d let things slip in Westport, made herself look weak. She couldn’t let that happen again.

“The pair o’ you seem pretty familiar,” Shivers was saying now, eyes moving between her and Cosca. “Old friends, are you?”

“Family, rather!” The old mercenary waved his fork wildly enough to have someone’s eye out. “We fought side by side as noble members of the Thousand Swords, most famous mercenary brigade in the Circle of the World!” Monza frowned sideways at him. His old bloody stories were bringing back things done and choices made she’d sooner have left in the past. “We fought across Styria and back, while Sazine was captain general. Those were the days to be a mercenary! Before things started to get… complicated.”

Vitari snorted. “You mean bloody.”

“Different words for the same thing. People were richer back then, and scared more easily, and the walls were all lower. Then Sazine took an arrow in the arm, then lost the arm, then died, and I was voted to the captain general’s chair.” Cosca poked his stew around. “Burying that old wolf, I realised that fighting was too much hard work, and I, like most persons of quality, wished to do as little of it as possible.” He gave Monza a twitchy grin. “So we split the brigade in two.”

“You split the brigade in two.”

“I took one half, and Monzcarro and her brother Benna took the other, and we spread a rumour we’d had a falling out. We hired ourselves out to both sides of every argument we could find—and we found plenty—and… pretended to fight.”