By dusk, the cohort was back off the ridge and within a glass’s march of their former campsite, where they’d left the wagons and two tensquads.

“I don’t think we’ll see any attacks for a few days,” Arcolin said. “They’ll be resupplied, no doubt, but that will take time. We must be hurting them. We’ll send word back to the city. These dies could be stolen from their mint, or made elsewhere. I want to take them in myself, in case they do have a traitor who might intercept them. Perhaps if we get word about Stammel.” It had been so long, he did not expect good news.

Burek nodded. “I wouldn’t trust them either—not after what they tried before.”

Arcolin gave the dies to their own smith, who looked them over carefully.

“This little anvil’s definitely a coiner’s,” he said. “At the mints they’d use a water-powered hammer to strike multiples at once; this would be a merchant’s set. Seen them up north, to strike Finthan coins with Tsaia’s mark.”

“I thought both passed easily in the northern realms,” Burek said. “Doesn’t the north have a sort of Guild League?”

“No,” Arcolin said. “Finthan and Tsaian coins are commonly accepted at mint value—at least in Vérella and Fin Panir—but everything else must be changed—at a cost—and some are regulated.”

Burek looked puzzled. “But doesn’t that impede trade? I mean, if the money changers take their snip, and the realms—”

“Yes, but not so much that most people mind it. We use letters of credit, as you saw. And the periodic bankers’ caravans—heavily guarded—often carry gold bullion and lump silver, so it can be fresh-minted in Tsaia. There’s no tax on letters of credit and much less on unminted metals.”

“What about the others, like Pargun and Lyonya and so on?”

“Pargun doesn’t trade in Tsaia.”

“But they trade on the coast,” Burek said, scowling. “I’ve seen Pargunese coins—not many, to be sure, but some.”

“I suppose …” Arcolin had not ever considered where the Pargunese traded. Down here? They must go by sea, down the river. “I suppose they trade in Bannerlíth, on the northern coast, north of the Eastbight—perhaps they themselves have come to the southern coast.”

“Even Andressat uses Guild League standards for coinage. It would be simpler if everyone did.”

“True,” Arcolin said. “But the money changers would hate it. They’d lose half their trade.”

“I suppose,” Burek said. He had picked up the dead sailor’s medallion and now turned it over and over, examining the designs on both sides. “I wonder what this means.”

“I never saw it before,” Arcolin said. “It’s not the device Alured picked when he claimed the duchy of Immer. He went with one from the Cortes Immer ruins.” He poked through the pile of coins, setting them in stacks according to size, metal, design. “Some of these wouldn’t fit the dies at all. If you stamped this one width of the die—” He held up a small silver. “—it would be obviously thinner than standard. There must be more dies.”