“Thank you for letting me come back, sir,” Stammel said. He sighed. “But you have lost me, one way. A blind sergeant—not much use in a fight. I’ll try to be useful at something, until—until we go north. I can still scrub pots and chop redroots.”

“Stop that,” Arcolin said. “I didn’t order you back here to scrub pots. We need you, your expertise. You’re the senior sergeant, just as if you’d broken a leg and were riding in a wagon. From what Marshal Harak told me, you were already starting to train his yeomen.”

Stammel’s face relaxed. “Just wanted to give you a chance—”

“What, to waste the best sergeant I ever had? I may not be Kieri’s equal, but I’m not stupid. Let’s start this over. Welcome back, Sergeant Stammel.”

“Glad to be back, Captain,” Stammel said.

“Devlin already has some ideas for you,” Arcolin said. “But I wanted to brief you on the situation. It’s gotten complicated.”

“Complicated?”

“It’s not just brigands we’re fighting. I don’t know if someone—Alured, for instance—is trying to infiltrate a whole army into southern Vonja or something else …”

“That money the merchant we captured had. I heard in the city it was counterfeit.” That sounded like the old Stammel.

“You heard?”

“People see a man being led around by a young woman, they think neither of them can hear. Or think. Suli’s my eyes now, sir, but I’m the ears. I don’t think I hear better, but not seeing … I pay more attention. Anyway, she’d take me out on walks in the city. We stopped in a tavern … and I heard men talking. Merchants, I think, because one was talking wool prices, and then their voices got lower and it was about coins. That some of the Guild League cities are minting false coinage, cheating their own people.”

“I wish I’d thought to look at those money bags,” Arcolin said. “All I saw was silver and copper coins; when he said it was his own, I thought I’d let the Council figure it out.”

“Well, they have. ’Course, what I heard could be just rumor, but I heard other things that fit in. Those coins were supposed to have been minted here, in Vonja—had the Vonja die marks. But the Vonja Council swore they weren’t, by some secret mark no one’s supposed to know. The odd thing is, most of ’em were the right weight and passed the float test, whatever that is. Only some of the silvers were too heavy. Why would anyone make counterfeits with too much silver?”

“I’m not sure,” Arcolin said. “Burek told that last season, most of Golden Company contracted there and the bankers turned back a lot of their contract payment as counterfeit. Those were Sorellin natas … or they bore Sorellin’s mint marks. Burek said it almost caused riots.”

“Did M’dierra tell you about it, sir?”

“No. She did mention some counterfeiting—so did the banker—but she didn’t tell me specifically about her experience.”