The blood coin hunter growls until spittle dangles from his scarred half-mouth. He jerks his head viciously to one side, the spikes embedded in his cheek snapping the blade of Evie’s short sword cleanly at its center.

Evie seizes the opportunity to smash the hardest part of her skull into the fleshy side of the blood coin hunter’s face. Namrok’s head snaps back awkwardly, and he freezes atop her, stunned. Evie pulls her knees toward her chest, wriggling her legs between their bodies, and shoves him back into the rocks with her feet. She nips back up to her feet quickly, readying herself for him.

Leaping away from the boulder, Namrok tosses aside his empty crossbow and draws a dull wide blade with a tanto tip and jaggedly serrated edge that’s more machete than short sword.

Evie has no idea how she’ll defend against that wicked-looking thing with three inches of broken blade, but she clings to the tsuka all the same. Her mind races for a strategy, a method of attack, but her body and brain are weary.

Fortunately and unfortunately for Evie, her mind is relieved of that responsibility when an unseen force crashes into her side and sends her careening against the nearest boulder. The broken short sword flies from her hand and her body bounces against the surface of the stone in a wholly unnatural and remarkably painful fashion. She rolls across the bottom of the narrow path in a daze, the world continuing to spin around her even after she’s stopped moving.

Evie stares up from the gritty earth at armored legs and an equally armored torso that seem to rise all the way to the sun. The armor is composed of huge animal bones, ending in a bear’s skull helm with jaws full of teeth as large and jagged as stone arrowheads. Evie remembers Tomoe, the giantess, as the other hunter Laython introduced her batch of Savage recruits to before blood coins were forced down their gullets. The bone-armored warrior is still cradling the poleax that’s as tall as she is; its foot-long wedged pommel must be what struck Evie to the ground.

In the next moment the slanted tip of Namrok’s dull blade is at her throat and the ugly lump of a man is laughing through the side of his mouth that remains intact.

“I’d’a had her,” he gleefully insists.

“I was becoming bored,” Tomoe says, tapping the edge of her boot’s sole against the pommel gently as if she’s concerned that Evie’s broken body damaged it somehow.

The slanted tip of Namrok’s machete flits down to Evie’s belly.

“She sliced up my good ear,” he says. “I want her coin while she’s still alive.”

“She fought like a warrior,” Tomoe reminds him. “She will receive a warrior’s death.”

“Damn your codes!” Namrok growls.