The Savage swallows. As he speaks it’s obvious he’s not reciting a speech he memorized as much as remembering the important facts he was issued.

“Laython says the price on all yer coins is doubled. He says don’t expect no more Savages after me to join your side. He says I’m the last one you’ll get.”

“He sent you all the way here just to tell us that?” Biggs asks, dubious.

“The sack,” Lariat says. “What’s in the sack, boy?”

Evie looks up at the broom-mustached elder Savage. The expression on his face is unusually serious.

The man glances between the black-masked warriors holding him.

“Let him go!” Lariat barks.

The warriors stare at him through the thin eye slits in their hoods with obvious contempt, then they both look to Sirach.

She nods, and they release their hold on the Savage.

Laython’s messenger steps forward, cautiously. Without another word he untwists the top of the sack and upends the putrid bulging burlap.

Instead of dead rats, the severed heads of half a dozen men and women tumble from within. They’ve already begun to rot and several of them crack like eggs when they hit the soft ground. The smell that’s unleashed in their wake is enough to gag spectators several dozen yards away. Everyone gathered around the messenger can make out the faded runes on what’s left of their faces.

Savages, all.

“Who are they?” Evie asks with a hand clamped over her mouth and nose.

“Us,” Mother Manai answers her in the coldest tone Evie has heard the woman invoke.

“They’re the rest of the Elder Company,” Diggs explains calmly, though it’s clear from the way his handsome features have dropped he’s as shocked and repulsed as the rest of them.

Lariat approaches the messenger slowly, almost tentatively. Evie has yet to witness such somber and delayed behavior in the perpetually raucous man.

“You knew what was in the sack?” he asks the messenger in a quiet voice that might belong to someone else entirely.

The Savage nods.

Lariat launches his right fist with an awesome speed and power that defies both his advanced age and rotund frame. When that fist collides with the messenger’s jaw he collapses onto the ground as if the hand of a God Star itself pressed him to the earth. Lariat takes one step over the messenger’s crumpled form and drops to his knees, mounting the already dazed Savage on the ground.

“Lariat—” Evie begins, striding forward only to have Mother Manai roughly grab her by the shoulder.

She looks back at Manai and sees the many lines of the older woman’s face hardened into a warning expression. Mother Manai shakes her head, slow and definite.