“It’s very simple,” Laython explains. “The blood coin sits in your gut. It doesn’t pass. Drink all you want. Puke all you want…” He looks at Evie. “There it stays, inside you. Over time the dye the coin is treated with gets into your own blood. It raises those runes you see on your new brothers and sisters. It marks you as a Savage for all to see. The runes don’t scrub out. And it should be obvious tryin’ to cut ’em out produces the same effect as letting them show.”

Behind Laython, the other taskers are affixing the chair’s half dozen straps around the man’s legs, arms, torso, and head.

“Why’re you strapping him in after you’ve already shoved it down his throat?” Evie asks, disturbed and angry.

With an angry dog’s expression, he strides over to her and puts his face directly above her, his shouts like thunder from a stormy sky.

“You’re developing a distasteful habit of telling me my business, little girl! I suggest you save that sass for the Sicclunan front line where it might actually serve you well, lest you find my boot burrowing toward where I’m about to deposit a blood coin!”

Evie says nothing. She’s long sober now and able to see there’s no percentage in it for her to speak another word.

Her silence only serves to highlight the screams that pour forth from the chair in the next moment. The portly, bearded man begins thrashing against the tight straps, struggling more fiercely and violently than he did when the taskers seized him. They all watch as for the next thirty seconds straight all-consuming agony has its way with the man, no one lifting a finger to help or even attempt to help him.

Finally, gratefully, he falls still and silent.

Laython turns back to him, walking over to the chair and gripping the half-unconscious man by his abundance of beard. Laython tilts the portly man’s head to the right for them all to see.

There, on his cheek, is a bluish green mark almost like a sickle.

“That’s a good’n,” Laython remarks, releasing the man’s beard and making a show of wiping his hands on the cloth again. “The marks’ll fade if you ever get the coin out. And the only way that happens is if we give you the right mixture to help you pass it. To earn that particular cup of wine, you only need to survive one hundred battles. It’s that simple, children.

“Now then. Any man, woman, or child who returns a blood coin, either still inside a runaway Savage or a coin on its own, will be rewarded with one of these.”