Paid in Full

Korga noticed the coin the third time it came back to her. She was not a careless woman about money. A sellsword who is careless about money is a sellsword who dies in a ditch with an empty purse, and Korga had buried enough of those to take the lesson. So when she paid the ferryman two coppers at the Marrow crossing and felt, an hour down the road, the weight still sitting in her purse exactly as before, she stopped, and counted, and found the two coppers she had paid out lying among the others, and a third coin she did not recognize lying with them. The third coin was old. Older than old — it was worn so smooth that whatever face or beast it had once carried was gone, just a blank disc of dark metal, warmer than the coppers around it, always very slightly warmer, as though it had just left someone's hand. She remembered then where she had got it. Three days back, in the hill village of Sennet, she had taken a small job — clear a cellar of something that was eating the village's goats. It had not been much of a monster. Korga had killed it without breaking stride and without learning its name, and the village had been too poor to pay her properly, and an old woman at the back of the gathered crowd had pressed this one dark coin into Korga's palm and closed her fingers over it and said: "It's worth more than the whole of Sennet, sellsword. Only mind — the coin always comes home. Spend it where you like. It will not stay spent." Korga had taken it for an old woman's nonsense and a poor village's apology. She took it less for nonsense now. She tested it the way she tested everything, which was thoroughly and without sentiment. She paid it to a tavern-keeper at Drell for a night's bed and a hot meal; she woke with the coin back in her purse and the tavern-keeper none the wiser, his till one coin lighter than his memory of it. She gave it to a child on the Drell road, pressed it right into the small grubby hand and walked away fast and did not look back; it was in her purse before the next milestone. She climbed down the bank of the Marrow river itself and threw the cursed thing as far out into the brown water as her arm would send it, and watched it sink, and walked back up to the road feeling foolish and relieved in equal measure. It was waiting in her purse, faintly warm, when she stopped to drink at noon. Korga sat down on a milestone then, and held the coin up between two scarred fingers against the grey sky, and did the thing she was good at, which was not fighting — plenty of people were good at fighting — but thinking clearly about a bad situation without letting the badness of it rush her. The coin always comes home, the old woman had said. And then a second thing, which Korga had not weighed at the time and weighed now with great care. And so, now, must its bearer. She had not been cursed with a coin. She understood that, sitting on the milestone. A coin that returns is a riddle, an inconvenience, a strange story to tell. It is not a curse. The curse was the second clause, the quiet one — that the coin was not the thing being summoned home. The coin was the leash. And the hand at the other end of the leash was, slowly, patiently, the way you reel a slow fish, drawing in whoever carried it. Korga had been a sellsword twenty years. She had walked away from every place that had ever tried to keep her — every lord, every company, every warm bed and soft offer — because the one thing she had always, always owned was the direction of her own next step. She closed her fist around the warm dark coin. "Home," she said aloud, to the empty road, tasting the word. She did not have one. She had not had one since she was nine years old, and she had spent thirty years making very sure of that, and now some old woman in a goat-poor village had handed her a disc of nameless metal that intended, gently and without any hurry at all, to take her to one. There were two roads off the milestone where Korga sat. East ran to honest work, to the next town and the next job and the next stranger's coin. West — she could feel it now that she was looking, the way you feel a slope under a level-seeming floor — west was very slightly warmer. Korga the sellsword sat a long while between the two. Then she stood, and shouldered her blade, and because she had buried too many fools who tried to outrun a thing instead of walking up to it and looking it in the eye, she turned her boots west, toward whatever house the coin called home, and toward whoever was waiting in it for her to finally, after thirty years, arrive.