“You’re welcome to give me a search,” Mat said, raising his arms to the side.
Barlden hesitated. “You will have thrown them away, of course,” he finally said. “It’s a fine scheme, dressing like a lord, loading dice so they make you lose instead of win. Never heard of a man bold enough to throw away gold like that on fake dice.”
“If you’re so certain that I’m cheating,” Mat said, “then why go through with this?”
“Because I know how to stop you,” the mayor replied. “Like I said, you’ll use my dice on this throw.” He hesitated, then smiled, grabbing a pair of dice off the table that Mat had been using. He tossed them. They came up a one and a two. He tossed them again, and got the same result.
“Better yet.” The mayor smiled deeply. “You’ll use these. In fact . . . I’ll make the throw for you.” Barlden’s face in the dim light took on a decidedly sinister cast.
Mat felt a stab of panic.
Talmanes took his arm. “All right, Mat,” he said. “I think we should go.”
Mat held up a hand. Would his luck work if someone else threw? Sometimes it worked to prevent him from being wounded in combat. He was sure of that. Wasn’t he?
“Go ahead,” he said to Barlden.
The man looked shocked.
“You can make the throw,” Mat said. “But it counts the same as if I’d tossed. A winning hand, and I walk away with everything. A losing hand, and I’ll be on my way with my hat and my horse, and you can keep the bloody chest. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Mat stuck out his hand for a shake, but the mayor turned away, holding the dice in his hand. “No,” he said. “You’ll get no chance to swap these dice, traveler. Let’s just go out front and wait. And you keep your distance.”
They did as he said, leaving the muggy, ale-soaked stench of the tavern for the clear street outside. Mat’s soldiers brought the chest. Barlden demanded that the chest remain open so that it couldn’t be switched. One of his thugs poked around inside it, biting the coins, making certain that it really was full and that the coins were authentic. Mat waited, leaning against the door as a wagon rolled up, and men from inside the tavern began rolling casks of ale onto its bed.
The sun was barely a haze of light on the horizon, behind those blasted clouds. As Mat waited, he saw the mayor grow more and more anxious. Blood and bloody ashes, the man was a stickler for his rules! Well, Mat would show him, and all of them. He’d show them. . . .
Show them what? That he couldn’t be beaten? What did that prove? As Mat waited, the cart piled higher and higher with foodstuffs, and he began to feel a strange sense of guilt.
I’m not doing anything wrong, he thought. I’ve got to feed my men, don’t I? These men are betting fair, and I’m betting fair. No loaded dice. No cheating.
Except his luck. Well, his luck was his own—just as every man’s luck was his own. Some men were born with a talent for music, and they became bards and gleemen. Who begrudged them earning coin with what the Creator gave them? Mat had luck, and so he used it. There was nothing wrong with that.
Still, as the men came back into the inn, he started to see what it was that Talmanes had noticed. There was an edge of desperation to these men. Had they been too eager to gamble? Had they been foolhardy with their betting? What was that look in their eyes, a look that Mat had mistaken for weariness? Had they been drinking to celebrate the end of the day, or had they been drinking to banish that haunted cast in their eyes?
“Maybe you were right,” Mat said to Talmanes, who was watching the sun with almost as much anxiety as the mayor. Its last light was dusting the tops of the peaked homes, coloring the tan tile a deeper orange. The sunset was a blaze behind the clouds.
“We can go, then?” Talmanes asked.
“No,” Mat said. “We’re staying.”
And the dice stopped rattling in his head. It was so sudden, the silence so unexpected, that he froze. It was enough to make him think he’d made the wrong decision.
“Burn me, we’re staying,” he repeated. “I’ve never backed down from a bet before, and I don’t plan to now.”
A group of riders returned, bearing sacks of grain on their horses. It was amazing what a little coin could do for motivation. As more riders arrived, a young boy came trotting up the road. “Mayor,” he said, tugging on Barlden’s purple vest. That vest bore a crisscross of patched rips across the front. “Mother says that the outlander women aren’t done bathing. She’s trying to hurry them, but. . . .”
The mayor tensed. He glanced at Mat angrily.
Mat snorted. “Don’t think I can do anything to hurry that lot,” he said. “If I were to go rush them, they’d likely dig in like mules and take twice as long. Let someone else bloody have a turn dealing with them.”
Talmanes kept glancing at the lengthening shadows along the road. “Burn me,” he muttered. “If those gh
osts start appearing again, Mat. . . .”
“This is something else,” Mat said as the newcomers threw their grain onto the wagon. “It feels different.”