1.8.4 — The Hollow Coin

You spent the night losing money, winning fights, and negotiating your way through a woman who could read a guild coin at twenty paces. By morning you were standing in a room where two dead men had already tried what you were about to try.

The Hollow Coin earned its reputation. The fighting pit pulled Brawn in within the first hour. He beat Dok, the young Ork at ringside who'd lost his own fight and was watching to learn something, then stepped back in against Egil, the veteran, and lost. The crowd had bet on him both times. Riven took a seat at the Raven's Cross tables, won his first two hands cleanly, then spent the rest of the evening cheating with perfect invisibility and losing anyway. Gunnar went upstairs after the lightest shove of peer pressure anyone has ever called convincing. The mission was intelligence. Information. A simple transaction. When push came to shove, Gunnar chose to shove. Erevyn, an elf three months into her time at the Hollow Coin, happily relieved him of his gold and everything else he was carrying, and somewhere in the proceedings mentioned that her mother used to call this building something else. Galanthas. The Flower Gate. She didn't know what it meant. She knew Brynja did.

Brynja found the table when she'd made up her mind about them. The pitch was simple: a space beneath the establishment, old elven construction, workers who'd gone down and hadn't come back useful. She needed capable people. They looked capable. Down the road at the Notched Axe, Ulf was three-quarters of the way through a quantity of drink he couldn't afford and had been trying for three days to explain what he'd seen to anyone who'd listen. He told you. Three of them went in. The other two rushed ahead through the arch. The circle accepted them. Ulf was the odd one out, left behind in the dark with a portal that wouldn't open and two companions who didn't come back. He wasn't going back. Gunnar left him enough coin for the rest of the evening and you walked back.

The second negotiation with Brynja went better. A hundred gold, rooms for the night, drinks. She agreed. Then mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she knew plenty of Guild members with coins like Hantz carries, and none of them tried to hide theirs from the people around them. The negotiation ended there. You slept it off behind her walls.

In the morning Brynja took you to the cellar. Heavy door, worn flower symbol above the lintel. A room older than everything above it. The circle in the floor, fifteen feet across, three shallow depressions in the stone. Three hollow coins in hand.

You placed them.

Pale gold light. Flowers, and underneath something older. Iron. An old wound still present in the air.

The circle opened. You stepped through.

Behind you: the clean stone wall you'd spent weeks on the wrong side of. On the floor: two bodies. Not together. No visible wounds.

On the left wall, cut into the stone in dancing elven script, a story:

The Lay of Hrafn and the Hidden Lady

She was tired of being worshipped.

Ten thousand years of flowers. Of fathers on their knees before a wedding. Of mothers burning cloth when the children would not come. She knew what every face wanted before it opened its mouth. She had not been surprised in centuries. So she took off the cloak that lets a woman fly, set it down on the floor of Fólkvangr, and walked out without it.

She called herself Runa. She walked into the worst tavern she could find.

She found Hrafn.

He was winning at dice. This was suspicious, because the dice were his, and they were loaded. He had a face built for borrowing things and a laugh like a man who had never once considered consequences. She sat beside him and ordered the cheap drink.

He stole her purse before she finished it.

She let him.

Two rounds later he looked at her sideways. "You know I have your money."

"I know."

"You haven't called for anyone."

"No."

The longest pause in the history of his particular profession. "...Why?"

She said: "I wanted to see what you'd do next."

This was, for Hrafn, completely fatal. He fell in love immediately and completely and against every interest he had.

Now the gods were watching, as gods do, and some of them were not pleased. The problem with mortals, they said, is that they are always almost worthy and then they aren't. Three bets were placed.

Odin said: Watch the first road.

Three weeks into their travelling they came to a crossroads. One road had a checkpoint. Hrafn had forty-seven reasons not to walk through a checkpoint. The other road took three days longer and crossed a river that drowned men in spring.

He looked at the checkpoint. At the river. At her.

"Can you swim?"

"No."

He took the river road without another word.

She watched him from his back, her arms around his neck, the current at his chest and rising. His jaw was set. He was not asking for credit. He was not saying anything at all. He was just walking.

She thought: hm.

Odin said nothing. He paid the bet.

Thor said: Watch the second road.

They sheltered from a storm in a cave that went much deeper than it looked, and in the second hour she twisted her ankle on a root she couldn't see. Absolute dark. He could find the exit and come back, or not, and she would never know which he had chosen.

She heard him sit down.

He started talking.

He told her about the worst theft he had ever attempted and the three different ways it had gone wrong. He told her the part that still made him laugh, and then with the same voice and no pause between them, the part that didn't. He did not explain why the second part didn't. He talked for two hours.

At some point Runa understood that he was still there because he did not want her to be alone in the dark.

She had been a goddess for ten thousand years.

This was the first time anyone had sat with her in the dark without wanting anything from it.

Thor said nothing. He paid the bet.

Heimdall said: Watch the third road.

A merchant lord in the next city knew Hrafn's face and had opinions about it. He offered him the following, enumerated on fingers: land, a name, a woman of appropriate family, the forgetting of certain debts. All of it, if Hrafn delivered the foreign woman to his estate by morning.

Hrafn was quiet for long enough that the merchant lord thought it was negotiation and raised the offer.

Then Hrafn started laughing.

Not a performance. Not the laugh of a man choosing virtue loudly so someone will notice. The laugh of someone who has just understood a joke at someone else's expense. Who has seen, completely, that the merchant lord doesn't understand anything about the situation at all.

"She," he said, when he had stopped, "is the worst thing that has ever happened to my income."

He took Runa's hand. They left.

Heimdall said nothing. He paid the bet. Odin said: I told you.

She showed him what she was on the road out of the city, when it was quiet and the light was good.

He looked at her for a very long time.

"I am," he said carefully, "a significantly worse man than you deserve."

"You were. Three weeks ago you were."

He thought about this. "I still stole your purse."

"You bought me the cheap drink with it and called it even."

"That's not — I don't think that counts."

"Hrafn." She was almost smiling. "You gave it back."

After that, when the noble families came to her with their flowers and their requests, she told them she had a new requirement.

Not gold. Not ceremony. Not devotion sworn on knees.

Proof.

She built a house for it beneath the city that no longer remembers its name. She laid her requirements into the stone in the old tongue and left the entrance open and told them: those who prove worthy, I will bless. Those who do not —

On the right wall, shorter, the flourish abandoned:

You enter as one or you do not enter. Choose your partner before the threshold. Devotion is your currency and Freya will test your wealth.

Two bodies on the floor. Neither of them Ulf.

Remember For Next Time

• Two nights left: The party slept at the Hollow Coin. The ritual is two nights away. The temple is not a quick trip.
• The Flower Gate is open: Three hollow coins seated, the party through. Brynja has a barrel of them — the party kept their coins and have a way back.
• Brynja's deal: 100g and rooms for clearing whatever is below. She doesn't know this is a divine shrine. She clocked Hantz's coin and didn't push. Yet.
• Ulf: At the Notched Axe in Richeri. Three went in. The arch accepted two and locked him out. His companions didn't come back.
• The inscription hall: Enter as a pair or don't enter. The rules are on the wall. The arch enforces them.

Where We Are

You are standing in the first chamber of Freya's temple. The story is on the left wall. The rules are on the right. The arch ahead leads into the dark, and you have not yet chosen your partners.