+1 Bonus Chapter
…..
It didn’t take long for Erwin to reach the mouth of the cave where the bandits kept their coin.
He didn’t rush in, though, waiting instead for Willem’s group to catch up before giving his order, calm as anything.
“Hold the entrance.
No one comes in.”
“At once, m’lord!”
Willem held to it without question, planting himself and blocking every eager sellsword crowding the entrance.
“Fuck, Willem, why are you keeping us out?” one of Griff’s men snapped, temper flaring at the sight of him barring the way.
Willem kept one hand on his sword hilt, body squarely in the gap.
“Lord Erwin’s order.
No one goes in.”
That settled most of them down, though a few still craned their necks trying to see past him, muttering guesses back and forth about how much coin might be waiting inside.
The three other mail-clad sellswords held their ground at the entrance right alongside him.
Before long, Erwin’s head appeared from around the bend.
“Willem.
Two men, and find me some crates.
Ale barrels will do if there aren’t enough.”
A couple of sharp-eyed sellswords went looking before Willem even had to ask.
They came jogging back soon after with two empty crates and a handful of barrels between them.
“The rest of you hold here.
Willem, help me carry these in.”
Erwin and Willem hauled the crates and barrels inside together.
The cave ran a good dozen paces deep, bent in an S-curve, and once Erwin led Willem around the bend, the men waiting outside lost sight of them completely.
“Same as before.
Rock and dirt, fill every one of these.”
Erwin kicked at a crate near his feet, tossed Willem a shovel, then hauled two of the barrels deeper into the cave himself.
Willem froze for half a heartbeat before the reason struck him.
Coin turned men’s heads fast, and Erwin meant to pad out the haul with a few extra crates of dirt to muddy the trail.
Even if someone in the company got greedy enough to crack a crate open on the sly, all he’d find was dirt, with no way to guess which crate held the real coin, or how much of it there truly was.
Not unless he emptied every crate to find out.
So Willem set to filling his own without another word.
Deeper in, Erwin found what he was looking for.
The broken old crates back there held a real haul of silver stags and copper stars both.
This gang had clearly done well for itself, holed up in the kingswood as long as they had.
Next to the gold sitting in his own pack, it barely registered.
But to an ordinary sellsword, this was a fortune, and worth every bit of the noise it was about to cause.
Erwin was running the same trick as before, having Willem pack extra crates with dirt to make the haul look more impressive than it was, giving himself a believable enough source for the far larger sums already sitting in his own bag.
He’d only brought Willem in because one man couldn’t manage this alone, and Willem was the one man here he trusted enough for it.
Erwin pulled a good handful of silver stags from the crates and set them into one small chest, then grabbed a few more fistfuls at random and split them between the barrels he’d brought.
The rest of every container, he packed with dirt.
By the time he and Willem had both finished, Erwin called the other sellswords in to carry everything back out.
Crate after crate, barrel after barrel came out into the light, and every man watching started guessing at what was inside.
Griff and his men made no effort at all to hide the greed on their faces.
“Good people.”
Erwin let his gaze pass over the whole group once he’d taken his place in front of them.
“This gang of vile, honorless bandits attacked and killed my servants, and took property I carried all the way from my homeland.
Tonight, it’s finally been returned to me, and every one of you had a hand in it.”
The sellswords cheered at that, knocking fists together all around.
Clear enough what came next, knowing this lord’s habits by now.
Reward was coming.
Erwin let the moment sit before going on.
“Once we reach King’s Landing, I’ll settle accounts properly, by merit earned.
I saw every man of you fight bravely tonight.
For now, let’s start with what I promised, sixty silver stags for every bandit killed.”
“Willem.
You’ll handle the distribution.
See every man gets exactly what he’s owed.”
He passed the small chest in his arms over to Willem as he said it.
Lucky the bandits had kept this much silver stag on hand.
Without it, Erwin would have had to hand out his own coin instead, and that would have cost him plenty.
Back where he came from, gold, silver, and copper had all converted at a flat rate of one to a hundred straight through the chain.
Here, the rate ran one gold dragon to two hundred and ten silver stags, and eleven thousand seven hundred sixty copper stars to match.
Paying these men out of his own pack would have meant taking a real loss on the exchange.
With real silver stags in hand instead, he could pay them exactly what the local market expected.
The moment word of payment went around, the whole company erupted, shouting Erwin’s name like a toast.
Erwin felt real excitement of his own, and not only over the coin recovered from the bandits.
Something else had turned up that pleased him even more.
He’d tried, on a whim, feeding some of these silver stags into his own pack, curious whether the system would even recognize a foreign currency.
It had.
But because his own coin carried more weight, or more silver in it, than a Westerosi stag did, it took something close to a hundred and fifty stags before his gold count ticked up by even one.
Which meant a hundred and fifty silver stags bought him one of his own gold coins through the system.
By the local exchange, two hundred and ten stags bought one gold dragon.
Every time he converted, he came out sixty stags ahead of what the market itself would have charged him.
And among the bandits’ loot sat a few gold dragons besides.
Setting them beside his own coin, Erwin noticed his own ran visibly larger too.
Which meant that if he ever melted his own coin down and reminted it as gold dragons, he’d profit twice over on the difference.
Once he had the standing and the coin to work with, all he needed was to keep earning silver stags out in the world, feed them through his system for his own gold, then melt that gold down into dragons.
Coin from nothing, over and over, for as long as he kept at it.
A money mill, more or less, that never ran dry.
This, more than the bandits’ own hoard, was the real prize of the night.
Once Willem finished paying everyone out, Erwin had the gang’s stores of food and ale brought out too, and let the whole company eat and drink its fill.
With a few hours left before dawn once everyone was fed, he let them rest.
Snoring settled over the cave in waves before long, and that was when a single shadow rose quietly and nudged the man sleeping beside him.
Others followed, one after another, eight or nine in all, every one of them moving with slow, careful steps, terrified of making a sound.
At the head of them, of course, was Griff.
He pointed toward the entrance and drew a finger across his throat.
Two of his men grinned, vicious and eager, and slipped out into the dark.
A muffled grunt came from outside not long after, followed by the dull thud of something heavy hitting the ground.
The two crept back in soon after, nodding at Griff, the smell of fresh blood thick on them.
Griff’s smile turned satisfied, then curdled into something crueler.
He turned toward the rest of the sellswords sleeping nearby and drew the knife at his belt.
They worked fast and clean after that, slitting throats in the dark one after another, closing the distance toward Erwin and Willem with every step.
Then one of the men clipped a clay jar at his foot, and it toppled with a soft, hollow clatter.
Small as it was, the sound carried far in the dead silence of the small hours, and it was enough to snap Willem awake instantly.
He saw Griff lunging at him, dagger raised, the reek of blood thick in the air around him, and understood in an instant exactly what he was looking at.
He rolled clear on pure instinct, dodging the strike, and shouted as he came up.
“Griff!
What in seven hells do you think you’re doing?”