21/04/2026 18:23

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The sole was bright and unmarked. Then he looked back, first at Susannah, then at Jake. He had one hand buried deep in Reynolds’s sweaty hair; the other maintained a steady pressure on the knife at Reynolds’s throat. Still with not a whit of hesitation.

He approached the center of the courtyard in rolling side-to-side loops, the tugstring of his sombrero twisted against his scrawny throat, his long white hair flying. This ’un takes away the headache if ye drink too much of Mayor Thorin’s damned punch, but it gripes the bowels somethin fierce, so it does. I tied him to the cook’s pump. He rocked back and forth against her, moaning like a man with stomach cramps.