Juna pressed her ear to the packed ice and counted hooves the way her mother taught her.
Forty, fifty, seventy, the beat rolled through the frozen floor of the square and into her jaw. She reached ninety before the sound blurred into one long drum, shaking snow off the fountain's rim.
"Ninety-something horses and one of me," she muttered, flipping both daggers into her palms, "fine... dinner's on me."
"Wolf, you can't afford dinner, you borrowed my coin for pancakes this morning," Vella called from the clinic steps.
"Then it's dinner on credit, healer," she shot back.
Loccy hauled the hammer off her shoulder with a grunt, planting herself in the lane between the oncoming wave and the bread carts, "Hajin, if they step on the loaves again I'm going to be really upset."
"Then don't let them, swing it the way you swing at the pantry door."
"That's the fast way!"
"That's the one."
