Earlier that day I had retrieved my winnings, and my sack of coins felt heavier, I guessed that the gentleman placed my standard bet for me. As the bitter lady glared at me, I dropped it on the table in front of me, with a nice heavy thump. Her face turned a shade scarlet, beyond her typical wine drunk rouge.

“Wanna make a bet?” I asked with a smile, I reached in my bag of coins, grabbed a few coins...one of which was gold. I let the coins fall from my fingers like poker chips. It was loud enough for the entire Inn to hear. She’d either refuse, and look shy, or accept and fall deeper into the spiral.

She took the bait, and strode over, as elegantly as she could in her perpetual drunkenness, and said “I thought you wasted all of your money.” Then asked “what do you have in mind.” She said in anticipation of something grandiose.

I grinned, and plopped down twenty five coppers. “I see that the man you sponsored has somehow made it to the final bout, so my bet is even money Rick VS Morigan.” If she took the bet even if I lost I would still have a bag full of coins, if she refused I kept twenty five coppers. Things would only get dangerous if she made a counter bet. I was hoping that she would make a counter bet, if it was big enough I could make it to where she would leave me alone.

“That’s not good enough!” She announced to the entire Inn...big mistake “How much is in your coin bag?” She asked in full voice, I dumped the contents of my bag, and was pleasantly surprised. Twelve gold crowns, two hundred silver scepters, seventy five copper coronets. In five days I had apparently become a moderately if temporarily wealthy man.

The bitter want to be baroness’ hackles went up “that’s more than what you took from me!” she hissed.

I shrugged , and said “make your bet.”

The bitter lady wiggled mentally, it was a mental acrobatic that i’ve seen a few times, she needed that money back desperately. She also wanted to make the point that she was superior all because of noble birth, unfortunately for her the only way she could prove this was to throw ever increasing sums of money at me in the not so vain hopes that I’d eventually lose a bet. “Three-hundred fifty silver scepters” she said.

I winced, and asked “really, you’re going to try the same trap again, in the vain hope that I would accept that bet? Then you knowing that I don’t have enough to cover the bet if I lose would put me into indentured servitude? Serfdom?”

The bitter lady’s eyes narrowed. She'd been caught setting the same exact trap that I had caught her setting last time. Then I nodded “You know what?!” I said giving the bitter lady a glare “The real bet here is humiliation, so how bout this even money, if Rick wins, you get a year of my service free. I win however…”