Innkeeper's Song

THE INNKEEPER

They paid me handsomely for the horses—I will say that—and did me the honor of offering no explanations as to what had become of them. When you are my age, you’ll have long given up expecting the truth from anybody, but you will appreciate not being lied to all the more for it. As for where they had been and, more important, how they got back in only seven days from a journey that had left the black one limping badly and a good ten pounds thinner, while Miss Kiss-my-ring Nyateneri looked as many years older… well, what could they have told me that I’d have believed, then or even now? I took the money, told the boy to tell Marinesha to bring dinner to their room, and bloody let it go.

The old man was starting to have me more nervous than the women by then, anyway. I knew him for a wizard, of course—had from the first day; you can’t miss them, it’s almost a smell—which made no matter by itself. I don’t like wizards—show me someone who does—but they’re usually mannerly guests, generous to the help, and a good bit more careful than most about keeping the landlord sweet. But I also knew from Marinesha that this one was frail, sick, practically dying, hadn’t stirred out of his room since Rosseth and Tikat carried him there. And here he was now, on his feet at any rate, and plainly up to his neck in whatever those women had been at since they left the inn. No simple woods wizard, either, curing colicky-animals and promising sunshine for the harvest—oh no, thank you, this one was turning out to be just the sort that trouble delights in following home like a stray dog, never mind whose home it may be, nor who’s to feed the beast. I’d no idea what breed of trouble it was likely to be, but I could smell that, too, as you smell rain, or a cartload of manure coming around the next bend. Unmistakable. About that, at least, I am never wrong.

Turn him out? Turn him out? Oh, aye—Karsh, who hadn’t the stomach to order three women out of The Gaff and Slasher, Karsh is now to tell a wizard to take his custom somewhere else. Well, I have no shame in telling you that I smiled and nodded at him whenever I saw him, asked him if his room was comfortable enough, and sent him up better wine than Miss I’ve-killed-men-over-a-bad-vintage Lal ever wrinkled her nose at. He appreciated it, too—said so in her royal presence more than once. Even innkeepers have their moments.

Yet nothing seemed to happen—nothing you could call happening, anyway, smells or no smells. The summer days creaked by, travelers came and went—Shadry’s wife ran off with one of them, the way she does most summers, just for the vacation from Shadry—horses got looked after, meals got cooked, dishes went on being washed, rooms were more or less swept out, carters lugged casks of red ale and Dragon’s Daughter into the taproom, and a family of Narsai tinkers left in the night without paying their score. My fault for not charging them in advance—my father was half-Narsai, and I know better than that.

The three women behaved almost like ordinary guests, taking the sun and buying trinkets and antiquities at Corcorua Market; though why they stayed on, except to nurse their wizard friend, I couldn’t fathom. Tikat seemed to have given up running after that daft white one, Lukassa—hardly looked at her these days, except to move out of the way when she passed by, more like a little wandering ghost than ever, with those eyes eating up her face. I’d have kicked him out, just to be kicking someone, but he was more than earning his keep between the stable, the house, and the kitchen garden. A silent, grim-faced lad, with a south-country brogue to curdle beer, but a good worker, I’ll say that.

In honesty, the only real complaint I could have mustered during that time had to do with the boy. And I couldn’t have put it in words, either, as well as I know him and myself. He was happy as bedamned to see those women back, of course—took on to unsettle your dinner, and was forever slipping off to see if any little chore of theirs wanted doing. Nothing new about that, certainly: no, what niggled at me was an idea that something was niggling at him, and growing worse by the day. Not that he said a word about it—not to me anyway, of course, he’d die first—but Gatti Jinni could have read that face, and that anxious way he was developing of looking quickly around him at odd moments, just as though he were sneaking off to bother Marinesha and heard me shouting for him. I thought it was the wizard then. I thought he’d taken to hanging after him, as he did with those women. It gave me a bit of a queer feeling.