Innkeeper's Song

THE INNKEEPER

I watched him come toward me, exactly as I had watched him walk away that night when there were dead men all over the bathhouse. Sounds carry far and long on damp mornings here, and I could still hear the hoofbeats even after they had reached the main road. I said, “Wouldn’t take you along, heh?”

He answered nothing at all to that but, “I had to see to Tikat. I am sorry to be late. It was a bad night.”

“There’s naught in the least amiss with Tikat, and well you both know it,” I said. “Nothing wrong with anybody who can turn an addled gape and a tiny bruise on the neck into two full days’ eating at my expense. As for those women—ah, well, cheer up, keep at it. Bound to be a slave caravan or a bandit gang through here sometime soon, and you can run off with them. Steal a younger horse than Tunzi, though—he’d not make it past Hrakimakka’s orchard, if he got that far.” By this time, I was hitting him, or trying to: half-asleep, he was still all shrugs and sidesteps, catching blows on every part of his body that could possibly hurt me and not him. I don’t believe I ever landed one solid clout on that boy after he turned eight or so. I really don’t.

He kept mumbling, “I was not running away, I was not,” but I paid that no more attention than you’d have done. Who wouldn’t run from fat old Karsh and The Gaff and Slasher to follow two beautiful women adventurers away to the golden horizon? I hit him for thinking I’d believe anything different, and for not having the wit and the courtesy to imagine that I might have done the same myself. As well as he imagined he knew me.

“Shadry needs wood and water in the kitchen,” I said. “When he’s done with you, I want those drainage ditches below the stable cleaned out. They’re fouled again—I can smell them from here. Tikat’s to help you, if he plans to spend another night under any roof of mine. As for your plans”—and I bounced one off the point of his elbow that left my hand sore all that day—“next time, don’t let them hang on someone else’s yes or no. Next time, you’d best keep running as straight and far as you can go, for I’ll pulp every last drop of cider out of you if you try sneaking back. Do you understand what I am telling you, boy?”

He didn’t, not then. He gave me one dark, puzzled blink, and then ducked past me toward the woodshed. I shouted after him, “Stay away from the old man, do you hear me? And the girl, too—I don’t want you speaking a bloody word to that mad girl.” When I turned, because I felt someone watching me, it was the fox, grinning between the withes of a berry basket. He was gone, vanished, while my shout for Gatti Jinni was still echoing, but I know I saw him. I saw him, all right.