The Last Inn

by Rachel Gay

  Erin fought to keep the smile from sliding off of her face as she led them inside, where the servant pulled out a chair that put up a feeble protest when the madam sat down in it. He stepped back, put both arms behind his back, and seemed ready to stand there the whole time.

  This was off-putting enough, but when Erin returned with the salad and wine and orders from Kota to stall until the rest was ready, Madam Elzwig began to ask questions.

  The first was innocent enough, as her sharp, prying eyes roamed over the room, “Tell me, girl, how long have you been running this place?”

  “Oh, just over a month,” Erin said, surprising herself with how long it had been. Then again, it seemed like she had been here forever at the same time.

  “You must be poor Daniel Sollis’s granddaughter, right?” There was a pitying tone in her voice now, and Erin blushed.

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think Mr. Sollis had any family.” She wondered how often the madam had come here before. Maybe that was where she had seen the coat of arms, from a previous visit.

  “Oh? Then how did you come by this place?” Madam Elzwig turned over some lettuce and Erin held her breath until she took another bite of the salad.

  Erin explained how she had volunteered to take on the inn, which then led Elzwig to ask about the mayor, then Kota. Erin went carefully here, and felt that she gave the impression that Kota was just another young man from the area, and the questions soon turned to the town, and Sollis, one right after the other until Erin felt as picked over as the salad.

  It came as a great relief when she was able to take the empty bowl back into the kitchen and deposit it into the sink.

  Kota put the last plate onto an enormous tray, loaded with what seemed to be all of the food they had left. Erin wondered if it would be enough as she stared longingly at the last pastry from the bakery that she had been saving for herself.

  “Be careful,” he said in a low voice. “Should you really be telling her so much?”

  “She just asks a lot of questions,” Erin said with a shrug, thinking of Mrs. Grimsby. “Just like any other gossip.”

  “Or like an inquisitor,” Kota remarked dryly as he started to put the dirty dishes into the sink. With his back to her he could not see the sudden change in Erin’s expression as she remembered where she had seen the coach’s insignia before.

  Entry 26: Judged

  Erin walked back into the common room without saying a word to Kota. Her legs shook from nerves and her arms trembled under the weight of the enormous tray piled with a myriad of plates, but fortunately Madam Elzwig’s servant moved into action and took it from her. He passed the plates out with a precision that spoke of years of experience, placing them in a neat array around the madam’s table and setting aside the two glasses of water that he had requested.

  “Would you mind if I took these outside?” he asked, motioning toward the glasses. “Nothing will persuade the coachman to leave his horses, I’m afraid.”

  Erin nodded and Madam Elzwig asked, “Are you sure you two would not like something to eat?”

  The servant bowed and said, “No, Madam, but thank you. We wish to wait until we arrive in Wichel.”

  Erin knew Wichel, it was the port city to the southeast that many of the foreign traders came from. With their coach and fresh horses, they could have made it to the city before nightfall if they had not chosen to stop at the inn.

  The servant left and Erin wondered if she should go back to the kitchen as well until Madam Elzwig fixed her with a steady, bright eye and said, “Please, sit down, girl.”

  She said it in a way that sounded more like a command than a request, and Erin found herself pulling up a chair and sitting down on the opposite side of the table. Silence fell in the inn, except for the sound of the madam’s fork scraping across plates and her steady chewing.

  It put Erin on edge, waiting for her to say something, anything. She kept thinking of that insignia, the eye surrounded by vines. It wasn’t a family crest, it was the insignia of an imperial post. A Judge.

  Capital Judges oversaw the highest courts in the entire empire. They investigated cases on their own, and were known to interrogate people through various methods to get to the truth. Very few people could overturn one of the Judge’s sentences and even fewer laws applied to them when they were on the case.

  “Have you ever been to Wichel?” Elzwig asked, with barely a pause in her eating. When Erin shook her head, she said, “You should go, it’s a beautiful place this time of the year. Shame I’m going on business.”

  “You’re a Judge, right?” Erin asked, unable to hold the question in any longer.

  “That I am,” Elzwig said. She took up a knife and began on the side of beef. “Got a man the bounty hunters brought in on a charge of murder back at the capital, bad business. I have to go and check up on it, of course.”

  Erin nodded, and when the madam allowed the silence to return for an even longer stretch, Erin felt the need to fill the void by saying, “We had a bounty hunter here, a few weeks ago. Do you know Miles?”

  The corners of Elzwig’s mouth turned down and she firmly placed her fork and knife down. She delicately wiped her mouth with her napkin while her eyes bored into Erin before she said, “Yes, I know the vampire. What business did he have here?”

  “He came as an inspector,” Erin said slowly, wondering if she should have kept her mouth shut.

  “Hmph.” Elzwig lifted her fork again just when Erin was wondering if she had finally stopped eating. “An inspector, you say? They must have wanted an excuse to get him out of the capital, not that I blame the office. What did you think of him?”

  Erin knew that the madam clearly had something against the vampire, though she could not guess what. She decided to go for the safe answer and said, “I didn’t get much of an impression before he had to leave on another job.”

  Madam Elzwig sniffed and asked no more questions. Erin sat there, her mouth firmly clamped shut, and watched as she went through every single place, scraping the last one clean before she sat back with a contented sigh. The chair gave another groan but held up to Erin’s relief.

  “I simply must give my compliments to the chef,” Madam Elzwig declared.

  Erin thought of what would happen when Kota stepped into the sunlit room and said, “I’m sorry, Kota is...shy. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that you liked it, though.”

  The servant returned just as Madam Elzwig levered herself onto her feet and declared, “We must be off. Neil, pay them for the excellent meal. I look forward to more of your Kota’s work when we return the day after tomorrow to stay the night.”

  Erin barely had time to process this before Neil pressed the money into her hand and placed two empty glasses on the table with all of the other scraped clean dishes. She waited while Madam Elzwig climbed back into the coach and the coachman urged the horses on before she ran back into the kitchen where Kota was washing dishes.

  “Well, at least we’ll have one guest this week,” Kota said as she tried to explain about Elzwig.

  “But you don’t understand,” Erin said, but she was interrupted by a knock at the front door of the inn. They looked at each other and she asked, “Do you think they came back for something?”

  They heard a loud, high-pitched laugh that did not belong to Elzwig and certainly not to her companions. Kota peeked out of the kitchen and said, “Or maybe not.”

  Entry 27: Strange Business

  A large group of about fifteen or twenty people walked in, all of them taller than Kota and Erin by about a foot and dressed in outlandish green and gold clothes. After a heated argument behind the kitchen door, Erin walked out to meet the group, many of whom were already straying around the inn’s common room, taking in the fireplace and decor (or lack thereof) and chatting in high, lilting voices.

  “Hello,” Erin said to the room in general, unsure which of them to address. “Welcome to the Last Inn.”

  She felt ridiculous the moment the wor
ds passed her lips, and even more so when a giggle came from one of the people roaming around.

  “Can I help you?” Erin continued, a little more coldly.

  “Yes, we’d like some rooms for the next couple of days,” one of the tall men said. “We have some business in the area.”

  “Business?” Erin tried not to sound too surprised, but she couldn’t help looking at their strange clothes. “What kind of—”

  A loud cough from the kitchen interrupted her.

  “How many rooms would you like?” Erin said without missing a beat.

  The tall man considered this and a woman with braided waist-length hair drifted to his side and said, “At least ten if they’re available, and evening meals only.”

  “Ah?” Well, that was a relief, Erin thought to herself when she remembered the empty cupboards in the kitchen. “Yes, that’s okay. As for the price...”

  The tall woman reached around the back of her head and pulled a slip of money out of one of the ties in her braid, which she handed to Erin. “Is that enough for the first night?”

  “Oh, yes,” Erin said, but she looked at the money uncertainly. “I thought you said you wanted to stay a couple of days though?”

  The woman smiled and the tall man laughed and said, “We never know how long we’ll stay in one place, but don’t worry, we always pay each day as it comes.”

  Erin nodded and the tall man gave a low whistle. At the signal, all of the tall people turned his way and he took the keys to the rooms from Erin’s fumbling hands and started tossing them around the room. Silver keys jangled and flashed in the air before hands clapped over them and, in twos and threes, the people ran up the stairs to put away their bags.

  When he was down to just one key, the tall man turned back to Erin and said, “Thank you. We must run now, but we’ll be back in a few hours.”

  He dashed up the stairs as well and then seconds later the whole, laughing mob of them came crashing and whooping down the stairs and out the front door. When the door shut behind them it felt like a tornado had just left the room and Erin breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Are they gone?” Kota opened the kitchen door a crack and peered in.

  “Yeah. Hey, did you interrupt me on purpose?” Erin asked. She sighed when she saw Kota was not about to leave the kitchen and started closing shutters around the common room, blocking out the sunlight.

  “You shouldn’t inquire too much into those people’s business,” Kota said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Kota shrugged and waited until the last shutter was closed before walking out into the common room and looking at the empty hooks on the room key rack. “If you didn’t notice, then maybe it’s nothing. How are we going to feed them?”

  “Well, I guess I’ll go and get groceries, like always,” Erin said. “That Judge payed well, and we’ve got payment for ten rooms.”

  “For one night,” Kota said. “And we have to feed at least twenty people, not including ourselves, for who knows how long.”

  “I’ll figure it out.” Erin stuck the money in her pocket, but she did feel a little worried. If anything, knowing that Madame Elzwig would be back in a few days meant that they needed to be ready for that too. “Write out a list of stuff that we need and I’ll pick it up, okay? We should be able to get by if I’m careful with the money.”

  Kota tilted his head, reminding Erin a lot of a dog considering something, but said nothing. Instead, he took up a pencil and a scrap of paper off the desk and came up with a list faster than she expected.

  “That’s not a lot of meat,” she said, looking over his shoulder at his strange, slanted writing.

  “Meat is expensive, and I can make this work.” Kota started to write something else and hesitated. “No, I think that’s it. Can you find all of this in town?”

  “Sure, I’ll get it.” Erin sighed and said, “I wish I could just send you out to do the shopping once in a while. This starts to get really boring really fast, you know?”

  “Take some time, talk to a few people then.” Kota gave a small smile and said, “Your people will have something new to talk about. A Judge and our other guests, all on the same day.”

  Erin imagined the havoc that laughing crowd would make on her sleepy little town and found herself smiling at the thought as she left the Last Inn and climbed onto her bike. However, when she pulled into town and started asking around while she picked up the groceries, she found that no one had seen the Judge’s carriage nor any sign of the tall people.

  When the butcher suggested that he thought she was making it all up, Erin huffed and nearly walked out without her packages.

  That man had said they had some kind of business in the area, but where else could they be? A strange thought occurred to Erin as she rode over the bridge in town and she stopped to look at the far trees of the forest, just visible over the lower buildings.

  A movement caught out of the corner of her eye made Erin turn her head just in time to see the old fisherman standing in the water in knee-high waders shield his eyes, look out at those same trees, and shake his head.

  Entry 28: Wayfarers

  By the time Erin returned to the inn with all of the groceries Kota had asked for, her bike wobbling under the weight in the front basket, the sun had nearly set. She rode around to the back of the inn and knocked on the kitchen door until Kota opened it, careful to stand out of the light.

  “Help me with these, would you?” she said. Her arms were already straining to keep the bike from falling over.

  He looked around, as if anyone would be watching, before walking outside and turning into a wolf with a sigh. He didn’t seem any more enthused about it when Erin laughed at the sight of the wolf taking the handles of the bags she handed him in his mouth, careful not to bite down so hard that the paper ripped.

  “Good boy,” Erin said and Kota’s ears drooped against his head as he ran back inside. She could get the rest, and left her bike by the open door as she walked in.

  Kota stood up on his own two legs and took the bags out of his mouth. “So I take it everything went well in town?”

  “I guess so. We had enough money, but nobody believed me when I told them about the Judge, or those other strange people.”

  “Well, Madame Elzwig didn’t go that way, did she? And neither did the others.” Kota opened and shut his mouth a few times and rubbed at his jaw. “One of those bags tasted weird.”

  “So they really did go into the forest?” Erin stopped in the middle of emptying the bags, but Kota just shrugged.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s the nearest place for them. Do you think you could shut the door?”

  “What?” It took Erin a second to realize that Kota stood in the farthest corner of the kitchen, where the sunlight could not reach through the open door. She shut it and he audibly breathed out before beginning to empty the grocery bags. “Does it really bother you to change that much?”

  “It’s not pleasant, and it does make a conversation harder,” Kota admitted. He took out some greens and sniffed them appreciatively. “Oh, this is nice. Did you get this from the Farmers?”

  “What did you mean when you said that’s ‘the nearest place for them?’” Erin asked. She stared at Kota, wondering how his mind could wander off so easily. Who cared where she got the broccoli from? “No one goes into the forest, that place is dangerous! They say there are monsters and beasts in there, and the forest itself will twist and turn around you so that you can’t find your way back out again if you go too far in.”

  “There’s a road that goes straight through it, more or less,” Kota pointed out.

  “And no one ever leaves it, for good reason.”

  “So then how would they know if the forest tries to keep people in?” Kota put the green vegetables in the sink and started washing them. “I came through the forest, and it never tried to stop me from leaving. Some of the people in there were very helpful, actually.”

  “There are pe
ople in the forest?”

  “Well, maybe not ‘people’ as you’re used to the term,” Kota admitted. “The only human I met in the forest was the witch I used to work for, Olgytha, many miles from here.”

  Erin thought about this while they put away the food, except for the stuff Kota set aside for tonight’s dinner. What other sort of people were there? Did he mean vampires, like Miles, or something else? She couldn’t see Kota taking directions from a vampire, even in their own home.

  It wasn’t until she was helping him cook (mostly just by doing some of the chopping and peeling) that she thought to say, “You still haven’t said why you think they would go there. Do you know something about those people or not?”

  Kota stirred the sauce cooking on the stove and tapped the spoon on the side of the pot before answering. “They have many names, I think, but the one I know is ‘Wayfarer.’ Olgytha said they walked the roads and the forgotten paths, keeping them alive for travelers.”

  “Alive? How is a road alive?”

  Kota looked over his shoulder and smiled at her with a little shrug. “How should I know? She was always saying things like that. I just know that they are a strange people, and it is best not to delve into their business. Something you may want to keep in mind while they are here.”

  Erin pressed him for more details, but Kota would say no more and she became tired of his constant changes of topic. It almost came as a relief to hear the front door of the inn open and have an excuse to go out and greet the wayfarers as they came in. A crisp breeze snuck in with them before the last one shut the door behind him and hinted of the autumn to come, but the room soon became far too crowded and warm for her.

  “Ah, there is our hostess!” the one she thought of as the leader of the group cried when he spotted her. He sniffed the air and said, “Did we make it just in time?”

  “The food is almost ready,” Erin said and the statement was greeted with a cheer. The group pulled around tables and chairs with a great deal of scraping and talking.

  Erin took the opportunity to get a good look at these so-called wayfarers while they were too busy to notice, and felt a little disappointed. Aside from their height and voices, they did not seem so different from the people back in town. Well, in appearance at least. They laughed a lot more than the townspeople did, and there was a constant air or feeling around them that time was moving differently. By the time they finished moving everything around and Erin returned to the kitchen, she felt as if she had been gone not for five minutes, but more like five hours or only five seconds.