The Last Inn

by Rachel Gay

  She saw the mayor’s hand go to his pocket and stepped forward only for the tamer to block her way and say, “That’s enough out of you, I think. Mr. Mayor, you want me to deal with this?”

  “I told you to keep her and the boy out of this,” Geld said, and looked baffled when Lani laughed. “It’s bad enough Daniel got involved.”

  “Involved? Is that what you call killing someone over a stone?” Erin fought the urge to push the tamer out of the way and just take the stone, if only because she knew the griffin had to be somewhere nearby. When he started to protest, she said, “Blood at the clock tower, and you knew Mr. Sollis had found it. He never told anyone, never even had any time to write a note, but you knew where Lani should look, didn’t you?”

  “That was an accident,” Geld said, eyeing the crowd of townspeople who were being attracted by the scene. “I mean, Sollis’s death was just an accident. Everyone knows that.”

  “No, everyone knows he died from a heart attack out in the yard, because that’s what you told everyone after you ‘found’ his body,” Erin said, biting back the bile rising in her throat. Everything in the mayor’s demeanor, from his shifty expression to his nervous rocking on his feet, confirmed every word she said even as he fumbled for an answer.

  “Oh, you do know how to put your foot in it, don’t you?” Lani said. “Just tell her you let the man die because you didn’t realize he had managed to get to the stone until after she’d already set up in the inn and you couldn’t look for it yourself. Not like she or wolf boy won’t be able to connect the dots on their own.”

  “Wolf boy?” Geld asked, if only because he couldn’t say what he wanted to with others listening.

  “Oi, Erin!” Terra came running across the square, waving and smiling even as he scanned the growing crowd and no doubt spotted Lani. “Are you okay?”

  “Well, this is just getting impossible,” Lani said and rolled her eyes. “If it’s all the same to you, Geld, I’ll be taking my money and going now.”

  “No you don’t,” Geld hissed and grabbed her wrist. “You’re going to help me blow this over, and now.”

  Lani stopped and glared at the little man. “Well, the easiest way to get people to forget something they might have heard is to distract them. Let me handle that.”

  She raised a hand to her mouth and gave a loud, piercing whistle. A loud roar came from the alley behind the inn and when the mayor turned, she twisted his hand until he released her wrist and ran. He cried out in pain and turned to yell after the tamer only to have his pocket picked by Erin.

  “Her griffin,” Erin told Terra just as the monster itself came tearing around the corner, its beak dripping as it looked around. It spotted Erin and, perhaps because it remembered the one who got away in the forest or just because she was closest, ran for her first.

  The townspeople screamed and scattered, but Terra had enough presence of mind to push Erin out of the griffin’s path. The griffin’s claws scraped on the stone as it spun around and came for them again. Erin, Terra, and Geld, the only ones still left out in the open, ran for the mayor’s office but as soon as Geld was inside he turned and flung the door shut in their faces.

  “Wonderful man,” Terra muttered as they turned and ran down the street.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Erin gasped out as they darted through one street after another. She was already starting to fall behind, and her ankle throbbed as if it had been broken again.

  Terra looked over his shoulder and grabbed the nearest thing to hand, a broom left by the terrified shopkeeper now hiding behind his counter, and swung it at the griffin’s head. With an undignified squawk, it backed away and then swatted at the hunter with one of its vast paws. A crack accompanied the broom’s demise, leaving Terra holding two pieces of wood, one of which he threw at the griffin for all the good it did.

  The griffin snarled but stumbled when Kota, as a wolf, tackled it. The wolf growled and snapped at the griffin’s ears, before jumping back to avoid the griffin’s beak.

  “Attaboy,” Terra said, before the wolf stumbled and Kota turned back into a man. Just as the griffin lurched toward him, the hunter used what remained of the broom to whack the griffin on its lion hindquarters.

  Terra and Kota circled the griffin, keeping it turning and unable to focus on one or the other, but Erin knew this could only last for so long before someone got hurt. She looked around and, recognizing what street they were on, ran into a nearby shop and came back out a minute later with her arms full of badly wrapped packages.

  She took one and threw it at the griffin’s head, where it burst open and dropped a pile of raw meat onto the ground. The griffin immediately snapped it up and turned, searching for more.

  “Kota!” Erin yelled and tossed him another package. “Lead it back to the town circle, the long way!”

  Kota looked at her, baffled, but did not argue. He waved the meat in front of the griffin’s beak and ran as fast as he could with it right on his tail while Erin went the direct way with Terra following behind.

  They raced across the street and Erin opened the door of the clock tower and threw the rest of the meat into the center of the stone floor. She fumbled with the lock and, before Terra could ask, they heard the clatter of paws on the stone street above the sound of screams and shouts. She waved at the wolf running their way, the package of meat dangling from a string in its mouth.

  “In here!” Erin yelled and, as soon as Kota was close enough, she grabbed the meat from him, waved it in the griffin’s direction, and threw it into the clock tower. The griffin, acting on stomach alone, followed the meat into the tower and dove at the pile, oblivious to the sound of the heavy metal door clanging shut until it was too late.

  “That might actually hold it,” Terra said, and then glanced down at the wolf and the gathering townspeople. “But I think we have another problem now.”

  Entry 71: The Sun and the Moon

  Erin looked from the wolf to the approaching townspeople, more than a few of whom had armed themselves at the word that there was a monster running around town again. “Terra, do you think you could distract them?”

  “Yeah, but–”

  “Come on, Kota, we need to get to Wen.”

  The wolf nodded and Terra stared as they ran off before he remembered the crowd. He threw his hands up to get their attention and before Kota and Erin went out of earshot they heard him say, “Now, I know you’re all wondering about the wolf, but what you really need to be thinking about is how to get a griffin out of a clock tower.”

  Erin laughed, if only because she couldn’t think of anything else to do at this point. Everything had gone absolutely insane today, and she hardly even blinked at the gasps and stares they earned as Kota, without missing a step, went from wolf to himself again.

  “You have the stone?” he asked and when she nodded that seemed to be answer enough.

  They reached the bridge together and Kota just barely managed to stop Erin from plunging into the river as she slid down the bank again. The old man in the river looked up at them and his breath seemed to catch in his throat as he said, “You came back.”

  “You, the curse,” Erin gasped out, but after all of the running she could barely string a sentence together.

  Kota seemed to understand though as he looked at Wen with a new expression. “You’re the one Sollis wrote about?”

  Wen sighed and said, “Aye, I am. What was all of that racket in town?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Erin said quickly, trying not to think of the people already looking for them. “What curse? What happened?”

  Wen pinched the bridge of his nose and then said, “Your friend there may want to sit under the bridge while I tell you a story.”

  Catching the hint, Kota and Erin immediately moved into the shade of the bridge, both being careful not to look too hard at the darker shape snuffling around the reeds.

  “Once, long ago, this land was dry, and barren. No one lived here, no one
even noticed it, until a...person saw it, and loved it, and asked that care of it be given to him. That care was granted, and this person channeled life into the land, forming a river and nourishing the ground so that it came forth. People came to the river, and this person loved them too, and the town that they built. Oh, he loved it, the life that they brought with them, and extended his care to protect them, to help them to grow and prosper. The years flowed by like the river, and one generation came to the next, and he watched over them all, until the day he found someone like him.

  “She walked the borders and the in between and loved the forest in his care like he loved the town, lending her care to the creatures there. Between them, this land flourished beyond compare, and there was no one closer. The people of the town though, they were afraid that the person would forget them and let the land die because he loved this other. So they resented her, and her children.

  “Then came the people from beyond the care, those who walk the roads and call to the forgotten and the outsider. They came to the people of the town, and they offered them a solution so that they might have the love of their caretaker all to themselves. The people of the town agreed, and lured their caretaker away so that the roadwalkers, the wayfarers, could have their way with the other, and they took her beyond his land.

  “The caretaker found that she was gone, and would have followed, but the people of the land cried out that they would die without him. He tried to explain that this was not so, but they did not, would not listen. So they bound him to the land, unable to follow his beloved, and with time, forgot him who cared for them, who loved them and this land even then, even now.”

  Wen stopped and wiped his eyes, unable to look at the pair sitting under the bridge.

  When they finally found the will to speak, Kota said, “So that story, the one you told Erin, about the Sun and the Moon, that was you and her.”

  “How could they do that?” Erin cried out as she jumped up. “Why don’t you just leave or do something? Tell someone?”

  “I could not tell anyone unless they already knew the curse existed, could not place my hand on the key to my freedom,” Wen said. Now he turned his red-rimmed eyes to them. “That is how they forgot. There is one way to break my curse, but it is to break my care over the land.”

  “And it would just go back to how it was when you found it,” Kota said and the old man nodded. “Even now, you’d still care for these people rather than go after her?”

  “Sometimes...I wish I didn’t,” Wen said. He looked at Erin with a broken expression, filled with pain and sadness. “But you’re still my people. My children. How could I face her again, knowing what it cost?”

  Erin stepped out from under the bridge and threw her arms around Wen’s shoulders. He hesitated and hugged her back, but his knees nearly gave out underneath when she whispered, “Human hands must break what human hands have wrought, right?”

  She pulled the sun stone out of her pocket and placed it in Wen’s trembling hands.

  “No! What are you doing?!”

  The three of them looked up at the silhouette of Mayor Geld leaning over the bridge, close to falling as he shouted down at them. “Free him and the whole land dies, he just told you!”

  He pushed past the people crowded around the bridge and river and stopped at the foot of the water. “Someone, take it from him now!”

  “You knew?” Erin said, advancing on the hopping mad mayor. “You knew about the curse and the stone, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did, every leader of this town knew! Someone had to remember, someone had to make sure this town survived, and you went and destroyed us all, you little–”

  “That’s enough!”

  It took Erin a second to recognize her own father’s voice, if only because she had never heard that much anger and venom in it before. The blacksmith stepped out from among the crowd and said, “That is enough out of you, Geld. How could you?”

  “Me? I did what had to be done, what everyone before me has done, what your ancestors did,” Geld said, nearly foaming at the mouth in his rage. “And you, if you had any sense at all, would do.”

  “Oh, I know exactly what to do,” Eli Smith said and, after a glance at Wen to be sure, took the stone from his hands and smashed it on the stones of the riverbank to the cheers of those watching.

  From the broken stone the flame rose up and flowed into Wen’s chest, filling him from the inside out with a burning light that, eventually, dimmed to a more bearable shade but did not fade entirely. With the light flowing from within, most of the lines and weather faded from his skin and bones, leaving him looking neither young nor old but ageless.

  “Thank you,” he whispered as a different kind of tears gather in his eyes. Eli pulled him close and clapped him on the back, whispering something in his ear that made Wen laugh. He looked to the people, which seemed to be the whole town gathered together, and began to explain that he would be leaving, if only for a short time.

  “No!” Geld protested, but his interruption would prove to be very brief when something, no one was entirely sure what, pulled him under the bridge. There were gasps from among the crowd, but no one moved to help him, and even Wen turned his head away when he saw that it was too late to do anything. Instead, he sighed and began to address the townspeople.

  With everyone’s attention on Wen, who was reassuring the people about what was to come, Kota edged out from the other side of the bridge, and Erin followed him up the riverbank. No one made a move to stop them, and Terra slipped out of the crowd to join them on the silent walk back to the inn.

  The Last Entry

  “Are you sure about this?” Terra asked Miles and Kota as they stood outside of the Last Inn in the growing twilight.

  Miles looked at Kota, who shrugged silently, and said, “I suppose so. You’ll pass the news on to her?”

  “Do I have to?” Terra asked, and the vampire put a hand on his shoulder and wished him luck, as they both knew he would need it.

  Four days after Wen had left town, and still no one had come to the inn looking for Kota. That is, except to seek help. With his assistance, along with some food, they managed to lure the griffin out of the clock tower, and she was already on her way to becoming something of a town mascot. Even Joe Farmer had sent some workers to ask him how to deal with the mud badger Junta that had taken up residence in one of his fields.

  No one mentioned the wolf. It was as if they were all afraid to upset him, or more likely, incur the wrath of the blacksmith who had become something of an interim leader, or at least the one they all went to for advice until a new mayor could be found. Truth be told, the arrangement wasn’t that much different than before, other than cutting out the middleman.

  The hunter sighed and went back into the inn to keep an eye on the guests who had just arrived, only stopping to wave at them one last time before he closed the door behind him.

  “Kota,” Miles started, but he just shook his head.

  “Let’s go. You want to make it to the capital before sunrise, right?”

  Kota started to walk away from the inn with his shoulders bowed under the light burden of his small pack that held all he had in the world. Miles watched him walk and sighed, but said nothing as he followed.

  They made it some way down the road before Kota stopped and turned, narrowing his eyes so that he could better see the figure racing to catch up with them. He barely had time to brace himself before Erin ran into him and nearly knocked him off of his feet.

  “How could you?” she yelled as she stepped back. “How could you just try and leave without saying a word?”

  “I’m just going to take a little walk over there,” Miles said, and edged away so that Erin could not turn her wrath upon him.

  “I’m sorry, I–”

  “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have done it.”

  Kota wilted under her accusing glare and said, “I don’t want to leave, I swear. It’s just...My time is running out, Erin. Ther
e’s no cure to my curse here, whatever the witch said, and maybe someone in the capital really can help me.”

  “You’re not scared to go anymore?” Erin asked, staring hard to make out his expression in the growing darkness.

  “I’m scared to leave,” he whispered, but Erin pushed him away.

  “You could have said something, anything,” she protested. “Instead, you just sneak away with Miles like I wouldn’t care at all!”

  “Please don’t bring me into this,” the vampire called from off in the distance.

  “Then don’t eavesdrop!” Erin yelled back.

  Kota sighed and said, “I know. Look, I talked to your dad, and he said your brother Arthur could come to the inn with you and take my place. Terra even agreed to stay around, in case Lani tries to come back around. Not that you need any help, of course. You can keep the inn open, you don’t need me anymore. That’s good, right?”

  Erin groaned, and from out of the darkness Miles yelled, “It was never about the inn, you idiot!”

  “What?”

  Erin smiled at his baffled expression and said, “The inn can take care of itself, Kota. I can always go back, but if it’s okay with you, I want to go with you and find a cure for your curse.”

  “It could take a while,” Kota said, and winced when a pebble hit him from out of the darkness. “But, yes, if you’ll come, then….”

  He cleared his throat and noticed for the first time that Erin had a pack of her own on her back. “Wait, you knew?”

  “I packed two days ago,” Erin said. “And yes, I knew you would try and leave me behind.”

  “Well, this is great, isn’t it?” Miles said as he suddenly reappeared on the trail in front of them. “The witch sent you for a cure and you ended up with a girl, which I suppose is a fair enough trade. And, if all else fails, we can always go back to your village and watch Erin knock a cure out of them with her broom, right?”

  He avoided Erin’s swing and chuckled as he walked ahead.

  “Do we have to go with him?” Erin asked and Kota smiled.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Erin returned the smile. “Well, it’s not like I can let my partner go running off by himself.”