Innkeeper's Song

In bed, Lukassa whispers to me, like every night, “Fox, fox, what is your name?” I lick inside wrist, she makes little tired sigh. Whisper. “They call me Lukassa, but I don’t know.” Like every night.

Sleeps. Lal sleeps. Nyateneri leans over bed, speaks in the other talk, ours. Says, “Hear me. Old man drinks no more ale downstairs.” I keep eyes tight shut. Nyateneri. “Hear me.”

Early, early morning, they go out, all three together. Lukassa kisses nose, says, “Be good.” Nyateneri looks at me. Boots on stairs, gone. I eat rest of the meat and cheese, go under bed when Marinesha comes in to sweep. Very safe place. Marinesha opens window a little, goes away. Tree makes crick-sish, crick-sish against window.

People don’t know foxes can climb trees if they really want. Squirrels know.

MARINESHA

What happened was, I was ru

But it was gone when I came around the stable—just completely vanished; it must have turned on its track, shot right under the bathhouse and slipped away through the wild berry-brambles beyond. Rosseth has been told and told and told to block up that place—the frogs pop up and frighten the guests, and once or twice there’s been a tharakki. Rosseth can be quite pleasant, in his way, but he is simply an irresponsible boy.

Anyway, I stood there for a moment—so angry all over again about Sona, she was such a nice hen—and then I remembered the wet clothes, and I hurried back, hoping I hadn’t spilled any out of the basket. And I hadn’t, thank goodness, at least nothing that would be any the worse off for one more grass-stain, and I was just turning toward the naril tree where I like to hang wash this time of year because everything picks up the smell of the blossoms— and suddenly there they were, two men coming up out of the orchard, as though they’d cut right across the fields, not staying to the road at all. I didn’t trust them right away. I don’t trust people who don’t walk the road.

They were small, thin, brown men, both of them, dressed in brown, and they looked almost exactly alike to me, except that one of them had something wrong with his mouth—only half of his upper lip moved when he spoke. The other had blue eyes. I was frightened of his eyes. I can’t tell you why.

I stood very, very still, pretending I hadn’t seen them. That’s what Sona used to do, my hen, when a hawk was circling overhead. The other chickens would be ru

Well, it didn’t work any better for me. They came up to me—they really were small, no taller than I am, and they made no sound. Their feet didn’t, I mean. The one with the blue eyes stood right in front of me, facing me, and the one with the fu

They were very polite, I’ll say that for them. The blue-eyed one said, “Please excuse us, good young lady, we are looking for a friend? A tall woman? With a bow and a pet fox? Her name will be Nyateneri?” That was how he talked, everything a question, in a soft, slidey kind of voice. Foreign accents like that make me nervous, anyway.

I know they shouldn’t, working around i

Just the kind of friends that hulking creature would have, that’s what I thought. I didn’t have any reason to do her any favors, strutting around in her ugly boots and letting her fox kill my Sona. “There’s no one like that staying here,” I told them. “The only women we have right now are with the players, sleeping in the stable. But they don’t have any bows.” Let her miss her stupid message, I thought—maybe she’ll learn to say Good morning, Marinesha once in a while.

The blue-eyed man asked me, “Perhaps she only stayed here a night or two, and then went on? It would be recent, quite recent?” I just shook my head. I said, “We had some dancers here last month, and a horse-coper, she cured Rosseth’s donkey of the staggers, but she was small, tiny. That’s all, honestly.” Once you start lying, it’s amazing how you go on, how it catches you up. I made up all that part about the horse-coper.

The other one said, at my shoulder, “Perhaps we should talk to the landlord? You could take us to him?” The same sort of voice, you couldn’t have told them apart with your eyes shut. I looked around for Rosseth, but of course he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Blue Eyes nodded. He said, “That would be best? If we spoke to the landlord?” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I actually cried out with the heat of it—I did, and I felt that heat for a week afterward, what’s more. I can feel it now, if I think about it. Blue Eyes said, “We will follow you? Please?”

So I walked back to the i

ROSSETH

I hadn’t slept very well, because of the players. They were supposed to give a performance in two days for the Mercers’ Guild in town, and they had been rehearsing almost all night every night for a week. It wasn’t that they didn’t know the play well—there can’t be a traveling troupe in the land that doesn’t give some version of The Marriage of the Wicked Lord Hassidanya twenty or thirty times a year—but I think this must have been the largest and most knowledgeable audience they were ever likely to face, and none of them could sleep for nervousness anyway. So they kept going over and over their parts, two and three at a time or all together, ru

The women rode out just before dawn, all three together for the first time. They didn’t see me. Usually I waved at them when I saw them setting off each day— and Lal, at least, always waved back—but this once I stepped aside, into the hollow of a burned-out tree, and watched them pass by in silence. It might have been a different air about them, literally, a new smell of purpose, for I was already as tuned, as pitched to their scent as to no other in my life, except that of Karsh, because of the way he likes to slip up and catch you not working. Or perhaps it was simply the way they looked in the red and silver morning: sudden strangers beyond my conception of foreig