tge outsider pov fic where the owner of an inn sees a young goblin man stumble into her establishment one day, supporting the weight of two badly injured elf men.
his clothes are dirty and torn and his hair is in tangles but she knows he must be someone important, perhaps the son of a noble family from one of the towns along the border with barizhan. She knows it from the way he speaks to the way he holds himself and right down to his soft, elegant fingers with their perfectly laquered nails.
And yet there's no arrogance in the way he begs her to help his two bodyguards. He promises he'll do anything to pay her back. He says that they had asked for help at the noble manor in the center of town and had been turned away.
She agrees to help him, ushers them up into one of their empty rooms, has one of her sons fetch an old sheet to rip up into bandages, and sends the other one running to fetch a cleric of csaivo.
He scribbles a hasty letter and sends it off with one of the couriers from town, and then all that's left is to wait. She agrees to let him help around the inn - not because she needs it, but because she knows he would otherwise spend his days pacing the small room he shares with his guards, worrying over their state.
It's a long two weeks that they wait, during which time his guards drift in and out of consciousness, spending their few waking moments fretting over their lordling and trying to drag themselves out of bed to carry out their duty of protecting him.
And then, on one quiet day while she and the young lord are working in companionable silence in the kitchen, they hear a great clamour from the entrance of the inn, and they go rushing out to see the source of the commotion.
Her heart jumps into her throat as she sees a group of guards come pouring into her inn, bristling with weapons and ready for a fight. They're dressed in the livery of the drazhada, and she doesn't even have time to wonder at their presence here before their eyes alight on the young lord at her side.
"Serenity!" shout several voices at once, and she stares in stunned silence as three figures break away from the group to come rushing up to the young lord.
One of them is a secretary, eyes wide and full of desperate relief as he reaches out to clasp his lord's, his emperor's, hands tightly in his own.
The other two, a soldier and a maza, must be his nohecharei. As are, she realizes with a start, the two men upstairs.
The maza looks her emperor over with a critical eye, and she remembers hearing somewhere that the woman was a cleric of csaivo.
"Our firsts?" asks the soldier once he gets the reassurance from his partner that their emperor is in good health.
"Upstairs," says the emperor. "They're safe."
There's several sighs of relief, not just from the two nohecharei, but also from the rest of the guards
The emperor turns to look at her then, and there's a heartstopping moment where she remembers that she had had him running errands for her these past two weeks, and she wonders if she will be executed for her sins.
Instead, the young emperor smiles gently at her, and pushes past his guards to stand in front of her.
He inclines his head slightly, a concession that one of her station could normally never even dream of, and says, "We cannot thank you enough for your hospitality these past two weeks, merrem. Were it not for your kindness, we would have lost two of our household. Is there any way we could possibly repay you?"
