TALES

a young desk clerk's experience at an old inn

It had been about two months since I had left the Mainland to join my aunts at their inn, affectionately and absurdly named the Sparrow's Skull. Punishment, according to my parents, for lighting my Latin teacher's car on fire.

(I told them, I told them, that there was something inside that couldn't be let out.)

The Sparrow's Skull is the oldest proper inn in the Barony, which in turn is the oldest proper city on the island. It had been founded hundreds of years ago, back when the port was in its infancy, and was a passing point for yeggs and bootleggers, pickpockets and outlaws. There are initials scrawled into the old wood of the sills, walls boarded up from past fights, and the clientele list consists of the strangest drifters and highwaymen. It gives me a headache just looking at it.

A rainy night, the list had someone called the Gleeful Doctor. I don't know about you, but I've never had the good fortune of meeting a doctor happy enough to be given such a title.

I never had the good fortune of meeting whoever they were, either.

But in tandem with the patter of the rain were the chatter of the patrons, their voices from the taproom loud even from the vestibule where I usually lurked when I was not needed at the front desk.

They said she came all the way from Ville des Visons, that she was here on important business. They said she could cure even the most morbid of ailments, for a price. The prices, however, were things like daisies plucked from the grave of a murdered one, the bottled song of a dying bird, and the most valuable was a dead or alive Rat Soldier.

I don't know what a Rat Soldier is - we do have rats in Olneyville (as lovely as it is) but none with prowess enough to be granted the mantle of 'Soldier'. Nevertheless, late into the night before I retreated to my quarters, I went to the kitchen to get some whoopie pies. Because, whoopie pies. My aunts do try to keep the place clean, but there is simply something about this place that attracts all kinds of weird creatures.

I noticed that rainy night, as the patrons waited out the downpour with conversations and ruminations that went nowhere, the kitchen and the fields to the back of the inn, were completely silent. No cricket, owl, or fox dared make a sound.