The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [58]
“For all of the pleasant surroundings, they still don’t really care.” Tamra’s voice broke the silence.
I pulled back my chair. “I need some sleep.” I would have liked to talk to Krystal, but the thought of saying anything with Tamra hanging on every word bothered me.
“It’s early yet,” complained Myrten.
Nodding at the innkeeper, back behind the counter, I took the stairs two at a time. I wasn’t up to another argument, and staying downstairs would have led to that. Besides, after the next morning, I might never see any of them again, and I was getting tired of Tamra’s attitude. Then, it was clear she was tired of mine.
The door opened easily, and I stepped inside. The room was just as I had left it, except darker, because the blackness outside was absolute, with not even a single light showing anywhere when I stepped to the window. The fog and clouds seemed thicker, but how could I really tell?
…click…
As I sat on the edge of the soft bed and pulled off my boots, I heard Krystal’s door open and close, but no sound of voices. Off came the tunic and trousers, and I reached up and turned off the lamp.
With the quilt around me, I was asleep in instants, although I thought I heard a faint knock on my door once, just as I was dropping off; but I was too sleepy to get up and check, especially since it was probably my imagination.
Still…I wondered, but I dreamed of neither red-headed girls nor of dark-haired women.
XIX
ONCE I STEPPED outside the inn the next morning, I could sense more strongly what I had felt the night before and what Isolde had alluded to in saying we would be safe there without weapons. For all the faded blue paint on the shutters, the weathered timbers and gray-painted plank walls, the building radiated order. No barred windows, no heavy doors, no guards—just order. Enough order that it just would not appeal to anyone bent on disorder.
The clouds and fog of the previous day had vanished, except for higher puffy gray-and-white clouds that scudded quickly across a bright-blue fall sky.
I looked at the inn again. The thick shutters were supported by heavy iron hinges, with iron hasps for the sliding locks that would be on the inside when the shutters were closed against weather or other forms of attack. The iron was clean and black, the hinges clearly functional. The red oak of the door had faded under the varnish to a grayed gold that almost matched the big bronze door handles on the double doors that were now folded back against the planks for the day.
From a timber projecting above the open doors and perhaps two cubits below the second-floor window hung the neatly painted sign—Travelers’ Rest. The gray paving-stones were laid edge-to-edge from the front wall to the curb, a distance of five cubits or less, and stretched from one side of the building to the other. Already, the stones had been swept.
Glancing up to the room where I thought Tamra had slept, I could see a glimpse of red through the half-open window. But the sea breeze gusting up from the harbor fluttered the fabric enough to tell me it was only one of the bright red curtains. Then I looked toward the back of the building, but Krystal’s room window was around the corner. She had either left earlier, or was still asleep.
I shrugged and shouldered my pack, which didn’t seem nearly so heavy as when I had left Wandernaught, and, after a last look at the Travelers’ Rest, turned my steps toward the livery stable that had been listed on the wall behind the front desk of the inn. If I had to reach the Westhorns, it wasn’t going to be on foot, not unless I wanted to take years. A thousand kays or more—I still resented Talryn’s flat pronouncement. Someone definitely wanted me out of Recluce for a while.
“Watch it, outlander!”
I dodged a thin man wearing a short cloak, a ragged tunic not concealing a mail shirt underneath, and a short sword in a battered scabbard. Then I smiled politely, and stepped aside. He stopped and studied me.
I waited, shifting my hands on the staff ever so slightly.
“Told you to watch