Chương 13: Chapter 14: Mopping Up

I looked again at the ruined room and understood I could not remain there waiting for morning while the innkeeper discovered half his furniture broken and a Crimson Elf possibly loose on the roof. I also had no desire to sleep beside a window that no longer existed. My hands shook as I gathered my coin pouch, knife, and cloak. One boot went on the wrong foot. My belt slipped from my fingers twice.

When I reached for the axe, the weapon felt too heavy to carry safely, and the shame of that settled hard in my stomach. I took it anyway. The corridor outside was dim and narrow. A merchant opened his door halfway, nightcap crooked, eyes wide with offended terror.

"What in the saints was that?"

"Window," I said. The merchant stared.

"What?"

"Broke." The man looked past me toward the cold gust moving down the passage from my room.

"Was that furniture?"

"Some." I continued before explanation could become necessary. The stairs had been built by a malicious mind. I descended them sideways with one hand on the rail and the other wrapped around the axe haft, each step arriving too early or too late. The taproom below widened into view by degrees. Lanterns burned low. The hearth had sunk into red coals. Three travellers sat rigid at a corner table, no longer drunk enough to enjoy being awake.

Behind the bar stood the innkeeper, Garron Vell, broad and bearded, holding a cudgel in one hand and a brass lamp in the other. Beside him stood his daughter, the young woman I remembered from the evening before because she had argued with a guest over the correct name for a southern river he had crossed only once, then produced a little notebook from her apron and made him spell it.

She was small enough that people probably mistook her for younger until she started speaking, thin as a reed and twice as restless, with dark curls tied back so poorly that half had escaped by force. A strip of blue ribbon held the notebook shut against her chest. A charcoal pencil was tucked behind one ear like a weapon. Her eyes widened when she saw me, not only with fear, but with curiosity too, immediate and irrepressible.

"By all the saints," Garron said.

"You look dead." I reached the bottom stair and held the post until the room steadied.

"Not dead." The girl tilted her head.

"Dead men usually come down quieter."

"Lysa," Garron warned.

"What? He broke the upstairs window, threw furniture around, and walked down like a drunk ghost. That is not quiet." I tried to smile. It failed somewhere near my cheek. Garron moved around the bar, cudgel lowering as concern overtook suspicion.

"Sit before you fall. Lysa, water. Not ale. Ale would finish him."

"I was attacked," I said.

"Yes," Garron replied.

"I had begun to suspect that when part of my inn exploded."

"Crimson Elf." The taproom changed. The travellers at the corner table went still. Garron's hand tightened around the cudgel. Lysa, who had been reaching for a pitcher, froze with one hand in the air. Her liveliness did not disappear, but it focused, bright and sharp.

"A Crimson Elf was upstairs?" she asked.

"In my room." Garron looked toward the stairs, then the front door, then every shadowed window in the taproom.

"There was no one meant to be upstairs except guests."

"She used the window." Lysa slapped the bar with her free hand.

"I told you." Garron turned.

"Not now."

"No, exactly now. Three nights I heard scratching above the west rooms. Three. I wrote it down." She yanked the blue-bound notebook open and flipped through pages covered in uneven handwriting and quick little sketches of faces, boots, birds, doors, and what looked like a heroic drawing of the inn's kitchen cat.

"First night, roof tiles. Second night, gutter. Tonight, wall by his room before the rain got loud."

"You told me rats."

"I told you not rats."

"You said roof rats with suspiciously elegant feet."

"Because if I said elves, you would have told me to stop frightening the guests." Garron opened his mouth, then closed it again because she was right enough to be irritating. I lowered myself onto a bench. The wood felt too hard beneath me, but remaining upright felt like a public achievement. Lysa brought water and set it in front of me, then hovered with the notebook still open.

"You keep records?" I asked.

"Of unusual things," she said.

"Guests lie, roofs creak, pipes knock, and Father forgets anything inconvenient before breakfast."

"I forget nonsense," Garron said.

"You call anything you cannot fix nonsense."

"That is because I prefer problems with nails in them." I drank too quickly and coughed. Water ran down my chin. Lysa watched me with open concern now, though she tried to disguise it by pretending to study the torn collar of my shirt.

"Did she bite you?"

"Lysa."

"I need to know what to write."

"She did not bite me," I said.

"Claws?"

"Fingers." Lysa wrote that down. Garron stared at her.

"Are you taking notes while the man bleeds on my bench?" Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"If we survive, accuracy will matter."

"If we survive, you are cleaning the blood."

"I will label the stain first." The absurdity of it almost made me laugh. The laugh caught in my chest and turned into a shudder. I pressed one hand against my sternum, and the hollow there seemed to answer. Garron noticed.

"What did she do to you?" I looked down at my hand.

"She was taking something."

"Blood?"

"No."

"Breath?"

"No."

"Then what?" I swallowed. The room seemed to lean closer.

"I don't know." That was true enough. I knew the sensation, not the name. I knew the cold hooks beneath my ribs. I knew the terrible patience of the pull. But words like mana belonged to healers, scholars, and expensive people who had never had to guess whether a wound was invisible or imaginary. Lysa stopped writing.

"You look emptied." Garron gave her a sharp glance, but this time she did not flinch into chatter. Her eyes remained fixed on me, not excited now, not triumphant, only young and afraid in a way she had been trying very hard not to be.

"My mother looked like that near the end," she said.

"Not the blood. The hollow bit." The taproom softened around the words. Garron's face changed for one brief moment. The hard innkeeper mask loosened, and beneath it was a tired man standing in the ruins of an old grief. Then the mask returned, but not quickly enough to hide the truth.

"Lysa," he said, gentler.

"What? He should see Bellan at dawn. Maybe before dawn. Hollow things get worse when people wait." I looked from her to Garron.

"Bellan?"

"Healer," Garron said.

"Bad temper. Good hands."

"She tells people when they are being stupid before she treats them," Lysa added.

"So if she insults you, that means she thinks you might live." Garron set the cudgel on the table and fetched a basin, cloth, and a small brown bottle from behind the bar.

"Let me see the shoulder." I had not realised my shoulder was bleeding until the innkeeper peeled torn cloth away from it. Four long scratches marked the flesh where the elf's fingers had raked me. They were shallow, but clean and narrow, too deliberate to be ordinary nails. Garron cleaned them with a spirit that burned fiercely enough to clear my head for several blessed breaths. In that clarity, I felt the new shape of Desperate Counter. It sat inside me like a drawn wire. Iron (late) had made it fast.

Copper (early) had made it aware. It did not feel noble. It did not feel like swordsmanship or axe craft or anything a trainer would praise. It was the readiness of a trapped thing to bite the hand around its throat. It was ugly, immediate, and alive, and I hated how much I trusted it. Garron bound the wound while Lysa watched, occasionally making notes despite her father's increasingly murderous looks.

"What are you writing now?" Garron asked.

"Claw spacing."

"Why?"

"So if I see similar marks later, I know."

"You are not inspecting bodies for claw spacing."

"I might have to if everyone keeps ignoring roof sounds." One of the travellers gave a nervous laugh. It died quickly when Garron looked at him. I stared into the low coals of the hearth.

"I threw her out." The room went silent again. Garron's hand paused on the bandage.

"Out?"

"The window."

"Onto the street?"

"I think."

"You think?"

"I was half asleep." Lysa's pencil moved.

"Thrown through west window. Possible escape into alley." Garron pointed at her.

"Do not write possible escape like that is tomorrow's breakfast order."

"It is important."

"It is also outside my inn." I tried to stand. Garron pushed me back down with one hand.

"No."

"I should check."

"You should remain conscious."

"She might still be alive."

"If she is alive, you are in no condition to improve the situation."

"If she ran?"

"Then she can continue running until dawn." Lysa leaned toward her father.

"Unless she comes back." Garron closed his eyes.

"Why would you say that?"

"Because someone should." The wind pressed against the inn. Above us, the broken window let winter into the room I had left behind. Somewhere outside, below that shattered frame, the elf might be limping through the alley, climbing another wall, or watching the inn from a roofline. I held to that thought because it made more sense than anything else. I had thrown her out. She had fled. That was all I knew, and the rest could wait until I could stand without the floor trying to drown me.

Garron finished tying the bandage and sat opposite me.

"My name is Garron Vell," he said, though I already knew.

"This is my inn. That is my daughter, grown enough to ignore me and still young enough to think a notebook is armour."

"It is better than your cudgel," Lysa said.

"My notebook has successfully recorded more elves."

"My cudgel has successfully not invited elves in."

"The window did that." Garron breathed in through his nose.

"It is just the two of us here. Has been six years. I have guests, debts, a roof that apparently has foreign traffic, and a daughter who thinks danger improves a story. I need to know whether that thing came for my inn or for you." I heard what lived beneath the question, not accusation, not yet, but fear held down with both hands. I thought of Dunmere's thin doors and colder lanes, of Orven dead in the forest, of the Crimson Elf ritual burning under my skin in ways nobody understood.

I thought of this inn with its sleeping guests, its widowed keeper, and its bright-eyed girl who collected details because details made the world feel less random.

"She came for me," I said. Garron's jaw worked once.

"That is not as comforting as you may think."

"I know."

"Why?" I looked at the water cup, then at the notebook in Lysa's hands. The girl waited with her pencil ready, but her expression had changed. She wanted the answer, of course she did. Yet beneath that curiosity was something more fragile. She wanted the world to make sense. She wanted scratches to mean rats or elves, not both and neither. She wanted a thing written down to become manageable, and I wished I could give her that.

"I don't know," I said. Lysa studied me.

"People say that when they know the shape of a thing but not its name." Garron sighed.

"She gets that from her mother."

"Being observant?"

"Making tired men feel accused."

"She would have liked him," Lysa said, still looking at me.

"Mother liked strays." This time Garron did not correct her. I looked away first. The hollow in my chest throbbed again, and a wave of dizziness passed through me so strongly that the taproom smeared at the edges. Lysa saw it at once. She shut the notebook, tucked the pencil behind her ear, and moved with sudden practicality.

"He needs broth. And blankets. And the chair by the hearth, not the bench. If he falls from the bench he will hit his head."

"I am not a sack of grain," I muttered.

"No. Grain does not usually get attacked by elves." Garron stood.

"Lysa."

"What?"

"Broth."

"I was already going." She moved quickly, but not gracefully. She bumped the bar with one hip, caught a hanging ladle before it fell, then pretended none of it had happened. There was something fiercely alive about her, as though grief, fear, and poverty had all tried to make her smaller and failed out of exhaustion. She returned with a bowl of thin broth, two blankets, and an air of command that would have suited a queen if queens wore crooked aprons over nightdresses. She draped one blanket around my shoulders.

"You should eat slowly."

"I might throw it up."

"Then throw it up slowly." Despite myself, I laughed. It hurt. Lysa smiled as if the laugh were a small victory she had earned and intended to record later. Garron bolted the front door, then checked every window in the taproom. He did it with the slow care of a man counting the few defences he possessed. When he passed near Lysa, his hand briefly touched the back of her head. She did not look at him, but she leaned into it for half a second before straightening again. I saw it.

I would remember it: the father pretending not to be terrified, the daughter pretending fear was just another thing to catalogue, the inn standing warm around them while the night pressed its face against the glass. It seemed impossible that this small room, with its broth and ledgers and bad jokes, could exist in the same world as Crimson Elves crawling across roofs. Yet perhaps that was what towns were, fragile rooms built against things that had always known how to climb. At last Garron returned to the table.

"At dawn, I take you to Bellan."

"I can go myself."

"You nearly lost an argument with stairs."

"That was temporary."

"So is life. We still take precautions." Lysa opened her notebook again and wrote something. Garron narrowed his eyes.

"What now?"

"Temporary life," she said.

"Good phrase."

"Do not quote me in that thing."

"I quote everyone. Otherwise people improve themselves afterward." I held the broth in both hands. Steam rose against my face. I could barely taste it, but warmth entered me by degrees, ordinary warmth this time, not the false softness of the siphon. Outside, the winter wind moved along the roof where Lysa had heard the scratching. Somewhere beyond the wall below my room, a Crimson Elf might be fleeing through the dark with broken ribs and murder in her heart. I did not know where she had gone.

I did not know what she had taken. I knew only that Desperate Counter now sat within me at Copper (early), sharp and shameful and waiting. At dawn, the healer would name the wound if it had a name. At dawn, Talvek would hear what had happened and look at me with that hard measuring stare.

For the few hours before morning, I sat wrapped in borrowed wool beside the hearth of The Cataract, watched over by a widowed innkeeper and his notebook-armed daughter, while the town slept around us as if the night had not just grown claws.