The crooked handle over the door had a habit of catching light as if it remembered other noons. Beneath it, The Golden Flagon worked at the city's hunger with a craftsman's confidence. The threshold gave underfoot in a way that suggested the floor had learned the step of Orathis and chosen not to argue with it.
Rothgar shouldered in and spread the room around him like an apron. "Mira! Vinegar acquired and unspilled. We have a guest—two, if you count the vinegar."
"Count the vinegar when it can pay," a woman said from behind the bar. She had a book open and a quill tucked in her hair the way some keep knives. Mira measured things—coin, spice, people—with the same economy that keeps food honest. Her eyes went first to Selith, then to Kaelthar, and then, bracketed between the two, to anything that might become trouble.
Elira appeared at a door with a stack of bowls balanced on her hip. She was quick without being hurried. "Da, don't block the light," she said, and then saw Kaelthar and half‑smiled as if she'd found a story trying to behave itself. On her way to the tables she tapped the doorframe twice with the back of her knuckles.
"Guest," Rothgar said, aiming the word toward Mira as if it were a coin. "Master Kaelthar."
Mira closed the book. "Welcome," she said, with exactly enough warmth to acknowledge the roof over both of them. "Sit where you like if you can find it. If you can't, sit where there's room. Elira, bowls. Selith, you'll stay and eat or I will be offended at your profession."
"Offend the baskets," Selith said, grinning. "They can be woven again."
Kaelthar took a place near the long window that gave a view of the sign's shadow moving across sun and stone. He set his satchel at his feet with the care one gives a useful tool and nothing more. The room carried the voices of men who came in from carts and water and hammers and liked to argue their day into better shape.
Mira poured ale into a clay cup and set it before him. The foam lifted like a low hill. A fleck of soot from the hearth drifted across the room and landed on the head of the drink without melting or sinking. It lay there the way a word lies on the tongue before it chooses a sentence.
Kaelthar watched it and did not touch the cup.
Mira watched him watching. "Too warm?"
"It will cool," Kaelthar said.
"Everything does," she answered, and moved on, counting mugs in sixes as she went.
A fiddler in the corner sawed a tune that had learned not to apologize for repeating itself. The room's candles leaned very slightly toward Kaelthar when he passed one to step aside for a serving boy; when he settled, their flames behaved as if no such thing had occurred. Selith claimed a stool within speaking distance and traded rumor with a woman who worked the dye market along the river: guild talk, a minor quarrel about fees, a man who had tried to pay with a prayer and discovered the exchange rate.
Rothgar thumped the vinegar down at the kitchen hatch. "You ruin it, I blame the gods," he warned the steam.
"You blame the gods, I ruin you," came Mira's answer. The room approved quietly.
At the edge table under a beam that had been rescued from a better house, a hooded patron sat with the posture of a man pretending his bones were a shelf for books. A thin ledger lay open before him, not written in at the moment but left where the hand rests when it is used to weight paper. He looked at no one, which is how one looks at someone without consent. Elira set a cup near him, and he thanked her in a voice that had been trained to learn rooms without touching them.
Kaelthar tasted the stew when it came. Mira's law could be read in it: thyme that had been patient, meat that had been persuaded rather than coerced, vinegar that believed it had always been meant to be there. Bread arrived warm enough to suggest a decision had been taken recently. The ale cooled. He lifted the cup and drank. The fleck of soot clung to the rim as if for purchase, then fell inward and made no sound.
"Will you be lodging?" Mira asked when she returned with the book. She did not write the answer first. She waited for the world to say what it intended to do and corrected it only after.
"For a little while," Kaelthar said.
"We have a room that is kind to travelers and strict with fleas." She named a price that would feed three and leave the fourth a story. Kaelthar counted coin as if confirming an old sum. She added a mark to the book with a precise swipe. "Elira will show you after the washings."
Elira, passing with bowls, said, "After the washings," in a tone that meant, do not argue with the order of steps by which a house remains a house.
"Selith says you listen to cities," Mira said, not looking up from the page.
"I listen," Kaelthar said.
"What do we sound like?"
"Like a wheel that has learned the road," he said.
Mira's mouth twitched. "Then you'll know when the road changes." She closed the book. "Eat."
A small commotion rose by the door. Two men tried to enter as one from opposite sides; they performed the ancient dance of generosity and annoyance until Rothgar divided them with two hands and a laugh. He had a way of pressing heat into chaos as a cook does into bread, and the result rose acceptably.
"Tell the north road not to cheat," a carter called. "It's been a bastard slope all morning."
"It cheats the south as well," said a woman shelling peas into a bowl that refused to be full. "Fair is fair."
"Fair," Rothgar agreed. "Which is why we will discuss it like philosophers rather than fight like men with arms and reasons." He set three cups on a table with a thud like a wise bell. The talk quickened and then settled to a good simmer.
Elira, making a circuit, paused by Kaelthar's table. "You don't mind the noise?"
"It keeps the roof up," Kaelthar said.
She considered that, then nodded as if she had been offered an apprenticeship in thinking. "If you need anything not on the list, we sometimes have it anyway." She glanced, not very subtly, toward the hooded man under the beam. "We also have things we do not have."
"Such as?"
"Privacy," she said, and slipped away, light on her feet with the knowledge of where every uneven board waited.
The door opened and a grain of afternoon spilled in. A crow landed on the sign's iron and tilted until it looked down through the window as if into a mirror it had ordered. No one in the room looked up except Selith, who made a small warding gesture as if brushing crumbs from a sleeve. The bird considered its reflection, concluded the other bird would not pay, and left.
The hooded patron turned a page of his ledger with the same care Elira used on bowls. The corner of the leaf made a dry sound. His hand paused very briefly in the air as if measuring the weight of the room from that height. Then he wrote a single character, small and economical, and closed the book as if he had accomplished enough for a life.
Mira carried three plates to the carters, and returned to the bar by a path that made its own argument for efficiency. She oiled the bar plank in a single pass with a cloth and a thumb of fat, a ritual without flourish. Her eyes cut once toward the door as if she had heard news arrive in a language only she spoke.
"Storm?" Rothgar asked, catching the glance.
"Not weather," Mira said.
The light in the room thinned, not dimming so much as forgetting for an instant what its work was. It remembered and returned, but in the space of the forgetting a knife paused above an onion, a laugh halted just before becoming itself, and a boy with a tray looked to his feet as if he had just discovered he possessed them.
Kaelthar lifted his head, not as a dog does, but as a man does who expects the world to attempt a sentence and is willing to wait out its clause.
Somewhere beyond the stone of the wall, a bell thought about speaking. It chose not to.
Selith said, lightly because lightness is a tool, "It's only the smith; he sets his hammer to the anvil like a prayer when he is short on coin."
Rothgar laughed obligingly. The room picked up the cue and went on as rooms do when encouraged by custom to continue being themselves.
Evening tugged at the corners. The first customers who considered themselves elders by tenure rather than years claimed their table as if it had been carved for them. Someone started a game with stones that clicked like small arguments settling. The door breathed people in and out. The light went copper and then more complicated.
Elira arrived with a small dessert made from the idea of honey and the reality of flour. "For listening," she said, putting it down as if bribing a friendly god. "Also because Da will overfeed you from sentiment if I do not preempt him with sense."
"Sense is a rarer spice," Kaelthar said.
"Don't tell him that. He will raise prices on it." She smiled and vanished into the traffic of the room.
The soot fleck that had fallen into the ale earlier had sunk and left a faint shadow at the bottom of the cup, like a dark eye that had decided to look up from a different angle. Kaelthar set the cup aside. The shadow did not mind.
The bell spoke.
Not the hour. Not any measure the city had agreed upon. A single note too full for its throat, as if metal had been startled into truth. It came through the wall without regard for craft and made the candle flames straighten one heartbeat too long.
This time the room heard. A dozen faces tilted the way wheat tilts when wind remembers its work. Conversation forgot what it had been doing and reached to pick itself up, only to realize its hands were occupied with silence.
Rothgar and Mira traded a look that contained the history of decisions made quickly and lived with bravely.
"Keep eating," Mira said to the room, as much order as advice. People obeyed because the alternative was to perform the invention of a better idea under scrutiny.
The door opened, and a man entered wearing a coat that had been cut to keep rain off of a person who might stand long hours in the business of asking for answers. The city's watch mark sat plain on his collar: a scale over an open hand. He carried no drawn weapon and more authority than would have fit in one.
"Watch‑Captain," someone said, and the name was not quite right but near enough to be forgiven.
He removed his hat and waited for the room to give back his breath. "Rothgar," he said. His gaze made a circuit of the tables with the caution of a man who has been lied to politely and often.
"Captain Ysren," Rothgar said, making space at the bar that had not existed a moment before. "If you've come to taste the stew, I can be prevailed upon to extend credit to the watch in exchange for protection from the watch."
"Protection is an indulgence," Ysren said. His eyes were the sort that knew when a truth had been polished and preferred it with some tarnish left on. He did not yet look at Kaelthar, which is a way of looking at someone. "I'm here about the bell. And about a thing reported near the southern market this afternoon." His attention slid across the room like a weight across a scale and found Selith, then moved on. It reached Kaelthar and paused a fraction, like a foot touching a stair that has altered since the last time it was trusted.
Kaelthar inclined his head in the manner one uses to acknowledge weather.
Ysren returned the courtesy by the width of a breath and looked away with the expertise of a man who files questions in a folder marked later.
"We had a single toll," he said to Rothgar, "not marked on any hour. It carried as if it had been rung inside the stone rather than by it. Priests are quarrelling over whose business it is to declare what it means. In the meantime, people eat. And I ask if anything here"—he gestured, taking in light, wood, coin, and breath—"behaved as if it had been taught a new trick."
Mira said, "Ale keeps its own counsel, Captain. If it learns tricks, it doesn't share them with me."
"Then it is better company than most," Ysren said. "May I have a corner and a cup while I perform my investigation by the ancient method of asking the same question three ways?"
"You may have two corners," Rothgar said. "But you will pay for the cup."
The room, given permission to exist at its comfort level, began to move again. Ysren took the corner near Kaelthar because it was available, and because a man who reads rooms without letting rooms read him chooses the place with fewest angles.
The hooded patron under the beam had not moved when the bell spoke. Now he shifted the ledger very slightly so that the edge no longer pointed at Kaelthar but lay parallel to the bar. It was the sort of courtesy one extends to lightning.
Ysren folded his hands. He did not open a notebook. He did not need to write down that something had already altered. He said, to no one in particular and to Kaelthar without forcing the admission, "If anyone saw the bell before it rang, I would be grateful to learn how."
Kaelthar said nothing. Silence said enough and not nearly.
Selith, who knew when to let a thread run and when to cut it, rose from her stool. "Captain, the Flagon makes a fine witness when you feed it," she said. "Buy a round and you'll hear five versions of the truth, which add up to one truth and four chasers."
Ysren considered the math and accepted. "A round," he told Rothgar.
Rothgar poured like a man baptizing an idea. Cups met wood. The room remembered how to be human under supervision.
Ysren took his and lifted it a finger's height toward Kaelthar, the way one acknowledges other weather in a new season. Kaelthar returned the fraction. Their glances touched and looked away. The bell did not speak again. The light steadied. The soot in the cup at Kaelthar's elbow had forgotten itself in beer and would never be recovered.