🍹┃the-green-queen-inn

Stranger than Fiction (Night 2)

Behind the polished bar of the Green Queen Inn stands Alda Farnum, brown hair pinned beneath a fashionable hat, tailored outfit without a wrinkle to its name. She greets each arrival with a warm smile that reaches her eyes, already weighing what they might be worth.

Business had changed of late. Where once she could predict a face before it came through the door, the merchant with mud on his boots, the courier with a letter tucked in his coat, now came Strangers. That was what the townsfolk had taken to calling them: people who had never set foot here before, who didn't carry themselves like anyone she could place. Alda didn't lose sleep over it. Strange coin spends the same as familiar coin, and coin was the only tongue she needed to understand.

Still, one recent arrival had lodged itself under her skin like a splinter. Curled beneath one of the inn's corner benches was a small creature she hadn't noticed at first, swaddled in what appeared to be a patchwork blanket stitched together from whatever scraps misfortune had left behind. She might have walked past it entirely, had it not made a sound. Not words. Something more like a whimper, the kind that slips out in the middle of a bad dream. Whatever the thing was, it stirred something in her she didn't particularly want stirred. She left it alone. No waking it, no sending it off into the cold, not yet. But it couldn't stay. The Green Queen was not a charity, and a bench was not a bed.

She had barely settled back into her rhythm when the door swung open again.

The pair that entered stopped her mid-pour. One of them she couldn't decide if he wore the face of a devil or simply hadn't decided against it. The other moved with the loose, unhurried grace of something that had only recently concluded that walking upright was worth the effort. She held her tongue to a quiet minimum: a clipped greeting, a look she kept carefully neutral, a glass set down with more precision than warmth. Inside, her thoughts were considerably louder.

Alda straightened, and cast a slow look across her inn, the sleeping creature under the bench, the third devil that had arrived and his feral companion, the door still swinging on its hinge.

More where those came from, she thought. She poured herself a small glass, allowed herself one private grimace, and got back to work.