Chapter 4: Four | The Inn

The inn at Thornewell was the last proper building before the road gave up pretending to be a road and became a suggestion with ambitions. It had a door that locked, a window that mostly closed, and a woman behind the bar who asked no questions because the answers were rarely worth the trouble. He paid for the week. He paid in old coin, which the woman accepted by weight with the expression of someone who had seen worse and charged accordingly. He asked for the room on the second floor, the one with the bolt, and he asked for a meal to be brought up at evening, and he asked that the girl be given the room, not him. "Your granddaughter?" said the woman. "No." "Your ward?" "No." "Is she wanted?" "By me? Absolutely not." He put Ali in the room with the bolt and the meal on its way and a purse with enough coin for the week and instructions that were, he felt, perfectly clear. "Stay," he said, from the hallway. "Eat. Sleep. Do not steal anything. Do not leave. In seven days the county will have been notified and someone with a ledger and an onion smell will arrive to process you properly, and I will be far enough east that neither of us will need to think about the other again." "That's the most words you've said to me at once," she said. "That's at least a silver's worth. Possibly a gold." He closed the door. He heard the bolt slide home from the inside, which was encouraging. He walked down the stairs and out into the grey, and the road past Thornewell gave up its gravel within the first mile and became a rutted track through heather and peat bog, the kind of ground…