“Here we are!” The tinker turned around holding up a shirt of plain grey homespun. “Nothing fancy, I’m afraid, but it’s new. Well, newish.” He held it up to my chest to judge the fit.
“The wedding?” I prompted.
“What? Oh no. I wasn’t there. Bit of an event though, from what I understand. Mauthen’s only daughter and they were sending her off proper. Been planning it for months.”
“So you didn’t hear of anything odd happening?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my gut.
He shrugged helplessly. “Like I said, I wasn’t there. I’ve been up around the ironworks the last couple days,” he nodded to the west. “Trading with panners and folk up in the high rock.” He tapped the side of his head as if he’d just remembered something. “That reminds me, I found a brassie up in the hills.” He rummaged in his packs again and brought out a flat, thick bottle. “If you don’t care for wine, maybe something a little stronger…?”
I started to shake my head, then realized that some homemade brand would be useful cleaning my side tonight. “I might be….” I said. “Depending on the offer on the table.”
“Honest young gent like yourself,” he said grandly. “I’ll give you blanket, both bottles, and the coil of rope.”
“You’re generous, tinker. But I’d rather have the shirt than the rope and the fruit wine. They’d just be dead weight in my bag and I’ve got a lot of walking ahead of me.”
His expression soured a little, but he shrugged. “Your call, of course. Blanket, shirt, brand, and three jots.”
We shook hands, and I took time to help him load Keth-Selhan because I had the vague feeling that I’d insulted him by turning down his previous offer. Ten minutes later he was heading east, and I made my way north over the green hills into Trebon.
I was glad to walk the last half-mile under my own power as it helped me work the stiffness from my legs and back. As I crested the hill, I saw Trebon sprawling out below, tucked into a low bowl made by the hills. It wasn’t a large town by any means, perhaps a hundred buildings sprawling around a dozen winding, packed-dirt streets.
In the early days with the troupe, I’d learned how to size up a town. It’s a lot like reading your audience when you’re playing in a tavern. The stakes are higher of course, play the wrong song in a tavern and people might hiss you, but misjudge an entire town and things can get uglier than that.
So I sized up Trebon. It was off the beaten path, halfway between a mining town and a farming town. They weren’t likely to be instantly suspicious of strangers, but it was small enough that everyone knew by looking at you that you weren’t one of the locals.
I was surprised to see people setting up straw-stuffed shamble-men outside their homes. That meant that despite the proximity to Imre and the University, Trebon was truly a backwater community. Every town has a harvest festival of some sort, but these days most folk settle for having a bonfire and getting drunk. The fact that they were following old folk traditions meant people in Trebon were more superstitious than I would usually expect.
Despite that, I liked seeing the shamble-men. I have a fondness for the traditional harvest festivals, superstitions and all. They’re a type of theater, really.
The Tehlin church was the nicest building in town, three stories tall and made of quarried stone. Nothing odd about that, but bolted above the front doors, high above the ground, was one of the biggest iron wheels I’d ever seen. It was real iron too, not just painted wood. It was ten feet tall and must have weighed a solid ton. Ordinarily such a display would have made me nervous, but since Trebon was a mining town I guessed it showed civic pride more than fanatic piety.
Most of the other buildings in town were low to the ground, built of rough timber with cedar-shingle roofs. The inn was respectable though, two stories tall, with plaster walls and red clay tiles on the roof. There was bound to be someone in there who would know more about the wedding.
There was a bare handful of people inside, not surprising as harvest was in full swing and there were still five or six hours of good daylight left. I put on my best anxious expression as I made my way over to the bar where the innkeeper stood.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I hate to trouble you, but I’m looking for someone.”
The innkeeper was a dark-haired man with a perpetual scowl. “Who’s that then?”
“My cousin was here for a wedding,” I said, “and I heard there was some trouble.”
At the word wedding the innkeeper’s scowl turned stony. I could feel the two men farther down the bar not looking at me, pointedly not looking anywhere in my direction. It was true then. Something terrible had happened.
I saw the innkeeper reach out and press his fingers onto the bar. It took me a second to realize he was touching the iron head of a nail driven into the wood. “Bad business,” he said shortly. “Nothing I care to say about it.”
“Please,” I said, letting worry bleed into my tone. “I was visiting family in Temfalls when the rumor came down that something had happened. They’re all busy pulling in the last of the wheat, so I promised I’d come up and see what the trouble was.”
The innkeeper looked me up and down. A gawker he could turn away, but he couldn’t deny me the right to know what had happened to a family member. “There’s the one upstairs who was there,” he said shortly. “Not from around here. Might be your cousin.”
A witness! I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he shook his head. “I don’t know a thing about it,” he said firmly. “Don’t care to, either.” He turned and made himself suddenly busy with the taps of his beer barrels. “Up at the far end of the hall, on the left.”
I headed across the room and up the stairs. I could feel everyone not looking at me now. Their silence and the innkeeper’s tone made it clear that whoever was upstairs was not one of the many who had been there, it was the one. One survivor.
I went to the end of the hallway and knocked on the door. First softly, then again, louder. I opened the door slowly, so as not to startle whoever might be inside.
It was a narrow room with a narrow bed. A woman lay on it, fully clothed, one arm wrapped in a bandage. Her head was turned toward the window, so I could only see her profile.
Still I recognized her. Denna.
I must have made some noise, because she turned to look at me. Her eyes went wide and for once she was the one who was at a loss for words.
“I heard you were in some trouble,” I said nonchalantly. “So I thought I’d come and help.”
Her eyes went wide for a moment, then narrowed. “You’re lying,” she said with a wry twist to her lips.
“I am,” I admitted. “But it’s a pretty lie.” I took a step into the room and closed the door softly. “I would have come, if I’d known.”