Fenholt was every bit as lively as Hallowmere used to be, back before the world changed. A dirt road ran its length, flanked by houses in every shape, color, and state of disrepair. Merchant stalls in the town center rang with the competing shouts of vendors trying to out-sell each other.
I asked around for an inn and got pointed toward the tallest building in sight, second only to the stronghold itself.
The building was called the Lady Luck.
Inside, the smell hit me before anything else did: something foul and half-familiar, tugging at a memory I didn't want, my grandfather passed out on the porch, soaked through with his own drink and misery. It was alcohol, of course. I sat down and waited for the woman working the floor, and she looked as thunderous as any storm cloud I'd seen roll in off the mountains.
It occurred to me, not for the last time, that every young woman I'd ever met seemed to be furious about something.
She had a considerable bosom held in check by a tunic that had clearly given up the fight some time ago.
I must have stared a beat too long, because she cut straight through the silence with, "See something you like?"
"Sorry for staring, ma'am.
You're very beautiful," I said, which I meant as a peace offering and which somehow made things worse.
"Are you trying to get up my skirt, boy?"
she asked, and I wanted very badly to sink into the floorboards.
"No ma'am, I already have someone I love," I said.
"Then keep your eyes up here," she said, tapping two fingers against her own eyes with the exact patience you'd use on a slow dog.
I nodded and kept them there.
"So what'll you have?"
"What do you have?"
I asked.
"Mead," she said, in the tone of someone stating the obvious law of the land.
"Could I have water instead?"
"Why, you think my mead isn't good enough for you?"
She looked genuinely wounded, the way anyone would if you insulted the one thing they'd built their entire reputation around.
"I don't drink," I admitted.
I'd tried it once, at the new harvest festival, and it tasted so much like spoiled grape juice that I spat it straight back out in front of half the town.
"You're standing in a tavern," she pointed out, reasonably.
"I thought this was an inn," I said, with the specific confusion of someone who has clearly walked into the wrong building.
"Inn's out back.
You're not from around here, are you," she said.
It wasn't really a question.
"No ma'am.
I'm from Hallowmere," I said.
"Stop calling me ma'am, I'm Greta.
And what in the world is a Hallowmere?"
she asked, baffled.
"Pleased to meet you, Greta.
I'm Jon Marrow, from Hallowmere, the little farming town," I said, offering my best smile.
Her whole expression curdled the moment my name left my mouth, and for a second I couldn't figure out what I'd done wrong.
"Marrow.
Any relation to Bobby Marrow?"
she asked, her face darkening several shades past mere irritation.
"My father's name is Robert.
I've come looking for him," I said, already bracing.
"He owes me a small fortune in mead," she said flatly.
"I'll cover it, then," I said, playing the hero, which turned out to be the single most expensive mistake I'd made in my entire life to that point.
I walked out of the Lady Luck nearly penniless, which meant I spent that first night camped outside with Aki and Yoshi instead of in a proper bed, which they were thrilled about and I very much was not. The one useful thing I got out of it: Greta let slip that my father was out on a mining run, and that she'd been planning to ambush him the moment he got back to collect every coin he owed her, a fate he'd narrowly dodged purely because his son had been foolish enough to volunteer.
The following day I got the fuller portrait of my father's talents. I repainted a settler's house after Dad had defaced it with horse dung. I settled his overdue bill with the blacksmith for pickaxe repairs.
I paid off the fruit sellers. I covered his gambling debts. I apologized, with money, to a man walking around with a broken jaw my father had apparently given him.
And, worst of all, I paid off what he owed his favorite working girl.
By the end of it I had decided, with total conviction, that my father was quite possibly the worst human being currently drawing breath, and that I could not wait for him to walk back through that door so I could tell him so with my fists.
That second night I slept in the hayloft above the Lady Luck, too broke for a room, too proud to camp outside two nights running when there was a roof available for free if I helped stack barrels until closing. An old dungeon miner, gray bearded and missing most of one ear, had planted himself at the bar all evening, muttering into his cup loud enough for half the room to hear whether they wanted to or not.
"Something's gone wrong out west," he was saying, to nobody in particular and everybody at once.
"Things that don't belong in any bestiary I've ever heard tell of.
Animals turning on their own kind for no reason a beast should have.
My cousin swears he saw a whole warren of rot-rats eat each other down to the last one, screaming the whole while like they knew what they were doing to themselves."
"Wrong how?"
I asked, before I'd decided to.
The miner turned his one good ear toward me like he'd been waiting all night for somebody to actually ask instead of just tolerating him.
"Wrong like somebody wanted it wrong.
You don't get rot-rats turning on their own kind out of nowhere, boy. Nothing in this world goes bad like that on its own.
Somebody's put something out there that isn't supposed to be there, something that makes the rest of it curdle around it, and I'd bet my other ear whoever did it meant to."
Greta told him to drink up or shut up, and he did neither, just kept muttering the same handful of words into his cup until the candles burned low: something's wrong, something's wrong, this isn't how the world's supposed to work.