The inn's common room was the kind of room that had been full every night for forty years and knew it.
The ceiling was low and smoke-dark from decades of hearth fires. The beams were original — old hardwood, the kind cut from forests that no longer existed, the grain visible under the soot.
Long tables ran the length of the room, occupied by the particular cross-section of humanity that the last waystation before a capital city always produced: minor nobles in traveling clothes with their crests half-covered, merchant families with their good clothes slightly wrong in the way good clothes are always slightly wrong when they are new, road guards drinking efficiently rather than pleasurably, and the various category of traveler who occupied the middle distance between all of these and defied easy classification.
The fireplace at the far end was working.
