I frowned. "How do you still have money if your coins keep disappearing?"
"There are classes that create currency and classes that use it, so the sum total of all the coins in the kingdom fluctuates. On good years, people produce more coins than they use. When this has happened for several consecutive years the kingdom can try to expand. That's how villages like Blackwood are built. Sometimes the kingdom recuperates its investment, and other times, like here, for instance, they lose it. Now, that is all an overly simplified version of how the system actually functions, but it is all the time we have to discuss this. We need to get a room at the inn."
"Why are you so grouchy?"
Salem glared at me. "I am grouchy because your ignorance has taken me to a backwater level three village in the middle of nowhere. There is no library, no restaurants, no theatre, and there isn't a teleportation circle anywhere within half a week's travel. I have access to none of the comforts of civilisation. And now you can't even do a simple task like securing us a room at the inn so I can educate you the way I should have been doing for the past ten weeks. That is why I am grouchy."
That was fair, I guess.
"Okay, let's get a room."
We turned around and started walking back to the village. Now that I knew the village's history, I could understand why so much of everything looked abandoned, why every structure was almost pressed up against the palisade. The people here were scared.
I'd been through a ghost town with my parents when I was a kid. The factory in the town had closed forty years earlier and most people had left. There were abandoned houses and empty shops. This reminded me a lot of that.
The guard in the tower smiled when we walked back through the gate. "How was the tour of the village?"
"Short," I said.
He chuckled. "Well, that is because we have plenty opportunity for expansion."
"More than most places. I'm looking for an inn."
"You will only find the one. The other closed last year. Just go to the main square and you will see it. Gretel might be a village appointed innkeeper, but she runs a good place, cheap one too."
"Thanks, Brill."
"You are welcome, Arnold."
The village inside the wall was barely two hundred yards from start to finish. A massive warehouse was to the left of the gate, with what looked like workshops to the right. I could hear hammering coming from behind some houses and saw a sign that had a hammer hitting an anvil. I took a wild guess and figured it was probably a smithy.
Salem led me down the main street. The outer industrial area gave way to housing and a few small shops. Most of the shops were closed, however, the entrances boarded up. The line of abandoned buildings gave way to a large open square that was cobbled.
There was a fountain in the middle with clean, clear water. A building that looked like it might be a guard's barracks sat on the far side. A boarded-up wooden temple with a faded yellow serpent image above the entrance was on the left side of the square, and a large stone house—which was very nearly a manor with its own wall and iron gate—was on the right. The inn was the building closest to the gate. It had three floors with whitewash weatherboarding and a thatched roof.
I only knew that it was the inn because Salem headed straight for the door, pressing his shoulder against the wood to indicate we needed to go inside.
I entered what could easily have been mistaken for an Irish pub. There were a lot of polished dark wooden panels and furniture. Opposite the door was a bar with a wall of bottles behind it and a countertop that had seen better days. Between that and the door were tables and chairs. A large fireplace sat along one wall, and a small stage sat against the other, beside a staircase that led to higher levels. Apart from the lanterns fixed on the wall, the interior looked almost modern.
A cougar of a woman stood behind the bar reading a book. She had curly red hair with a touch of grey and a few freckles on her cheeks. She looked up and smiled at me as I closed the door. She had a dress that was a tad too tight and a neckline that was invitingly low. She was eyeing me up more than I was her. "Welcome to Gretel's Inn. I'm the illustrious Gretel. How may I be of service, Arnold?"
I crossed the room. "I need a room for a few nights for me and Salem." I nodded to the familiar to show who I was talking about.
Gretel's smile faltered as I got closer and she dropped the flirtatious tone. "The cat is welcome, but if you are staying in my inn, you will need to have a bath before you use my sheets."
The cleanliness of the place and her comments made me notice that the sour smell, which had been following me around, didn't belong to the village, but was in fact me.
My smile went a little shaky. "A bath would be great. Do you have a bucket and some soap that I could use to wash my clothes? And maybe somewhere to hang them up?"
"I can have your clothes laundered for you…but if you are a bit tight on funds to pay the five coppers, I can sell you a bar of soap for three and lend you a wash bucket and show you where to get some water."
"I'll take the bar of soap. How much do I owe you?"
"A room costs eleven coppers a night, which includes breakfast. A hot bath will cost you three coppers. A cold bath will cost you two. Our water comes from a deep well, so I suggest the hot. Dinner is five coppers, but that includes a couple of ales. House ale is one copper a jug which is a passable local brew. If you want something branded, that will set you back a copper a tankard."
"So, twenty-eight coppers for two nights, a hot bath, and a bar of soap," I said before she could list off any more prices.
Gretel smiled. "I took you for a farmer."
I tried to hide my disappointment. "I am a farmer."
"That's a surprise—most of the ones around here can't add in their heads. That puts you a step above the locals."
I nodded as I put my backpack down and opened the leather buckles to get inside. I'd tucked my smaller purse back under the dirty clothes which I noticed smelled even worse than the ones I was wearing.
I counted out twenty-eight coppers and handed them over.
Gretel counted them again and then put them in her apron pocket. "I can show you to your room…or I can show you where you can do your laundry while I fix that bath? I strongly suggest the second."
I glanced down at Salem. He was glaring at me. Glancing at him, however, brought my nose closer to my armpit—which chose for me. "Laundry first."
A sharp pain burned my ankle and I looked down to see Salem pulling back his mouth from a nasty bite.
Gretel eyed Salem uncertainly. "Is he always like that?" I could hear the hesitation in her tone.
"No, he just hates water and recognises most of the words associated with it," I said, fumbling through a lie. "He'll behave once I've finished my laundry and have bathed."
"He'd better. This way."
Gretel led me to a hallway and the back of the inn. Halfway down, I froze. There was a map of North America on the wall that went from floor to ceiling. Varla had repeatedly told me I was in another universe, a different version of Earth than where I came from, but that hadn't made its way into reality the way seeing this map did. I was looking at North America, but everything about it was wrong. A forest took up almost the entire centre and east coast of the continent. The only signs of civilisation in the north were along the west coast near the ocean. Texas and Mexico contained hundreds of cities making up the bulk of the kingdom, but everything else had a "here be dragons" vibe to it, with names like The Widows Mountains and The Valley of Tears.
Gretel saw why I had stopped and walked back. She pointed to a red dot of paint that might have been in the northeastern part of Oregon or maybe Washington—though the topography certainly didn't match. Judging by the ring of hills, it looked like the dot was on the inner edge of a giant meteor crater, which explained the two lines of jagged hills I'd seen beyond the forest.
"That's us." She moved her finger a couple of hundred miles north through a forest into what would have been Washington or Canada. "That's the elven border." She then followed a series of mountains I couldn't name. "The western dwarven mountain kingdoms."