Chapter 12
So that was how I ended up at this inn.
The inn sat near the edge of a forest, far enough from the main roads that unnecessary attention rarely found us, but close enough that the occasional traveler stopped by when they needed food, rest, or both.
Most of our customers were local villagers or small-time merchants passing through.
They cared about weather, crop prices, and whether their cart wheels would survive the next road.
They did not care about royal politics.
They definitely did not care about missing girls from distant kingdoms.
Which worked perfectly for me.
Miss Ann, the owner of the inn, was... difficult to describe.
She looked like an ordinary old woman.
She was not.
She spoke little, noticed everything, and somehow always knew when I was about to do something stupid, often before I did. It was deeply unsettling.
In some ways, she reminded me of myself.
She liked silence.
She preferred routine.
She avoided unnecessary socializing.
The difference was that she had excellent judgment and decades of life experience.
I had panic-driven improvisation and a long history of questionable decisions.
So, naturally, she was the more competent version.
I helped with the daily work at the inn.
Serving food.
Taking orders.
Cleaning tables.
Carrying wood.
Washing dishes.
It was repetitive work, but I liked it.
Routine has a strange way of calming the mind. When your biggest concern is whether table three needs more soup, life feels manageable.
The forest had became my second refuge.
There's something important I forgot to mention.
I started practicing my magic.
I already had magic whether I liked it or not, and ignoring it clearly wasn't working. Even when I tried not to use it, it leaked out in small accidental bursts whenever I got emotional, tired, or annoyed-which, unfortunately, happened often.
So I made a decision.
If I had magic, I would learn to control it and the forest was the perfect place to practice.
Whenever I went out to collect firewood, I stayed a little longer.
Just enough to practice.
Nothing dramatic.
I wasn't trying to summon storms or split mountains. I preferred surviving, so I started small.
I practiced by lifting pieces of wood off the ground for a few seconds, moving pebbles, and shifting fallen branches while testing my control, measuring how much strain each attempt caused, and slowly learning my limits.
Sometimes, when Miss Ann wasn't paying attention, I used tiny bits of magic while doing chores.
A subtle pull here.
A tiny movement there.
Washing dishes a little too efficiently.
Nothing obvious or flashy, bit just enough to improve control.
Just enough to remind myself that the power was still there.
The only audience to these training sessions were the trees, a group of squirrels, a few birds, and one particularly rude rabbit that looked offended every time I entered its territory.
Honestly, I preferred them.
They judged silently, and trees were famously terrible at gossip. People, they asked questions.
Life was peaceful.
Sometimes I listened to travelers talk and picked up bits of news about the kingdom I had left behind.
Not because I cared.
Because I was cautious.
But there was nothing.
No news of a missing girl.
No search parties.
No rumors.
That meant one of two things.
Either I had successfully made myself irrelevant.
Or I had never mattered to the story as much as I thought.
Both options were acceptable.
Sometimes, usually when I was tired enough to stop lying to myself, I wondered.
Had the prince and princess fallen in love?
Had events unfolded the way they were supposed to?
I never let that line of thought continue for long.
Some questions are safer unanswered.
On one particularly uneventful afternoon, I sat near the back of the inn grinding herbs with an expression that suggested competence, which was, definitely, misleading.
Miss Ann, as it turned out, was also a healer.
A very good one.
She wasn't trained in grand academies or magical institutions. Her knowledge came from years of treating injuries, illnesses, fevers, burns, and every stupid thing humans did to themselves.
Which, apparently, was a lot.
For reasons I still didn't fully understand, she had decided to teach me.
Simple remedies.
Basic mixtures.
Herbal pastes.
Nothing too advanced.
Today's lesson involved grinding herbs.
Which I was doing poorly, with very slight magical assistance.
Just enough to help and not enough to be obvious.
I leaned over the table and muttered under my breath.
"Interesting," I said. "These herbs are contributing more to society than I am."
I kept grinding, fully committed to my quiet life of controlled irrelevance.
While continuing my deeply serious conversation with the herbs, Miss Ann finally spoke from behind me.
"You know," she said dryly, "if talking to yourself were a marketable skill, this inn would be wildly profitable."
I didn't look up.
Experience had taught me that eye contact encouraged her.
"And yet," she continued, "the water is still not boiling, the paste is not ready, and whatever you're doing cannot legally be called grinding."
To be fair, I had never met her standards in medicine.
This, apparently, was her version of encouragement.
"I am multitasking," I said calmly, pressing the stone down with determination.
"You are failing at multiple tasks simultaneously," she replied.
"That still counts."
"It does not."
I exhaled and adjusted the pot over the fire.
Over the past two years, I had learned one important truth.
Arguing with Miss Ann changed nothing.
If I argued, she gave me snide commentary and she gave me more work.
If I stayed quiet, she only gave me more work.
In both cases, the work remained exactly the same.
Technically speaking, I was always losing.
Still, I depended on her, which limited my options.
As a result, the only acceptable outlet for my frustration had become the innocent kitchen tools of this establishment.
Several spoons had suffered.
One bowl had cracked.
A ladle had bent under mysterious circumstances.
I maintained my innocence.
So I continued working.
That was when the entrance bell chimed.
I paused, not enough to stop working but enough to listen.
From the front, I heard her voice shift instantly into that practiced tone she used for customers.
"Welco-"
She stopped.
Then-
"...oh... dear..."
I went still.
That was new. Very new and highly concerning.
Because in the two years I had been here, her tone had remained consistently unimpressed regardless of circumstance, and for it to change like that meant something had gone very wrong.
A low, strained sound followed.
Unmistakably, Pain.
Curiosity, which had never once led to a favorable outcome in my life, surfaced immediately anyway.
I leaned slightly, just enough to see past the doorway, and caught sight of her back as she helped a man-or rather, supported most of his weight-into the healing room.
"Girl," she called sharply, her tone already back to business, "get me the strongest herbs. Quickly."
"I'm coming," I replied, already moving.
I gathered what she needed and entered the room, placing the items beside her before turning to hand over the prepared paste-
and then I saw him.
I froze.
Completely.
Because on what possible version of this already questionable timeline was he doing here?