Chapter 6 #3
Ainsworth heard Quiddle momentarily pause in the kneading of dough and give a small, breathless sigh.
“I’m seventeen actually, sir,” he said as if rebuked.
Ainsworth endured a brief awkward silence before the boy continued.
“But I hated it there. Oh, the coast was sparkling enough if you had plenty of coin to live there, yet my da didn’t, and so I didn’t, either. ”
“Oh. I’m…sorry to hear that,” Ainsworth offered meekly.
Memories of his own humble upbringing—one he had gone to great lengths to try to hide from Enach and his other colleagues—threatened to rise to the surface.
But he did not let them, and instead focused with all his might on a stubbornly stained pot.
“I got work polishing boots and armor for some of the Order of Linn guards. They were all right, them. The ones that took a shine to me turned their heads when I went picking pockets. One summer, a bunch of new guards were sent to the city, redeployed from elsewhere in the kingdom. Some of them had been patrolling the Dubhrach Mountains to the north of here. One lost an eye doing it, too. He’d come to Cawle to settle down, he said, and he told me some of the stories about the mountains from the folk of Allfhraoch.
I couldn’t even imagine a place like Mount Vengeance.
A mountain with a dragon atop it, and no one known to claim whatever riches it held?
Sounded like the wealth was ripe for the taking.
Told my da I’d come back with enough to get us a place on the waterfront. He’d like that.”
Ainsworth almost dropped the dish he was scrubbing.
An adolescent hauflin boy had thought he could stroll up to Mount Vengeance and simply…
take the treasure from a dragon? Ainsworth knew that with youth came a heady sense of arrogance, but this was a bit much!
“And you just…made your way here? By yourself?”
“Yup,” said Quiddle, as though it had been no hard task. “Took months. By the time I arrived, I was half starved and skinnier than I am now.”
Quiddle was a slip of a boy, and no wonder.
Ainsworth had felt the hardships of a journey that lasted a mere four weeks, less than a moon’s turn.
And he had the lavish coin of his grant to break his journey with tavern stays and the finest camping equipment he could afford.
He could not imagine making the journey on foot with anything less.
“Well then? Did you conquer it?” Ainsworth asked, half in jest.
“I arrived here, and true as the soldier had told me, the Misnich Inn was here, ready to prepare any budding adventurer for their journey. But I had no coin left to stay here for a night, and I was in no condition to just walk up the mountain.”
“Honey didn’t turn you away, did she?” Ainsworth asked, aghast.
“No, but she told me I’d have to earn my keep if I wanted to stay. That a night’s stay at the inn would cost me about three days of work. And if I wanted somewhere to sleep on those nights, and to be fed, well…”
“Quiddle, this is outrageous! You are being exploited!” Ainsworth left the dishes, shaking his wet hands over the floor, and approached the boy. “You do know the Labor Guild of Allfhraoch reaches here to the border? I myself will write to them on your behalf if—”
“Ainsworth, sir, you don’t get it,” the boy said, shaking his head with a smile.
“I was too stubborn to accept it at the time, but if I had set foot on that mountain as I was, I would have died. She fed me up, gave me a place to stay, and after a few weeks she said my service was over. She paid me all the coin I was due for the work and said I was free to do what I pleased. And it pleased me to stay here, earning a good wage, sending coin to my da and saving the rest.”
“Oh.” Ainsworth dried his hands with a cloth and thought of Fig and Fern. “So you also woke up one morning and decided not to fulfill your ambition?”
Quiddle scratched his chin. “I guess?”
“This place must truly be cursed,” Ainsworth muttered.
Quiddle raised a brow under his mop of unbound russet hair. “Honey must really like you to let you stay, considering how rude you are about this place sometimes.”
“Ah, my apologies. But I think it’s my coin that she likes, not me.”
Quiddle gave him a puzzled look. “Well, not really. I don’t even think this place needs that much coin.”
“How so?”
Quiddle shrugged, returning his attention to the dough he was working.
“Honey is never short on our wages. Never short on money for supplies. And she doesn’t exactly charge much for room and board.
Sometimes we go weeks without seeing anyone.
But…everything is fine. She says her ma, and her ma’s ma, ran this place before her.
Maybe they were busier and made money enough to see the inn through tough times. ”
Ainsworth did not know what to say to that, so instead he returned to his post at the dishes. Quiddle’s account provided him little in the way of solid facts for his work, but this lead was certainly interesting. Suddenly, the mass of boxes upstairs seemed all the more appealing.