Chapter Eight
Rummer's Pub
Eleanor sat hunched over in the bar’s corner with a large mug of ale curled in her gloved hand.
From this position, she had a prime view of the pub’s room from her gloomy corner, which aided in obscuring her features.
Along with her cloak’s hood being pulled tight to hide her, and her trousers tucked into her worn boots, she might pass for an old man.
“Fucking rich pricks,” the bartender muttered under her breath as the curvy woman returned to the bar.
Eleanor didn’t need to look over at the group of men to see who the bartender was talking about.
She’d already clocked the three men sitting at one of the round tables in the centre in the pub room.
They were loud and too cheerful, causing a few of the dedicated locals to look their way, but kept their distance.
Everything about these lads told Eleanor and the entire pub that they didn’t belong here.
They all knew, as much as the three young men were trying to hide it, that they were nobles, some rich lord’s sons.
The three of them were wearing what they thought would pass as what the lower classes wore.
Eleanor had to give them credit, though.
It would have worked in the dim light of another pub, but in this part of Breninsol, the differences were glaringly obvious to those who belonged here.
Their too thick cloaks, which would make sure they didn’t feel the bite of the evening chill, were tossed over the backs of their wooden chairs.
Their plain jackets were clean, almost too clean, as if the clothes were brand new.
Decent-looking string made up their ties, and their cuffs showed crisp stitching without a single loose thread.
The fabric of their perfectly fitting trousers showed no signs of general wear at the knees.
Their flat caps were too big and bulky, suggesting that they’d tucked their long hair under them.
Long hair was a fashion statement that only those who didn’t do manual labour could practically afford.
Everything about these lads indicated that they were sons of wealthy lords, descending from their mansions to experience life for the lower born.
They found it amusing to only get a glimpse, enough for them to believe they understood the lives of those beneath them, yet failing to comprehend the reality of the people in the room.
Eleanor had kept an eye on the regulars.
Some took advantage of the lads and their somewhat generous nature to get a free drink from the aristos.
Others avoided them, sneering and wanting no involvement, unwilling to become an anecdote for the lords to take back to their mansions with tales about the one night they ventured into the seedy depths of Breninsol.
She had encountered the affluent types in the Barrow’s taverns and pubs before, seeking tales to impress their wealthy friends, as if it were a misguided rite of passage for them.
When she’d first seen a noble’s poor imitation, she’d thought the locals would make an attempt at their lives, or at the very least rob them of their weighty coin purses.
Later, she learned what the king’s ancestor had done when a lord was robbed and left bloody in the streets.
The King’s Justice had been swift and brutal, effectively wiping the entire area from the city.
The punishment to incur the king’s wrath over a coin purse wasn’t worth it. They would find the culprits and punish those around them as well. The king’s justice would be as abrupt and bloody as the Purge.
“Such arseholes ,” the bartender continued, muttering to herself as she cleaned the earthenware mugs and tidied them away.
The way she’d pronounced the word was incorrect for the accent she was using.
That wasn’t the first slip up that Eleanor had noticed the bartender make.
The woman’s accent was good, but she was angry.
Annoyed at the table of aristos having made a grab at her arse and she’d let her temper get the better of her.
Eleanor, not having Solacian as her native language, noticed the obvious differences.
She had been speaking it long enough to know the accentual nuances in the kingdom that showed up in the capital.
It could be easily explained away as the woman’s mother was a servant for some wealthy merchant’s house, and she’d picked up some words in passing. However, that would be too much of a coincidence, and Eleanor was nothing if not suspicious by nature. Time had made sure of that.
The bartender slipped back into the accent she was using while serving other patrons at the bar, which matched their accents. The woman seemed harmless enough, but not enough to discount her from posing some sort of threat.
“Fen,” admonished the other bartender behind her in a hush tone.
“What? They think they can come in here—”
“Yeah. They can.” The old man hissed back, giving her a stern look to keep quiet.
Fen mumbled under her breath some more while she continued tidying behind the bar.
“No right,” the man slurred in the middle of the bar, speaking more to his drink than to anyone listening. “You wouldn’t catch me talking to my Nettie like that. Not right.”
The bartender, Fen, gave him a small smile as she finished putting away the mugs. “I know, Wilfred,” she said, throwing the dishcloth over her shoulder and leaned a hip against the bar. “Where is she anyways?”
“Don’t, Fen,” growled the older bartender.
“What? I’m only asking,” Fen replied defensively.
“You know she’s at Moonlight House,” the old bartender said, then ducked out the back.
And that was why Eleanor was sitting on a rickety wooden stool in a noisy pub rather than lying in her bed, alone, and with a bottle of whatever alcohol she got her hands on.
She was here for that man, who was slurring his words into his mug.
He was the one that was sweet on Linnet, the missing woman from the Moonlight House.
Prior to this, Eleanor had been to two pubs searching for this man.
The first pub was in the Exchange, where she expected passable ale, but the reality, as so often happened, disappointed her.
The ale had been watered down, criminally so.
Eleanor’s only reward was to add a layer of acrid alcohol stench to her mouth and cloak.
The second pub had been closer to the Moonlight House, but it was too quiet a place, with watchful eyes and tight lips among the pub’s inhabitants.
Eleanor had given an exaggerated limp into this place; an apparent injury would hopefully explain away her muteness at the bar.
Eleanor gambled by going to Rummers Pub, even though she was sorely tempted to call it a night, but she’d known she had a small window of opportunity to find the man, deep in his cups, drowning out his sorrow for his missing lover.
He would soon end up Missing, or more likely, would leave the city, not wanting his memories to haunt him.
As she looked over at the troubled man, she knew he wouldn’t be moving on from this woman.
He’d drink to stay in the memories that plagued him, until he woke with only wisps of smoke from his dreams of his lover.
He wasn’t getting over her anytime soon.
Eleanor knew a heartbroken man when she saw one.
The bartender had taken pity on him and kept refilling his mug.
Sitting a few stools down was a man with his worn cloak pulled over his head, showing a hint of light hair.
He’d only had two mugs that she’d seen and had been giving the depressed man a respectful distance to grieve, but prompting him with conversation to talk about his lover.
“Nah, not anymore, she’s not,” he mumbled into his drink. “ Left , is what they tells me. But I know my Nettie and she’d not leave. Not me. We had a plan.”
“Fred,” the bartender said, her voice both kind and placating. Intoxicated men being sweet on a prostitute was not a new experience for her. Dreaming of running off into the sunset to have their happily ever after.
The man—Wilfred, or Fred to his friends—slammed his fist onto the sticky, nicked wooden bar, drawing a few interested eyes their way. “I tell you. Nettie’s not left.”
Fen had the good inclination to nod her head. “Alright, Fred. If you say so.” That seemed to appease the man before he nodded and returned to his drink.
“What makes you think that?” the hooded man asked.
His accent blended in with the locals of the Barrow and he was the only other inhabitant sharing the bar with them.
She couldn’t see the man’s face as he kept his hood up, but his light hair caught the shine from the overhead candles, revealing short blond hair that fell over his forehead.
When Eleanor had first sat down, she’d thought the blond man was Wilfred’s friend.
However, he kept an eye on a table where two figures sat in the shadows, and Eleanor suspected the idle chatter served as the blond man’s excuse for his presence at the bar.
Tucked away from the warmth of the roaring hearth, the two men, the subject of the blond man's persistent, surreptitious glances, managed to attract her attention.
The shadows, in conjunction with their cloaks, effectively hid their faces from view.
She sensed their attention was riveted on the group of young aristocrats; their boisterous laughter and the clinking of glasses were the loudest noises in the pub.
As if Eleanor only needed to think of the two shadowed men, she felt a sudden shift from them, as she felt their gaze on her.
The hood of the smaller of the two turned, and with a flash of dark eyes, she could have sworn he looked in her direction.
Eleanor narrowed her eyes in the darkness of her hood, her spine tingling as the air seemed to tighten around her.
BANG!
The sound of the Wilfred’s drunken fist banging onto the bar snapped her attention back to the reason she was here.
“I knows her. My Nettie wouldn’t leave, not without this.” He slurred as he opened his palm and revealed a small silver necklace that revealed what he’d been clutching close to his chest.
“How did you get it, if it’s so precious to her?” the absent man asked.
“Found it stashed in her room at the Moonlight House.” Wilfred’s slurring was strengthening his accent.
If Eleanor had not been familiar with the name of the brothel—pleasure house—she would have mistaken his words for “mouse,” instead of “house.” “Her coins were gone. No doubt the other girls at that place. Can’t blame them for that.
They knows asss…ass well as me that she’d been taken.
But they didn’t know aboutsss her spot.”
“Who’d bother to take her?” Eleanor was thankful that this man, whoever he was, had somewhat befriended Wilfred. Otherwise, she would’ve needed to talk to him, and that wasn’t something she was in the mood for tonight.
“Dunno. She was the sweetest. The sweetest.” The grieving man mumbled into his ale.
One thing was for sure: he would not find her at the bottom of his drink.
“She can’t be Missing,” Wilfred repeated in a sad voice as he stroked the necklace on the bar table.
Eleanor was done listening to this man bemoaning his lover.
It was all the information she’d get from him now.
She moved along the bar from her dark corner, getting as close to Wilfred as she could without raising attention, and her hands faltered as she found the money to pay.
The necklace glinted in the candlelight, revealing it wasn’t a simple piece of cheap jewellery as she’d thought.
A droplet-shaped, pure blue stone with an intricate silver pattern woven around it, resembling clouds in a silver line flicking below the pointed tip.
She felt herself leaning in and wanting to touch it, to discover if the Air would form in the stone.
That deep, dark recess which she always kept tightly locked and hidden began to stir within her.
Eleanor drew in a ragged breath, at the unexpectedness of her own reaction and impulse and astonishment flew over her.
“That’d be half-sterling, please,” Fen said with a large smile.
Even if Eleanor hadn’t been feigning muteness, tonight she wouldn’t have been able to speak. She hadn’t seen a symbol like that in years, decades, maybe even longer. Not since the Purge, when her kind had been hunted to extinction.
“Love?” Fen asked. Her accent for this word was good, it was a commonly heard word especially in this part of Breninsol, where the “o” was replaced with a “u”.
Eleanor fumbled for her coins and slapped her money onto the bar. She needed to leave before she said or did something that could get her killed.