Cassandra's Lantern

Chapter 9: Still Waters

Loholt rose before any of the staff and dressed himself in darkness as he had always done, feeling his way by instinct and memory until he was ready to close the door to his modest chamber and descend the stairs to the ground floor of the tavern, where the familiar routine of the day awaited him. As the landlord, he could in theory at least have slept in as long as he desired, but the years seemed to have played a cruel trick in depriving him of the vitality that he had possessed in youth while at the same time relieving him of the need to sleep for more than a few hours of a night. Mostly he spent the time laid awake in his bed, tormented by thoughts of his own mortality and the problems, which seemed by day to be minor irritations, magnified until they threatened to convince him that there was really no point in going on with it all. And on those nights, he was always glad to see the hands of the clock show a time when he could justify beginning the chores of the day.

It was only when he began to open the shutters and let in the pale light of the predawn, that he recalled the events of the previous evening, the utter chaos in which the taproom had been left still painfully evident in the debris that littered the flagged floor and various items of broken furniture hastily piled in the corners.

The scar that ran from his temple to jaw, stopping only for his eye socket on the left side of his face itched as it always did when he was agitated, but he fought the urge scratch at it and won.

He paused for a moment, making a mental calculation as to what had been ruined beyond hope and what could still be salvaged from the wreckage. Even in the poor light that managed to make it in through the shattered glass of the windows where he had opened the shutters, it was clear that the general disarray hid far less actual damage than it at first appeared.

There had been brawls at The Sign of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight before and no doubt there would be again before the end of his days.

All that remained now was to begin the effort of cleaning away the mess.

Though he would need to assign the heavy lifting to the cellar lads, there was nothing to keep him from seeing to the dried pools of ale that had been spilt and sweeping up the broken glass. Loholt found his broom from where it always stood behind the bar, and set to work with a rueful grin at the memory of how the whole affair had ended.

Matlock was by no means the quiet and rural community it had been back when he first arrived to build the tavern by the bank of the river, but that did not mean that some of the locals who made the trip in from the outlying districts to frequent such establishments had been able to shake off the more quaint habits and attitudes that persisted in the most backwards of farms and villages. He could have guessed that Edmund Tope would be an element of trouble when he strode into the place with perhaps half a dozen of his largest and most thick-headed associates, but he also knew that the other element in the taproom with whom he could react was most likely up to the challenge of a brawny miner's son who only needed to match wits with the few goats that he was responsible for tending on the family fields.

Despite the fact that the newcomers had made a point of keeping themselves very much to themselves as they talked and drank in a corner by one of the smaller fireplaces, Loholt had spied the looks that were cast their way throughout the night. Most of the other patrons simply looked out of curiosity for the novelty of a man who was either a genuine sorcerer or else a fool who wanted others to think he was, and the unusual girl with whom he shared the table.

She was of a darker complexion than was common in the region, and that marked her out as a probable foreigner, making her seem all the more intriguing for that hint of the exotic that could be added to the pretty face and trim body. But it was the sword that she wore which truly made her stand out as something that was a novelty, not only an armsman sitting there in one of the local taverns where nothing was ever supposed to happen that was out of the ordinary, but on top of that a woman as well.