“Thank you.”
I tossed tea leaves into a small glass teapot, poured the near-boiling water from the electric kettle into it, and watched it turn golden brown. Orro found our TV fascinating. His latest discovery was the Food Channel and Garry Keys’ Fire and Lightning cooking show. Garry specialized in Latin American and Mexican cuisine and when things went his way while cooking, he’d shout “Fire and Lightning!”
Orro had shortened it to “Fire!” which he yelled at surprising moments, giving Gertrude Hunt kittens.
I poured my tea into a cup and sipped it. Mmmm…. Thirteen days ago, the siege of the inn had finally ended, and we’d celebrated Christmas, a full week late, on New Year’s Day. Tomorrow, on January 14th, we would celebrate Treaty Stay, the oldest of the innkeeper holidays. You could skip Christmas and forget Thanksgiving, but no inn ever failed to celebrate Treaty Stay. Hopefully we’d still have the inn to celebrate in. If everything went according to plan, tonight we’d leave for Casa Feliz, a large inn in Dallas where we would attend an Assembly meeting and answer uncomfortable questions…
Tony walked into the kitchen. Tall, tan, and dark haired, Tony Rodriguez gave the impression of being harmless. Sometimes he looked sleepy and slightly befuddled. Sometimes, especially around his father, Brian Rodriguez, who ran Casa Feliz, he wore the “grant me patience” expression instantly recognizable by any adult child who had to endure lectures on the wrongfulness of their life choices. The prospect of tasting Orro’s culinary masterpieces reduced Tony to excited giddiness.
Some of it had to be a front, because Tony was an ad-hal, the Assembly’s guardian and enforcer of its judgements. But most of it was genuine Tony. And right now, Tony looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.
My stomach dropped. “What happened?”
“I have good news and bad news.”
“Give me the good news.”
Sean walked into the kitchen.
Tony perched on the edge of the dining room table. “The good news is that we don’t have to go to my father’s inn, because your appointment with the Assembly has been postponed.”
Orro spun around. “I do not like this Assembly. It jerks the small human to and fro.” He stabbed the air with his giant fork for emphasis. “Can they not see that she is exhausted? Do they not know what she has been through? Come to the meeting, do not come to the meeting, is there no decorum?”
“I’m not in charge of the Assembly’s decisions,” Tony said.
“What’s the bad news?” Sean asked.
“You have a special request.”
Now? “Treaty Stay?”
Tony nodded.
No innkeeper could turn away a guest during Treaty Stay unless that guest had been banned from the inns. The Treaty Stay didn’t start for another twenty-four hours, but the Assembly had cancelled our meeting, which meant they thought I would require these twenty-four hours to prepare… Oh no.
“A Drífan?”
Orro sucked in an audible breath. Tony nodded.
“Are you serious?”
He nodded for the third time.
During the fight with the clan of assassins who had besieged our inn, the leader of the assassins sent me a seed, a little baby inn, too weak to survive. I had jumped through a dimensional gateway to keep its death from injuring Gertrude Hunt, but living through it had rendered me unresponsive. Gertrude Hunt had survived several days without me. If it hadn’t been for my sister and my niece, the inn would have gone mad or turned catatonic. It’d been thirteen days and as I moved around the inn, Gertrude Hunt watched me. The inn was always aware of me, but now it had redoubled its efforts. If it was a person, it would be hovering over my shoulder, terrified that I might stumble and it would miss the opportunity to catch me.
And now the Assembly wanted me to host a Drífan.
“Is it a liege?” I asked. “Please don’t nod again.”
“Yes,” Tony said.
Perfect. Just perfect.
Orro spun around and hurled a cabbage at Tony’s head. Tony caught it and set it on the table. “Again, I’m just the messenger.”
I sighed and poured more tea. This was fundamentally unfair.
“I swear, it’s not a punishment.”
“Who are the Drífan?” Sean asked.
“Drífan is singular,” I told him. “Drífen is plural. The first comprehensive account of them was given by an Anglo-Saxon innkeeper and we are stuck with a lot of Old English terms which we have since butchered. Drífan is a very old word. It means to drive, to force living beings to move, to cause one to flee before one’s pursuit, to chase, to hunt, to force by a blow, to proceed with violence.”
“Okay,” Sean said. “None of those are good.”
“The Drífen are probably the most magical beings in the galaxy,” Tony explained. “Their star system is only accessible through a dimensional rip. They are magic, the star system is magic, and their planets are very choosy about who they allow to enter and leave. We don’t know very much about them. We do know that there are several states within the star system and they may or may not be at war with each other.”
“The states are ruled by emperors,” I added. “The emperors rely on a vast bureaucracy and liege lords, dryhten, for power. Each liege lord is responsible for a dryht, a combination of a clan, a sect, and a magic order. The dryht exists in a magical symbiosis with the territory it occupies, and its members take on the characteristics of whatever their dryht is dedicated to.”
“So, if the dryht is dedicated to an animal predator, they develop a better sense of smell and grow claws?” Sean asked.
“Sometimes.” I drank more tea. Right now, I’d need an ocean of tea to make me feel better. “For example, if we had to host a person from a Fire Dryht, we would have to make special quarters for them as far away from the main building as we could, because Gertrude Hunt would think that they were literally living fire and would try to douse them. The inns intensely dislike the Drífen. Their magic scares them, especially if they are from a dryht that’s dedicated to a landscape or a plant. The inns, at their cores, are trees.”
Sean turned to Tony. “Which dryht are we hosting?”
Tony took a deep breath.
Please don’t be a regional dryht, please don’t be a regional dryht. I would take an element, a mineral, an animal…
“Green Mountain.”
I groaned.
“I’m sorry.” Tony raised his hands.
Sean looked to me.
“Green Mountain is called that because it’s covered with trees,” I said. “It’s one of the worst for us.”
“Can we decline?”
I shook my head.
“You could,” Tony said. “But the liege specifically requested this inn and no guest, unless they have been banned already, can be turned away from an inn for the duration of the Treaty Stay.”
“It’s worse than that,” I told Sean. “The Treaty Stay is the anniversary of the three days when the Treaty of Earth was written into being. The inns had existed before that, but not in an official capacity. On the first day of the Treaty Stay, the oldest inns in China, the Kingdom of Aksum, the Satavahana Empire, Rome, the three inns in the Americas, and the lands of the Northern Venedae hosted representatives of different galactic civilizations. Each inn had three guests, each from a different species: a warrior, a sage, and a pilgrim. One of the warrior guests was a Drífan. Their name is on the original treaty.”