“If you absolutely kick your feet and refuse, Casa Feliz will step in,” Tony said. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Caldenia swept into the room. Her Grace had elevated the idea of aging gracefully to an art. She wore a deep-green robe of shimmering silk. Her grey hair curled on top of her head in an elegant wave, studded with emeralds and dripping with platinum filigree. Her makeup was subtle and flawless, accentuating her cheek bones and brightening her skin. It did nothing to diminish the predatory light in her eyes.
“Why the sour faces?” she asked.
“The Assembly meeting has been cancelled. We’re hosting a Drífan liege instead,” I told her.
“Which dryht?”
“Green Mountain.”
Caldenia shrugged. “I have no doubt you will rise to the challenge, my dear. Or were you thinking of declining?”
“Gertrude Hunt honors our Treaty Stay obligations,” I told her. “As you well know.”
“Excellent. Life gives us precious few opportunities to put our best foot forward, so when a chance to shine presents itself, one should always take it.” Caldenia grinned, baring inhumanely sharp teeth. “Besides, it’s been almost two weeks since anyone was brutally murdered. Things were getting a bit dull. We wouldn’t want to die of boredom, would we?”
The official colors of Treaty Stay were green and pastel lavender, closer to pink than to purple, because the first inn to receive the three visitors for the ceremonial signing of the treaty was located in China and the innkeeper, hoping to impress the guests, coaxed the foxglove trees on the grounds to bloom.
I surveyed the Grand Ballroom and waved my broom. The glowing nebulae on the ceiling turned pink, lavender, and white against the cosmos. The enormous light fixtures suspended from the ceiling withdrew. New green stems of pale metal spiraled out, braiding into a canopy around the columns, and sprouted glass flowers a full two feet across. The foxglove tree blooms started purple at the base of the flute, then paled at the tips of the frilly petals. The flowers shivered and opened, revealing glowing yellow centers and dark purple dotted lines running down the length of the delicate flutes. Pastel-colored lanterns appeared in the canopy, bathing the room in a soft light. Matching banners unrolled on the walls that had turned sage green. I turned the color of the columns to a deep red and surveyed the room.
Good. The floor didn’t match though.
Fatigue rolled over me. Tinting the floor mosaic would take a lot of magic.
I sat down with my back against the nearest column. Beast, my little black-and-white Shih Tzu, trotted over to me and flopped at my feet. I scratched her tummy.
Tony left back to Casa Feliz, his father’s inn. I’d spent most of the day making rooms for the Drífan. Or Drífen. In my experience beings in position of power rarely travelled alone. I had stripped the Otrokar wing of its decorations, since we wouldn’t be expecting a large delegation from the Hope-Crushing Horde any time soon, and repurposed the space. Sean spent the day cataloging the damages to our defenses. Fighting with a clan of interstellar assassins had taken a toll, and he had gone through the garage looking for tools and ended up pulling spare parts out of storage. I’d passed him on the stairs a few times, as he carried various odd-looking doohickeys a normal human shouldn’t have been able to lift. At some point he went to repair the particle cannon on the west side, and I heard him cursing in three different languages while I reshaped the balcony.
It was evening now, and I was tired. The fight with the Draziri damaged more than just our guns. Living through the death of the baby inn was like entering a comatose state, except I had been aware of everything that was happening. Breaking out of it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. I still felt…depleted somehow. And the inn wasn’t responding as readily as I was used to. It didn’t exactly hesitate, but the connection between us was slightly muddled. Maybe I could do the mosaic first thing in the morning.
Sean walked into the Grand Ballroom. He’d traded the robe for his usual jeans and T-shirt. There was something wolfish about Sean Evans even in his human form. It was the way he moved, with a deceptively leisurely stride, or the way he held himself, ready, or maybe it was in his eyes. Sometimes when I looked into them, a wolf gazed back at me from the edges of a dark forest.
He approached and smoothly sat on the floor next to me. Beast immediately crawled in his lap.
“I can’t find anything on the Drífen in the archives,” he said. “I’ve read Wictred’s account in the inn’s files and looked through the books, but there is nothing since that. Is there a code word I don’t know?”
“No. There simply isn’t that much information available about them.”
“Usually there are notations by other innkeepers,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I read a lot when you weren’t yourself. The inn helped me to look for a cure.”
Poor Gertrude Hunt. Poor Sean. I could picture him sitting in the room searching for the answer while the inn pulled up one archive after another. I had to make sure this didn’t happen again.
“You’re right,” I told him. “When an innkeeper learns something new about a particular species, they will add notations to the general files. In old times, they would write entries in the books. That’s why the margins are so wide. But with the Drífen, it’s different. The original guidance the innkeepers received was to safeguard their privacy at all costs. In addition, each Drífan is different. There are hundreds of dryhts. You can live for a hundred years and never see two Drífen from the same dryht. Actually, you can live for a hundred years and never meet a Drífan at all.”
“So, what do we do?”
“Usually the lieges will send someone ahead with their demands. We will try to get as much information as we can and go from there.”
A soft melodious sound rolled through the inn. Hmm. Someone was requesting a vacancy in advance. Usually the guests simply showed up. The inn always had a vacancy, because I could make as many rooms as the guests required.
“Let me see,” I told the inn.
The ceiling parted and a folded parchment fell into my hands. Sean raised his eyebrows.
“The innkeeper before me died in the 1980s,” I explained. “He was solitary, a bit odd, and overly fond of antiques. A lot of Gertrude Hunt’s communication happened on parchment when I got here. I fixed most of it, but once in a while something like this happens. In the future, a screen would be fine.”
I opened the parchment and read it. Just what we needed. This was shaping up to be a hell of a holiday. I passed the parchment to Sean.
He glanced at it. “A family dispute, party of sixty-one?”
“It looks like two sides of the same family have descended from two brothers. One of them left and founded an influential philosophy school on a different planet, while the other remained on the home world and established his own philosophical academy. Now they are feuding about which of the brothers can truly be considered the family’s founder: the one who left to colonize the new planet or the one who stayed on their original world. They’ve invited a wise elder to settle their dispute.”
“Sixty-one new guests. Seems like it would be good for the inn, but you don’t look happy.”