The Broken Shield

The Broken Shield stands over by the Bronze District in Loshev, and it is cheaper than most of the houses in town, which is the whole of its reputation. It fills early and it stays loud. The rowdiness is the drinking kind rather than the fighting kind, and when Tariq al-Mahir took a table there to hire three strangers for a bandit hunt, nobody on the floor thought the captain of the guard being in the room was worth looking up for. A hobgoblin woman worked the bar that night, pouring for the whole place at once and keeping up with it.

The sign was a shield once, and the house was called something else. Drinkers on their way out took up the habit of jumping and slapping it, and between that and years of weather the wood wore through and broke in two. Whatever the name had been went with it. Half of the shield hangs outside still. The other half is sometimes hung inside the bar and sometimes is not, because the custom among locals far enough into their cups is to get the sign down, smuggle it off, keep it a few days, and then hand it back to be rehung. Nobody calls that theft. Who owns the building, and who keeps it, was never written down.

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Terms for the company’s first job together were settled at one of its tables: up to five bandits still living, a gold a head and another for each brought back breathing, with the evening’s tab covered. The house has been in the company’s life ever since. After a long run of failed names, and after the town settled on calling them the Dandan after the jailer Dan, Mikhail said the Valiant Few out loud at the Broken Shield and it grew on everyone in the room. Aldo had taken the sign by then and woke up holding it, along with the jail’s own; asked after it by a guard, he deflected onto Tony and was believed.

The winter after, the whole bar sang at them. The Dan song came first and then a song about the Valiant Few, with Mikhail playing to acclaim and a flutist nobody yet had a name for volunteering to fetch Elliot for two copper. That was Gerald. Mikhail heckled his pitch in front of the whole room, and the grudge he carried out of it outlasted the winter.

A year on the house was being done up, and the talk in town was that the new dance hall would go to the cook Yullen Gemsmith had dismissed over a lamb: cleared of the auction robbery, never given his post back, taking odd work where he could. Aldo went out one night to steal the sign again, chose not to, and knocked on his own front door at two in the morning to announce it, purely to needle the others.

Tony drinks there now, cheap and in volume, and has nearly worn out his welcome; Aldo cleared the two gold he owed across the bar and left the same again against the next of it.