The Prancing Prince

The Prancing Prince is a drinking house in Loshev, and its name is a joke. Peredhel keeps a prince over each of its provinces, Loshev lives on trade with them, and a house in that town calling itself the Prancing Prince was taken locally as tongue in cheek rather than as flattery. Aldo said so in front of the council, and added that he passed no judgment on it himself. The place is called a tavern and an inn about equally, the man who keeps it is the innkeeper, and his name was never written down.

Its trouble was not new. Loshev is a town of some two thousand, with few enough guards that they know every business owner by name, and what finished the Prince’s run was not the brawl but the argument after it, which was plainly one the two men had had before. The brawl was ordinary enough: a half-orc named Tony got loud, the room went with him, and three guards came at the building at once, one through the front, one from a back door, one circling the outside. There were about three dozen drinkers in it. Then a guard put it to the owner how many times this had become an issue inside his establishment, and would not be talked down: if that was the custom the house meant to serve, and those the problems it meant to bring to Loshev, every one of them could come. They manacled the room. Seven went to the cells in a barred wagon that looked newer than a town that size had any use for, the owner among them, swearing without pause the whole way.

He did not stay. The holding room could not take seven at once, so three were turned loose: two after arguing their case, and the innkeeper after speaking to somebody there who knew him, with something passing between their hands that Aldo, waiting his turn, saw. Giving evidence some days later, Aldo named the man as the jailer Dan, and the subject as protection money the house had not been paying enough of. There was an argument, the innkeeper relented, a pouch of coins changed hands, and he walked out.

The house also ran to a schedule. When Dan wanted a stranger to pick a fight with Tony, he could name two days in advance the night the man would be drinking at the Prancing Prince, and be right. It is not the run-down house with the dance hall that Aldo drank in earlier in that same stay, and which he judged too shabby to go back to so soon.