River's Edge

The River’s Edge stands at the western end of Haudh-Gwenn, about as near as the town gets to the fork where its two rivers split, and the way to it from the landings runs upstream through the low tenements and the quarter that smells of Keif. The name is the whole of the advertisement.

It is the middle house of three, and being the middle house is why anyone chooses it. Down on the waterfront the cheap rooms go for very little, a decent price buys a lock on the door, and the standing advice is to leave nothing behind it worth taking. Away from the river, in the better part of town, there is a proper inn that costs a great deal and that Koa had never once set foot in. Arriving with money and reasons to keep hold of it, the company asked for the place that was not the cheap one and was not the expensive one, and this is where that lands a traveler.

What the middling rate buys is plain enough. The rooms are small and unimpressive: a wash basin, a little dresser with drawers that mostly work, a bed with a straw mattress and a pillow of moderate comfort. The doors do lock, though the keys are worn and the locks are honest rather than good, and a practiced hand can open one. The bar on the window is a literal bar, jammed in the frame so that the window cannot be lifted without breaking it. The floorboards creak and the walls are thin, which a guest expecting company in the night counts as a feature of the house rather than a fault in it.

The room keys hang in a reinforced wooden lock box behind the counter. Below there is a locked cellar for whatever a guest would rather not carry upstairs, and outside a stable, though the place is short of hands, so horses are housed and fed and the walking and brushing of them is left to their owners. Three rooms can be had close together, two adjoining and one across the hall, or a single room with bunks in it, where the beds are smaller than a grown man would like. Half the stay is paid at the counter and half at the end of it. Board of the average sort reckons at ten silver the month a head, so four nights for three travelers, the stable thrown in, came to four silver and two copper.

The woman who kept it before was fair about her prices and kind with it, and the cough is what a guest remembers: she was not old by any stretch, but she was sickly for as long as anyone stayed there. She died not long before the company first came through the door, and the man behind the counter now is her son, Kogi, who had been about the place for years without ever being the one you dealt with. He put their trunk in the cellar, stabled Nightstorm in the yard, and gave them two rooms adjoining and one across the hall.