Free The Soul Weaver by Carol Berg

and I sat down to supper in the inn’s common room. Radele did not join us. He seemed uneasy with the press of people, saying he’d prefer to watch the horse, the cart, and the inn from outside.
    Despite a long day’s traveling from Verdillon, Gerick was not inclined to go upstairs once we’d finished eating. “We’ve not been anywhere in all these years,” he said, leaning across the scrubbed pine table after the barmaid took away our plates. “Don’t you want to hear some news of the world?”
    He was right. Gerick and I rarely ventured beyond Verdillon’s walls and never to a town of any size. Tennice often rode into Yurevan, always returning with much to say of the newest books at his favorite bookseller’s or who was teaching philosophy at the University, but little of politics or gossip. Nothing like the news one could get in the common room of a crossroads inn.
    I ordered us each a tankard of the local ale. As the daylight faded outside the smoke-grimed windows of the Fire Goat, a potboy threw a fresh log on the smoky fire, poking and fussing until it was crackling. The dancing flames revealed all sorts of folk: a ruddy, broad-faced man with a curling red beard, a solitary woman, pinched and pale, with darting black eyes and bad teeth, a heavyset man, careworn and gray, who slumped over his supper at a table beside three noisy companions. Some eighteen or twenty patrons crowded the little room, and as the ale flowed from the landlord’s barrel, the talk grew louder and less cautious.
    From the sound of it, Evard had made little progress in his attempts to bring Iskeran under Leire’s heel alongside Valleor and Kerotea. The Valloreans in the room, always distinguishable by their fair coloring and somber garb, smiled behind their hands at the stories of the Leiran king’s setbacks. A threadbare merchant pronounced unsettling rumors from Montevial of spies and executions and an entire slum quarter of the city that had been burned by a mob. Other travelers nodded their heads, confirming that the capital city of Leire was an uncomfortable place these days.
    A bony man, a tinker by trade, told a harrowing and unlikely story of getting caught in a bog and being rescued by a pack of wild dogs. The fantastic tale left the company hungry for more stories.
    â€œCome, let’s each offer a tale or a song,” said the pale woman with bad teeth. “The company will buy a tankard for the one as tells the best.”
    A Vallorean tax-clerk, one of the poorly paid local functionaries reviled as traitorous tools of the cruel Leiran governor, volunteered for the competition. He redeemed his unsavory profession for the evening with a hilarious tale of two Leiran tax collectors being chased all over northern Valleor by an outlaw named ‘Red Eye.’ The pale woman had the landlord refill the man’s mug, not waiting for the voting at the end of the evening.
    One rawboned farmer, his unshaven face pitted with pockmarks, kept the company in high hilarity with his tale of a Leiran merchant who had been left naked in a tree with two wolves tied to its bole while his entire stock of cloth and leather was divided among the starving populace of a Vallorean village. The company roared with delight.
    Gerick listened intently to every word. While the barmaid passed another round and the listeners shouted raucously for the next story, he murmured, half to himself, “Why didn’t the villagers kill the merchant? It was stupid to let him go.” He might have been speaking of strategy in a game of draughts.
    â€œPerhaps they didn’t think the cloth was worth a man’s life,” I said, “even a stupid man’s.”
    â€œHe’ll come back and kill them. That one”—he pointed to the farmer who had told the tale—“that one will lead the soldiers back to the village. Then they’ll all be dead.”
    His conviction sent a