“I am not running a home for wayward girls, here, Jie,'' Sam groaned. “She’s not a kitten, you can’t just keep her.”

“May I have a kitten?” Jie asked.

“What? No! No kittens, either. She’s taken up your room for almost a week now. This is an inn, too, Jie, I can’t have all my rooms taken up all the time.”

“I do not suggest we ‘keep’ Dari, at any rate,” Jie began, “as she is not a kitten. Only that we cannot abandon her.”

“I didn’t say abandon,” Sam retorted. “Sisters, Jie, I’m not a monster. One of the guild girls ‘Latus knows grew up in lostro in Grundee. We could send for a Daughter.”

“You’d send her to an orphanage? She’s…well she looks to be about my age, anyhow.”

“Not an orphanage! An Ayndinic lostro. ‘Latus’ friend turned out just fine,” Sam insisted.

“A lostro to Aydin,” Jie scoffed, crossing his arms. “We both love Deliatus enough to overlook how patently insane the Faithful are, but Aydin? The literal Mother of the Mad?”

“They’d be equipped,” Sam said, pretending to scrub a spot on the bar.

“Dari’s not mad,” Jie insisted. “She might go that way in a lostro, though. How does Deliatus feel about that plan?”

Sam scowled at Jie’s smug grin.

“Deliatus doesn’t run this place,” Sam muttered without conviction.

“Ah, of course. Forgive me, lady-lord. Deliatus’ opinions don’t hold sway over you in the least. It might upset her a bit, sending Dari away, but she’d manage, I’m sure. After all, she has her rooms at Mrs. Machen’s…”

“Ok, fine! What’s your plan to get back at least one room of my inn, then?” Sam demanded.

“Given a few weeks, I believe I have a plan that could guide Dari to basic fluency in no more than three languages. Enough to herself understood with minor difficulty. We could find her people, and, if safe, she could go back to them.”

Sam raised an eyebrow and leaned on the bar.

“Jie, that’s too many ‘ifs’. Can’t afford ifs, can’t afford her. ”

“I said ‘if’, only once,” Jie corrected.

“You only said ‘if’ one time, but you used a mess of other words that mean ‘if’ in there. I know you too well, boy, and you know me. Whole string of ‘ifs’ and she’d be on her way to Grundee by this afternoon, you were thinking.”

“Without the near certainty of Deliatus’ intervention, I was knowing you’d react thusly to ‘ifs’.”

“Practically extorting me, here, Jie,” Sam accused.

“My apologies, lady lord, and I redact ‘I think’ and all conditionals from my previous statement. I have a plan that will enable Dari to speak with reasonable fluency in a couple of weeks. The only conditional I’d like to retain is ‘if’ it is safe to send her back to her people, should they be found. Have you ever seen a girl in a state like hers whose family life was roses?”

“Never seen a girl in a state like hers, and you haven’t, either.”

“True enough,” Jie conceded, taking a sip from a tiny, handleless teacup of dark black tea the approximate temperature of lava. Sam could barely stand the smell of the stuff, but it seemed to keep Jie going stronger than her morning coffee. “But I’ve read of cases like hers. Classical Mori and Vandalian linguistic specialists agree on a program of…”

“Where would we even keep her? We only have the one room to rent out as it is, ” Sam interrupted Jie’s lecture, feeling her will beginning to slip. Jie’s talent for persuasion was tremendously irritating, but always on the side of the Star Sisters. Sam thought his ignorance of this fact a blessing for all. A power to sway opinion as strong as his should lie solely in hands that did not know they possessed it.

“My room,” Jie said, holding up a hand to stop Sam’s protests, “And I’ll set up a bunk for myself in the barn loft. It would be good for all, my living out there. Per Balladeer’s ethnography on the mountain goat herders of Balad, comfortable, content goats produce greater quantities of higher quality milk. As the logic goes, if I find the smell or temperature unpleasant, they likely do.”

“Well, if Balladeer said it, that’s alright,” Sam rolled her eyes. “Fine, so happier goats. But how will we feed her?”

“You can take that from my wages,” Jie said, not looking up from writing in his notebook.

Sam sucked her teeth. What she paid Jie could barely be called “wages”. She kept him in food and clothes, as well as housed, but he more than earned his keep. Before Jie, Sam had not kept a garden; it wasn’t as if she knew what to do with herbs in the first. The chickens and goats had been his idea as well-- very profitable ideas. He collected eggs, made butter, cheese and soap for trade while caring for the animals alone. Jie’s side business in charms, medicines and light cosmetics turned a tidier profit than Sam believed he realized. In truth, after all these years, she dreaded the idea of the Bronze Bough without Jie. And the bathtub! Sam still didn’t understand the blueprints for making water run indoors he’d shown her, but Mothers and Sisters, she would sooner give up a limb than the bathtub. Jie asked for so little, and what little he asked for, as a rule, yielded better results than she anticipated. Sam was reluctant to take on another mouth to feed, but more reluctant to deny Jie one of his rare requests.

“She’s more than a bit odd, though. What about the folks in town? ”

“What about them?” Jie said, never looking up from his notes. “Pickaway is a haven for the odd. Are we not proof of as much?”

For as far-flung as it was, Pickaway had an inexplicable magnetism. Travelers and boarders, just passing through, found themselves courting a nice washer-girl or staking out a patch in the for a cart or stall in the steadily crowding town square, their journeys forgotten, with abnormal frequency. Pickaway was a patchwork; natives like Sam and outsiders like Jie were in near equal measure. Elsewhere, elves tended to live in elf towns, dwarves in dwarf towns, humans in villages composed of their own countrymen. To the eternal chagrin of older natives, Pickaway attracted misfits like moths to a woolen sweater. Natives complained, as all natives complain of transplants; but they complained in Vandalian woven cloth, tending gardens with Dwarf-made tools inherited from their grandparents, chewing Sobian pain-catchers for their rheumatism.

The Bronze Bough did decent business, but most in Pickaway had never quite gotten the hang of a cash economy, and couldn’t be bothered to try at their time in life; which, for many villagers, started somewhere around twenty. Sam was often paid in ham hocks, pickled trotters, pork shoulders, and parts of pigs which she begged customers not to name. It wasn’t all pork, though. Villagers paid in kids (baby goats, usually. She flatly turned down offers of the other sort of kid), wooly blankets, duck eggs, and, when Orm got around to it, daggers and shortswords. Money was in short supply, but as long as Sam kept Jie in paper and pencils, he was content. Paper and pencils were not easy to come by, but Jie never left a blank spot on a page. The tinkers who came around a few times a year could be relied on to have great reams of the stuff, which they gladly traded for ham hocks. Sam was never unhappy to part with pork.

“You’d have that poor girl eat so much pig?”

Jie chuckled.

“I have a great many carrots in the cellar, onions, potatoes, and garlic too. She could eat those, in addition to our, if you will excuse the joke, pork larder.”

Sam scowled, crossing her arms.

“And we could use help around here, too,” Jie said, avoiding Sam’s gaze.

“Oh, definitely,” Sam agreed, “just look at this crowd.” She gestured to the pub, empty but for a softly snoring Orm under one table.

“I am a disaster in the kitchen,” Jie said.

This was not strictly true. Jie, like many intelligent people unusually gifted at specific tasks, avoided cooking because it was dull and he had no extraordinary talent for it compared to charm smithing or linguistics. Feigning total incompetence kept him out of the boring parts of the kitchen that were not his charm table.

“You’re never a disaster. You are a...what’s a word stronger than disaster?” Sam asked.

“Catastrophe? Cataclysm? Calamity?” Jie offered.

“Calamity, I like that one,” said Sam. “You are a calamity in the kitchen.”

“I do not argue. You, my lady-lord, are a mere fiasco, but that is with my own cooking for comparison. We could use a pretty pot-girl.”

“A pretty pot girl? As opposed to a plain one, or a handsome pot-man?”

“I do not aim to objectify Dari,” Jie said, “but it is rather objective that she is pretty. Violet eyes, clear skin, and her hair...it doesn’t seem to be dyed, perhaps it’s a charm? But the violet suits her.”

Sam sniffed, stifling a laugh.

“You seem to have given her appearance some serious consideration.”

“Not at all,” Jie said, his eyes fixed on the book in front of him, pretending to skim a passage. “I merely seek to support my argument for her staying with us. She would be good for business, in much the same way as Deliatus is good for business.”

“You are not proposing...” Sam warned.

“If Dari decides to enter Deliatus’ apprenticeship, it is her own affair. I speak of our affairs. ‘Latus doesn’t realize how much she helps us. Men who can’t afford her come just to look at her, buying drinks to camouflage their gawking. It cheats her, on nights when no clients are forthcoming, as she’s boosted our profits merely sitting at the bar.”

Sam scratched the back of her neck.

“‘Latus never pays for food nor drink.”

“Oh, good. I’ve been doing that, too.”

Sam growled in her throat.

“You just said you do the same! I thought it simpler to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Jie said.

“She’s the only one, though, right?”

Jie chewed the end of his pencil, quiet.

“Jie!”

“I was thinking. Yes, Deliatus is the only person I have alotted free drink and fresh food.”

“I don’t like how you say ‘fresh’ all specific like,” Sam grumbled.

“Well, there’s Guo, of course.”

Sam shook her head.

“Guo doesn’t count. He’s been through enough without having to take our leftovers, besides.”

“As you say. Which is why he typically eats whatever you and I are eating for the day. But otherwise, there have been those I’ve given our less presentable dishes to at the end of the night, when said culinary failures would’ve been thrown out, anyway.”

“You’re supposed to feed that stuff to the chickens! You said yourself, it’s for the yolks or somesuch.”

“Oh, that’s never a problem. The chickens won’t touch our cooking,” Jie said, “Which is why we could change the menu, such as there is one, to stew. It is practically a law for taverns serving stew to employ a pretty pot-girl to stir it.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“That seems a real strange law.”

“Oh, I mean natural law. I have a theory that even a very plain girl, given a sufficiently large spoon and a tavern pot to stir, would become pretty.”

“The cheek! I’d never have thought I'd hear you spout such nonsense about women, Jie!” Sam exclaimed.

“It isn't nonsense, my lady-lord. It’s merely a theory. Do you remember when we went to Nadir to breed Mormo?”

“Yeah. The Blue Ox,” Sam said, dreamily. “Mind, that was before me and ‘Latus was exclusive. Well, I was exclusive anyhow. They weren’t half the tavern we are, but the tavernkeep’s daughter...”

“Was mousy haired and dull eyed before she picked up her big spoon,” Jie interrupted.

“She never was!” Sam protested. “I saw her real up-close like. Later.”

“You saw her after she’d been a pot-girl. She couldn’t help but be beautiful. Natural law,” Jie said, tapping the bar with his pencil.

Sam rolled her eyes.

“So if we have a girl who is already pretty?”

“I do not believe it would prove to be a reversal of properties. Stirring a pot should make Dari more, by wholly objective standards, pretty,” Jie stammered. “But it would have to be a proper kettle. A cauldron, really. We have one in the cellar, unless I’m mistaken. From when Orm convinced us to brew Kurmgis.”

“Mothers, I don’t know how he managed to talk me into that...stank like the darkness,” Sam said, her nose crinkling at the memory of fermented mare’s milk and juniper berries.

“He did drink it all himself, and even paid in gold, upfront,” Jie said, underlining something in his notes. “A rare occurrence.”

“That’s fair. But tavern stew is vile, in my experience, pretty girl stirring it or not,” Sam said, a forgotten idea tugged at the back of her mind.

“Perpetual stew, it’s called in Vandalian cookery. Most taverns simply toss whatever is at hand into the pot. But we’ve something other taverns do not,” Jie said.

“Which is?”

“A magnificent herb garden. Even the most eternal of perpetual stews would greatly improve with the a good measure of sage, onions, garlic and the like, which we have in abundance.”

Sam chewed her lip, a nascent rebuttal darting around her mind faster than she could snatch it.

“So, how do you go about getting a stew pot started?”

“Well,” Jie began “We’d need to season the pot, with some manner of fat, for preference, but basically, Dari could be serving by week's end.”

“Wait!” Sam shouted, slapping the bar, causing Orm to stir in his slumber. “You’re trying to give me stew recipes!”

“It’s hardly a recipe,” Jie said mildly, scarctching a line into his notebook. “As I said, common practice is to add whatever is at hand.We merely better ingredients at hand than most.”

“Not that,” Sam protested, “I mean, yes, that, but more’s the point, I never said Dari could stay.”

“No, you didn’t. However, we agreed she would be good for business, adding a pretty face and palatable food to the Bough’s considerable charm.The goats will give sweeter milk in greater quantities in my company, and you'll once again have a room to rent. With such obvious benefits to Dari staying with us, I assumed you’d given the arrangement your blessing,” Jie looked up with a sly, triumphant smile. “And, if I may, you just referred to her as ‘Dari’, rather than ‘the girl’.”

Sam sputtered, feeling her resolve slipping.

Light, early-morning female footsteps creaked down the stairs. Deliatus emerged, stretching. She wore one of Sam’s work shirts, which, on her narrow frame, hung to her knees.

“Sweet Sammy, I missed you,” she startled, jumping back toward the stairs on sighting Jie.

“‘Latus, please, you are more modestly attired than most evenings. I have no particular keenness for shins, and Orm’s still asleep,” Jie said without looking up.

“Oh. I was just surprised you were inside so early, Jie, darling.You tend to the goats and chickens first thing, yes? It made sense for me to stay the night, did it not? It was rather late. Mrs. Machen would’ve been in a right state,” Deliatus said.

“‘Latus, I do not care if you spend the night,” Jie said, tapping his notebook with his pencil.

Sam’s face flushed, not quite able to look at Deliatus.

“I tell a lie,” said Jie, looking up from his notebook, “I prefer when you stay over. You’re both cheerful for the rest of the day. Deliatus, you shrug off inebriated would-be grabbers before Sam or I, or, Mothers help us, Orm, need to intervene. As for Sam, I caught her singing this morning. A sea shanty, I think it was?”

“Drinking song,” Sam corrected, red faced.

“Ah, that makes more sense. A happy song, though. She usually sings it mornings after you leave.”

“You can tell when I leave?” Deliatus asked, suspicious.

“The boards creak, and we are in rather close quarters. I wake by first light, but the goats get cranky if I milk too early. So I sit and write or read. And, as I noted, I am nearly always treated to a concert from Sam after your departures.”

“How come you never mentioned this before?” Sam asked, hands balled at her hips.

“No one asked. If anyone wanted my opinion, they would’ve.”

“Oh, you’re so peculiar, Jie, but I do just adore you,” Deliatus said, hugging his head to her chest. “I knew from the very moment, the very instant we met you’d grow to be indispensable to my sweet Sammy.”

“You are less peculiar, but I’m quite fond of you as well, ‘Latus,” Jie said with practiced impassivity to the press of Deliatus’ ample bosom against his face.

“Oh, and speaking of wonderfully peculiar individuals, Jie, how is dear Dari? Shouldn’t her stitches be out by now?" Deliatus asked, lifting Jie’s teapot. He produced a second tiny porcelain cup from the box holding his tea leaves and slid it toward her. Tea, Deliatus believed, was more ladylike than coffee. Jie was her sole source for it.

“Not yet. But she’s healing well and quickly. I ought to have anticipated as much. She took stitches so easily.” Jie said with a smile at Sam. “Not a single squawk or flinch.”

“I do not squawk or flinch!” Sam squawked.

“No, but you make this face,” Jie said, frowning hard and furrowing his brow deep, “which always leads me to believe I’m a misplaced poke away from getting my ear cuffed.”

“Why would you think that?” Sam demanded.

“Because the first few times I gave you stitches, you cuffed my ear. The left one still rings when it rains.”

“Oh, Sammy, how awful!” Deliatus purred, putting an arm around Jie.

“No, it’s for the best,” Jie said, shrugging her off. “I can only sew stitches as prettily and painlessly as I did for Dari because of Sam’s corporal encouragement.”

“Well, that’s a blessing. When do you think she’ll be up and about?”

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s keeping a rather low profile, but she’s walking about upstairs and I’ve got her taking herbal baths. I have directed her to take herbal baths,” Jie pointed his pencil at Sam before she could protest. “The state of her wounds leads me to believe she had taken my advice.”

Deliatus nodded sagely.

“I am so glad we are here to help her. She’s something special, I think. No, I know she’s something special. In her time of trouble, in these troubled times, the Mothers led her straight to us. She is certainly Mothers-touched, with that hair, those eyes, oh, and her singing voice! But so are we, for giving her safety and a home! The Mothers would not have led her to us, if we were not,” Deliatus declared, tapping the sign of the star across her hips, forehead and shoulders.

“You’ll forgive my skepticism, though I agree Dari’s finding us first was rather serendipitous.She would not have received as warm a welcome from some of our neighbors, good country people they may be. They’d have assumed she was a trick of the Lich,” Jie said, taking a sip of his tea.

Deliatus’ eyes went wide.

“Never! I heard her sing! Nothing so lovely as her voice could be born of wickedness.”

“I tend to agree about her voice, but that alone wouldn’t preclude her being a piece of dark magic. Firstly, any creature of the Lich, Sam would have felt. But more obviously, she’s too intelligent and too easy to look at.”

“There you go looking at her, again,” Sam said.

“Dari is a pretty girl. This is an objective fact, no different than observing you are tall, lady-lord,” Jie huffed, “but more precisely, she doesn’t hurt to look at. Glamors set by dark magic are rather apparent. Painful to look at for too long. A dark glamor is said to be like staring too long into a flame.”

“Thought you kept your head out of magic. Where’d you read that?” Sam asked. Not for the first time, she wondered about Jie’s life before they met, about the round scar in the space just under the center of his collar bones, beneath his clan scarf, which he seemed to believe no one noticed.

“I didn’t. A washed-out apprentice told me, here,” Jie replied. “Lucky for the poor boy, he was only working with one of the Lich’s underlings when realized he didn’t have the stomach for dark magic and fled.”

“Mothers above, you let someone like that in here?” Sam swore.

“He was five drinks deep before he told me,” Jie said with a dismissive wave. “It’s not a problem. If someone cared to find him, they would’ve done so the very night, poor wretch. Anyway, the Lich’s real power comes from people believing he has real power. Things ‘everybody knows’ about him sound like threats to naughty children.”

“You said Dari sang for you, as well?” Deliatus asked, desperate to change the subject from Lich-lore.

“Yes. She sings quite a lot, actually. She’s particularly fond of a variant of ‘Star of Sharahala’ I’ve not heard before.”

“You’ve never heard it before? None of it?” Sam marveled.

“Not a word. She couldn’t tell me if it was very old or very new; you know how musicians set new songs to old tunes. We’re so far away from the cities it takes ages for news to reach us. Dari’s verses could just as easily be posh new lyrics from Amissopolis as they could be forgotten for a century.”

“Oh, my heart could just burst with joy that dear Dari has you to help her with her communication, Jie!” Deliatus gushed, hugging him around his shoulders and pressing a kiss against his temple. “I dare not imagine what would become of her without us.”

“You speak my mind,” Jie said, crossing something out of his notebook. “But we can’t take for granted that Dari will stay with us.”

Sam glared at Jie.

“What? Why wouldn’t you keep Dari, Sammy? She simply must stay on, at least until she’s got her feet beneath her! We would shame the Mothers themselves should we turn dear Dari out!” Deliatus exclaimed.

“Of course Dari’s staying!” Sam said, casting Jie a warning look. “Jie had the just brilliant idea of getting a big stew going, getting her to be a pot-girl.”

“Oh, yes, a pot-girl,” Jie agreed. “Stew would be easy to manage. Quite simple, really, but we’d need someone to stir and dispense it while Sam and I tend customers. I just thought perhaps Dari wouldn’t want to stay with us,” Jie lied quickly, without conviction. “That perhaps, oh, say, the lostro of Aydin in Grundee might be better equipped for her struggles.”

“An Aydinic lostro? Dear Dari is not mad!” Deliatus protested. “Simply a bit mixed up, in need of a family. I’ve always believed the Bough could do with some nice stew a pretty pot-girl,” Deliatus said, swirling the dregs of her tea thoughtfully. “With no offense to either of you, but it’s simply not done, serving stew without a pretty pot-girl. Jie is obviously disqualified by his gender, and Sammy, you are wonderfully handsome, not pretty. Despite Dari’s difficulties, I feel certain she could manage stirring a pot.”

Sam sighed, defeated, as always, by the sparkle of Deliatus’ eyes.

“Yes. Which is why I’m going to have Jie ask her to stay.”

“You are an absolute Star Sister, Sammy, a first-born of the Mothers themselves!” Deliatus cried, covering Sam’s face in exuberant kisses. Sam glowed crimson, a half-witted smile spreading across her face.

“She shall need help from me, as well,” Deliatus asserted, “if she’s to live as a lady does.”

“I’m a ...” Sam broke off laughing,“I can’t even say it. I don't have the first idea what to do with long hair and dresses, and Jie is too shy to ‘study’ such things.”

“Hm?” Jie chewed the end of his pencil absent-mindedly. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t. Without offense, Deliatus, I find the subject of female grooming terribly dull, and you’re quite obviously an expert as it stands.”

Orm snorted from under his table, eliciting a squeal of surprise from Deliatus.

“Where’s my axe? I feel like I was set to beat Bryjer at throwin’, until I got interrupted. You owe me five gold, Sam!”

Sam pulled the heavy iron axe from under the bar and tossed it to Orm as if it weighed no more than a child’s toy.

“Go home, Orm. Get some proper sleep, off my floor. And I swear to Mothers and Sisters all, if I have to tell you axe-throwing isn’t an indoor sport one more time, I’ll keep the damn thing.”

Sam expected an argument from Orm, but his eyes were fixed on the stairway.

He leapt to his feet, heading for the door at speed.“It weren’t that I was lookin’, she snuck up on me!” He shouted behind him.

A soft shuffle came from the top of the stairs.

“Jie--” Dari’s voice called.

“Would not dream of it,” he answered, never looking up from his notebook. Deliatus walked to the foot of the stairs.

Upstairs, Dari shuffled, perplexed by navigating the stairs, not wearing a stitch, spare those remaining in her legs.

“Oh, dear. She seems to have lost the hang of clothes,” Deliatus sighed. “It’s just those awful nightgowns from your grandmother, I’d wager. I’ll be back in a trice with a few of my old dresses,” she said, climbing the stairs to retrieve yesterday’s dress.

“Come, Dari, my dear, let’s wait to come down until your good friend Deliatus can get you into a dress almost as pretty as yourself.” She led the girl back into the empty guest’s room without protest.

“Sometimes,” Sam said, “I swear the two of you conspire against me.”

Jie paused in consideration.

“Not an unreasonable suspicion, but incorrect. What your heart wants and what your wallet asks for are often two quite different things.”

“And?”

“And you are the ‘sensible one’. ‘Latus and I merely nudge you toward your true heart’s path when it conflicts with what only appears to be sensible.”

“Load of nonsense. I wasn’t ‘nudged’ by anything. It’s just the humane thing to do, and the girl will earn her keep,” Sam insisted.

“As you like,” Jie grinned, “sweet Sammy.”

Jie fled Sam snapping a bar rag at him, both laughing. Sam had a soft spot for strays. Turning Dari away would’ve hurt far more than the expense of keeping her.

Deliatus dashed down the stairs, her jewelry rattling and hair half-braided. “Back in a tick! Be a lamb, make certain she doesn’t try the stairs again.”

Halfway to the door, Deliatus turned and ran back to Sam, leaping into her arms to kiss her face rosy.

“Such a generous heart has my sweet Sammy!” she smiled. “And…do you really sing on mornings when I’ve stayed over?”

Sam shrugged, trying and failing to maintain a friendly sort of detachment.

“How could I not?”

Deliatus hooked her arm around Sam’s neck, melting into a long, breathless kiss, leaving Sam unsteady on her feet when she broke away abruptly.

“Oh, but what a wonderful distraction you are, sweet Sammy! Just a tick, just a tick!” she called, sweeping out the door.

Sam smiled, touching her mouth, still tingling with Deliatus’ kiss. She’d been Deliatus’ ‘favorite’ for years, on and off, never once paying for her time. She was used to ‘Latus’ excessive affection. But that kiss, the exuberance that poured off her in the days since Dari had appeared felt…new.

Perhaps Deliatus and Jie were only partly right, Sam thought. In her secret heart, Sam began to suspect Dari was more than just something special. The girl felt like something new. Like the beginning of something new.

Sam shook her head and opened the cellar door to search for the old cauldron. ‘The sensible one’ ought to keep a cooler head, she told herself sternly, but found herself humming ‘Come Out, Ye Elves and Ogres’, just the same.