Winter came with the new year, and I celebrated my birth with the turn of the calendar into the year 322, as all Kindred did. Individual birthdays were for people who had surnames, families, and legacies.

My legacy was supposed to be forged from blood.

Lucian, the owner of that inn at the crossroads, hired me, probably thinking I'd either scare away all the bad customers or draw in some of the richer ones. I wasn't exactly a small, timid, nondescript woman. He'd had the perfect candidate for a bouncer delivered right to his door.

He gripped my arm like a man might grip a beam of wood to feel its density. "The muscle on you," he had uttered in a hoarse voice. At that point, my being Kindred was just a bonus.

"There's a war coming," he said, heaving an axe down on a log. "Sure, things are holding together a bit for now, but it's all going to collapse. Merity Point will turn on Durn. Ibolan will try to annex Espara. All the provinces will be at each others' throats."

I blinked. It had only been a week at the time since Senvia had vanished. I couldn't imagine the total collapse of an empire that spanned most of the continent. I took the log from him, set it down, and split the wood in half with my bare hands.

"And a war means thirsty soldiers," he continued, a hint of alarm in his voice. "I'll need help in the tavern, just across the road."

He was an extremely short fellow, and too often got pushed around for it.

It didn't help that the inn made him look poor. It was centuries old, and it looked the part. He could have renovated it, I'm sure, at least sanded and revarnished the wood, but I know he liked the roughshod look of the place.

They weren't bad enough to cause splinters, and they were sturdy, but the stairs creaked like something haunted. Over the main entryway was a burnished diamond pattern that reminded me in a way of the triangle of Pathoticism. The doors looked rough, but held against all sorts of weather and abuse. The hardwood flooring was well-used, enough so that the shoes of countless travellers had smoothened it far past the original grain, and there were odd dips where people walked most often.

It was, in a very real sense, the epitome of the phrase, "they don't make them like they used to."

Still, it was a rest stop. We were the inn at the crossroads that just happened to be near where Senvia once stood. Nobody gave us any merit for the age of the place. There were plenty of old things about, and we had all manner of customers.

Normal folk, as Lucian liked to call the underserved of society, used us as a place to sleep on their travels. There weren't that many of them though. Most of the poor didn't have the luxury of frequent travel unless they had a specific skill that made them more desirable to employers, or unless Senvia decided to relocate them for military reasons.

Merchants were our most frequent customers, and we had stables and a staging area designed for them. One of my duties was to clear it of weeds and saplings.

The nobility were frequent too, and they often looked at me, sometimes recognising me for what I was, but never who. They had the training to see that something was off, though they often reasoned that there was no way a Kindred would be working in a place like this, not with a dozen wars breaking out across the continent.

At the very least, they figured me a lost soldier. They weren't far off.

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I recognised so many of them from my time in the royal court, and it gave me a chuckle that they didn't recognise me in turn. Lewyn Moss, not nobility, but a very renowned merchant of spice. Lord Iblis and the Lady Lasset, the twins of Delheim. Numeria of the Kor, the last family of goldsmiths outside of Merity Point.

Many of them approached me, unsure where they had seen me before. I was distinctive enough. I was taller than many men, and my arms were thicker too. Even my skin tone stood out as unique. Most of the darker folk were far northeast, far northwest, far south, or buried deep in the forests of Durn.

But none of them ever bothered with Lucian. He was short, barely tanned despite his time in the sun, and had greying hair that looked unkempt no matter how much he tended to it. It was thinning, so he refused to cut it, but the wind flicked it around his face whenever he was outside. Height aside, that hair was the most distinctive thing about him, and it hardly stood out. He fit in perfectly in this part of the empire.

Merchants, if they were not bringing him his stock, would approach me for their room key and ignore him entirely.

The ones who did notice him were often more trouble than not.

In turn, I placed myself in front of them and called them what they were. Children. It was one thing to mock a man for his height or hair. It was entirely another to be then faced with a woman who towered over them.

We had a system, he and I, and at his glance, I'd set them straight.

Soldiers looked over him, fixing their eyes on Ana.

"Sky's bleeding," one of them said, a slight drunken slur decorating his voice. "Come and watch it with us."

Another of the soldiers elbowed him. "Romantics," he scoffed. "Come on, let me show you how a real man'll treat you!"

She gave them a smile and handed them their drinks before turning away.

The smile should have been a mistake. For anyone else, it would have been a mistake. But she played them with an evasive, taunting grace.

"Oh, come on, sweet thing!" they shouted, "I'll take real good care of you! Let me hold ya, and you can walk my Path with me."

"I have my own," she said in a too-cheery tone.

"What do they even pay you for? Come keep us company!"

Three soldiers a table away gave a mocking howl. I shifted my foot, ready to step in. It was instinctive. There was rarely a need.

"Words," she said. Then, to the confused looks they shot at her, "I get paid for words." The turn she gave them was seductive, and left her head trailing behind her body to show off her long, gorgeous curly blonde hair as it dangled through the air.

One of the other soldiers piped up. "Hear that, Jay? She doesn't want to sleep with you, she just wants to tease ya!"

"Maybe I want a little more than teasing," he said. "Maybe I want to haul you up there myself, have my way with you. And that other one, over there." He pointed at me. "She looks like she could throw some colours around."

I slid my foot out. My hand tightened, and I fingered my rock crystal ring.

No, that was too much. Overkill, was the word some used. There were... at most, a dozen of them. I could do that with one hand.

And Ana could wrap them around her finger if she wanted to. Not with her fists, but with those sweet words she claimed to be hired for. If sirens were real, she could have been one.

These sorts were by far our most common customers, and Ana flourished whenever they came by. She didn't care about the tips they slipped into her pouches or the money they brought to the inn, only the attention they gave her. She wasn't my type, but I understood them more than any of them realised.

And she knew it. That knowledge was on full display in the look she shot me after turning away from the soldiers. Not quite a wink, and not quite a smile, but a half smirk and squinched eyes.

Oh, she knew.

It was a dangerous game to play for both of us. I returned her looks with a small, silent chuckle and a laugh.

I couldn't do the same things with my hair as she did. I kept it shorter, and the curls and frizz forced all of my black hair to stay up and out of the way. Nothing was left to dangle, except the occasional annoying hair, and I lacked the face and body for it anyway. My eyes were unpleasant to look at, at least as I saw in the mirror. They were blue, but the worst kind of murky blue, dark and almost hazel. My neck was too long, and my torso was too short.

I stood out as much as she did, but in a very different way. She was the taunting finger, luring men to a bed she would never occupy, and I was a sore thumb.

But I belonged, just as the wanderers did.

Each of them, the soldiers and the rich, the merchants and the vagabonds, they had their place at the inn at the crossroads. We welcomed them, and their coin. And that's why they came, and continued to drink at the tavern even when Ana had a day off.

We were a pit stop along the road to wherever they were all going.