9 - The River Sister

The Sister, as most locals called the three-story inn and tavern, was the cleanest, most respected establishment in Tabby Square, perhaps in all of southern Yartha. That wasn't necessarily a high bar to clear, but Milyara Bryngarten- known throughout the district and beyond as Millie- was still rightfully proud of it. Operating an inn of The River Sister's size required most of her time, especially with the regulations the Towers had slowly implemented over the past two decades- increasingly strict standards which she and other residents saw as a protracted effort by the highborn to get them to sell their buildings. She never would. The River Sister was one of the last bastions of the underclass in the southwest quarter, and the license revolts of twenty years past were never forgotten in the minds of the people who gathered there.

The drought was a stark reality. The future looked dire, but Millie believed that if they could just pull through the summer that things would be alright. She had a small but competent and close-knit staff, and for the past week or so her niece Cass had been visiting from her sister’s farm on the western borderland. To Millie the inn was more than her livelihood; more than her home, even. In many ways, she saw herself as part of its legacy rather than it as part of hers. She believed that the old building had its own personality in a way. A natural, unplaceable scent on the upper floors, the creak on the seventh step to the top floor with its low ceilings where her room had been as a child, the cozy hearth in the common room where now decades of mornings and nights had been spent among family and friends.

The three-story brick building had stood nestled in its spot within Tabby Square for over three-hundred years. It was one of the oldest inns still in operation in Yartha. Remarkably, over all those tumultuous decades of reinforcements and additions, changing of staff, the Bryngarten family had been there, finally coming into its ownership after the downfall of Solomon Pyne.

They were a lowborn, matriarchal family, of which there had been few in the city, and one of the few lowborn families to avoid a full seizure of assets during Yartha’s dark years. There were more matriarchal lines now, but for generations they were seen as something of an anomaly if not an oddity in Yartha. Her ancestral grandmother had built The River Sister in the year 499 by the Yarthan calendar, and it had been passed down to the women of the family ever since.

At the age of twenty-three, after their mother passed away suddenly, Millie had inherited the inn herself. By that time her older sister Lena had already left for the borderlands to become a farmer, uninterested in a life in the city, and Millie had accepted the role of tavernmaster and innkeep with grace, intent to continue her family's legacy.

Roughly twenty years ago there had been an uprising in southern Yartha over a decree passed down from the towers. The law had required lowborn merchants in the city to obtain a license from the academy in order for their stores and services to remain in operation. Many of them had refused, but Millie, who had been only twenty-five at the time, had been apprehensive to join them in protest, not wanting to risk losing the inn, and so had attended the seminars at their academy. Five sessions in total in the spring of 779, though they'd been little more than instructions on how to properly pay taxes. However, by the winter of 780, as more and more lowborn merchants refused to bow to the demands of the Towers, standoffs between the underclass and Yarthanguard turned to conflict, and The River Sister had become a sort of unofficial headquarters of the citizen resistance.

The lowborn army of southern Yartha had consisted of hundreds of loosely affiliated gangs, cults, and vigilante groups of the southwest quarter. They were plagued with infighting, and when the conflicts had turned especially violent, only a minority had truly wished to continue on. In contrast, the Yarthanguard were a trained military force, although there had been no real necessity for one in centuries. They were citizens as well, and it hadn't been uncommon for a rebel to find himself in battle with a family-member or a friend.

Eventually, Tabby Square itself had become a warzone, and the River Sister a refuge for the uprisers as well as anyone caught in the middle. The rebels would recover from skirmishes in the beds upstairs and hold meetings in the common room. They had protected the inn from the torches of the Yarthanguard with their lives on more than one occasion. It was something Millie would never forget, and why her sympathies would remain with them long after the physical fighting had ceased. The uprising had finally been quelled following a spectacular loss at what became known as the Battle of Fiddlewood. When the smoke had cleared both literally and metaphorically, Millie and most of the others had been eager to move on with any semblance of normalcy and peace that was offered. The law held still, in writing at least, but it was difficult to enforce and was now considered by most to be a spectacular failure. The resistance, however, had never truly gone away.

She was now middle-aged and childless, with no direct heirs to the inn; hence in part the visit of her young niece Cass, now sixteen years old. It was the first time of any significance that the girl had spent in the city. Her sister’s farm on the edge of the western borderlands had struggled the past two years, and as it had continued to decline, the two decided through letters of correspondence that Cass would be sent with the next pilgrimage to Yartha, to stay with Millie through the summer solstice as Lena and her husband dealt with salvaging the farm. Her sister had not said so, but Millie gathered that it would be something of a relief to her. Cass was polite and well-mannered, genuinely kind, but could also be opinionated and head-strong, even when she was young. Especially now, perhaps, she thought.

She had not seen Cass since she'd been a child, but suspected that the girl's curious mind may have come to an impasse with the monotonous, often dull life of the border farmers, and that she had acted out in her way. She had grown to become a beautiful young woman, with the bronze skin and dark eyes of all their family. Her rebellious traits were also common in a Bryngarten, Millie was aware, but so far Cass hadn't been any trouble to anyone. Quite the opposite.

She seemed quieter to Millie, more reserved, but that was also to be expected. Yartha was a lot to take in for a simple farm girl, she reasoned. By Cass’ third day at the inn, though, Millie had seen a crack in her shell . She had proven to be a hard and eager worker at The River Sister, picking up the inn's rhythms and cycles as if she had always known them. The regulars already adored her, and Millie had decided to herself that if Cass liked the thought of it, then she would plan to leave the inn to her when she passed on or decided to retire.

A large fireplace and two pot-bellied stoves heated the expansive common room in the winter, empty of kindling and clean of soot since she'd gone over everything herself last spring, but still the room was dusted daily by her or one of the girls. Behind the bar and on to the kitchen and pantry, the floors were the same cobblestone of Old Yartha's streets, but the common room and second and third floors were sturdy oak hardwood. It was not the fanciest inn of Yartha by a long shot, but had remained mostly the same for close to a century and it had its own charm, and its own share of prominent visitors over the years.

That morning Millie opened all fifteen of the windows in the common room- they were wide and wooden-shuttered, lining the expansive walls of the inn's northeast corner, directly opened to Locust Street on the east and Whistler Street to the north, busy thoroughfares both. The air outside was not yet hot, the odor of the city not yet especially foul. Foot-traffic streamed past the windows at the hour before noon as the daily chatter rose up, indecipherable unless shouted in excitement or anger. Dogs barked and children yelled. The wooden wheels of a handcart or an occasional rickshaw clattered down the brick streets.

Stolen novel; please report.

Her hair, now with its first streaks of gray, was tied in the same short yorkie-tail she had worn all her life. The dress she wore was pale green and simple, her only jewelry a necklace which had been her mother's. She stood behind the bar, wiped up a few crumbs from her morning bread. Her first customers of the day would arrive soon, but the business would be light.

She’d given Cass the morning off to see Tabby Square. It was her first time alone in Yartha since her arrival, and it had made Millie nervous. She knew Yarthans could spot an outsider from a mile away, but also she didn't want to watch the girl like a hawk. She'd always thought her sister Lena was a tad overprotective, and wanted to give Cass some space after her first days at the inn. All she'd told her was to stay within the district, that she could go out onto Velias Bridge but not to cross it, and to be back before lunch time.

She had considered asking one of the serving girls to go with her, but then quietly dismissed the thought. None of them working that morning had actually been girls in a long time. Yvette was a decade older than Millie, and the city was no longer anything special to them, really. It occurred to her then that Cass would likely get along with the orphan boys- Syatt and Pox. They were a bit younger than her, but Millie was quite fond of the two, and knew they explored the city often.

She was also aware that they were involved in some sort of criminal activity, but that seemed to be the case with almost everyone in the southwest quarter, lowborn or highborn, and she could not begrudge them for it. For them it was survival. She'd been lucky with the inn and knew it, and considered it her life's work to try and bring up those around her, to share her good fortune. Millie thought that as long as she didn't return to her sister a pickpocket in place of a farmgirl, that the two boys would make fine guides for her niece.

The plague that had taken the boys’ parents had also taken her and Lena’s younger brother almost a decade and a half ago. Banta. He'd been a clockmaker. She’d lost a number of friends to the illness as well, but had never contracted it. Years later when the news of the orphanage closing down came to her, she had felt compelled to help somehow. During better times, when the harvests were plentiful and the produce cheap, she could afford to feed the orphans leftovers from whatever they had served at the inn that night, usually a soup or stew. They would bring the huge pots and wooden bowls out onto the porch around closing time, as she shooed away the inebriated customers she’d just served and they stumbled out of the common room to go their separate ways for the night. Around two dozen orphans of Tabby Square, most in the ages of seven to ten, would line up just as they had at the orphanage before it had closed and then fallen to ruin, young Syatt and Pox among them. They would fill their bowls and eat on the enclosed brick porch by lantern light, bickering over who got to sit on the swing. Afterwards they would all help her wash the dishes and dry them, putting everything back into its place.

She hoped to have taught them the value of cooperative work, and although she had never felt much of a desire for a child of her own, still she enjoyed their company. She'd watched the orphans of the plague grow up. Over the past few years many of them had stopped coming by. Sometimes she would come to know that their exits from her small world had been happy, but more often than not she would learn that they had been drawn into a gang or thieves guild, or worse. The two boys, however, continued to visit her on occasion.

She heard Pox's voice, and was startled before she realized it came from outside. She shook her head and laughed at the coincidence. Footsteps on the porch followed, and the two boys entered, always together. Old Tannis Barth, who would be the first of her regular customers that morning, followed close behind. Tannis listened to Pox as he recounted something. All three of them looked troubled.

"Millie," Tannis said when Pox had finished. "Pour these boys a drink. They seen some feller jump off Velias Bridge last night." He looked at the boys, as if unsure, then continued. "Killed himself. A man with a beard, dressed in rags. I asked around but don't nobody know his name." Tannis sat down on one of the tall stools at the bar and laid his coin purse there. The boys climbed up on the ones next to him. Tannis had a grave look on his face. He turned to them. "You boys ever seen somebody die before?" he asked them in a gravelly voice.

Syatt stared down at his hands on the bar. Pox answered, "No, unless that fellow we saw get beat up on Glass Avenue did. We never found out."

Tannis turned back to Millie. "Pour 'em a drink, Millie," he repeated, "and one for me, and one for yourself." He laid down the copper bits after fishing them from the coin purse at his side.

"Well, look at that", Millie said with a smile. She got the tankards and went to the barrel of the weakest ale they served. 'Pisswater,' was what the regulars called it, but she didn't think the boys knew that. She filled Tannis' with his normal grog. He would throw a fit if she didn't.

She had never served spirits to the boys before. There was no age limit or penalty for drinking or drugging in the free city, but the lowborn had their own laws and customs, and the two were at that age where a drink would not be uncommon. She remembered when she had first met them, shivering, hungry, and lost, and marveled at the quick passage of time.

As she sat the tankards on the bar, Pox turned to Syatt with a dopey smile and raised his eyebrows. Syatt responded with his own grin, but she could tell his mind was elsewhere. She composed her face and pulled the tankards back just an inch, spoke in a serious tone. "I've told you boys this before, but I'm going to tell you again- I won't let y'all become drunks. You're still too young for this to be a regular thing, but even once I think you're old enough- one hint of trouble and this tap and every tap in Tabby Square will be dry for you." She looked at their nodding heads with a faint smile and pushed the tankards forward.

"Thanks, Millie," Syatt told her, and Pox nodded in agreement.

"Well, I hope," she said. "I hope you aren't cursing me years from now when your lives have gone to hell... like ol' Tannis' has, here." She gave the boys a sly wink and a smile.

"You heard her, boys," Tannis said. "Ain't my fault. Millie done it to me."

They sat there in silence for a moment, and after a while Millie spoke again. "About that man," she started, "Some followers of Slybbon believe that what he did is an absolution of some great sin- a return to the river, where all followers go in the end.” She pulled up her own stool and sat down. “It’s an old custom, and most who follow Slybbon have wised up, but it happens from time to time.” She took a drink, sat her tankard down in front of her and pointed her eyes up at the rafters. “The truth is that we can't know why anyone does anything. That's the scary part, boys. That's what took me a long time to figure out. People are baffling, sometimes. We can know ourselves, though. We can know the things we believe in and the things we'd never do." She paused and smiled, "I was just thinking about you two when you walked in. I wanted to tell you that my niece Cass is here from my sister’s farm out on the borderlands. She got here the day before last and she’ll be here through these last few weeks of the summer. I was looking for somebody closer to her age than me or Yvette, old crones that we are, to give her a little tour of our fair city on her next day off. Anyhow, I figured you two would know the spots worth looking at these days. I just ask that you don’t go anywhere or do anything dangerous, and don't break the law. The Yarthanguard are jittery. Come to think of it, it’d be best if you’d not mention that aspect of your day-to-day life to her if you could keep from it.”

Syatt looked almost stunned, she thought, but Pox heartily agreed for both of them. Millie called for a toast, raising her tankard. “To Yartha, and friendships new and old," she said, and they echoed her words and did the same.