The evening had crossed over into the kind of territory where time stopped meaning much.
The lute player had moved on to a second song, which was really just the first one with different words and the same last line, and half the room was still singing it. The other half had graduated to that stage of drunkenness where singing was no longer physically possible but swaying was, and so they swayed, arms over each other's shoulders, mugs tilted at angles that were going to become someone else's problem in the morning.
Sael set down his. He'd lost count, actually. Somewhere past sixty. The number had stopped being impressive to the crowd around the fiftieth and had become a kind of background miracle they'd all quietly agreed to stop questioning, like... weather.
It was time to go. He knew this the way you know anything obvious: the hour, the noise, the fact that Mira had fallen asleep against her mother's arm two songs ago and Jonn was pretending he hadn't. Edric was still upright, talking to a man Sael didn't recognize, but his gestures had gone loose and slow in the way that meant he'd be asleep within minutes of hitting a pillow.
Sael stood, and the movement drew a few cheers from nearby tables, which he waved off with a small motion that he hoped said no, I'm not doing another one without requiring him to actually say it.
He looked for Margaret, and his gaze swept the room — past the hearth, the lute player who had climbed down from his chair and was now sitting on the floor beside it, Helen's daughters collecting mugs and refilling some — and stopped, briefly, at a table near the far wall.
There were three women there. They sat apart from the rest of the inn, though not in any way that suggested they'd been excluded, but rather that they'd chosen the distance themselves. There was wine on their table, a bottle and three glasses, and the arrangement of all of it — the glasses, the postures, the unhurried spacing between the three of them — had a kind of composure that stood out against the chaos of the room.
Also, it was worth noting that the one in the middle was looking at him.
She had dark hair, long and wavy, falling well past her shoulders, and running through it — just left of center, starting near the temple — was a single strand of silver hair. Her face was narrow, composed, and she held her wine glass by the stem.
...That last remark had Sael realize he'd been looking at her for slightly too long, and that realization made him immediately unsure of what the appropriate duration was supposed to have been. He'd noticed her earlier, actually — twice, maybe three times over the course of the evening — and each time, she'd already been looking at him. There was nothing aggressive or pointed about it though, just a gaze that happened to be aimed in his direction whenever his happened to pass through hers.
Which could mean anything, really. He was the centerpiece of the evening. Everyone had been looking at him. She was probably watching the spectacle the same way the rest of the inn was.
Now, looking away felt rude, but continuing to look felt worse. The socially reasonable move was probably some kind of acknowledgment; a nod, maybe, something brief and neutral that communicated I see that you see me and I am now going to stop seeing you, goodnight without requiring either of them to speak or, God forbid, walk over.
So he nodded once.
Her smile — she'd had a faint one already, he noticed only now — widened just so. But she didn't nod back, nor did she look away.
The other two looked at him then.
It happened in near-unison, the one on the left and the one on the right turning their attention toward him as though some signal had passed between the three of them that Sael hadn't been invited to. Another thing that retained his attention of them from the start had been their eyes.
The woman in the middle, she had eyes the unusual color of lilac, while the one on her left had eyes that were red, or close to it, as it was more of a deep rose that darkened toward the edges of the iris and caught the candlelight with a warmth that wasn't quite pink and wasn't quite red but lived in the narrow space between the two.
As for the one on the right, she had eyes the color of verdigris, that grey-green you see in weathered copper or old sea glass.
All three had a quality Sael could only describe as lit. A faint light that came from somewhere inside iris rather than reflecting off the surface. It wasn't the sort of thing human eyes did.
Eyes like those, in Sael's experience, meant fae blood. A grandparent, a great-grandparent, someone not entirely mortal somewhere back in the line. It happened — particularly in regions where the old forests still stood or where the boundary between the fae realms and the mortal ones had been worn thin by centuries of proximity. The rest of them looked human. Their features, their builds, the way they sat and held their glasses and occupied space — all of it unremarkable. Just the eyes, then.
Only the one in the middle was smiling. The other two regarded him with expressions that were civil and closed.
Sael became aware, somewhat belatedly, that he was now the one doing the staring. He looked away swiftly, and finally found Margaret where she always ended up at gatherings: near the host.
She sat at the end of the bar with Helen, both of them with wine, and whatever they were discussing had Helen leaning in with an eager, conspiratorial posture. Margaret, for her part, looked like she was having a wonderful time.
Sael made his way over to the bar. Margaret was mid-sentence when he arrived, and she finished it before acknowledging him, which was very Margaret.
"Helen," he said. "Thank you. For all of this."
Helen turned on her stool and the professional composure she'd been wearing all evening broke a little. "No— thank you. I mean that. I truly, sincerely—" She stopped, pressed a hand flat on the bar as though grounding herself. "I made tonight what I'd normally make in six months. Six months! And I ran out of everything. I had to send my eldest to the Broken Antler and the Cup and Table halfway through the night for more ale and bread and lamb because I physically did not have enough food in this building to feed everyone who showed up."
She said this last part like she still didn't entirely believe it.
"It was a good night," Sael said.
"It was the best night this inn has had in its life." She paused. "Possibly the best night I've had in my life, but I'll need to sit with that one."
Margaret looked up at him.
"Did you have fun, grandpa?"
Sael considered the question with more seriousness than it probably required. The singing, the sixty-odd mugs of ale that had done about as much to him as a light breeze, the stories he'd told and the better ones he'd listened to, the girl who'd asked him to make the fire dance and the boy who'd asked him to make it talk.
"Yes," he said. "Quite a lot, actually."
Margaret smiled at that.
And just then, something tugged at Sael's robes.
He looked down, and saw liitle Mira standing there, barefoot on the floorboards, one hand gripping a fistful of his sleeve and the other scratching her belly through her nightgown. Her eyes were at maybe a quarter open. She had the look of someone who had woken up specifically to be upset about being awake.
"Are you leaving, Sael the Great?"
He crouched down. "I am."
"Oh." She thought about this, which at her current level of consciousness was visibly hard work. "Will you come back?"
"If I'm invited."
"I'm inviting you."
"Then I'll come back."
This seemed to satisfy her. She yawned so wide her jaw cracked, and did not cover it, and did not care.
Her parents appeared behind her a moment later. Edric had Jonn draped over his shoulder, the boy was gone, fully unconscious, mouth open, one arm hanging limp, and his wife, Mara, walked beside him.
"We owe you an apology," Edric said, pitching his voice low. Jonn stirred against his shoulder, mumbled something that contained no real words, and sank back under. "This was supposed to be a drink. Maybe two. A reasonable hour. And then... " He gestured at the room. "It seems we overdid it. With the children here, no less."
Sael glanced around. There were at least four others children in various arrangements of sleep: tucked into laps, curled on benches, and in one case, under a table with someone's coat pulled up to the chin.
"There are many children here tonight," Sael said. "None of them seem damaged by the experience."
"Still, we should've — "
"Nothing happened. They'll remember it well." At least Sael hoped so.
Edric nodded, still looking a bit guilty. His wife leaned into his free side and rested her head against his arm, which could have been tenderness or could have been load-bearing, she looked a bit drunk.
Mira tugged at Sael's robe again. She wasn't looking at him, but at Jonn, up on her father's shoulder, dead to the world.
"He's sleeping," she said.
"He is."
"I want to sleep."
"A fine idea."
"In my bed." She turned to her mother. "I want my bed. Not the same bed. He kicks. He kicked me last time right — " She put her hand on her own cheekbone. " — here. And he didn't even wake up. I woke up and he was still sleeping and that's not fair."
"Mira," her mother said.
"It's not."
"We'll sort it out, love."
"You said that last time and then we didn't sort it out and he kicked me again."
Mara looked at Edric, who looked at the ceiling and sighed slightly.
Sael hadn't seen their room, but he'd heard enough earlier. The attic. Couldn't stand up straight near the walls. Jonn on a bedroll between the beds, or on the floor, depending on which child had won the most recent territorial negotiation.
The whole family was packed into a space that was barely large enough to sleep in, let alone live in. And the inn itself, he'd been inside it for hours now. The kitchen was a miracle of compression. The staircase was narrow enough that passing someone required a brief, uncomfortable negotiation. The ceiling in the main room had a bow to it that suggested the second floor had been carrying more weight than it was designed for. The building leaned, and groaned, and held on through a combination of stubbornness and habit, and neither of those was structural.
So, Sael turned back to the bar.
"Helen."
She looked up from the mug she'd been drying. "Yes?"
"Would you be willing to let me make some changes to the inn?"
She tilted her head. "Changes, sir?"
"Resize it. Open things up. More rooms, more space in the kitchen, reinforce the bones of the building so it stands properly for the next several decades." He paused. "Reinvigorate the whole thing."
Helen set the mug down slowly. She looked at him, and he could see the thought traveling across her face.
"I... I'm not sure I follow," she said. "You mean build onto it? Because the property sits on the duchy's land, and my lease is for this footprint specifically, and there's a surveyor's log that specifies the dimensions, and if the building changes I'd need to refile with the steward's office and there are fees for any structural — "
"Don't worry about any of that," Margaret said.
Helen stopped mid-sentence.
"The title, the lease, the land registry, the surveyor's report, none of it will be a problem. I'll speak to my nephew's steward first thing tomorrow and have everything documented, approved, and sealed before you've finished your breakfast." Margaret held Helen's gaze and winked. "Whatever Grandpa does here tonight will be fully accounted for. You won't owe a single copper more than you already pay."
Helen stood very still behind her bar, seeming surprised for some time, then her hands came together in front of her apron, fingers twisting once, and then she straightened up behind her own bar looking for all the world like she'd decided to stop standing in the way of her own good fortune.
"Yes," she said. "God, yes. Please."
Mira's head snapped toward him from where she now stood behind Mara's leg. "Wait. Are you going to do real magic?"
Every trace of sleepiness vanished from the girl in an instant, like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over her head. She was suddenly wide awake, practically bouncing on her toes, tugging at her mother's hand and pointing at Sael.
Sael smiled. And found, to his mild surprise, that he was actually looking forward to this. He hadn't built anything in a long time. Destruction was easy, any mage with enough power could level a building, crack the earth, burn a city to cinders. But construction, was the part of magic he'd always loved most and practiced least these days.
He stepped back from the Quiet Lamb and studied it properly. With his mana sense, the bones of the building told their story. Old oak framing, solid but tired. Warped joints where decades of rain had done their patient work. A foundation of river stone that had shifted and settled unevenly over the years, pulling the whole structure slightly—almost imperceptibly—to the left. But the wood was good, and so was the stone. They just needed encouragement.
"Everyone take a few steps back, please," he said quietly.
Helen, who had been standing near the door, moved without question. Edric put a hand on Mara's shoulder and guided his family further down the street, though Mira immediately squirmed around in her mother's grip to keep watching, her small face scrunched with fierce concentration as though she might miss something critical if she blinked. Sael made sure everyone was clear before he raised his hand.
He started with the foundation, because everything else depended on it.
"[Deep Root Mending]."
A blue etheral mana sank into the earth beneath the inn and the river stones shifted with a low grinding murmur that you felt in your chest more than heard with your ears, pressing flush as the gaps between them filled and the earth beneath compacted and firmed. The building's faint leftward lean corrected itself with a groan that rolled through the timber framing, and the entire structure settled, for the first time in decades, onto something solid and true.
Every conversation in the inn stopped at once. Someone grabbed the edge of their table and another grabbed the person next to them while a man near the hearth said "What in the—" and didn't finish, because the tremor passed as quickly as it had come, but Sael didn't pause. The second spell was already forming.
"[Timber's Memory]."
This one was harder to see but impossible to miss if you were paying attention. A warmth radiated outward from the inn's walls as the old oak remembered what it had been. Warped boards straightened. Grain that had dried and split over long years sealed back together, fibers knitting tight as the wood drew on what it had once been at its strongest and returned to that state. Weathered gray deepened to a rich, living brown, and the scent of fresh-cut oak rolled over the street so thickly that Mira gasped and said, too loudly, "Mother, it smells like the woodcutter's!"
Mara shushed her, but gently, and Sael could hear gasps, laughs and one long ohhhhh from somewhere near the middle of the room.
Now the growth.
"[Living Frame]."
This drew even more gasps as the old oak remembered that it hadn't always been dead wood, and new timber began to grow from the existing structure, guided by Sael's will. The roof groaned and lifted as the ridgepole extended and the second floor gained headroom it had never had.
"[Fold]."
Space bent as the common room doubled. The ceiling sat high and sure. The hallway upstairs stretched longer than any hallway had a right to in a building that shape. This was a form of spatial magic. Mage towers had it, just like royal vaults. But rarely did one see an inn with magic that made the interior even bigger than what it looked like from the outside.
Sael held dozens of mana threads simultaneously, and he was careful with every single one. He layered the next spell without releasing the others.
"[Stoneshape]."
The chimney, which had been listing and shedding mortar for years, restructured itself from within. Cracked stones fused together and the hearth inside—he could feel it through the walls—widened and deepened, and new stone grew from old, pulled from deep beneath the foundation where the earth offered it willingly.
One more.
"[Hearthward Seal]."
A quiet spell, with no visible spectacle, but mana threaded itself through every joint and seam and place where wood met stone and beam met beam, binding them against water, rot, wind, settling, and the slow patient cruelty of years.
Sael lowered his hand. The mana conduits closed, and the night went still.
People were on their feet, touching things. Hands flat on walls, fingers tracing the grain of the bar, then Sael heard footsteps on the staircase, heavy and fast, and a man in his nightclothes came stumbling down wide-eyed. "What happened?! My room, it's suddenly bigger! The wall moved! I was lying right there and the wall moved!"
That got everyone's attention.
People pushed for the stairs. From above, the shouts started coming. "There's new doors!" "This one's empty!" "There's four empty ones!"
They came back down one by one, grabbing at Helen. "Give me one of those rooms tonight." "What's the rate for the new ones?" "I'm not walking home, put me in one."
Helen looked at Sael, completely at lost for words and the latter looked down at Mira, who was vibrating.
"You," he said, "will probably find there's a bit more space up there now. Enough that no one needs to kick anyone."
Mira's whole face split open. "You're the best. You're the best person I've ever met!"
"Why, thank you. That's very kind."
He turned to Edric and Mara. "You should go have a look. Take your time."
They didn't need to be told twice. Edric shifted Jonn on his shoulder and headed for the door with Mara and Mira in tow, Mira already pulling ahead. Behind them, the crowd around Helen hadn't thinned at all. Someone was asking about rates while another was asking if the new rooms had windows. A third person was trying to negotiate a weekly arrangement and Helen was blinking very fast.
Then Margaret's hand closed around his wrist.
He looked at her. "What—"
"We should go. Before the attention comes back to you."
"Hmm, but we haven't paid for the drinks yet."
Margaret laughed. "I took care of it an hour ago." She tugged him toward the door. "Come on, grandpa. Let's fly away."
Sael let himself be pulled. The crowd was still moving through the building, opening doors, testing stairs, marveling at walls. As he passed through the common room his eyes went to the table near the far wall.
It was empty, now. The bottle was gone, the three glasses were gone, and the women were gone.
Huh.
Then they were outside, and the night air hit cool and clean after the heat of the inn. Sael looked at Margaret.
"Ready?"
She grinned up at him. "Up, up and away, grandpa!"
He chuckled. "You haven't forgotten that."
"Of course not."
And just like that, they lifted off the street, Margaret in his arm, shouting in the sky.
"Weeeee!"