Avengard: The Fall of Senvia

Chapter 3 - The Stranger Before Dawn

"You okay?"

Ana was behind me. She'd learned the hard way not to tap me too hard on the back. I'd apologised to her, and offered to cover her shifts for the next few days, but she waved me off. "It's just an elbow," she had said, laughing as she tilted her head back to catch the blood dripping down her nose. "I startled you. Could have happened—would have happened to anyone. Besides, that shriek you gave was worth it. I never get to hear anything that high-pitched from you."

"Yeah," I had said. "Thank you. I'm alright."

"Did you see that guest with the red hair?" she asked, bringing me back to the present. "Ugh, he's cute."

I twirled a towel in my hands. My eyes were fixed on a speck on the floor.

"Xera?" She whacked me in the arm with a wooden spoon.

I looked up, startled out of my trance. Even though she was standing well off to the side for the safety of her nose, I was a bit proud of my reaction. There was a relaxation in my muscles, and after so long, I could be slapped with a spoon and not instinctively respond with violence.

"Just lost in your thoughts," she mused. "Like always. It's a schedule. I know, I understand. You get lost in your thoughts. Every. Single. Time."

I flushed. "Sorry, I'll—"

"No, no, you go ahead, you rest and get lost in your thoughts while I finish this," she insisted, gesturing to the pile of dishes in front of her. "I'll just have to change the water, oh... twenty times? Alone. The pump to the well is only in the basement, it's not like I have to walk outside. It's not like I have to go and get the other dishes from the inn and bring them back here, across the road, to the tavern to clean them. No, you rest Xera, you take your time being lost in your thoughts, and you—"

"I'll do them," I said, covering her mouth with my hand. She muffled out a startled protest for a moment, then realised what I said. She raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, I will."

She raised it higher.

"All of them. Myself. Go on, take the rest of the night off."

She tried to say something, but I kept my hand on her mouth.

"I'm going to do all of this myself, tonight. Okay? AH!" I pulled my hand back, wiping it against my trousers. Ana stuck her tongue out at me, gave me a wide closed-lip smile, then bolted off to her room.

She hadn't been kidding. The stack of dishes was as tall as she was. Normally, we did them throughout the day, but there were only three of us to manage two buildings, and Lucian had felt too ill to work.

We went through our entire stock of pots, bowls, clay plates, knives, and cups. Nothing was left to use. I didn't even know if I had enough towels to dry it all, and I knew I had no space to wait for them all to dry, but I worked at it anyway.

The sun had long since set, even with earlier hours for the tavern in the spring. It wasn't quite the dead of the night, not yet. That hour when everything is quiet and not even a whisper of the wind would break the imposed silence, had not come yet. For now, it was still early, at the time of day when the dark sky looked over parties and events and lights in the cities. In Senvia, the night market would have been in full march just then. Of course, out there, at the inn at the crossroads, there wasn't much more than the horses in the stables to make a sound. Sometimes we'd hear the coyotes laughing and the foxes screaming, and there was always the river in the distance, but most of the time, it was quiet.

When I was finally finished my work, it was proper night, closer to the early morning and the dawn. The witching hour, some called it. The time of night when nothing really existed, and everything did at the same time. The hour when legends of the Witchgiver and her witchskin sunflowers haunted the abandoned crop fields.