The Heirs Bargain
The tavern was called the Bailed Boat now, and the sign above the door showed a skiff half-full of water and a man with a leather bucket who, by the artist's intention or accident, was not winning. The low door stood open onto a room thick with pipe smoke and the smell of braised onions and a fire that had been fed too much wet driftwood. Reyna stooped under the lintel and let her eyes adjust and counted, as her old tutor had taught her, in the first ten seconds she was inside a room she did not know: three exits, nine men, one woman behind the counter, a dog asleep under the far bench, two men at the corner table who had looked up when she entered and looked down again a beat too quickly.
She went to the counter and asked in the flat inland accent she had practiced for a bowl of the onion soup and a cup of small beer, and the woman served her without comment and took her coin and bit it, which was civil in this quarter. Reyna took her bowl to a bench along the wall from which she could watch the door and the corner table both, and she ate slowly, and she waited.
The old man came in at the turn of the hour, as the port bell was striking four, and she knew him before he had crossed the threshold. He was shorter than she remembered, but the shoulders were the same, and the white hair was still bound in the pilots' queue, and the hand he set on the doorframe to steady himself