“Have you eaten yet?” Ainsworth interrupted her, and before she could answer, he took her by the shoulders and steered her into one of the only vacant seats left, a solitary table by one of the windows. “Iknowyou haven’t, so sit there until I bring you something.”
“Oh, very well, then,” she said, settling into her chair with little convincing. “Will you get me something I’ll like, or something youthinkI should like?”
Honey wasn’t into some of the fancy dishes Alvea had made to impress the new guests. Alvea, at least, seemed genuinely happy to stretch that particular muscle. She had admitted to Ainsworth when they’d shared an evening meal some days prior that she now felt she got the best of both worlds, making such dishes in the comfortable atmosphere of the Misnich Inn.
Ainsworth gave Honey a knowing look before heading to the kitchen, a warm flush rising from his chest. Over the past few weeks, the comfortable companionship between them had continued to grow, and while she did enjoy teasing him about his…occasional snobbish tendences, he felt he could truly consider her a friend. A close friend.
Almost more than a close friend, perhaps?
He shook his head, briefly horrified at himself. He was still spoken for! Despite how they’d left things, despite everything that had happened, he would not let himself think about Honey in any capacity other than as a friend. Even if he did find himself flirting, occasionally—and also found himself magnificently pleased when he made her blush or had her roaring with laughter. Although he had finished his sketch of the standing stones and Beatrice long before the third trip to the mountain, he had insisted Honey take him once more so he could “complete”it.
“Can I grab something for Honey’s breakfast, Alvea?” Ainsworth asked as he entered the kitchen. He had, perhaps, made himself a tad too much at home here in Alvea and Quiddle’s workspace after her cooking challenge, but she did not complain. She had evenrequested he make more of his auldfruit preserves—but she was by far the superior bannock baker.
“Yes—and yourself, remember!” Alvea called from the pantry.
Ainsworth swooped around the worktables and popped some bread, some auldfruit preserves, and a pot of cream on a tray. He used some water freshly boiled by Quiddle to fill a small teapot for ficklebell tea for two.
“Very romantic,” Quiddle jested as he came in with empty plates for washing, balancing them precariously on his arms.
“Veryfunny,” Ainsworth replied, reddening at the remark. He heard Alvea laugh from the pantry and took a deep breath so as to not appear flushed when he returned to the tavern room.
He chose to believe he sat down in front of Honey looking composed and with an average complexion. An amicable silence descended between them as Honey made short work of the food. She had truly been run off her feet these past few days. All the staff had—and he, helping when he could, was busy spending every other spare minute writing and poring over the diaries.
As if she read his mind, Honey asked over a mouthful of toasted bread: “Surely you’re almost done with those diaries now?”
He took a sip of tea. It was not quite sharp, but not too gentle, either—a perfect start to the day. “It is not a matter of simply reading them, Honey. I need to go over the data many times during my investigation, and in my own notes I assign codes to certain excerpts and then—”
“Okay, okay. I wish I never asked,” she said, smiling mischievously from behind her teacup. He made himself look away, but he returned the smile nonetheless.
“To be honest,” he said, hoping hecouldbe honest with her, “they are not as useful as I’d hoped. They mostly contain…gossip about guests, and there’s a tremendous number of pages dedicated to Beatrice’s walks upon the mountain.”
“Ah, but those sections are beautiful, are they not?”
They were, Ainsworth had to admit. Indeed, he could hardly believe that the moving accounts of the landscape described the samemountain he had set foot on. Her accounts, Ainsworth suspected, were a kind of reflective and healing prose, written to come to terms with her fate and perhaps reclaim the land. He had found himself utterly absorbed, coming away from the page each time with a renewed appreciation for the landscape around him.
“Truly magnificent writing,” Ainsworth agreed. “I am very much enjoying conducting a close reading. I hope, with your permission, I can include some excerpts in the finished manuscript. The earliest journal does have some very helpful accounts of the inn’s establishment, I suppose.”
Indeed, the diaries had been most useful in documenting the early days of the inn. They were devoid of the motivation behind it (Honey, he had noted to his frustration, had ripped out some pages, which he suspected held those answers), but Beatrice had helpfully described the setting up of the inn some two hundred years ago, and all the wealth required to do so. And what a wealth indeed! Her journal accounts lined up with the various invoices he had found for all the supplies she needed, from the hiring of an initial workforce to build the place to everything needed for sustenance. She was not, from the diaries or to Honey’s knowledge, married, and Honey claimed she did not know what profession she had before becoming an innkeeper. “Surely generational wealth funded this place?” Ainsworth had speculated, but Honey kept tight-lipped. It felt rude to pry, and…well, it was really none of his business. He had what he needed to be accurate in his writing, and that was enough.
The inn’s current finances were also really none of his business, but in recent days, he could not see how it could possibly run on anything other than a loss. Was the money running dry, or still readily available? Again, his own research covered no such thing, but damn it if he wasn’t curious. Honey was different from his colleagues at the Skarrow Library: Those affluent academics were both performatively reticent and yet simultaneously showy around the issue of familial wealth, which many of them possessed in great quantities.
Ainsworth, on the other hand, had taken great pains to keep the fact that he worked in a small warehouse—taking stock of deliveriesfrom farms beyond the city before they were dispersed to local taverns—during his own studies a secret, despite being a recipient of one of the few scholarships available, which funded his tuition and residence. It did not fund his other living costs, so he had worked tirelessly to try to keep up a lifestyle similar to the others’ in order to fit in. Nor was such a lifestyle just for show, he quickly realized. Networking was key to career progression, and so he had to bite his tongue and shell over more money than his family had made in a year to attend dances, the theater, and fine establishments like Alvea’s dining room. After the completion of his degree, he had landed a full-time job as a researcher with a healthy salary and generous access to grants for research. It was then, he suspected, that he must have disassociated from the eye-watering costs of maintaining such a career and a lifestyle, as it had become normal for him.
It all seemed so far away now. He recalled how he and Enach collected names like children collected shells on the beach—always on display, at hand for whenever the perfect moment to show them off presented itself. It all seemed so inconsequential as he sat enjoying the pleasant morning, company, and bustle of the tavern.
An empty tray slammed on the table beside him, startling him out of his contemplation. “Done?” barked Bren, his voice low and gruff.
“I— Yes, thank you, Bren,” Ainsworth replied. He was met with a stony look before the teacups and pot were clattered onto the tray and Bren stormed away.
“Bren isn’t…quite so happy at the abundance of visitors,” said Honey, watching him stomp off.
Ainsworth grimaced. “I understand why, but it’s not as if he didn’t have ample warning as to what we were doing…”
“I don’t think he expected it to work. I mean, we have been a quiet, sleepy inn for…well, decades now!”
Ainsworth nodded. He wondered if he might start finding other diaries up in the attic from innkeepers later than Beatrice that could help him pinpoint when guests started to fizzle out and turn away. He had guest logs and accounts from Honey’s mother’s time asinnkeeper, but as of yet had found no other personal writing that might shed light on the situation. It was something he could not quite bring himself to ask about; Honey never really mentioned her mother, and Ainsworth was loath to bring her up. There was something difficult there, he sensed. He suspected that the pages she had ripped from Beatrice’s diaries held familial matters and stories she was not willing to share with him.
“What’s that look for?” Honey asked, and Ainsworth realized he had been frowning, lost in thought.
