Sweep with Me (Innkeeper Chronicles Book 5) Read online

  The official colors of Treaty Stay were green and pastel lavender, closer to pink than to purple, because the first inn to receive the three visitors for the ceremonial signing of the treaty was located in China and the innkeeper, hoping to impress the guests, coaxed the foxglove trees on the grounds to bloom.

  I surveyed the Grand Ballroom and waved my broom. The glowing nebulae on the ceiling turned pink, lavender, and white against the cosmos. The enormous light fixtures suspended from the ceiling withdrew. New green stems of pale metal spiraled out, braiding into a canopy around the columns, and sprouted glass flowers a full two feet across. The foxglove tree blooms started purple at the base of the flute, then paled at the tips of the frilly petals. The flowers shivered and opened, revealing glowing yellow centers and dark purple dotted lines running down the length of the delicate flutes. Pastel-colored lanterns appeared in the canopy, bathing the room in a soft light. Matching banners unrolled on the walls that had turned sage green. I turned the color of the columns to a deep red and surveyed the room.

  Good. The floor didn’t match though.

  Fatigue rolled over me. Tinting the floor mosaic would take a lot of magic.

  I sat down with my back against the nearest column. Beast, my little black-and-white Shih Tzu, trotted over to me and flopped at my feet. I scratched her tummy.

  Tony left back to Casa Feliz, his father’s inn. I’d spent most of the day making rooms for the Drífan. Or Drífen. In my experience beings in position of power rarely travelled alone. I had stripped the Otrokar wing of its decorations, since we wouldn’t be expecting a large delegation from the Hope-Crushing Horde any time soon, and repurposed the space. Sean spent the day cataloging the damages to our defenses. Fighting with a clan of interstellar assassins had taken a toll, and he had gone through the garage looking for tools and ended up pulling spare parts out of storage. I’d passed him on the stairs a few times, as he carried various odd-looking doohickeys a normal human shouldn’t have been able to lift. At some point he went to repair the particle cannon on the west side, and I heard him cursing in three different languages while I reshaped the balcony.

  It was evening now, and I was tired. The fight with the Draziri damaged more than just our guns. Living through the death of the baby inn was like entering a comatose state, except I had been aware of everything that was happening. Breaking out of it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. I still felt…depleted somehow. And the inn wasn’t responding as readily as I was used to. It didn’t exactly hesitate, but the connection between us was slightly muddled. Maybe I could do the mosaic first thing in the morning.

  Sean walked into the Grand Ballroom. He’d traded the robe for his usual jeans and T-shirt. There was something wolfish about Sean Evans even in his human form. It was the way he moved, with a deceptively leisurely stride, or the way he held himself, ready, or maybe it was in his eyes. Sometimes when I looked into them, a wolf gazed back at me from the edges of a dark forest.

  He approached and smoothly sat on the floor next to me. Beast immediately crawled in his lap.

  “I can’t find anything on the Drífen in the archives,” he said. “I’ve read Wictred’s account in the inn’s files and looked through the books, but there is nothing since that. Is there a code word I don’t know?”

  “No. There simply isn’t that much information available about them.”

  “Usually there are notations by other innkeepers,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I read a lot when you weren’t yourself. The inn helped me to look for a cure.”

  Poor Gertrude Hunt. Poor Sean. I could picture him sitting in the room searching for the answer while the inn pulled up one archive after another. I had to make sure this didn’t happen again.

  “You’re right,” I told him. “When an innkeeper learns something new about a particular species, they will add notations to the general files. In old times, they would write entries in the books. That’s why the margins are so wide. But with the Drífen, it’s different. The original guidance the innkeepers received was to safeguard their privacy at all costs. In addition, each Drífan is different. There are hundreds of dryhts. You can live for a hundred years and never see two Drífen from the same dryht. Actually, you can live for a hundred years and never meet a Drífan at all.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Usually the lieges will send someone ahead with their demands. We will try to get as much information as we can and go from there.”

  A soft melodious sound rolled through the inn. Hmm. Someone was requesting a vacancy in advance. Usually the guests simply showed up. The inn always had a vacancy, because I could make as many rooms as the guests required.

  “Let me see,” I told the inn.

  The ceiling parted and a folded parchment fell into my hands. Sean raised his eyebrows.

  “The innkeeper before me died in the 1980s,” I explained. “He was solitary, a bit odd, and overly fond of antiques. A lot of Gertrude Hunt’s communication happened on parchment when I got here. I fixed most of it, but once in a while something like this happens. In the future, a screen would be fine.”

  I opened the parchment and read it. Just what we needed. This was shaping up to be a hell of a holiday. I passed the parchment to Sean.

  He glanced at it. “A family dispute, party of sixty-one?”

  “It looks like two sides of the same family have descended from two brothers. One of them left and founded an influential philosophy school on a different planet, while the other remained on the home world and established his own philosophical academy. Now they are feuding about which of the brothers can truly be considered the family’s founder: the one who left to colonize the new planet or the one who stayed on their original world. They’ve invited a wise elder to settle their dispute.”

  “Sixty-one new guests. Seems like it would be good for the inn, but you don’t look happy.”

  “They are koo-ko.”

  Sean looked at the ceiling. “Show me a koo-ko.”

  A screen slid from the wall. On it, a being about thirty inches tall spread its plumage. Soft cream feathers covered its face, brightening to a shocking pink on the back of its head and back and turning vivid crimson on the wings and bushy tail. A second pair of appendages that resembled the front limbs of a dinosaur or perhaps a monkey if the monkey somehow grew talons, thrust from underneath the wings.

  An oversized tail marked the koo-ko as a male. He wore an elaborate pleated harness that fit over his head and sat on his shoulders, then widened into a lavish utility belt stuffed with electronics, quills made from bright feathers, and rolls of something suspiciously resembling toilet paper on a wide bobbin.

  The koo-ko looked at us with purple eyes, fluffed up his feathers, and strode back and forth, his plump body rocking with each step.

  Sean cracked a smile. “They are chickens.”

  “Technically they’re not even avian.”

  “Dina, we’re going to host sixty-one space chickens.”

  I gave up. “Yes.”

  “And they’re going to argue philosophy.”

  “Mhm. This means they will want a forum with a podium and a debate circle, and a coop to sleep in, and we have to buy a lot of grain…”

  He laughed.

  “You’re not taking this very seriously.”

  “We’ll have to tell Orro to stop serving poultry.”

  “Sean Evans!”

  He put his arm around me. I leaned against him.

  “A beautiful room,” he said.

  It was beautiful. There was something ethereal about the Treaty Stay, something fresh and clean and hopeful, like a bright spring day after a terrible winter.

  “You’ve hosted a peace summit between the Holy Anocracy, the Merchants and the Hope-Crushing Horde. And then you took on the Draziri,” Sean said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never seen you this anxious. What’s the matter?”

  I sighed.
/>   “Is it the Assembly?”

  “Partially. I don’t like not knowing where we stand with them, but in the end, as you said, they can only downgrade us. They can’t take away Gertrude Hunt unless we commit a truly heinous offense.”

  “So, it’s the Drífan.”

  “I abandoned my inn.” It just kind of fell out.

  Sean frowned. “I don’t follow.”

  “When I jumped through the door with the seed of the baby inn, I abandoned Gertrude Hunt. The inn had to survive without me. I traumatized it.”

  “You had no choice.”

  “I know. But the inn is fragile now. It waits and watches and the connection between us…is more tentative. I don’t know if Gertrude Hunt is afraid of getting hurt or of me being hurt, or maybe it worries it might hurt me somehow. But there is a distance between us. It wasn’t noticeable day-to-day, but redecorating the inn for the Treaty Stay is complicated and requires precision. I feel it, and now that I’m aware of it, it worries me. Adding a Drífan on top of it’s too much…”

  The floor in the back of the Grand Ballroom parted. That’s where I had put the massive Christmas tree before. Gertrude Hunt was doing something…

  “We’ll take it day by day,” Sean said.

  Something rumbled underneath the floor. A massive foxglove tree emerged from the depths of the inn, spreading huge branches through the ballroom. The long tree limbs dripped flower buds, still closed but tipped with faint lavender. I had no idea Gertrude Hunt had that hidden away. The inn didn’t show it to me the last two Treaty Stays. But then we had barely celebrated. Hard to be excited about holidays when you know your inn will be empty.

  “Wow,” Sean said.

  “That’s why they call it the Empress tree. Wait until it blooms.”

  Magic tugged on me. Someone had crossed the boundary of the inn.

  “Back camera.”

  Gertrude Hunt tossed the video feed from the back camera onto the screen. A tall man strode through the back field toward the inn. A two-tone cloak, dark green on one side and black on the other, wrapped his shoulders, elaborately draped and secured with an ornate metal pin in the shape of a dagger. The metal of the pin shone faintly as he walked. He wore a complex layered robe, charcoal and accented with bright green, and carried a long staff tipped with three claws. The claws clutched a blue jewel the size of a medium apple. Two blades curved around the jewel, turning the staff into a halberd. A deep hood hid his head.

  A small creature about three feet tall walked by him, holding on to his cloak with a dark brown raccoon hand. Fuzzy with cream and brown fur, it moved upright on two legs, the fur dense and thick on its body, but slicker and darker below its knees and elbows. A long fluffy tail curled into a squirrel-like S behind it. Its head was round, with a short dark muzzle and an adorable cat nose. Its eyes were round too, and huge, glowing with pale yellow when they caught the fading light. Its ears were layered, frilly and trembling, pointing downward like two floppy flowers on the sides of its head. As it walked, it must’ve heard a noise, because its ears snapped upright and it froze, terrified, standing on one skinny foot, its tail fluffed out so the fur stood on end like spikes.

  The person in the cloak kept walking.

  The small creature shook, seemingly torn, dashed after him, and clutched at the hem of his cloak again.

  The Drífan’s representative had arrived.

  2

  Sean met the Drífan by the door. It swung open in front of him without me having to ask Gertrude Hunt, which made me ridiculously happy. He gave the guest a one-second look and stepped aside, inviting the Drífan to enter. The cloaked person stepped into the sitting room.

  “Welcome to Gertrude Hunt,” I said. I decided that meeting him in the front room was the best strategy. The less time he had to spend in the inn, the better.

  The Drífan inclined his head. The small creature by his feet looked ready to faint from stress.

  “Please sit.”

  A smooth voice issued forth from under the hood. “I shall stand.”

  I sat on the couch. Orro loomed in the doorway to the kitchen on my left, while Caldenia perched in a padded chair by the window on the far right, sipping her tea and pretending to not be a part of this.

  The guest drew back his hood. The same set of genes that gave rise to humans, vampires, and Otrokars had spread far through the galaxy, but one look at the Drífan, and you knew this wasn’t a sibling, but a distant cousin at best. His otherness slapped you in the face.

  His face was all angles, lacking the human softness. His nose was sharply cut, just like his cheekbones, and his nostrils resembled that of a cat rather than a human. Light and dark patterns colored his walnut-brown skin, the kind you would see on a piece of polished red agate. They weren’t tattooed on or drawn; instead they seemed to be a natural pigmentation of his epidermis. His wide amber eyes glowed slightly with an eerie light, and the hand holding his staff had long, amber-colored claws. His hair, straight and loose, fell in a grey curtain around his face. He was beardless, but long grey whiskers hung from his upper lip.

  “Greetings, innkeeper,” the Drífan said in a melodious voice.

  “Greetings, herald of Dryhten.” And I had just exhausted the knowledge of the Drífen pleasantries from Wictred’s account. We were on our own. “My name is Dina Demille. The man by the door is Sean Evans.”

  The Drífan nodded slowly. “Call me Zedas. My mistress, who is without equal, she whose heart beats with the power of a mountain waterfall, she who is resolute like the sun, elegant like the moon, unyielding like living stone, yet versatile like a stream of pure water dashing about the rocks, she who kills enemies by the thousands, she who shelters her friends, who is feared by warriors, respected by scholars, beloved by her dryht, and recognized by the Emperor, sends you her greetings.”

  “Cool,” Sean said.

  I threw him a warning glance. “We are honored.”

  “You are blessed, for she has chosen this humble inn for her visit to this realm. I’m here to show you the inner sights of her lodge so she may be comfortable in her time of hardship. Look well, innkeeper, for your eyes will see a sight not witnessed by one of your kind in hundreds of years.”

  Zedas spun the staff and drew it in a wide circle. A ripple followed it as if the air had become liquid. The space between us shimmered and a holographic projection of startling clarity appeared in the sitting room. A throne room with a raised dais supported a crude throne chipped out of soft, translucent white stone saturated with veins of crimson, so dense in places, they had turned it blood red. The carving was so primitive, it looked almost prehistoric. I would have guessed a very high-quality chicken blood jade, but that stone’s red color came from cinnabar. Cinnabar darkened to brown with exposure to light. The ancient throne sat bathed in the light from the window, and the veins were vivid and bright.

  Everything else around the throne spoke of artisan craftsmanship and restrained opulence. The floor resembled a river, with alternating ribbons of malachite and onyx the color of warm honey flowing from the dais toward the walls. Wooden columns, square and elaborately carved, rose from the floor. The wood was unstained but heavily patterned, reminiscent of acacia sealed with a clear coat of resin. The walls matched the columns, interrupted by ornate stone reliefs, delicate metal screens depicting strange birds and animals with jeweled eyes, and paintings almost ethereal in their simplicity.

  The view moved, as the carrier of the camera walked through a tall doorway to an outside balcony that wrapped all the way around the building under a protruding roof. Here the floor was polished grey stone, bordered by a matching stone balustrade. Stone columns supported a high eave. Beyond the balcony was an ocean of air. Far below, small mountains rose, cushioned with trees that from this height resembled emerald green moss. A huge bird soared on the air currents, a hybrid of an eagle and a condor, its plumage a dark shade of sapphire. It looked large enough to carry off a human.

  The projection vanished.r />
  “I trust this is sufficient,” the herald said.

  So many little details that had to be perfect. No two panels or columns matched, and the patterns were meticulous. This would be a ton of work, and we didn’t get to see a bedroom either. For all we knew, they slept in nests.

  “It is,” I said. “How many beings will accompany your liege?”

  “Myself and four others.”

  Crap. I had to make extra rooms. “What are the dietary preferences of your mistress?”

  “She prefers vegetables and fruit, cooked lightly or not at all, cold-water fish cooked well, and red meat served rare. For her first meal, she has a special request. There are no equivalent words in our language, and my mouth is old and set in its ways, so I cannot shape the sounds. I have brought this small one to speak it for me.”

  He nodded at the furry thing. It shrunk back, but Zedas looked at it. The furry creature stepped forward, clutching its hands into a single fist. The pinkie finger on its left hand was missing, the stump ragged, as if it had been sawed off. It caught me looking and curled its hands into fists.

  “Go on,” Zedas said.

  The furry beast opened its mouth and a clear voice that should have belonged to some cute Muppet issued forth. “A double Grand Burger with cheese, large fries, and a Coke.”

  You could have knocked me over with a feather.

  “Was the pronunciation satisfactory?” Zedas asked.

  “It was,” I managed.

  Zedas motioned with his hand. The furry beast scampered forward and held out a scrap of paper to me with trembling hands.

  “Thank you.” I took the paper. On it written in ink in beautiful calligraphy were the words “Rudolph Peterson” along with a sequence of numbers that had to belong to a US phone.

  The little creature dashed back and hid behind Zedas, clutching the cloak and holding the fabric like a shield between itself and us. He ignored it.

  “My mistress is gracing your inn with her presence and is willing to endure the adversity of travel so she can meet this person. He has requested this meeting and in her infinite grace, she condescended to grant it. You will inform this person tomorrow that his presence is required here on the last day of the Treaty Stay, 5:00 p.m., and you will provide my mistress with a secure location for this meeting. Should he be late, she will not wait for him. Should he be early, she will not see him before the appointed time.” Zedas looked at the beast again. “Time for your second message.”