'You're teasing me.' Tika scowled, even when Otik smiled and shook his head. 'You don't take me seriously.'
'Oh, but I do, I do. This young man that sang-'
'Rian.' She said it softly, and the scowl went. 'He wasn't so young. Do you know, he had seven gray hairs?'
'Really? Seven, exactly?'
She didn't notice the tease, but nodded vigorously, her own hair bouncing off her shoulders. 'Exactly. He let three of us count them after he was done singing, and we all came up with the same number.'
'Nice of him to let you.'
'Oh, I think he liked it,' Tika said innocently. Then she frowned. 'Especially when Loriel did it.'
'Which one was Loriel?' There'd been a lot of them. After Rian had sung, the young women had walked around the Inn with their heads high, thinking noble thoughts, to Otik's vast amusement. One young man, a red- haired, spindly local with wide eyes, sat in the corner afterward determinedly mouthing lyrics to himself. His friends had seemed afraid he might sing.
Tika scrubbed fiercely at one of the barrels, tipping it. Otik steadied it for her as she said casually, 'Loriel? Oh, you know. Turned-up nose, too many freckles, shows her teeth when she laughs-it's a shame they're not straight-and she's the one with all that hair, you know, the yellow stuff?'
'Oh, is she the one with all that pretty blonde hair?' She was around a lot lately. She laughed too often for Otik's taste, but the boys her age seemed to like it. She also had a habit of spinning away from people so that her hair flew straight out and settled back. Otik had twice caught Tika practicing it.
'Do you think it's pretty, then?' Tika tried to look surprised. 'That's nice. Poor thing, she'd be pleased.' Scrub, scrub.
She began to daub her eyes. 'Oh, Otik! He liked her and not me.'
'There now.' Otik put an arm around her, thinking (not for the first time) that if he'd only found a wife, there'd be someone more sensitive to help the poor girl. He barely knew Tika's friends. 'There, now. It's not like he's your own true love, just an older lad with a good voice. You don't want him.'
Tika laughed and wiped her eyes on her arm. 'That's true. But Loriel's supposed to be my friend- what does he see in HERI'
'Ah.' Now he understood. 'Well, she's older than you.'
'Only a little. A year isn't so much.' She sniffed.
'Don't cry again.' He added, to get a smile from her, 'You'll salt the ale.' It almost worked. 'You must be patient, like that woman in the song. How did it go again?'
Tika looked wistful, forgetting her own sorrow. 'It's about a man who kisses his love good-bye and goes away forever, only she doesn't know that, and waits for him until she's old and lonely and she dies-'
'Birds sang where she died.'
Tika sighed happily. 'And all their songs were sad. Otik, am I going to end like that? Do you think I'll end up living all alone, with nobody to love or to live with, sleeping by myself and making meals for one?'
Otik looked for a long time in the mirror at the long bar's end. Finally he turned around. 'Sometimes it happens. Surely not to you, though. Now go, pretty young one, and get the last cask.'
He scrubbed the tun hard, perhaps harder than it needed.
It was noon, but there were no spiced potatoes cooking, no shouts for ale. Otik had hung a tankard upside down on the post at the bottom steps, so that even the unlettered would know not to climb up needlessly. Otik closed for every brewing, opening only when the alewort was made.
The brewing tun was clean and filled with spring water, waiting behind the bar for the malt syrup. The syrup was warmed and waiting. The yeast, the final addition to the alewort, was in a bowl on the bar.
But the hops had not yet arrived, and Otik was as impatient as Tika. before he heard slow, heavy steps on the stairs.
'Tika,' he called, 'come out.' She came from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron as he said, 'Hear that? Someone carrying a burden. Our hops have come.' He cocked an ear, listening with the knowledge of long years. 'Not as heavy as I thought. Did Kerwin not bring a full load?'
The Inn door flew open and a burlap bag waddled in, seemingly under its own power, and leaped to the floor before the tun. A kender, still doubled from his load, peered through his arched brows at them and grinned suddenly.
'Moonwick.' Otik did not say the kender's name with pleasure. Among men, the short, mischievous kender were famous for practical joking and for disregarding other people's property, and Moonwick Light-finger was famous among kender. It was said, even by sober travelers, that once when Moonwick was at Crystalmir Lake, the partying crew of a small fishing boat had woken in full gear, on deck, to find their boat lodged thirty feet off the ground between two trees. The topmost tree branches bore pulley marks, but the pulleys had been removed. It took eight men two days to get the boat down.
It was further rumored, in stories possibly started by the kender himself, that Moonwick had on separate occasions stolen the tail from a cat, the blonde hair from a human woman, and, on a night of unexplained eclipse, the moonlight itself-which was how he got his name. Otik subscribed to the more popular theory that the kender's name was a flattering corruption of Moonwit.
Moonwick smiled up at Otik. 'Here's your hops, and gods how I prayed a thousand times that they'd hop themselves here. Where's my reward?' He added, 'Gold will do.'
Otik did not smile back. 'Kerwin was bringing the hops. What happened to him?'
'You paid him in advance. He had money. He wanted to gamble.' The kender said earnestly, 'I said we could do it for anything: buttons, rocks, things in our pockets-but he wouldn't listen. He said he felt lucky.'
Otik stared at the kender. 'So he gambled for money with you? Lady of Plenty, look after your witiing orphans. What happened to him?'
Moonwick looked sad. 'He lost.'
Otik said dryly, 'I'm shocked.' As Moonwick opened his mouth in protest, Otik went on, 'Never mind. Why are you carrying the hops?'
Now Moonwick did look embarrassed and sincerely angry. 'Kerwin said that since I had his wages, I should do his work. I said that was foolish, and we argued, and finally we agreed to gamble for who made this trip.'
'Naturally you accepted. Can't pass up a game. And?' Otik suspected, but could not believe, the outcome.
The kender burst out, 'He won. I can't imagine how that could have happened. He must have cheated.'
'Undoubtedly. Well, you've been paid for your trip, but I'll give you ale for your trouble, and a meal if you wish.' Otik knelt and opened the bag, running his hands through the hops.
'I ate on the road. I shared lunch with-well, with another traveler.' The kender twiddled at the end of the short hoopak stick angled into his belt. The stick, at once the best weapon and chief musical instrument of kender, seemed to trouble him.
Years of innkeeping had made Otik alive to evasion. 'What sort of traveler?'
'Human.' Moonwick shrugged, grabbing again at the hoopak stick as it slipped in his belt. 'This thing doesn't seem to be balancing properly.'
Otik suddenly understood the kender's reluctance to speak of the fellow traveler. 'Perhaps that has to do with the purse hooked onto the end of it,' he observed.
'Purse?' The kender whirled around. The stick, naturally, whirled with him. 'I see no purse.'
'Look over your shoulder. No, the other shoulder. The drawstring is twisted over the end of your stick.' Otik sighed as the kender peered this way and that in apparent disbelief that he should ever end up with another man's belongings.
'Why, look at that! A purse, just as you say. Imagine that. How could that happen?'
'Seems incredible,' Otik agreed politely.
'And yet… Yes, I know exactly how it might have happened. You know how we use hoopaks?'
'Vaguely.' Kender could move a hoopak stick, in combat or to make a noise, faster than men could see. Otik had once seen a drunken swordsman lose a fight with an apparently unarmed kender. At the start of the fight, the kender had been five feet from the hoopak.
'Yes. Well, I was singing, and accompanying myself by whirling my hoopak to get a high note-on a dry day
