Just as we began to sit down, a voice hollered over the general din. “You cum-guzzling dickwad!” the voice sounded familiar, and I felt a smile pull at my lips.
It had come from the booth next to us.
“You try to steal from me again and I’ll rip your arms off and shove them up your asshole! Now, are you all going to play properly, or am I going to have to boot you all in the ass first?”
The voice came from one of the men at the table covered in gaming chips. I looked over. The man who was shouting wore a deep hood so I couldn’t see his face, but I would have known that voice anywhere.
He slammed his fist down on the table, making the beer mugs shake, and pushed his head back, leaning forward to look his companions all in the eyes.
“Jacques,” I said, louder than I’d intended to.
The hooded man turned quickly to look at me, reaching up and pushing his hood back as he did so, and revealing a very familiar face. Jaques had not changed much in the years that I’d seen him. His dark hair fell to his shoulders and his equally dark mustache was curled into circles at each end. His eyes were nut brown and piercing above his sharp nose. He wore a bright red vest under a black cloak.
“William,” he said, “Well, I’ll be buggered by a herd of stray cats. What are you doing here?”
Jacques’ insults had never made much sense, but I was used to them. Amelia was not, however, and her eyes seemed to be popping out of their sockets as she stared, slack-jawed, at Jacques and his table. Veronica folded her arms over her chest and simply watched as Jacques swiveled all the way around so that his back was to the three other men seated in his booth. The three men sitting with him glared at us, obviously displeased that we’d interfered with whatever was occurring in their booth.
“I might ask you the same thing,” I said to Jacques. “But I think we’re interrupting your game?” I took a closer look at the table. There were a bunch of coins piled up in front of each man, and a much larger pile in the center of the table. Gambling. Well, the years hadn’t changed Jacques’s habits any more than they had changed his looks.
“Actually, yes, you are,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a round.” He held up some dirty-looking playing cards in one hand, showing me a full house. With a grin and a wink, he whispered, “as you can very well see, shan’t be long until I make off with every last coin these fuckers have. Then, the game will have an intermission, and they’ll scrounge up whatever else they have that’s worth gambling with. In the meantime, why don’t you order yourselves a beer?”
I turned back to Amelia and Veronica as Jacques and the three disgruntled men with him put their heads down and kept playing.
“That’s Jacques?” Amelia asked. “Looks like he lives up to his reputation.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d forgotten how vulgar his language is. It’s all part of his charm though.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to end up in a game of cards with him,” Amelia said. “I have a feeling he has far too much experience with that pastime.”
“He certainly does,” I said. “And he reckons he has Loku, the god of good luck, on his side. I never know with him if he even takes it seriously himself. He does have his share of luck though. With the things he gets up to, he should have been dead many times over by now.”
Veronica nodded. “How he hasn’t been kicked out of this tavern, I’ll never know. They put up with a lot in this establishment, but he’s caused so many fights, I would have tossed him out for good by now if it were up to me.”
A pleasant voice cut into our conversation. “Can I take your order?”
I looked up to see one of the beer wenches standing by our table. She wore a bright yellow dress with a green dragon’s head painted over the bust. The dragon’s red eyes were painted right where her nipples pressed against the fabric of the dress. Was that deliberate? I glanced at the other wenches, noticing their clothing in greater detail now, and discovered that their dresses all had motifs placed in similarly provocative areas.
The wench held a small wooden board in her left hand and a metal stylus in her right.
“I’ll be your barmaid for the evening,” she said. “Anything you need, just let me know.”
So she was a barmaid, not a beer wench. Good to know. Maybe they didn’t call them beer wenches in Brightwater.
“I’ll take a Dragon’s Breath Ale, please,” Veronica said.
“Dragon’s Breath Ale,” the barmaid repeated as she pressed the stylus into the wax-covered surface of the board. She scrawled a couple of symbols into the wax. Even though I couldn’t read, I could tell there were too few of the symbols to make up real words. Maybe the barmaid, like me, couldn’t read, so she’d devised her own written language so she could remember patrons’ drink orders?
The barmaid turned to look at Amelia and me. Her eyebrows raised slightly when she saw the tattoos on our arms, but she said nothing about them. “And what will you two have to drink?”
“Uh,” I hesitated. “What do you have?”
“Well, we have ales, stouts, lagers. Each comes in pale, amber, and dark flavors. We also have a range of high strength beers, as well as some smoked ales.”
“You certainly seem to have a broad range,” I said.
The barmaid smiled. “We have a lot of travelers here. We try to cater to every taste.”
I turned to Amelia. “Do you know what you
