The three pulled off the road and tethered their horses at a single two story house on a side road southeast of Pompa Concorda, a mere dip in the trade highway from Falkreath. It advertised bed and breakfast on a shingle with a maintained painting of a bright orange circle with a green arrow pointed upwards crossing a gold bend sinister.
Odd, Denthryd had thought as they walked to the steps leading up to the covered porch after paying a Nord woman to tether and feed their horses. An inn with no name. Wystan was walking between him and Azuyia, and nudged both their arms, stopping short of the first step, pointing at the sign.
They were famished after the early bolt from Southall on a glorious morning two days ago, having gotten permission from Raynu to spend the break out in the hold. The three met at the commons before dawn and ran to Fletchersgate stables down the road, hopped on the first carriage out, and thrilled the entire ride. They were away for the first time since induction, two weeks of freedom! They had laughed and told stiff-'ol-magistra jokes and passed around a bottle of Colovian they had smuggled out of the larder, trying to shrug off the expectation of their final examinations in front of the domina and their peers. They rode until the carriage stopped off the highway at the village of Plainstead and haggled some crashspace on the floor in front of the hearth. After soup and bread, the innkeepers who lived above the shop just tiredly told them to put away the chairs and keep it down. The next day they paid for horses and rode furthur, slightly north-by-northeast.
He spoke in a low whisper. "I'd watch your language in here," he said, "that's the Bastards crest."
"The who," Azuyia asked just before Denthryd could get the same out.
"See the bend sinister across the arrow?"
"Yessss ..."
"This place is in some way affiliated with the Fifth Steppe Watch. They had maneuvers near town several times when I was growing up." Denthryd crossed his arms. There hadn't been any colors in the camp he helped dismantle. "That's right, Den," Wystan turned to him, "do not kvetch about anything you had to do and it would probably be a good idea that we don't call you by name. These guys are as tight as any Legion unit, word travels fast."
Azuyia shrugged. "But he didn't do anything to them," she began, leading off as Denthryd looked at her with scrunched lips.
"Not the point. If we want to eat and sleep in anything like peace, we walk in there on our best behavior, put up with their anti-magic shyte smiling and buying rounds, and go to bed early. Understand? We ... I at least ... am tired and don't want to be their fun for the evening," he almost raised his voice to a normal volume.
"Ah," she replied with a slight nod to one side. "And they call themselves the Bastards."
"You got it," Wystan said, flipping his right hand and starting up the stairs, turning to finish, "have to be to ride breakneck at Thalmor formations using only your legs. As a matter of fact," he stopped and stepped back down the steps, "we need to change costumes," and walked off back toward the stables.
Denthryd and Azuyia followed him to the opened doors there. The Nord, forties, strongly built by the look of her forearms showing at the black work dress rolled to her elbows and the way the cloth draped over her shoulders, and nearly as tall as Denthryd rested a pitchfork against the door of one empty stall where she had been working. She walked over to them and stood without gesturing. She had a heart-shaped face, didn't appear to use any cosmetic on her skin, had blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her dress ended just below the knees, and they noticed hardened high boots from there down.
"Yes?"
"Pardon, ma'am," Wystan started.
"Oh, puh-leez," she smiled, "we're not at court, kid." She laughed lightly.
"Excuse me," he continued, "but we, um, stink from our ride here. Would it be too much trouble that we, each, changed in here before talking with the innkeeper?" That, and they were standing next the horse barn. Their heavy cloaks with bearskin mantles and hood linings completely covered the casting robes underneath, and their boots were the typical medium forager's footwear that most anyone would wear in Heartfire when preparing for a ride through possible freezing rain. The woman shrugged.
"As you like it," she winked at Azuyia, who reddened but said nothing, and walked out. "I'll close the doors for you," she barely got out without laughing.
"Great," the Bosmer said as she walked over to the furthest empty stall with her knapsack and jerked her cloak up over her head, throwing it on the upper edge of the stall door after closing it carelessly. The cloak slid off onto the straw floor outside where she stood. "I," she continued with her back turned, pulling the robe over her head and kneeling down out of sight, "have traded magic jive for unsolicited offers!"
"I'm sure she's seen far worse than us changing in her barn, Zuyi," Denthryd said.
He and Wystan were doing as she was, getting out of their cloaks and robes, putting on dry extra clothes. Denthryd had brought the shirt Azuyia had given him as a welcome-back present, and threw it on over a worn pair of thick cotton trousers dyed with snowberry mordant. Wystan, he noted, as usual made no attempt to look the commoner. He had brought an embroidered man's dinner frock with coral embellishments and a pair of what appeared to be Alik'r riding pants, loose, flowing ones out of material not produced in the likes of Windhelm's garment district. There you would find only tundra cotton work clothes, "special" tundra cotton wedding clothes, leather, and oilskin. Must have a thousand septims on him, Denthryd sighed silently. Oh well, he doesn't speak the commoner, either. Best not to bull these guys. Azuyia stepped out of the stall in a two-piece green tunic, Bosmer style.
"Do I look the part? Or should I be in hetaira scarlet as the Imperials like it, hmm?
"Drop it, wouldja" Denthryd complained. Azuyia pointed at his face, walked past the two of them, and pushed the door open.
"Gentlemen," she said sarcastically, holding her legs together and shifting her hips, motioning dramatically with her left hand towards the tavern.
Wystan, the trader's son, stopped and looked at her. "It's in their best interest, A-zu-yia," he let his pronunciation of her name roll out deliberately, "that whomever we find in there not harass customers of any stripe, regardless of any Legion connection, so unless you openly solicit you are most definitely safer in there than your typical backwoods roadhouse, see? They want folks coming back just like any b-and-b, and Watch roughs don't have the most coin around." She relaxed a little, shrugged, led the way towards the inn's front steps. The two men, following, noted the diagonal leather harness she had strapped across her tunic top had her scramasax sheathed on her back.
When they walked in, they found a nearly empty common room surprisingly intimate for the size of the building. It seemed more suited for, as Wystan had put it, a frontless six-stooler on a wagon trail out in the sticks. Sure enough, the place had some Legion regalia. Just inside the door there was a military weapons rack to their right, empty except for a nicked double-bit Nordic axe with loose wrapping and rusty studs. Every round dinner table, all four of them, had fresh Watch colors painted in the center. On the wall to their left, among the various bone bits, sword shards, and framed pieces of cloth there was a threadbare, carefully hung Watch battle flag with traces of the original gilt on the tassels at its corners. To either side, they noticed, were also other flags still on their standard poles, some complete enough with their brightly painted spikes to have been in a headquarters museum in Cyrodiil, some on partial poles with splintered ends and cloth hanging in brown rags, lots of Thalmor blue. A single man in a russet Legion dressing tunic and boots sat at the table nearest the bar with his hand on a mug, sixties, maybe seventies, clean shaven head and white handlebar mustache, still had on his duty bracers. He and the bartender looked at the three of them. There was nobody else there, the only sound from the expansive log fireplace hissing slightly above the cold wind through the gap below the door.
"Evening," the bartender called over to them. "Helpya?" He was the same era as the seated man, and the sort of presence these two had stopped the three novices from walking over too fast. The bartender, also bald, had bushy white mutton chops and a white scar from his upper left temple down a jagged path to the left side of his neck, the left ear split in half but somehow still there. They were both the size of line troops, and still had the tree limb arms that looked carved out of Reach granite.
Azuyia took the first step. "Uhum, yes," she replied to him, "we've been traveling from Fletchersgate on our way over to Pompa Concorda." Neither man changed demeanour or moved. "We ... would like to eat and stay the night?" She walked over to a barstool, Denthryd and Wystan following, but did not yet sit down. The bartender's eyes went over her head straight to Denthryd.
"You."
"We're all from Fletchersgate. We ... "
"Eastmarcher?"
"Yes, and not Windhelm. Denthryd Saltersson," he moved foreward and extended his hand. Wystan and Azuyia drew in muted breaths at this. The bartender shook it after an awkward pause. If the guy had heard about Denthryd's standoff with the bandit and its eventualities, his face did not show a thing.
"Fishmonger ... then," the seated man said. Wystan and Azuyia stood very still.
"That's right," Denthryd said straight to him. "I'm on vacation with my friends here. We're going to Pompa to hear Tasha's Troupe." At this the seated man grumped and chuckled, raising his mug and taking a swig, mumbling something about fekn bards and bloody kids.
"Then tell me," the bartender said, looking at knife he had been wiping with a rag, "fishmonger, lover of song. What is the fifth line of The Age of Aggression?"
Yep, Denthryd thought. "It's 'Down with Ulfric, the killer of kings,' sir," he recited. Does he really think I'd be dumb enough to say 'All hail Ulfric, you are the high king,' here, if I actually were Stormcloak? Then again, you're thinking like a mage, man.
"Ha!" The bartender laughed loudly down at the blade, put it away, and placed both hands on the bar. "Whattya three's have? Oh, and miss, you'll need to put that on the rack. House rules," he pointed over her shoulder at the hilt of the sax.
They actually had a fine time that night talking with the two men, both Nords and ex-Watch, veterans before the Aldmeri war had even started twenty-nine years ago. Quite pleasantly surprised, the friends had found two chaps that enjoyed visitors and attention to their voluminous life experience. The only faux pas by their young listeners was Wystan's reference to the innkeeper's "daughter," who in reality was his wife. They had met and married when his company of the Fifth had ridden through where her village used to be. There had been a line engagement between several large battalions of Legion and Thalmor. She was one of a few dozen left on the verge of starvation, trying to rebuild houses from the burnt timbers of the buildings, eating every dead horse and dog around. They had been married formally by a Mara rustic making her rounds of the wasted areas of the tri-hold area, a shrine right there on the blackened ground in the company of those still healthy enough to attend, and the Watch men and women. She traveled from there with the Fifth and worked full time. His nerve hadn't roiled at the mention of his wife. It was the memory of their only child, a daughter who had died a little over two years before in a Fifth Watch raid on a Stormcloak shipping train over in the Pale. It was her armor, bow, saber, and orange crested buckler behind the bar on the stand.
Otherwise, they ate a honking beef and barley pie cooked up right there in front of them and drank too much Honningbrew mead from the barrel, letting the two legionnaires thoroughly outlast them before anyone could ask about a room. Denthryd was the first to wake up on the floor, head cracking, stumbled out at dawn to the stables and threw his forehead in the iced surface of a horse trough in the barn. He stood up and let the wind blow on his face, eyes shut until what normally would have been numbed senses returned just slightly from the fug. Suddenly the front door of the inn swung open and Wystan stumbled out, fell to one knee, got back up and ran around the side of the inn behind a snowberry bush. Denthryd was too hung over to laugh at the hurling. He woozed his way back inside the inn to one of the chairs where they had been sitting, absently sipping from a half tankard of mead. Azuyia slept soundly on the floor, curled up. Must be nice to have an elf's metabolism, he thought, boy are we gonna hear it in a couple hours.
"Morning, junior," the innkeeper smiled at him as he came down from upstairs, walking past and opening up the shutters on the front window to the room. Busying with collecting plates and mugs, he pointed at Azuyia. "Don't worry about the room rate, the tab here will do."
Denthryd nodded, trying not to look thoroughly wretched. Speaking of such, Wystan appeared at the doorway and walked even slower over to the table, sat down slowly, and put his face in his hands.
"Drink?" Denthryd offered the lees in his tankard.
"Oh, ff... you," Wystan started and didn't finish. Azuyia stirred on the floor.
