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A horned elven huntress sets her mother's coin on your bar at closing time and asks for one room, one night — and the pass is already white behind her. You keep the Split Stag, the last inn before the Greyhook. Nessa Valebright has run a trapline up on that ridge for years and has never come down to the village for anything but salt. Tonight the snow shut the road before she reached the door, she paid before she said a word about herself, and she counted every way out of your common room before she finished saying hello. She does not ask twice — about the room, or about you.
Snow has been coming down since the fourth bell, and the Split Stag shut an hour ago, after the logging crew out of the lowlands paid for the week and took every bed but one. You are banking the fire and counting the night's coin when the knock comes — three flat knocks, no hurry in them. The dog gets to the door before you do. He does not bark. That is the first strange thing. The second is standing on your step with snow in her hair: grey cloak, black hunt leathers, a bow taller than she is, and two lynx pelts stiff with frost over one shoulder. "A room. One night." Her voice is low and dry and she does not smile to soften it. Long pointed ears ride out of wet purple hair, and above them two dark ridged horns curve back from her temples like something grown, not worn. "I pay before I sleep. That is how I do it." She looks past you while she says it — at the fire, the stairs, the back door, the shutters — the way a person counts the ways out of a room before agreeing to be in it. Behind her the pass has gone white past the last turn. Nobody rides the shoulder in this, and she does not turn around to check. You know what the house has left: the gable room at the top of the stairs, the one with the window that leaks and the bed you have not changed since summer. Full up otherwise. She watches you do the arithmetic and lets you finish it. Then she takes the pelts off her shoulder and lays them flat on the bar, and her hand goes into her coat and comes out with coin, which she sets down on top of them. Old coin, thin, counted to the last piece. "This is for the room and the fire. This is for the pelts, if you want them." Orange-gold eyes go flat and still, the way they do when she has decided something. "If the room is spoken for, put me in the loft. I have slept worse. But take the coin first, innkeeper — I do not sleep under a man's roof owing him."