Chapter 2: The Worst Businessman in Aethermere

Chapter 2

The Worst Businessman in Aethermere

The Rusty Compass opened for business on a Tuesday morning.

Roen chose the day for no particular reason, other than the fact that he’d finally finished scrubbing the last window on Monday night and saw no point in waiting around. He unlocked the front door and set a hand-painted sign outside:

THE RUSTY COMPASS

Inn & Tavern Rooms Available.

Hot Meals.

Cold Ale.

Management Is Friendly.

Then he went back inside, poured himself a mug of ale, sat behind the bar, and waited.

…Nobody came.

He waited an hour, then two. He cleaned a glass that was already clean, a habit he had developed over his long life. He reorganised the shelves behind the bar by height, then by colour, then by height again, and briefly considered organising them alphabetically, realised most of the bottles didn’t have labels, and abandoned the idea.

This is fine, he thought. It’s the first day and people don’t know I exist yet, and word takes time.

By noon, the only living thing that had entered the Rusty Compass was a fly. It circled the common room twice before leaving through the window with an air of disappointment.

Even the fly didn’t stay…Outstanding.

Roen drummed his fingers on the bar. He had once talked a dragon out of burning a city, he’d done it calmly, over tea. He could not, apparently, convince a single person to walk through an open door and buy a drink.

Maybe the sign is bad.

He went outside and looked at it. “Management Is Friendly.” It felt… fine. That was a normal thing to write, wasn’t it? A woman walking past glanced at the sign, then at Roen standing beside it with his arms crossed and a frown, and she immediately quickened her pace.

…Perhaps I ought to smile more.

He attempted a smile, and it felt like his face was committing a minor crime.

…Perhaps I ought to smile less.

• • •

His first customer arrived at half past two.

He was a farmer with big, sun-darkened hands, and mud caked onto his boots. He stood in the doorway and looked around the common room with the cautious expression of a man entering a building he’d previously written off as a lost cause.

“You’re… open?”

“First day. I opened this morning”

“Huh.” The farmer looked around again, squinting at the clean floors. “Gregor’s finally sold it, then.”

“He practically threw it at me.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Gregor.”

The farmer sat at the bar carefully, almost testing whether the stool would actually hold his weight, which it did. He looked mildly surprised.

“Well. I’m Torben. I farm east of town. Oats, mostly.”

“Roen. I’m the new innkeeper.”

“You look a bit young for an innkeeper, boy.”

You have no idea, Roen thought. Aloud, he said, “I get that a lot. What can I get you?”

“Whatever ale you’ve got. Can’t be worse than what Gregor served. This man could make water taste like regret.”

Roen poured from the keg and slid the mug across the bar. Torben picked it up, raised it with the lowest possible expectations, like a man who had been disappointed by this building before, and drank.

He stopped…

He looked at the mug…

Then at Roen…

Then back at the mug…

“What—” His voice was quieter now. “What is this?”

“Ale.”

“This isn’t ale. I’ve had ale. I’ve had ale my entire life. This is..” He took another drink. A long one. When he set the mug down, his eyes were slightly wider. “How much?”

“Two coppers.”

Torben stared. “Two coppers?!”

“Is that too much? I can do one.”

“One cop—” Torben placed both hands flat on the bar. “Son, look, I would pay five coppers for this. Easily. Maybe more. My wife would pay more…My wife would pay considerably more, and she doesn’t even like ale.”

Interesting. I should probably charge five, then.

“Two’s fine,” Roen said, and as he said it, he realised he didn’t really care about the three extra coppers. Two felt right.

When Torben finally stood, with an expression of absolute bamboozlement on his face, he placed four coppers on the bar, twice what he owed.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. And I’m telling everyone I know.”

As he was leaving, Rien looked at the coins and felt, briefly and strangely, that he had accomplished something more meaningful than sealing a Demon Gate.

My first sale. He dropped the coins into the cash box, shook it, and they rattled inside it, lonely and hollow.

It was a start.

• • •

Torben, it turned out, was a man of both his word and considerable social reach.

By the end of the second day, seven people had come and by the end of the first week the Rusty Compass had a modest but steady evening crowd consisting of farmers, tradesmen, a few off-duty town guards and one middle-aged woman named Maren who arrived every afternoon at exactly three o’clock, ordered tea and sat in the corner reading a book thick enough to qualify as a weapon.

Roen realised he enjoyed learning their names.Their issues, problems, the smallness of them, the human nature of their problems…The kind that didn’t end with cities on fire. It felt refreshing.

What he did not like was the money.

How is it possible that I have more customers every day and less money every week?

He stared at his ledger, and it stared back, unimpressed. The problem, he was beginning to realise, was that he kept feeding people for free. Not intentionally. It just… happened. When a farmer would come in looking exhausted, and Roen would set a bowl of stew in front of him while they talked…and forget to charge for it. A travelling pedlar mentioned she hadn’t eaten since morning, and Roen brought bread and cheese “on the house” because it felt wrong not to.

I managed supply lines for five allied armies simultaneously…during a siege. And I cannot make a bar turn a profit. Have I gone senile?

As it turns out, money in his previous life had been something other people worried about. When the Archmage needed something, it appeared—because if it didn’t, the continent fell. Now he was just there, with a tavern and no concept of profit margins, and the universe clearly found this hilarious.

• • •

The storm came on the ninth day.

Roen felt it before anyone else did, of course, not magically, as his body didn’t have the reserves for weather-sensing anymore, but he had three centuries of reading the sky as if a spell diagram had carved instincts into him that didn’t need Aether. The clouds were stacking wrong, and the shift in pressure made the candle flames lean east. The birds went silent an hour too early.

Three hours out. Maybe four.

He closed the shutters, brought the sign in and lit every lantern in the common room. By late afternoon, the sky had turned the color of a bruise, and the wind was pulling at the roofs like it had a grudge.

The regulars didn’t come, he realised, and a single remark rose up in his mind. Smart. Roen made himself dinner, ate alone, and was wiping down the bar when the front door slammed open, and the storm blew a woman into his inn.

• • •

She came in sideways, shoulder first, shoving the door shut behind her with her full weight. Rain sheeted off her travelling cloak and pooled on the floorboards. Her boots were caked in thick, dark mud. A leather satchel hung across her body, clutched against her ribs like it contained something more valuable than her own life.

She pushed her hood back.

Auburn hair, dark with rain, plastered against sharp cheekbones. Green-gold eyes swept the room in a single pass—the bar, the exits, the lanterns, the man behind the counter.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Merchant, probably. Travelling alone, unless someone had fallen behind. The cloak was good quality but had been mended twice at the hem. Money had been better once. Or worse recently. The satchel was ledgers, contracts, letters, something harder to replace than silver.

Three centuries of reading people was a habit that had not died with him.

“Please tell me you have a room,” she said. Her voice was steady even if her breathing was still recovering. It was the kind of voice that had practised not shaking.

“Eight of them. As it happens, all of them are empty. You can pick your favourite.”

“And a stable?”

“Out back. How many horses?”

“One horse and one wagon.” She wiped rain from her face with the back of her hand. “The wagon has a cracked axle. I need it off the road before the mud gets worse or I’ll lose the whole thing.”

Roen was already reaching for his coat. “Show me, please.”

• • •

The wagon was fifty paces up the road, leaning badly to the right. The left rear axle had split but hadn’t snapped clean, just fractured along the grain. The kind of break that happens from sustained weight on bad roads over too many miles. The horse was looking at him very miserably. Roen didn’t blame it.

Rain hammered them both as he crouched beside the wheel, as she was holding a lantern she’d picked up from the inn without asking. He could feel her watching him, assessing whether this young innkeeper actually knew what he was doing or was about to make things worse.

The axle is oak of decent quality. The split ran about eight inches along the grain, and a carpenter would need to replace the whole thing; that’s two days of work minimum.

Or…

Or I could realign the wood fibres at the material, fibre level with a restoration weave so precise it would make the original carpenter cry.

He placed both hands on the axle, with his eyes closed, and pretended to test the wood. What he actually did was thread a hair-thin line of Aether into the split. Something finer, a thread. He found the grain of the wood the way a musician found a melody, by the note, by the tempo it carried. He did it by understanding how materials held together. He stitched the fibres back in alignment along the grain, encouraging the wood to return to what it had been before the break.

The wood didn’t heal but rather forgot it was broken. The whole “symphony” took a few seconds. He stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers.

“It’ll hold,” he said. “The split wasn’t as deep as it looked. Let’s get it to the stable.”

She stared at the axle.

Then at him.

Her eyes narrowed just slightly, just for a moment, and Roen felt something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. The uncomfortable sensation of being looked at by someone who actually saw things.

“That crack ran halfway through the beam,” she said. Quiet. Measured.

“Looked worse than it was. Water in the grain makes fractures seem deeper,” he lied practically.

A good one, he thought to himself.

The kind that would satisfy anyone who didn’t know wood, or magic, or the difference between a natural repair and an impossible one. She held his gaze for two seconds longer than was comfortable.

“…Right,” she said. “Water in the grain.”

The rain battered the lantern glass between them.

She did not believe him.

Not ideal.

But she also did not press him. Instead, she looked back at the axle, then at the wagon, and tucked the question away somewhere behind those green-gold eyes.

Dangerous. This one is dangerous.

They guided the horse down the road and into the stable behind the inn. The wheel held. The axle did not so much as groan.

The woman noticed that too.