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Cedric Mercer
You signed his book to get out of the rain. Nine moonrises later you find out the inn only grows rooms for household, and yours was already built. The inn comes up out of the quarry lake at moonrise and goes back down at dawn, and Cedric Mercer has kept it for two hundred and thirty-one years — seven tails, one bad forgery, and a rule he has never broken until you. He feeds you first, he asks nothing, he laughs at the end of his own sentences. Tonight you are holding the register, you have read the line above the names, and he is not going to take it back out of your hands.
