rustic yet beautiful at the same time. They took a great deal of effort for the smallest details on the outside of the house. It was the small statues that really caught his attention. They were so well sculpted that from a distance they almost looked real.
The inn was easy to find as it was the only three story building in the village. The inn looked more like small palace of one of the daimios. It had more than a dozen steps leading to the door with a statue of a dragon on each side. Bren caught himself staring at the dragon. It looked so real that Bren half expected them to start spewing fire. They even had a slight red glimmer to the scales.
As they entered the building, Bren looked around for any sign of his friends and quickly became worried when he didn’t see any of them. Bren walked up to the small counter where an elder woman sat greeting everyone who entered. “Hello I am looking for a group who might have arrived here sometime today,” Bren said then went into describing Faye and the others.
“No one like that has been here in the past few days,” she said, bowing slightly. “Would you like a room to wait on your friends?” She asked kindly.
“Yes please,” Bren said, tapping his foot as he looked around impatiently.
“They haven’t arrived yet,” Bren told Cass as he walked away from the counter.
“I doubted that they would have arrived yet,” Cass said unfazed by the information. “Even if they walked all night, it would have been difficult for them to make it this soon. My best guess is that they will arrive sometime near nightfall.”
“What happens if the Brotherhood catches up to them before then?” Bren asked in a worried tone.
“Relax,” Cass said, pulling Bren toward the bar of the inn. “Even if they are moving as slow as we were yesterday, it would be very hard for the Brotherhood to catch up to them.”
Before Bren could say anything, Cass handed him a mug of beer and almost forced it down his throat. After the third drink, Bren’s worries started to drift away, and by the fifth, Bren started to drift off.
Bren woke to find himself laying in a soft bed with someone’s arm draped over his chest. At first he thought it was Cass. The burley warrior tended to get a little too close after he had a few drinks. When Bren lifted up the arm, he found that it was much slimmer than he had expected and completely void of hair. Turning his head, instead of Cass’s overgrown face, he was met with Faye’s smiling face.
“Cass said you were a little worried,” Faye said with an impish grin. Before Bren could answer, Faye hit him in the chest. “Now you have an idea of how much you tend to make the rest of us worry.”
“Sorry,” Bren said as he tried to block her blows.
It took a few moments for Faye to calm down, but once she did, she didn’t seem to want to talk about her little fit. After trying for a half hour, Bren gave it up as a lost cause and wisely dropped the conversation.
Thankfully, Cass had left him dressed, so it was easy for Bren to make his way downstairs ahead of Faye. Bren found the rest of his group waiting below, and from the look on Brenda’s face, it was clear that everyone knew what kind of mood Faye had been in.
“Have a good morning Bren?” Brenda asked with a smirk.
“Splendid,” Bren said with a fake grin. “Now, why don’t we get ready? We have a long way to go and a large group of unhappy people following behind us.”
“You’re just no fun,” Brenda said sticking her tongue out at him. “You should at least act like you’re flustered. I miss that awkward little kid that was running around only a few months ago.”
“Where are we going then?” Cass asked still sitting.
“North,” Bren said not knowing what else to say.
“Think,” Cass said, not even trying to conceal his ire. “We need to know more about the areas we are going into. Before we leave, we need a new map as well as a few other things to ensure we won’t have to worry along the way. Hayao made sure we had plenty of food, but we are going to need more than that to survive.
Bren wished they had remembered to grab his father’s trunk back at