been there, how long had he been the innkeeper, how many rooms were there, and how many bats in the walls) but the innkeeper, already regretting his previous behavior, asked the woman nothing of herself and she volunteered very little.
They talked long after the bread and the soup were gone and another bottle of wine opened. The wind calmed, listening.
The innkeeper felt then that there was no world outside, no wind and no storm and no night and no day. There was simply this room and this fire and this woman and he did not mind.
After an immeasurable amount of time the woman suggested, hesitantly, that she should perhaps sleep in a bed rather than a chair and the innkeeper bid her a good night though he did not know if it was night or day and the darkness outside refused to comment on the matter.
The woman smiled at him and closed the door to her room and in that moment on the other side of the door the innkeeper felt truly lonely for the first time in this space.
He sat by the fire in thought for some time, holding an open book he did not read, and then he retired to his own room across the hall and slept in a dreamless sleep.
The next day (if it was a day) passed in a pleasant manner. The traveling woman helped the innkeeper bake more bread and taught him how to make a type of little bun he had never seen before, shaped into crescents. Through clouds of flour they told stories. Myths and fairy tales and old legends. The innkeeper told the woman the story of how the wind travels up and down the mountain searching for something it has lost, that the howling is it mourning its loss and crying for its return, so the stories go.
“What did it lose?” the woman asked.
The innkeeper shrugged.
“The stories are different,” he told her. “In some it lost the lake that once sat in the valley where a river runs now. In others it lost a person whom it loved, and howls because a mortal cannot love the wind the way that the wind loves it in return. In the common version it has lost only its way, because the placement of the mountains and the valley is unusual, the wind gets confused and lost and howls because of it.”
“Which one do you think is true?” the woman asked and the innkeeper stopped to consider the question.
“I think it is the wind, howling as the wind will always howl with mountains and valleys to howl through, and I think people like to tell stories to explain such things.”
“To explain to children that there is nothing to fear in the sound, only sadness.”
“I suppose.”
“Why then do you think the stories continue to be told once the children are grown?” the woman asked and the innkeeper did not have a satisfying answer to that question, so he asked her another.
“Do you have stories they tell to explain such things where you are from?” he asked, and again he did not ask where that was. He still could not place her accent and could not think of anyone he had met who put the same lilting emphasis on the local tongue.
“They sometimes tell a story about the moon when it is gone from the sky.”
“They tell those here, too,” the innkeeper said and the woman smiled.
“Do they say where the sun goes when it too is missing?” she asked and the innkeeper shook his head.
“Where I am from they tell a story about it,” the woman said, her attention on the work in front of her, the steady movement of her hands through the flour. “They say that every hundred years—some versions say every five hundred, or every thousand—the sun disappears from the daytime sky at the same time the moon vanishes from the night. They say their absence is coordinated so that they may meet in a secret location, unseen by the stars, to discuss the state of the world and compare what each has seen over the past hundred or five hundred or thousand years. They meet and talk and part again, returning to their respective places in the sky until their next meeting.”
It reminded the innkeeper of another, similar story and so he asked a question he regretted as soon as it fell from his lips.
“Are they lovers?” he asked and the woman’s cheeks flushed. He was about to apologize