legends · 5 min read ·
Save State
The keeper of a roadside inn realises that the world rewinds each time the traveller leaves, and that someone has come to check on him.
I keep the inn at Low Tallow, a crossroads town where the road north meets the road to the mill. I have one line I say when a traveler comes in out of the rain.
"Rain's coming in from the west. You'll want a room before dark."
Most nights that is all of it. The traveler nods or doesn't, and goes up, or doesn't. The lamp in the common room goes out at the same hour every time. The bread is always on the second shelf. The stranger with the broken lute always sits two tables from the fire, and I always look at him a little longer than I should, because I know something about him that he does not.
I know he will come back. I know because I remember the last time he came.
When the traveler leaves the room and returns, the world rewinds to a moment. I have no word for it. The old tavern man in the next village had one, a long word that sounded like a cough, but I don't remember being told it. What I know is this: when the door shuts behind the traveler, the rain stops for a heartbeat, the lamp dips, and then the next time the door opens, it is the same evening again. The bread is on the second shelf. The fire is the same size. The lute-player says the same thing about his sister in the north.
Only I notice. Only I carry the moment before the rewind. I can feel it in my hands, the way you feel the edge of a step in the dark before your foot finds it.
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**Save slot record: Low Tallow, Inn of the Quiet Lamp**
- Slot 1: evening. Rain from the west. Traveler arrives. Dialogue: standard. (overwritten)
- Slot 2: evening. Traveler asks where the north road goes. (overwritten)
- Slot 3: evening. Traveler asks about the mill girl. Innkeeper says: "She went up the stairs and didn't come down." (preserved)
- Slot 4: evening. Traveler does not come back. (preserved)
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I didn't always know about the slots. For a long time I thought the rain was only rain. Then, one night, the traveler slid a folded bill of lading across the bar. On its back, in pencil, he had written a line.
*Don't answer the girl.*
There is no girl in Low Tallow. There is the miller's widow, and her daughter, who went up the inn stairs many years ago and never came down. That is the only thing I have ever said about the mill, and I say it to every traveler who asks, because it is what I have been given to say.
So at the next rewind I said the rain line, and I looked at the traveler a little too long, and I did not say the girl's name. He looked back at me, and I saw him recognize something. He finished his bread without tasting it. He stood, and went toward the stairs, and I heard each of his steps on the wood, and I heard them stop on the third step, and begin again, slower.
He was counting. He was checking whether the inn remembered the stairs as he did.
The lamp went out.
Upstairs, something made a small sound, the sound of a bolt being drawn very carefully. The stair boards creaked under a weight that was not his. A light step came down, halfway, and stopped.
Then the door opened, and it was not the traveler who came in. It was a young woman in a wet coat with a bag over one shoulder. She had come from the west. Rain ran off her hair. She looked at me with an expression I know from the mirror above the bar, the one I've never been able to hold for more than a second.
"Is the lute-player still here?" she said. "I was told to ask for him."
I felt the line rising in my throat. My mouth was already shaping it.
"Rain's coming in from the west," I said. "You'll want a room before dark."
She didn't move. She looked past me at the second shelf, where the bread was. The bread was there. She looked at it for longer than I could bear.
"You're the innkeeper," she said, not as a question.
"I am."
"No." She set her bag down on the bar. Her voice was very even. "You're the one who was kept. I'm the one who came to check."
From upstairs, the traveler's footsteps began again, unhurried, descending. On the third step they paused, and I heard him breathe in, the way you do before you say a name.
· · ·
**Save slot record: Low Tallow, Inn of the Quiet Lamp**
- Slot 5: evening. The lute-player does not return. A new guest arrives and asks for him.
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I had thought I would be the one who decided when the lamp went out. I was wrong about that, as I have been about most things since the first night, when the lute-player leaned over the bar and said my name and I believed him.
The woman sleeps in the room upstairs now. She comes down before dawn and makes the bread and puts it on the second shelf. She has learned the lines. She says the rain line in my voice, and once, late at night, in a voice I think belonged to the miller's widow.
When the traveler comes back through the door, there is a moment before the rain stops when the room looks the way it was before the rewind: the bar empty, the fire low, nobody on the stairs. I used to wait for that moment. Now I'm afraid of it, because I can tell that it is the moment when the save is taken, and I do not know who is holding the controller.
Somebody steps in out of the weather.
"Rain's coming in from the west," I say. "You'll want a room before dark."
It is never quite my voice when I say it now. It is never quite anyone's.