The Open Mouth

An inn is meant to be a place you can shut the door on the road. The Open Mouth has forgotten how. Its door has not closed in living memory — by design or by rot, and nobody can tell you which anymore, which is somehow the most honest thing about the place. The name is a joke the building is too tired to stop making: a mouth that will not close, running its hours out on an argument that has no bottom.

You'll come to it up from Four-Arch Ford, once Bett has poled you across and taken her toll in a true story. The Crossing is a country of thresholds — four tuned arches, a ford, a barrow-hall, a moot — and the Open Mouth is the one threshold that has given up being one. People do not pass through it. They accumulate in it.

The proof is scratched into the doorframe: evenings lost here: 41, tallied in at least three different hands. Which tells you the argument predates its own excuse. The excuse, when it finally arrived, was a fitted bronze piece — dredged up out of the ford a month back, patient and green and belonging, as far as anyone can prove, to no one. Three delegations have taken up three corners of the same table to fight over it: the Bell's man, the Knot's woman, the Key's clerk, each swearing the metal answers to their banner. The Bell's man says the fittings ring true when struck. The Knot's woman says the alloy carries a salvager's patience. The Key's clerk says the locking-tab is a design older than any of their three houses. All three are a little right, which is worse than any of them being simply wrong.

What nobody at that table will look at is the fifth peg on the wall — bare, and bare so long the dust has stopped bothering to settle on it. The dredged piece is the thing the argument points at; the fifth peg is the thing the argument is dancing around. Ask about it and the table goes quiet in the particular way of people who hoped you wouldn't.

The innkeeper has made a study of not being drawn in. Cider used to come to the table; now the jug is simply left within reach, the way you'd leave water beside an argument that shows every sign of being thirsty a good while yet. It is the only sensible thing anyone in the room is doing.

For a traveler, the Open Mouth is the last warm noise before the cold business at the barrow-hall — the last place to sit before the Wardmoot beyond the ford, where Iliana reads the oaths off a card and asks you to pick the verb you'd want carved on your door. The inn is where the argument stays soft. The barrow-hall is where it turns into a choice. Worth marking the difference before you walk on.

There is, if you look, one thing here worth carrying out. The dredged piece came to the table wrapped in a length of colorless cloth — not undyed so much as *un-*dyed, blank the way a scraped charter is blank, on purpose, by something, a long time ago. When the Moot finally shelves the piece beneath the fifth peg, nobody objects if you fold the wrapper into your satchel. It fits nothing. It weighs almost nothing. You'll be surprised, later kingdoms on, how present a nothing can learn to be.

The Open Mouth keeps company with the road's other honest houses — The Crossed Keys up on the pass, where the only coin is barter, and Clasp Gate further on, where a woman with a ledger takes one true thing about you instead of gold. All three know the same secret: that what a traveler most needs to set down is rarely something you can pay with silver. The Open Mouth simply never learned how to charge for it — or how, having opened, to close.