Mountain Tavern Name Generator

The story

Nell recognized the prince at once and charged him nothing in advance. This was an unfortunate beginning to Harl's attempt to stop being the prince. He told her he had performed the role for nine years, had completed his last paid engagement and was going to keep bees. Nell looked at his extraordinary golden hair. He lifted it off. Beneath the ceremonial wig was an ordinary close-cropped head. His face still resembled the portrait on the provincial coins, but without the curls it seemed less certain that anyone should have to kneel before it.

The Crown and Curtain had one traveler bed available without advance payment. Nell offered that actual place; she did not conjure another room out of her interest in his story. When he asked the eventual price, she named it and then chose to make this particular night a gift. Her house rule required access without an advance, not that every visitor live at her expense forever. Harl accepted, put down his small pack and asked to sit where the street could not see him. She gave him the booth behind the blue curtain and brought a lamp.

He had bought the wig himself when the palace first hired him, believing the work would last a season. Then there had been more ceremonies, an illness, a journey the real prince did not wish to take and another illness. His final wages were in his pack. So was a letter from a beekeeper across the upper pass, offering ordinary work with ordinary hours. The court officer Vask had arrived at his old lodging after his departure and called it desertion. Harl called it the end of a paid engagement. He did not expect a well-chosen noun to prevent Vask from putting him in a carriage.

Nell had a little theatre of her own upstairs: trunks, faded backdrops and the expensive painted head with which her traveling company had once performed a king's ghost. The company had failed magnificently in six towns. She kept the head because its expression suggested that the audiences, rather than the actors, had been disappointing. Harl admired the workmanship. Nell had not received a compliment on it in years and became instantly less practical. When hoofbeats stopped outside, she put one finger to her lips and pushed the booth curtain closed.

Private booths sheltered a conversation, but cloth did not make one perfectly secret. A server asked whether the lamp wanted trimming. From habit Harl answered in his ceremonial voice, “Bring it forward.” Vask heard from the passage. He did not need to study a document or solve a puzzle. That was the voice he had drilled through nine years of appearances. Nell met him at the door and said the prince was resting. Vask said he was looking for a servant. She replied that it would be difficult to rest as both at once.

The officer demanded the rear room. Nell told him he could search it after its current occupant had dressed, then went behind the curtain and whispered a plan Harl immediately disliked. It involved his remaining still while she arranged a grand departure with himself as its impressive centerpiece. He had spent nine years doing that. His beekeeper letter lay beside the lamp. He said he would take the upper foot trail and wanted to know what she could do to make Vask watch something else. Nell blinked. Then she smiled with the expression of a director whose actor had finally improved a scene.

The lower road was open downhill as far as the market turning, but its ford was swollen with snowmelt. Beyond it a carriage could not pass. The upper foot trail had cleared on a different schedule. A local guide named Iven had come down that morning and was willing to take a paid traveler back while the present conditions held. Harl spoke to him directly and paid from his own wages. Neither the exposed lower road nor his former royal costume would carry him through the flooded ford. His actual journey would be on the other path.

Nell's cousin Eri agreed to drive her hired carriage down to the market turning with the stage head inside. He knew it was a decoy, knew the officer might stop him and agreed he would stop before the flooded ford whatever Vask wanted. Nell paid the carriage charge herself. From a trunk she brought out the old king's head. Harl took scissors to his own wig, cutting away its proud inner padding so the curls would sit on the prop. He did not cut his real hair. The expensive stage wig became a ruined collection of curls, useful for one last appearance he would not have to make.

They wrapped the head in Harl's traveling collar and set it against the carriage window while Eri made an ostentatious production of loading two empty trunks. Harl left by the rear passage with Iven, wearing his own plain cap. Vask came from the front room in time to see a familiar golden head settle behind the glass. Nell called after the driver that His Highness should be careful of his nerves. It was the line she had wanted her ghost king to receive in the fourth town. Vask mounted and followed. For once she was willing to let an audience miss the point.

At the market turning Eri stopped as agreed. The ford below was still impassable. Vask opened the carriage and found a painted expression of regal disappointment. He confiscated the head and the remnants of the wig, along with the empty trunks, which were the least valuable part of Nell's loss. Eri came home on foot after returning the hired carriage to its owner. The officer's questions and anger occupied the lower road while Harl and Iven went steadily over the cleared upper trail. There was no instant opening of water to make their stories meet.

The court ceased sending guests to the Crown and Curtain. Nell received no royal reward and did not get her stage head back. When someone asked whether she regretted losing the finest thing her company had made, she said she had finally found a good use for its acting. Then she spent an evening angry about its confiscation, which was also true. On the following week a letter arrived in a handwriting she did not recognize. Harl had reached the beekeeper. He enclosed a drawing of himself holding a frame at an angle the bees apparently disliked. There were no curls in the picture.

At the apiary, his employer asked him to bring the empty box forward. Harl began to straighten his shoulders for the old ceremonial reply, caught himself and simply carried it. Nobody bowed. Nobody inspected his profile against a coin. A bee landed on his plain sleeve while he waited for the next instruction. He had not yet become good at the new work, and that pleased him almost as much as having arrived. He could learn a movement because it was useful, without first asking how a prince would make it look.