He gave the wall one last lingering look, certain that the secret would reveal itself the moment before he turned his gaze away. Muttering to himself, he turned and stalked across the room to Kitalia’s table.
She was seated with one other individual, an older woman who wore a smile on her face in an ever-present way. There wasn’t another chair at the table though, so he waited patiently next to her, standing near her elbow, to see how this was going to play out.
As he waited, he took a moment to look around the room. It was a circular, and wide, about fifty feet across. To his left and right were two sets of stairs leading down, each running alongside the wall and curving with it as they descended. The room was comfortably warm, though there was no fire to be seen, and there were about a dozen tables of varying size scatted about the room. Some tables were long and rectangular, with a handful of folks seated, and some were like Kitalia’s, small and round and room enough for two comfortably, three if everyone knew each other well and if there were a third chair… neither of which applied to Kre’s situation.
The two ladies spoke in hushed tones, in voices lower than Kre could make out over the din of the rest of the room. He leaned down a bit to hear better and Kitalia raised her hand and casually brushed him back as if he were nothing more than an annoying fly.
“Go sit,” she repeated, clearly annoyed now. “Somewhere over there,” she said, gesturing to an empty seat two tables away. She hadn’t even looked up at him. She simply waved him away and returned to her conversation.
Suitably dismissed, Kre tried to tell himself that he might as well move along if she was going to act like that. It didn’t help, he still knew that she had brushed him off utterly and completely and it deflated his spirit a bit seeing as how he had just caught up to her after she left him alone in the woods.
He made his way to the empty seat she had indicated, but he quickly noted that the spot at the table was already set for someone’s dinner. A metal plate bore a long, thick piece of brown bread which was itself covered with an unrecognizable piece of meat drenched in a dark reddish-brown gravy. A pile of steamed greens was heaped on the plate next to the concoction and an apple was sitting just off to one side of the plate next to a mug filled to the brim with some dark liquid. Three other men were seated at the long table, their own plates already emptied and stacked to one side and a seemingly friendly game of card ongoing between them.
Kre turned to go, figuring that he should depart before missing fourth man found Kre eyeing up his dinner, but one of the men, an older fellow with gray hair, spoke up in a soft, slow manner. “Have a seat young man. Your dinner will get cold and your cider would get warm, and that is simply not the way of things.”
The older man, having said his piece, returned his attention back to his game. He very slowly drew a card from his hand and, at a snail’s pace, set it down atop two cards the other men played. It rested there for barely a moment when, with a deftness that contradicted his earlier dawdling movement, he scooped up all three cards and stacked them neatly in front of him. “Sau,” he crowed triumphantly, chuckling to himself.