Left Behind by the Hero, I Opened an Inn and the Sword Saint Never Checked Out novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gate at the Fork
The Hero marches out and calls Hanae a good neighbor; she hangs a lantern on her grandmother's empty house, and in the rain a limping stranger with a wrapped sword takes the first room. Hook: the name in her ledger matches the notice that the Sword Saint has retired.
Hanae Morikawa had packed the lunch at four in the morning, and she was still holding it when the Hero rode past her.
The whole village of Mikage had come out to the fork in the road to see the party off.
There were banners and drums, and a herald in a blue coat stood on a cart.
The Hero rode at the front of forty soldiers, in white and gold armor so bright it hurt to look at.
It was Kaito Asahina, who had lived next door to her for twenty-four years.
He had once cried in her father's barn because he was afraid of a goat.
Six months ago the Dawn Blade had come out of its stone for him, and now he was going north to kill the Demon King.
She pushed to the front of the crowd with the bundle in both hands.
"Kaito!"
He saw her.
His horse stopped, and the drums faltered, and the crowd made a little noise, because everyone in Mikage knew the two of them.
"Hanae," he said, smiling the new smile he had learned from the capital.
"I made your lunch. The rice balls you like, and the pickled plum."
He leaned down and took the bundle.
He did not open it, and he did not look at it.
He passed it to a squire behind him, who stuffed it into a saddlebag between a coil of rope and a bag of oats.
Then Kaito turned to the crowd and raised his voice.
"My dear neighbors," he said. "And this is Hanae, a good neighbor from my village, who has always been kind to me."
The people around her sighed.
A woman in the second row said, quite loudly, "Poor thing."
Kaito looked straight at Hanae for one more second, and she waited for the rest of it.
She waited for "wait for me", or "I'll write", or even her name said the way he used to say it.
He raised his hand and rode on.
A girl in a gold-trimmed cloak glanced back from a white horse and smiled at Hanae.
It was a small, pleasant smile, and Hanae understood exactly what it meant.
Then the herald unrolled a scroll and read out the last announcement of the day.
"By order of the Crown!" he cried. "The Sword Saint, Jiro Kurogane, retires today with honor!"
"He served the kingdom twelve years and trained the Hero himself, and the Crown thanks him!"
The crowd cheered.
He nailed a copy of the notice to the gatepost of the empty house at the corner of the fork.
It was her grandmother's house, which was hers now, and he did not even ask.
Hanae stood in the dust and listened to the drums get smaller.
She was not going to cry in front of the woman who had said "poor thing".
She turned around, walked into her grandmother's posting house, and kicked open the shutters.
It had been empty for six years.
The tatami was rotten in places and the roof dripped and there were swallows nesting in the kitchen.
It also had six rooms, a good well, a bathhouse, and the best corner on the only crossroads for thirty miles.
Her grandmother had run it as an inn, and everyone had said it was a shame when she died.
Hanae went to the shed and found the long ladder, and she found a paper lantern with a cracked frame and half of a candle.
She dragged both to the front of the house.
"Hanae," said the neighbor who had said "poor thing", from the road. "What are you doing?"
"Opening an inn."
"Today?"
"Tonight."
"You've never run an inn!"
"I've been cooking for travelers since I was nine," Hanae said, and she started up the ladder.
By dusk the lantern was lit.
It was a poor, lopsided thing, but it threw a yellow circle onto the road.
She had swept out one room and scrubbed the kitchen.
She had chased the swallows out with a broom, one at a time.
Nobody came.
The crowd had gone home, and the road was empty, and clouds rolled in from the north.
Then the rain began, hard and cold, and she climbed up the ladder one last time to bring the lantern in before it drowned.
The rung under her foot gave way.
Her hands slid off the post, and for one clean moment there was nothing under her at all.
A hand closed around her wrist.
It was big and warm and hard as a tool handle, and it stopped her fall as if she weighed nothing.
She looked down.
A man stood at the foot of the ladder in the rain, soaking wet, in a dark indigo travelling coat.
He was very tall and rangy, with shaggy black hair streaked with grey and a day's beard on his jaw.
He carried a long sword wrapped in grey cloth over one shoulder.
He held her up with his other hand, and he was not even out of breath.
"You have a light on," he said. His voice was low and dry and tired. "Do you have a room?"
Hanae let him lower her to the ground, and she was dizzy, and her wrist burned where he had held it.
"One," she said. "It's not much."
"I only need a bed."
"Then you're my first guest. Come in out of the rain."
She lit the lamp in the hall and put the ledger on the counter.
He wrote one line in it in a plain, square hand.
Jiro Kurogane.
She read it once and then read it again, and then she looked at the notice nailed to her gatepost outside, dripping in the dark.
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