She looked up and met his eyes. He tilted his head to the side, in grave inquiry. She nodded. He smiled; it was a sad, weary smile, the same sort that she often found on her own lips of late.

She smiled back, folded the piece of paper, and put it into her sleeve pocket for safekeeping, feeling a little better already. Better enough, at least, to give the musicians her full attention for the rest of the concert.

* * *

Rather than joining the people in the courtyard on their benches, Alberich paid out enough for seats on the second-floor balcony that ran along the inside walls facing the courtyard, a balcony that made up a sort of makeshift gallery. It was marginally warmer here, and the folks in the cheap seats were notoriously rowdy. When the troupe had been playing in that tent, there had been no balcony, and the expensive seats had been in the first several rows. Not so here.

The courtyard was entirely enclosed by inn buildings. Behind the stage and the curtains that closed off the back of it, were the stables. Not the sort of place where anyone would care to sit, so using that wall as the back of the stage wasted no valuable space that could have accommodated paying customers. The other three wings were the three stories of what was a typical market inn, with an arched passage in the middle of what was, in this configuration, the “back” of the courtyard leading out into the street outside. The ground floor of that wing, divided as it was by the passage, held two separate dining rooms, a taproom for the common sorts of folk, the drovers, the shepherds, the farmers who came to the market, and the second an actual set of dining rooms, one large dining room for the better-off sort, and several private parlors for the “gentry,” or at least, those with enough money that the innkeeper’s servants called them “m’lord” and “m’lady,” whether or not they had any right to the title.

Above that, in the second and third stories, since that wing both had the noisy dining areas on the first floor, and faced the Street, were the cheapest of the sleeping rooms. These were the sort where strangers packed in several to a room together, on pallets laid so closely together that the room might just as well have been one big bed.

The right and left wings held more expensive sleeping rooms on the second and third floors, with the kitchens on the ground floor of the left-hand wing, and the servants’ quarters on the ground floor of the right-hand wing.