The Blue Water Inn

Where

Vallaki, not far from St. Andral's Church.

Status

Home base. Our six-bed room upstairs is still ours, and our things are in it. The kitchen is down to one meal a week per person, and the wine has all but run out.

First entered

Session 7, at the end of the long day through the gate.

The house

A sign out front, a warm, welcoming taproom, a small stage, and the first room in Barovia where nobody watched us eat. "Welcome. I am Urwin Martikov, proprietor of The Blue Water Inn. This is my lovely wife, Danika, at the bar, and my boys, Brom and Bray." The boys were permanently underfoot.

The menu was potato pottage, hot beet soup and wolf steak "if you're feeling rich." Our room is upstairs: six beds for two gold a night, three windows and a door onto a balcony over the taproom. The staff do not clean it. It is the only tavern in Vallaki, so it is also where everyone ends up.

The regulars

• The musician, dressed in the brightest colours we have ever seen, as if making sure nobody could possibly mistake him for a Vistani. His wax jar says "Riptarvo's Finest Wax". He says the devil's name out loud like weather, lodges upstairs, and told us he would watch us with great interest. See The Bard ("Riptarvo").
• The Wachter brothers, Karl and Nikolai, rowdy, cheerful and drinking themselves silly every night, until their mother's manservant comes to cart them home, often in an actual cart. See The House of Wachter.
• Two happy drunks, well into their cups.
• Roger, at a corner table, the night we arrived, staring at us white as a sheet, like he'd seen a ghost. Urwin told us who he was: "what remains of the previous set of Mistwalkers." Sirius bought him wine, and Roger threw his old cards on the table and told us his tale. See The Reading.

What the inn gave us

Session 8

Danika, quietly: her family owns the winery down south, the latest wine is days late, and if we happened to go that way she'd be grateful, though she was not commissioning us. Sirius asked her to fill in some blanks on his map. When Roger's killing of the raven-man came up, she winced, visibly. We didn't understand why yet.

Session 9

Ireena sang on the stage with the band, and the whole room went quiet: a song she'd dreamed, and can't get out of her head. The Wachter brothers asked us to find their friend Bluto at the lake. The bar started rationing wine, and we started cutting our own with water. And that night, in our locked room with the windows fastened, a note lay in the middle of the floor. It told us Lady Wachter's raven was no true raven, and that she did not have the support of the Ravens of Barovia. Sirius sat down on the floor with his head in his hands, relieved. We left a polite reply, signed "From us."

Session 10

A second note, through a window we'd have sworn was shut: "Trust is hard. Want to prove yourselves." Drew had put an alarm on the room, Danika was very squirrelly about who might have been upstairs, and when Urwin came up to look he gave up pretending. He turned into a raven-man in front of us. The inn is an information house for The Ravens of Barovia, and Urwin is what he calls ravenkin. The raven-man the last Mistwalkers killed was his Great Uncle Frederick. He also told us the thing we most needed to know about the bones. We'd been sleeping in the safest room in Vallaki since the day we arrived.

Session 11

Danika and the boys had gone to the winery to find out what was wrong. The wine was half water. Ireena was waiting tables, and enjoying it. Muriel was waiting at a table too: "I heard you were admiring my plumage… You also snore." In the morning Izek sat in the taproom demanding a status report, and Muriel came out of the kitchen with a heavy chest the bard had left for us: a vampire-hunter's kit and a note, "Hunt well those who hunt." Henrik the coffin maker had slept here too, rather than in his shop.

Session 12

After the fire the taproom filled with people huddling and recovering. Urwin met us with "Oh, what a terror. You were meant to stop this," handed us commoners' cloaks for the Wachterhaus job, and told us Ernst had come and invited Ireena to Wachterhaus as Lady Wachter's guest: "Your friend, she left. I couldn't stop her." Then, to nobody in particular: "I hate living in Vallaki. I hate living in Barovia." The wine was dregs, one part in ten.

Session 13

Half of us slept here the night the bones went home. In the morning Urwin told us he couldn't serve anyone more than one meal a week, and Drew handed out Lady Wachter's liberated beets, one each, like a game-show host: "You get a beet. You get a beet." Over breakfast Muriel left our company: "yesterday was too rich for my blood." Sirius arrived leading a shining celestial horse, which was named Clancy on the spot (as in Plan C). Then the criers called everyone to the square.

Session 14

We haven't been back. We went from the square to the mansion to the Reformation Center without stopping. We promised the Wachter brothers wine, and the inn has none to give.

Open questions

• What do the Martikovs know about the bad times, and about us? Rather a lot, on both counts. See Urwin Martikov.
• Who delivers letters through locked doors? Wings.
• Why is the wine late? It has run dry. The winery is silent, Falkon never came back, and Danika and the boys flew into that silence. The west road is no longer a question. It's a destination. See The Winery.