The Inn That Wasn't There Yesterday

How You Write to an Inn

There is an inn in Wending that keeps no fixed address and never has. She arrives when a celebration is coming apart, and leaves when the mending is done, and the way you reach her is older than anyone alive.

You write a letter. You address it to the Keeper of the inn that wasn’t there yesterday, and you send it off, and Wending’s gentle impossible-post carries it to wherever the Goose has set herself down, dropping it through her travelling letterbox. The wording never changes, because the inn has been telling people how to find her since long before anyone can remember. Most send their letters half-believing: if you are there, and if you are the right one, and if a person may write to an inn at all. Grans pass the tale to grandchildren as the sort of thing grans say. Every so often a grandchild, out of ordinary mending and out of ideas, decides to find out whether gran was only saying it.

She was not. The letters come in young, uneven hands, pressed hard where the worry is, and the inn reads her mail and hops toward the one whose celebration most needs help. To write at all is a small act of hope: asking, before you are sure anyone will answer.