Ahnassi's Taproom

Valenfeld's one warm room — Ahnassi's hearth, her beds, and her bread, and the whole town's evening in one low-ceilinged hall.

There is exactly one fire in Valenfeld that never goes out overnight, and it is Ahnassi's. On a bad night — a burned crop, a bad diagnosis, a boy not home from the mine road — the taproom fills anyway, because Ahnassi pours the same whether you're paying tonight or Thursday, and because Bersi the Bold is always there to make the room laugh at something, even the thing everyone's actually afraid of. The talk runs to weather, silver, and whoever's newest debt, but the last round of the night is always the same shape: somebody says something true they wouldn't say sober, somebody else pretends not to notice, and Ahnassi tops up both cups without being asked. Travelers hear things here they won't hear anywhere else in the Vale — including, most nights, some half-drunk certainty about the road east: that the silver-diggers up the Sered Spur found something Vandahl Keep isn't telling anyone about, and that a sharp set of eyes and a spare week could go see for themselves.