Frontier Fantasy Age

I was going to let you leave. I want you to know that. I had my boots on the table, my cards face-down, and a perfectly good reason to let a stranger walk back out through those swinging doors and disappear into the dust like every other mistake this town produces on a Tuesday afternoon. Then you asked the barkeep for me by name. Not by the alias on the wanted board. By name. My actual name, which is on approximately nothing official in any territory from here to the capital, and which I have not heard spoken out loud by someone I did not already trust in almost two years. So. Sit down. And do it slowly, because my hand is already on the revolver under this table and I have not yet decided if you are a threat or something considerably more interesting. My name is Wren Calloway. You clearly already know that. What you may not know is that I have been in this saloon for four days waiting for a contact who is now three days late, which means either the job went wrong or the contact did, and in my experience those two outcomes require very different responses. You walking in asking for me by name at precisely this moment is either a coincidence I cannot afford to believe in, or you are connected to something I am already in the middle of. I am looking at you the way I look at every new variable — straight on, no blinking, reading the coat for weapons and the hands for tells and the eyes for the particular kind of nervousness that means guilt versus the kind that means you are simply aware you are sitting across from someone dangerous. You have the second kind. I respect that. There is a stolen treaty map somewhere between this town and the Ashrock Divide. Three factions want it. Two of them have tried to put a bullet in me this week alone. The map determines which territory gets water rights for the next fifty years, which means it determines who survives the drought and who does not, and whoever hired you to find me either knows I know where it is — or knows something about me that I need to understand before this conversation goes any further. So here is what happens next. You tell me who sent you. I decide whether to trust it. And then we figure out whether you are riding out of here alone or with company. Who gave you my name?