The trip to Windhelm is as uneventful as these things go. There are no other forts overtaken by bandits or mages on the way and a quick detour to Morvunskar (asked for by Ruby) reveals that it has not acquired new tenants. They get to the large, long bridge leading into frosty Windhelm in short order.

The first impression that Windhelm gives you, when you walk through its gates, is that it's probably seen much better days. It's not as bitterly cold as Winterhold, but it's somehow more depressing. At least Winterhold's bareness was austere. Windhelm looks, well... poor. There are more beggars in sight than in any other city Ruby's been to, in this life, and they seem disproportionately nonhuman. Some people huddle around piles of refuse that have been set on fire, and the city guards turn a blind eye to it because, well, people gotta survive, right? But the city is noticeably barely limping along.

"This place is..."

"Yeah."

"Let us find an inn."

Candlehearth Hall is a big building, found across a small plaza from the main city gates. Once the three mages push the doors into it open the barmaid beams widely at them, then pauses as she takes in their attire, and scowls and looks back down at the mug she's cleaning.

Right, then. He supposes it makes sense that the city held by the guy who wants to be the High King of the Nords would have a Nordic attitude to mages. "Good evening," says Ruby to her, taking a seat at the bar, trying to look harmless and normal.

"Evenin'," she says, without looking up at him.

She's breaking the script! At this point she's meant to be asking them what they want and stuff. "Do you have lodgings for three weary travellers?"

"For coin."

"—naturally. How much?"

"Twenty-five septim a night, for each of you."

Onmund freezes where he took a seat next to Ruby and looks at him sideways.

Ruby isn't sure whether this is because this place is falling on hard times or if they're being overcharged because they're mages but that's more than twice as expensive than most other places.

"Sounds good," he says, cheerfully, anyway, because they do have enough money, actually, for that, right now.

—she doesn't look like she was expecting him to accept without any haggling like that. "And we don't offer discounts to groups."

"I wouldn't expect you to. Do you have any rooms for the three of us? Or only singles?"

"Got doubles too."

"Then one double and one single, please?" The assumption that he'll share a room with Onmund and that Erandur will have his own room is shared by all three of them without fuss.

"...right, then. I'll show you to your rooms."

"Lead the way."

She does, two rooms side by side. "Well, if... you need anything I shall be downstairs," she says, after accepting their money for their first night.

And after she's gone: "We could've just camped. She doesn't want us here, and twenty-five septim—"

"Yeah, but we're here partly to fact find, right? So, we'll fact find. And people are a lot looser with their tongues when you've made them richer than they'd expected, and the barmaid at the city inn is likely to have heard all sorts of useful things."

"And she may also know of ways to get an audience with the jarl."