Legends & Lattes recap

Viv, an orc mercenary with decades of adventuring behind her, quits the life, taking from her last job a Scalvert's Stone, an artifact said to draw a line of fortune toward whatever its holder most wants. She buries it beneath a derelict livery stable in the walled city of Thune and converts the building into the city's first coffee shop, a drink nobody there has heard of. The shop nearly fails until she hires Tandri, a succubus with a far better grasp of people and business than Viv has, and Thimble, a rattkin baker whose pastries make the place a destination. A community of regulars collects around it, and the local crime boss's collectors come calling for their share. Fennus, a cold, calculating elf from Viv's old company, tracks her down, digs up the stone and burns the shop to the ground. Viv lets him go rather than return to the life she left, and the people the shop gathered rebuild it. She concludes the success was hers and her friends' rather than the artifact's, and she and Tandri become a couple.

Viv, an orc who has spent most of her adult life in mercenary companies, quits the work after a final job against a scalvert queen, taking from the creature's lair a Scalvert's Stone, an artifact reputed to draw a line of fortune toward whatever its holder most wants. She travels to the walled city of Thune, buys a derelict livery stable, and begins converting it into a coffee shop, a business the city has never seen selling a drink almost nobody there has tasted. She hires Cal, a taciturn hob carpenter, to do the conversion properly, and buries the stone beneath the building. Neither her plan nor the drink makes any sense to the people she tries to explain it to, and she is spending the last of her savings on both.

The shop opens to near-total indifference: Thune has no idea what coffee is and no reason to find out. Tandri, a succubus looking for work, talks her way into a job and immediately starts fixing what Viv cannot see, from the sign and the name to the arrangement of the room and the way the drink is explained to people who have never had one. Custom begins to trickle in. Hemington, a university student studying the ley lines beneath the city, installs himself at a corner table and does not meaningfully leave again. A man named Lack calls in to collect a share of the takings on behalf of the Madrigal, the figure who runs the district's criminal business; Viv turns him away, and he makes it plain that the matter is not closed.

Thimble, a quiet rattkin baker, joins the shop, and his pastries transform it. The spiced buns he makes sell out and bring in people who would never have crossed the threshold for coffee alone, and the business goes from precarious to profitable to genuinely busy. A regular clientele forms: Hemington at his table, a nervous young musician named Pendry who is given a place to play, and an enormous cat named Amity that moves in and refuses to be moved out. Viv, who came to Thune expecting to be left alone, finds herself at the centre of a small community she did not plan, and she and Tandri are working more and more closely together.

The shop's success draws attention. Viv invests in a gnomish machine that widens what she can serve, and the new drinks sell as fast as Thimble can bake. Gallina, a gnome from Viv's old mercenary company, turns up in Thune, delighted and entirely unbothered by Viv's change of career. Her arrival is a reminder that the old life has not finished with Viv simply because Viv finished with it, and the share the Madrigal's people came for is still outstanding and still being counted.

Fennus, the elf from Viv's old company, arrives in Thune. He is unhurried and superficially pleasant, and entirely explicit that he knows about the Scalvert's Stone and what Viv took it for, which leaves Viv unable to tell whether the shop's success has been earned or bought. The outstanding protection money also comes due: Viv is brought to meet the Madrigal in person, who proves to be a small, elderly woman of complete authority and considerable enthusiasm for Thimble's baking, and the two of them reach an arrangement that suits them both. The shop is doing better than Viv ever expected, and she has more to lose than she has had in years.

Fennus returns at night, digs the Scalvert's Stone out from under the shop and burns the place to the ground. Everyone gets out, but the building, the machine and everything Viv built over the year are destroyed, and the stone is gone. Viv does not pursue him: going after Fennus would mean taking the old life back up, and she decides against it. Instead the people the shop had gathered turn up on their own account, Cal and Tandri and Thimble and the regulars among them, along with the Madrigal's people, and the shop is rebuilt better than it was. Viv concludes that what she made was made by work and by the people she made it with rather than by an artifact under the floor, and she and Tandri stop pretending they are only colleagues.

Fennus returns at night, digs the Scalvert's Stone out from beneath the shop and burns Legends & Lattes to the ground. Everyone gets out, but the building, the gnomish machine and everything Viv spent the year making are destroyed, and the artifact she believed had drawn her luck is gone with him. Viv does not go after him. Chasing Fennus would mean picking the old life back up, and she decides against it, concluding that the shop worked because of the work she and the others put into it rather than because of a stone under the floor. What she thought was a business turns out to be a community: Cal rebuilds, Tandri, Thimble, Gallina, the regulars and even the Madrigal's people turn up to help, and the shop reopens better appointed than the first one. Viv and Tandri stop pretending they are only colleagues and are together openly by the close. Thimble's baking anchors the business, Pendry has grown into a competent performer, Hemington still has his table, Amity has resumed possession of the premises, and the arrangement with the Madrigal holds, settled as much in pastry as in coin. Viv's adventuring career is finished by her own decision rather than by circumstance, and the book ends with the shop open and its people settled around it.