The world of The Innkeeper's Song is unnamed, and Beagle says that it may remain unnamed in the tales he sets in it. In some ways, it resembles our own world. It has different ethnic groups, including blacks, whites, and Asiatics, and the concerns of its characters are familiar to us—buying and selling, earning a living, surviving hard times, hoping for something better.

The events of the novel take place primarily in and around an inn that is outside an unremarkable town. The inn seems to be a magnet for odd people, attracting, for instance, a mysterious company of women: a dead woman, a sailor woman with a wicked rapier, and a solemn, retiring woman who is not a woman. They are followed by an eighteen-year-old boy who is determined to retrieve his dead fiancee, a halfdead old wizard, and an annoying serving boy who does...