Black Spice (Book 3) (19 page)

It
began to rain as Kyric stepped out of
Calico
’s jolly boat and onto the
dock at the old harbor.  Ellec had asked Mr. Pallan to row him ashore.  He was
the one least likely to forget himself and take a short liberty.

Kyric
walked to the square and hailed a cabriolet.  This was where he had first
entered Aeva that night with Aiyan.  He felt like he had closed a circle.  And
now he had to close another.

When
he arrived at the gate to the royal residence, he was surprised to find his
name on the permanent list.  An officer escorted him to the house, and he soon
found himself standing in a reception hall, an errant drop of water falling
from his hat.

Princess
Aerlyn swept into the room in a dress that was rather plain considering her
status.  No one attended her.

“Where
is Sir Aiyan?” she said, and when Kyric didn’t answer right away, she suddenly
knew.  She could see it on his face, and he could see it on hers.  “He’s dead
isn’t he?”

Kyric
nodded slowly.  “There was a battle on Mokkala, your highness.”

He
gave her a brief account of the voyage and the situation in the Spice Islands. 
He didn’t know how much Aiyan had told her about the Knights of the Dragon’s
Blood, so he only told her a little about Soth Garo.  She seemed to understand.

“He
told me that this might happen one day.  I didn’t expect for it to be so
soon.”  She turned and looked out the window.  “I suppose it’s foolish to think
that Aiyan might have composed a message for me.  I’ve heard that soldiers
write letters the night before a battle.”

“He
told me,” Kyric said with a catch to his voice.  “He wanted me to say, that he
wished he could have seen you again.”  He looked her straight in the eye and
wondered when it had gotten so easy for him to lie.

He
handed her the letter Ellec had drafted.  “Captain Lyzuga has drawn a manifest,
along with suggestions for the particulars of the transaction.”

She
accepted the letter with a questioning glance, then shook her head as the
thought struck her.  “Of course.  You returned with a shipment of spice, and I
must broker it.  Aiyan forewarned me about this.  I will introduce you to my
cousin, Count Haelan.  He is my trusted agent, and he will handle this for me.”

“You
are very kind, Princess.  Without Captain Lyzuga, I would not have returned
from Mokkala.  He and Aiyan had become friends of a sort.”

Aerlyn
looked at him for a long moment.  “So tell me, Squire Kyric, will you go now to
Castle Island and become a Knight of the Flaming Blade?”

“I
shall, if they will have me.  I wonder if I might call again before I leave
Aeva.  I have some things I’d like to give to Eren and Kaelyn.”

“You
may call on us anytime you wish.  I know the children would want to see you.”

Kyric
returned the next day to meet Count Haelan, who changed into a plain merchant’s
coat before they went back out to
Calico
.  He met Ellec and inspected
the cargo, giving instructions to bring the ship to a certain private dock at
sunset.  He also handed Ellec a thousand kandars in coin, saying that the sale
of the spice would take weeks, but promising a bank draft in the amount of nine
thousand ducats the next day.

“If
he’s giving us that much up front,” Ellec said after Haelan had gone, “he must
think it worth ten times that sum.”

They
raised sail at the end of the day, and
Calico
slid alongside the private
dock as the last light dimmed in the west.  Haelan and several men in dark
cloaks met them there.  Several more stood at the gate to the dockside road.

Nothing
happened until it was full night, then the freight wagons began to arrive, full
of armed men disguised as stevedores.  The transfer of spice took less than two
hours.  Whips snapped and the big wagons rolled.

“I
will see you tomorrow, Captain,” said Haelan, saluting them and running to join
the caravan.  The rumble of the wagons faded away.  The waterfront was suddenly
silent.

“It’s
gone,” Lerica said.  “All the spice is gone.”

Ellec smiled.  “No, it’s not.  I saved a
jar of purple gavdi.”

In
the end it took over a month.  After Ellec found a berth for
Calico
at
the new harbor, Kyric moved to the Hotel Lions.  He figured he could afford
it.  Aiyan had carried a fair amount of coin in his sea chest, and there were
the boxes of spice to be sold.  He had been working his leg for several weeks,
and there was nothing more than a hint of soreness when he first got up in the
morning, so he hired a high-priced fencing master for daily lessons.  It seemed
to him that most swordsmen fought in the linear style, and he wanted more
experience with it.

Kyric
resolved to leave the skills he had honed with Aiyan at the door to the fencing
studio, to come in with a blank slate and concentrate on learning something new. 
He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he found it interesting that his linear
fencing had improved greatly since the last time he tried it.  The lessons went
well as long as the instructor drilled him in technique.  It was narrow and
mechanical and Kyric easily held back the weird.  At the end of the first week,
his teacher wanted to spar, to see how well Kyric applied what he had taught.  The
teacher was indeed a very good fencer.  The match became fast and furious, and
in the heat of the moment Kyric forgot himself.  With a shock, the weird and
the eternal flooded into him like a rushing wave and the fencing teacher
couldn’t touch him.  He called a halt and told Kyric that he wasn’t using
proper form.  After that, the fellow’s schedule became exceedingly full, and he
was never available for a lesson.

Kyric
visited the ship every day.  He still wanted to see Lerica every day.  He took
her out on the town one evening, dining at the hotel and going to a commedia
house afterward.  She smiled through the whole show, but never really laughed. 
He had bought a new doublet, and she wore a proper dress.  She said that she
didn’t know how to dance when he asked her after dinner.  He told her that she
would be a natural, but she wouldn’t let him try to teach her in front of all
those people who were waltzing so gracefully.  At the end of the night they
both felt awkward.

“I
can’t get used to seeing you in a dress,” he said.  “Your uncle must have turned
flips.”

“It’s
springtime in Aeva.  It just seemed like the thing to do.  But I can’t get used
to seeing us together here, going to the theatre of all places.  It feels wrong.”

He
chuckled softly.  “It does feel wrong.  We should be together in some distant
wilderness drinking bad water, and dressed in leathers and cavalier boots, with
swords and pistols in our belts.  Don’t you feel naked without a sword?”

“Yes.”

He
looked at her.  “You have a knife down your bodice, don’t you?”

She opened her fan and hid her smile
behind it.  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

It
was a cloudy, humid morning the day Kyric went to the ship and found Ellec
waiting for him with bag of Jakavian gold crowns.

“We’ve
been paid off.  This is your share.  It amounts to about twelve hundred ducats.”

Ellec
poured them each a brandy and they drank a toast to Aiyan.  He offered Kyric his
hand.  “I have to say goodbye now.  We depart for Ularra on the evening tide. 
You’re a good fellow, and it has been my pleasure to know you.  If I can ever
do anything for you, Kyric, find me in Terrula.”

He
ate lunch with Lerica at an outdoor café.  She hinted that the sale of the
spice brought double what Ellec had hoped.

“He’s
giving me
Calico
.  But since even the lowliest crewman is getting nearly
a thousand ducats, we’ll have to recruit a whole new crew.  No telling what these
men are going to do.  I hear a lot of talk about opening a tavern or something
like that.  I figure that one man out of the whole group might actually do it.”

She
took a sip of wine.  Kyric had ordered the finest in the house.  “I don’t want
to be a ship captain.  I love the isolation, but I’m not going to spend my
whole life at sea.  Uncle Ellec is going to buy land and — can you believe
this? — he’s going to start a coffee plantation using Dorigano’s hybrid.  He
wants me to be his shipping agent, but that’s just because he wants someone he
knows he can trust.  Can you see me doing paperwork?  The truth is, that with
the right investments, I won’t need a job the rest of my life.”

“What
are you going to do?”

“First
I’m going home to Aleria and get to know the family again.  After that, I have
no idea.  I feel like Ularra is my real home.”

“Then
go home.”

When they were done, he kissed her
lightly on the lips and then walked away without saying goodbye, thinking that
he would go down to the docks at the end of the day and see them off, maybe
wave like the Tialuccans did.  But he had trouble finding a cab, and as he
walked the massive docks of the new harbor the weird told him what he would
find when he got to the berth.  It was empty. 
Calico
had already sailed.

“This
is the headdress of a Tialuccan warrior,” Kyric said, handing it to Prince Eren. 
“It has feathers because they are the bird people of Mokkala.”  Eren was taller
by a hand than he had been last year.  His eyes had grown cooler but no less
dark.

Kaelyn
tugged at his sleeve.  “Can they fly?”

Kyric
smiled.  “The Tialuccans?  No, honey.  They don’t have wings or feathers. 
Actually, there was this one old priest who flew, but he needed the help of a
very big Gavdi bird.”

“I
would like to see a Gavdi bird,” she said.

Eren
shook his head.  “No you wouldn’t.  You would get scared and start crying.”

“How
do you know?  You don’t even know what a
Gavdee
bird looks like,” Kaelyn
said.  She looked at her brother, then she smiled and giggled a little.

Kyric
knelt in front of her and reached into his sack.  “For you my lady I have the seashell
crown of the Silasese people.”  She put it on her head, not sure if she liked
it.  “I have cardamom incense for your mother,” he continued, “and for all of
you, a jar of dried mango.  It was my favorite thing to eat in the whole Spice
Islands.”

“Thank
you,” Eren said.

Aerlyn
stood talking to the children’s governess, a sheaf of pages in her arms.  Kyric
had given her Aiyan’s play.  It was something that shouldn’t be lost for all
time.

“Say,”
Kyric said to Kaelyn, “why don’t you go and give the incense to your mother for
me.”

“Okay.”

When
Kaelyn had crossed the room and Aerlyn was distracted with her, Kyric reached
into his sash and brought out the pouch where he kept the crystal he had found
on the island of the fountain.  He poured it into his hand and held it out to
Eren.  It still glowed with the light of that sunrise.

“I
couldn’t bring back the water of the fountain, but I did bring you this.  It
comes from an island where our world touches the dreamlands.”

Eren
cocked his head in confusion, but he took the crystal shard anyway.

“Keep
it close to you, and let it be our secret,” Kyric said.

Eren closed his fist around it and
nodded.  A new light came into his eyes.

Kyric
checked out of his hotel at first light, loaded his sea chest into a cab, and
arrived at the old harbor before the sun was fully up.  Nearly a year had
passed since he first met Aiyan.  It felt like a dozen.

He
boarded the sailboat he had purchased the day before.  It was small enough for
him to handle, but he found himself wishing for one of the outrigger canoes of
the Silasese.  He wore Aiyan’s sword across his back.  If the weather turned
rough and he swamped the boat, it would be the one thing he didn’t lose.

The
narrow bay leading to the port of Aeva was twenty miles in length, and Kyric
skirted the western edge, passing fishing villages and weedy dunes.  The sun
rose high before he rounded the point, a sandy spit jutting from the coastline,
and began the long tack towards Esaiya.

The
southern end of the tiny island was dominated by a hill with a grove of trees
at the top, and he only caught glimpses of the towers until he finally passed
to the west and had his first sight of the far side.

Two
rocky arms enclosed a miniature harbor.  A handful of small boats lay against a
long stone wharf, and a sloop that Kyric recognized drifted at anchor, along
with a ketch that was big enough to weather the ocean.  A wide gate stood in
the curtain wall above the quay, and next to that, the tallest tower in the
castle.  It was of an older design and built from darker stone, as if it had
stood alone before the castle was built.  He didn’t see anyone, at quayside or
on the walls.

A
curving reef enclosed the west side of the island.  The waves rose sharply and
broke across it, throwing up a churning wall of water.  Kyric couldn’t see an
opening.  But then he was touched by the weird, and knew that this was part of
the barrier, made by the Unknowable Forces themselves.  He set a course, and
his little boat was tossed as it passed over the reef, pushing into the still
water beyond.