Black Spice (Book 3)

by James R. Sanford

  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 s
ailed.

  “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.

  End of Book III

  Afterword

  Thank you for reading Black Spice. If you enjoyed this book, please leave a rating and short review on the product page. It not only allows the book to reach more readers, but in a very real sense it is a vote for this series to continue. In today's vast eBook market, independent writers cannot flourish without the increased visibility that reviews bring.

  As with all my work, this book is DRM free. Pass it along to friends and family with my blessing.

  Lastly, I'm always happy to hear from my readers. If you have any questions about this series, I encourage you to use the Ask the Author feature on goodreads.com.

  Thanks again.

  Sincerely,

  James R. Sanford