The 3 Seas

It took all of Jace’s skills of communication and persuasion to convey to his aging master that there was in fact a whole mass of people following up the path behind him, eager for meat, drink and gossip.
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“Twelve… thousand…” the blustery man on the balcony gasped, sounding almost more pained than pleased, like a man who’d taken too large a bite of a roast and was struggling now to swallow it.

“Calm yourself, Striggs,” Montaldo said. “There’s still a wrinkle to be worked out in that bid. Let’s see how our man handles it.”
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“Two? Didn’t we agree not to settle for less than five?” the blustery-voiced man said.

“Yes, well, when we opened at five thousand in the last three port towns, we were laughed off the stage, weren’t we?” the smooth talker said. “This Tarnach knows his business. Two thousand is in reach… but just barely. People will begin to bid, overjoyed at being offered such a prize at a comparative bargain, and then as they outbid each other they’ll dig deeper and deeper in order to keep that bargain from slipping away.”
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Of course, Jace wasn’t in a position to do anything to help the fallen feathered princess at the moment. He wasn’t really in a position to do much of anything period, when the slightest movement might give away his position to the men below. He could only watch as the slave auction unfolded, the mundane and familiar sight made strange and grotesque by the inclusion of such a rare and radiant jewel of a woman.
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Jace first caught sight of the slave whose mere existence would bring about his first awareness of his own state of bondage when he set down the hill towards town late in the morning. All he really saw at the time was a flash of gold, the high sun glinting off something down in the center of town.
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Jace had no delusions that he was free, of course. It wasn’t any kind of secret that was kept from him. More people knew him as “Prit’s boy” than by his given name, and he knew that this was not due to any imagined bond of family between them. Physically, the two could not have resembled each other any less.
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It must be positively understood that Jace was a slave, but it must also be said that his life was not particularly bad for all that. Old Prit had a powerful fear of losing his other eye in some accident or another and becoming completely blind. For this reason he did not sample his own wares, so he never had the occasion to beat his young servant in a drunken rage.
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The town of Keeper’s Cove was a ramshackle settlement on the island of Faresia, in the Outer Sea. Only a few of the buildings, like the fort and the governor’s mansion, were made from imported brick and milled lumber, and built in the Elakebassian style. The rest were improvised structures made from the local palm trees and from material scavenged from ships.
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