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.
The tavern, located on a flat stretch of the gentle rise away from the bay, was an open-air structure like the fine seaside pavillions built for the Elakebassian nobility. Unlike the aforementioned fort and the governor’s mansion, though, that was the end of its resemblance to any mainland finery. The tavern’s canopy was old sailcloth stretched over a square frame of palm tree timbers. Extra canvas was rolled up at the edges of the “roof”, to be let down in heavy rain. A sturdy lean-to ran along the length of one side, housing the tavern keeper and his wares. The cooking was done in back of the lean-to, to lessen the risk of an out-of-control blaze and to avoid flooding the tavern with heat during the day. During the night, wood or charcoal was lit in a ceramic furnace in the tavern’s center, located beneath a flap in the ceiling.
The tavernkeeper was a squat, stoop-shouldered man with tawny fur and a single keen owlish eye that shone lamp-like in the night, when the tavern was lit by flickering oil lamps and his space behind the bar was dark as pitch. The light of his other eye had been put out forever in a storm twenty years before. He had been a sailor aboard a ship of freebooters at the time; his share of that voyage’s earnings plus recompense for the eye had paid for his official pardon, his tavern license, the minimal cost of such building materials as he needed, and his initial outlay for supplies.
There was no security in piracy, but pirates took care of their own. A captain in the navy of a king could not hope to be rewarded so handsomely for the loss of an organ or limb in the service of his country as could a common seaman aboard any pirate vessel with regular articles of agreement.
Now, the tavern keeper–whose name was Prit–was the lord of his meager little domain. His license as a tavern keeper also made him an agent of the governor, if not a particularly highly placed one, and that gave him a small measure of authority within the island settlement. Local custom magnified that power to absolute within the confines of the tavern.
Old Prit’s remaining eye was as sharp as ever, but it could not look everywhere, and he was not as fast as he once had been. He also had a terrible fear of storms. He’d built his tavern up on the hill so that it would be near the cave where he stored his meat and cheese and casks of rum, and in which he could take shelter when the skies turned dark.
Though the path from the harbor up to the tavern was not so steep as to be beyond the powers of dried-out sailors palsied with lack of drink, it was getting to be too steep for him, and so he rarely left his tavern except to go to the cave, or the cave except to go to the tavern.
Why should he? Prit’s customers came to him. His suppliers came to him, too. From time to time, there was other business that needed taking care of, which would have demanded Prit’s attention and presence… but that was why he had bought the boy, Jace. Jace was young and nimble, and could run his errands, just as he could keep his two good eyes on things in the tavern and see everything that old Prit’s one eye missed.
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2: The Boy, Jace » »