The owner of the kuku bud den was arrested. Axel and some men kicked in his door in the dead of night, dragged him from his bed without a word. Within the hour he was in a holding cell, buried beneath the squat stone tower near the harbor. They left him to his own filth and confusion until the morning, when Lucius doused him with a bucket. Not because the man was asleep and needed rousing, or even because he was filthy. Lucius did it merely to set the tone before flipping it over and sitting on it outside the prison bars.

“What do you want?” the proprietor asked, spitting some water from his beard.

“Your grower.”

“My what?”

“Where is the plant grown?”

The man stood up and didn’t know what to do with himself. Eventually, he clasped his hands behind his back and shrugged. “What do you want me to say? It’s grown in the fields. A man brings it by the bagful and sells it to me for a pittance. Enough to get himself a hogshead of liquor and off he goes.”

“And you expect me to believe you don’t know where he comes from?”

“He comes from the islands! Somewhere out there. What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me how I can find the plantation. These things are farmed, aren’t they? Or is the man a wild forager?”

“My lord, I can’t tell you what I do not know.”

Lucius interlaced his fingers and calmly said, “I could have you tortured. Your nails ripped out one by one.”

The man paled and stumbled away until his calves bumped against the prison cot. He collapsed into the filthy thing and tried to wet his mouth once more. “That won’t let me tell you something I do not myself know.”

Lucius stared, letting the silence thicken in the air until the man nearly suffocated in it. Satisfied the man wasn’t lying, he changed his question. “Then tell me every time the man has come to you for sale. The exact date. If you need receipts and ledgers, my men will be happy to fetch them from your establishment, but I can’t say what they’ll have to do to get them. What locks will have to be broken…”

The man swallowed again and nodded. “No need.” Then he accounted for every date on which he had bought from the man, and provided young Solhart a visual description of the man. Rather than release him for cooperating, Lucius left him there, in the dark and with little hope of a meal. His attention had already shifted to the dockmaster. With the list of dates, he sat down with the officeman and began cross referencing the arrival and departure of every ship to find a match.

The process took the better part of the day. Lucius consoled himself with the thought that Kajsa was busily marking up her designs for a processing factory to get the gold production back on track. She was doing very important work, and there was next to nothing he could do to aid her until it came time to pay, so he spent his labors in a paper-stuffed office whose window couldn’t crack half as wide as he would have liked.

At last, the two of them came to a solution, double checked it, and nodded to one another. Unless the courier had the wits and guile to take an intermediary ship–which was unlikely, given his purchase history–then there was only one island he could have been coming from: Little Doe Island.

“Alright, so where is that?”

“The south,” the dockmaster answered, and pulled out a crude sea map. “Somewhere around here.” He pointed to a cluster of unlabelled islands near the edge of the map. There were doodles of sea monsters between them, and their shapes were obloid and smooth, lacking the contours of harbors. Which was to say the cartographer had no idea what they looked like.

“I need a captain.”

Such a captain existed, or more precisely such a navigator existed. He was a grimy, drink infested sod known to the dockmaster for some time. The captain had lost his vessel in a storm and never managed to secure a loan to buy a new one, though not for lack of talent. The previous governor had never laid eyes upon the man, for he was local to the isles, but he had what no other captain had; a vendetta.

“Now, who the hell are you?”

“A bold question for a man in your… abode,” Lucius responded, gesturing at the dried out pigsty the man had been sleeping in for his siesta.

“Not bold, it’s a matter of etiquette. I learned plenty about you pale skinned folk, but I ain’t learned nothing about you particularly.”

“Lucius von Solhart, the new governor of the island.”

The captain scratched his muddy jaw and nodded. “And what is it you want with me, my lord? Or are you one to make a habit of charity?”

“To make a habit of charity is to make the dispossessed worthless,” Lucius said, and gestured to a crude well that still had a bucket. “If what you want is more liquor, you’ll have to buy it yourself, with the money I’ll pay you.”

“Pay me? What for?”

“Little Doe Island.”

“And what do you want there? There’s nothing on that but louts and farms.”

“I want the louts who are farming the kuku plant.”

At that, the captain grinned, despite having only half his teeth. “You came to the right man, my lord.” He rose and doused himself with water, scrubbing the filth from his body as quick as he could. “But, I don’t have a ship.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got one in mind,” Lucius said.

When approached, Lupin was playing a game of Trireme in the garden against Adam. The two of them had evidently worked out an arrangement to spare the man the morning amphibian terror. He put on an amiable smile at Lucius’ approach, and lost it when he saw the ambling captain behind him. Ever the businessman, he heard the boy out, and politely said, “You wish to hire my trading ship as a weapon of war? When I’ve barely been paid for my goods as is?”

“I’ll pay you more.”

“Lucius, you wouldn’t be stalling for time as Kajsa tries to make good on your first agreement, would you?” He smirked as he spoke.

“The thought had crossed my mind, but if it makes you feel better, you’d have the opportunity to abandon your delinquent debtor on a nearly uninhabited island and the only witnesses would be your own crew. A chance like that doesn’t come up very often.”

Lupin laughed. “You’d be surprised how often that does come up, actually, but I must say you’ve struck my curiosity. Maybe I’m still a boy at heart, but the idea of sailing where no civilized man has sailed before? Delving into the mists at the edge of the world for plunder and justice? Yes, Solhart, I will let you hire me and my ship.”

“Excellent, and here’s your navigator,” Lucius said, gesturing to the local captain.

The man scratched his beard and grumbled, “I could be a captain myself you know, but a pleasure.” The two men shook, and Lupin dismissed him to go down to the docks and introduce himself to the captain. While Lupin owned the ship, he did not care for the stress of maritime management.

Lucius would have preferred setting out at once, but preparing supplies was not such a thing as to be rushed. In a larger port like Rackvidd, it might have been done, but the economy of Aliston had already begun to shut down. The sun drooped across the sky and the only activity was the cooking of food. With the manor chef dead in the barracks, Adam proposed that perhaps they should have some wine ahead of dinner, to make the food go down better. Lucius agreed, and Adam set off to the cellar. He returned with three cups and watered down wine was poured for the three of them.

“To exploring new lands,” Lupin proposed, and they drank a toast.

“To bringing prosperity to the Isles,” Lucius said, and they drank a toast.

“To the raw freedom! To the imposition of self onto the world,” Adam said, and they drank a toast.

And so, in due time, the three of them staggered to the dining room, piss drunk and red in the face. Two more bottles of wine had been fetched and nearly finished. It slickened their nerves and coaxed their senses to a delirious blur such that the scent of food played a vixen siren to them.

Aisha had taken over the chef role for the evening, while the steward set about hiring a replacement. The man had sworn to do it, since a nobleman’s estate should have been training replacements. The kitchen should have been staffed with half a dozen workers able to do the job so that he might properly entertain guests and parties. No amount of apologies changed the fact that the only help for Aisha in the kitchen was Isalin, who had no actual training in the matter of fine cooking.

And yet, she produced a vegetable curry with loaves of fresh bread that put the previous night’s venison to shame. The stink of wine assaulted her nose as she glowered over the table. Not one of the three drunks met her wrath. They kept their heads down, their compliments muttered politely, and it fell to Kajsa to spark the conversation.

“My lord, the good news of the day is that the basic ingredients are in good supply, all that’s really lacking is sufficient firewood. Once the granules are extracted, they’ll need to be smelted into bars. I’m afraid we might run into some trouble with official weighting however.”

“Could we ship them unsmelted? Put that burden on someone else? Lord Raymi can handle it, can’t he?”

She shrugged and glanced at Lupin. “That wouldn’t be impossible, but the problem would become… well… one of petty theft. There’s a big enough issue with coin clipping. Could you imagine a situation where a pinch of gold dust could be pocketed? You’d never get it all across the sea. No offense, Lupin.”

The merchant shrugged. “None taken. All crews have a limit. You’d have to stand a chance of catching them if you hoped to keep them from taking the chance.”

“Right,” Kajsa said. “Which is why standardized bars are useful.”

Lucius glanced around the room. “So, what’s the problem with that? Did we lose the weights and measures bureaucrat too?” Half the room nodded in response, and Lucius rolled his eyes. “I should flog Lamdo, shouldn’t I? How is he not qualified to size out the bars himself?”

Adam laughed. “He’s not important enough.”

Aisha spoke up, her voice lacking in rancor. “Do the merchant guilds not manage that?”

“The king does,” Lupin said. “I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, but it allows independent merchants to survive. My understanding is cartels rule most of Skaldheim for this reason. They’d probably rule Giordana too, if it was easier to take a caravan across the desert.”

Lucius planted an elbow on the table and covered his face. “So, how long is it going to take me to get one of these officials down here? To certify the gold?”

Lupin grinned and poured himself some more wine. “If it helps you, my lord, I’d be happy to take payment in uncertified gold. I’m independent afterall. I can trade in any barter. That won’t do for your taxes, however. You’ll be needing someone to return to the mainland with your request, just like you got young Kajsa here.”

“Are you volunteering?”

“For a price,” the merchant said, and drank.

“A price we’ll negotiate after you bring me back from our adventure,” Lucius said, and got himself a cup of wine.

“You’re going somewhere?” Aisha asked, voice cool.

The young lord tapped his glass against the merchants and said, “Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve been in a fight. I’m afraid I might be getting flabby. So, I figured I should go put down some enemies of the realm.”

“Getting stabbed in the mine wasn’t enough excitement for you?”

“Not when it was followed up by several hours reviewing ledgers,” he said, and the memory provoked Aisha to get herself some wine. “I’m tired of waiting for the demon to come to me. I think it’s only appropriate that I go on the offensive.”

“Better than being bait, I suppose,” she said.

“And hopefully, much more profitable,” Lucius said. The merchant arched an eyebrow at him, though at the time the boy was too drunk to realize the greed that he had cultivated inside the merchant. The man’s aid would not come without cost, but Lucius’ mind rested solely on placating Aisha. “I need you to stay here though.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Will you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“Then I will, won’t I?”

“I’ll make it up to you.”