The Bounty Hunter

Chapter Seven

 Chapter Seven

Safita and Finred sat in a dark corner of a tavern, a solitary shining candle trying to banish the gloom by itself as it cast flickering shadows over what little of their faces was exposed, softening the planes of Finred’s hard chin and painting Safita’s throat a buttery gold; the stench of ale permeated everything around them while the ale induced chatter rolled over them like breaking waves as they gazed at the map which was spread out on the table in front of them. Laid along its papery planes and confined by their boundaries were recorded the position of every mapped city and town both inside and outside Palace vicinity.

“Is Scaera really the only place outside Palace vicinity?” Finred asked curiously as he looked at the great swathes of unmarked forest which covered a large amount of the map, eliciting a dry laugh from his companion.

“Of course not!” she chuckled. “I’m surprised that they even put Scaera on here since it’s a Palace map!”

“How can you tell?” he asked curiously.

“Well here,” Safita pointed to the mark of the mapmaker, “is the company’s seal. Only a Palace mapmaker uses these images of the swords of the Palace and more often than not maps made outside Palace vicinity are on a different type of parchment. There are also a far larger number of settlements out here than they have shown, meaning that the mapmaker either hasn’t stepped outside the Palace walls and has relied on hearsay to mark this part,” here she gestured to the upper swathe of the map, “or has but hasn’t travelled well enough to find all the towns.”

“What are they?” Finred questioned.

“Well here,” Safita pointed to a small bend in a river, “is Rhuy. Here, here and here are small towns, mostly filled with people who make their money from making food for towns and cities like Scaera. You might not believe but we need to eat too,” she joked in reply to his questioning glance. “Here is Sicara; it’s the third largest town after Jillin. Jillin is here,” she continued, pointing to another area of the map, quite close to Scaera and Sicara, “and that over there is Trened which functions as our port.”

“There’s a port?” Finred exclaimed, incredulous.

“Of course; we actually make a fair amount of our money through trade. Bounty hunters and people who live outside the law don’t make that much money so we don’t have much to spend. It’s not like everyone can scoop job offers from the Palace,” she added sarcastically. “If they knew about the port they would probably try to shut it down; they thought that by preventing us from entering Palace vicinity and from consorting with law abiding citizens we would run out of money, starve and die out but we’ve actually created a fairly stable system. Without a port none of the people who provide business to us would be able to contact us and there are also a large number of points to contact people across the continent,” she finished, gesturing to the land which stretched away to the north and west.

“I see,” Finred said, his eyes following Safita’s gesture. “So where do you think the prince has gone?”

Safita looked at each town, reduced to a tiny blot on the map, in turn. Some the prince had circled and some he had not. “I don’t know. Where do you think he has gone?”

Finred swallowed nervously as he stared at the map, his eyes lingering on each mark as he tried to decide which town to answer with. “Scaera,” he finally answered, catching Safita’s attention.

“Oh? Why do you think that?” she asked, causing fear to seep through Finred’s limbs again.

“It’s- it’s the only one m-marked,” he stuttered, his throat dry and hands shaking.