The trees were white.
Not pale, not bleached, not the washed-out grey of driftwood. White. A deep, settled, thoroughly committed white that started at the roots and went all the way to the tips of the branches, as though the island had decided on a colour long ago and seen no reason to reconsider. The grass was the same. The soil beneath his boots had a chalky brightness to it that caught the midday sun and threw it back in every direction at once.
Lucien crouched at the edge of the road and looked at it for a while.
"I always thought it would feel more like snow," he murmured. From a distance, coming in off the water, it had looked exactly like that. A city buried in a permanent winter, pale and still and oddly beautiful against the blue of the sea. Then he had stepped off the boat and felt the full weight of the afternoon heat on his neck, and the illusion had collapsed immediately.
He had read about Flevance in one of the adventure books the old man kept at the shipyard. The author, whose name he had already forgotten, had described it as mystical. The word had seemed imprecise at the time.
Standing here now, Lucien thought the author had probably been reaching for something more accurate and settled for mystical because nothing else fit. The colour was real, and it was everywhere, and it was wrong in a way that was difficult to articulate. Not ugly. Just insistently unnatural. The kind of wrong that took a moment to locate because everything around it was behaving normally.
Then the smell had reached him.
Metallic and faintly sharp, it sat underneath the ordinary city smells of salt and cooking and timber in a way that was easy to miss until you were paying attention, and then impossible to ignore. He had remembered it from the same book. Amber Lead.
A heavy ore found only in this island's soil, processed by the nobility into pigment, into medicine, into the white coating that covered everything from the buildings to the trees to the very ground the city was built on. The book had called it the island's greatest resource. The author had seemed proud of this on the city's behalf.
Lucien picked up a small white pebble from the road, turned it over in his fingers, and set it back down.
He pushed a hand through his hair absently. It was the same white as everything around him, which had been causing him a low-grade irritation since he arrived because it made him feel less like an observer and more like part of the scenery. It was his least favourite quality in an environment.
He stood, picked up his bag, and looked at the city properly for the first time. Flevance was larger than he had expected from the outside. The streets branched outward from the port in every direction, dense with stalls selling everyday goods that all shared the same quiet distinction: the Amber Lead refinement that gave them their pale finish. Bowls, tools, medicine bottles, decorative tiles, fabrics treated with white pigment.
The ore was in everything. It was the city's identity as much as its economy, and the people selling it had the easy confidence of those who understood their own value. The city had grown rich on the back of something that existed nowhere else in the world, and it knew it.
As he moved deeper into the city he passed the hospital, a building considerably larger than anything else on the street, set back slightly from the road as though it had been given room on purpose. He had read about it too. One of the best medical facilities in this part of North Blue, staffed by physicians the book had described with the kind of reverence usually reserved for admirals. He noted it and kept walking. He had things to do first.
The plan had come together on the three-day sail from the island. Bounty hunting. Before his time training it would have been a different calculation entirely, but he was taller now and considerably stronger, and the petty bounties on any working port board were not posted because the targets were dangerous. They were posted because nobody had bothered yet. He was bothering. It was a reasonable way to fund the rest of the journey north to find the man his father had sent him to.
He found the Marine outpost near the centre of the port district and located the bounty board outside it. It was larger than he had expected, covered in overlapping posters arranged in rough order of value, the faces becoming progressively less remarkable as the numbers decreased toward the bottom. He worked his way along it from one end to the other with the methodical patience he applied to most things, reading each poster briefly before moving on.
Then he reached the top.
The number stopped him before the name did. A figure so large it took him a moment to parse it as an actual quantity rather than a printing error. Five billion berries. He had never seen that many digits attached to a single person. He looked at the name.
Gold D. Roger.
The face in the picture was not what he had expected from a number like that. The man was grinning, wide and unhurried, the kind of smile that suggested he had been told exactly what the poster was for and found it genuinely funny. Lucien looked at it for a moment longer than he intended to, turning the number over in his head against that expression, trying to find where the two connected.
He filed it away and moved to the lower left of the board.
The smaller postings were clustered together, ranging from a thousand berries to twenty-five thousand, the kind of work that experienced hunters passed over without stopping. He read through them one by one.
A man who had gone rogue from a merchant escort a few days earlier caught his attention. He had stolen from his own clients and fled south, and was suspected to be lying low on a small island roughly half a day's sail from Flevance. The reward was ten thousand berries. The description suggested no particular fighting ability, just opportunism and a head start.
Lucien turned the poster over, read the back, and pocketed it. Then he walked out of the outpost and back toward the dock.