Mermaid Precinct by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Author:Keith R.A. DeCandido [DeCandido, Keith R.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Keith R.A. DeCandido, Precinct, Dragon Precinct, Unicorn Precinct, Goblin Precinct, Gryphon Precinct, Tales From Dragon Precinct, Fantasy, police procedural
Publisher: eSpec Books
Published: 2019-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

All Kustro wanted to do was kiss the boy.

He’d been working the docks since he grew hair on his nethers. His parents had served as portmasters for two different sections of the docklands, and Kustro did scut work for them both, later becoming a portmaster himself. In fact, he was the youngest person ever to be made a portmaster, but considering that he grew up with it, it wasn’t surprising that he knew more about how things ran on the Cliff’s End docks than people twice his age.

At least until Lord Blayk took over from Lord Albin. Then, all of a sudden, the portmaster positions were streamlined. Where the docks used to be divided into a dozen sections, Lord Blayk halved that, leaving six portmasters out of work—and three of them were Kustro and his parents. His parents hired on as deputy portmasters under their former colleagues, but Kustro wasn’t willing to take a pay cut to do the same job—and have to report to someone who had been his equal a week before.

Then Lord Blayk was arrested for something—Kustro didn’t know the specifics, and the rumor mill was on full for that one. Based on what the sailors around the docks were saying, Blayk was arrested for anything from patricide to attempted murder of the king and queen to embezzling tax funds to attempted murder of Lady Meerka. Kustro didn’t really care, he was just happy that the person who’d cost him his livelihood and who’d maimed his parents’ livelihood was now in a dungeon somewhere or hanged.

Unfortunately, his brother Lord Doval didn’t make things any better. He seemed to think that six sections of dock were sufficient, and kept things as they were.

Kustro tried to work as a deckhand, but he quickly discovered something about himself that he’d managed not to learn despite living and working on the docks for a decade and a half: he got seasick.

It was embarrassing more than anything. He’d worked with seafaring vessels his entire life, spent more time near the Garamin Sea than anywhere else, yet it took him until he was almost thirty before he learned that he couldn’t go on a seafaring craft without being violently ill.

His parents were kind enough to support him while he tried to figure out what he could do for a living. Even if he was willing to be a deputy portmaster, all those positions were filled, and nobody else would hire him for a lesser position given that he was a qualified portmaster. “The job would be beneath you,” they kept saying, even though what was really beneath him was starving to death.

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