Epilog to Deadly Wish

My editor and I disagreed about the epilog to Deadly Wish. She is a very sagacious lady so quite likely she is right and I am wrong, but I have always been fond of this epilog. If you’d like to find out what happened to the pearl with the demon’s soul inside once it ended up in the possession of a sailor from Portugal (thought by Kata to be a demon because who else could smell so bad?), read on!

Up ahead, Luys could see the place where the path curved around an ancient chestnut tree. He knew that it would head down a small slope through Jorge Velho’s olive grove, and from there he’d be able to see the lights of his village.

 

Night was gathering, but Luys didn’t need light to walk this path. Even after five years, his feet knew every stone, every rut, every hollow. And his heart was fuller of joy with every step.

 

Five years! He’d been five years at sea. A long time to leave his young family along. Little Beatriz, who’d been a baby in her mother’s arms, would be walking and talking. Manuel would be so tall, close to manhood. Luys would have to think about getting him apprenticed. And Isabel, his sweet wife Isabel, with her affectionate eyes more than making up for the tartness of her tongue. He’d be with her again before the sun was fully down.

 

But the trip had been worth the separation. They’d filled the hold of the ship with cinnamon and pepper, cloves and saffron, and Captain da Silva had been generous about sharing his newfound wealth. Luys had gold in his pack, enough to buy a little olive grove or vineyard of his own. Gifts for the children, too, and something for Isabel. Luys patted this pocket to be sure it was still there. They he couldn’t resist taking it out.

 

The pearl gleamed in the last of the light, trapped in its slim band of gold. Luys supposed he’d have to go to confession to rid himself of the sin of taking the jewel from the pocket of that girl. But it had been a small enough price to pay for her life, surely? And Luys had been the one to spot her, floating in the ocean, three-quarters drowned, miles from shore. How she’d gotten there he’d never know. But they’d plucked her from the water, and the English doctor had bandaged her arm, and Luys had helped to deliver her to that fisherman’s hut. So she owed him something, surely. Something like this.

 

The pearl would look lovely in a ring on Isabel’s finger, or on a chain around her plump neck. Luys was walking through the olive grove now, and he quickened his pace, his heartbeat hurrying his feet along. In a moment he’d see candles glimmering behind windows and he’d know that, at last, he was home. He wished he could be there now.

 

A cold wind worked its way underneath his collar and down his back. He shivered. Then he stared at the pearl in his hand. A strange white mist seemed to be rising from it, hovering for a moment before the breeze that had made chills run down his spine whisked the scrap of fog away.

 

The pearl crumbled to dust in Luys’s palm, and the ring of gold melted to a thread, then a hair, and then nothing.

 

Luys stared in astonishment and shook the chalky white dust form his palm.

 

So it had been a fake! Not a real jewel at all. Luys snorted with exasperation, feeling almost as if the half-drowned girl had robbed him. But at least the thing had fallen to bits before Isabel had seen it, and now he need not worry about doing penance for taking it out of the girl’s pocket. And after all, he did have lovely piece of silk brocade in his pack for Isabel as well. He’d simply never mention the pearl, and she would have no disappointment.

 

Somewhere far away, Luys heard a mournful howl, despair and rage threaded into the sound, vanishing on the wind. A dog? A wolf, perhaps, calling to its kind? It hardly mattered. He ducked under the branches of the last olive tree, and there, flickering to warm yellow life against the deep blues of the evening sky, the dark green of  mountain slopes and the brown of thatched roof and the gray of stone walls, were the lights of his village at last.

 

In a few minutes more, he’d be home.

 

Just as he had wished.