The sky was red on the last day of Xereks Lees’s life.
Calveeni’s dangled from the biggest mangrove tree at the western tip of Maresg, its wooden beams dappled russet by the sun squatting on the hills behind it. Whitecaps dotted the ocean and sighed up to blend their murmur with the hum of conversation. The emerald hills, like Calveeni’s famed balcony, were the color of rust in the b****y light cast between the remnants of a storm that trundled out of sight to the east.
The restaurant was three stories tall and as shapeless as the rest of the buildings of Maresg, built at an angle in the fork where the trunk of the tree split into two great branches. The top floor leaned over the water, supported by more giant limbs, and the balcony jutted out even further, held aloft by a snarl of fraye
