100.

100.

You have damaged an enemy ship of a higher level! You have been awarded 40,000XP.

You have caused the most damage in a significant engagement! Your reward is based on relative damage done and the average damage by your fellow combatants: +25,000 XP

I would have appreciated having more time sailing the miles of sea back to the armada to brainstorm a way of tell king Jovan how badly things had gone without making it sound like they’d all gone south because of me. Unfortunately, modern magic negated the distance by having air mages with communication spells on our vessels. No sooner had the Tempest disengaged than demands were coming to explain what exactly was going on.

So I told them plainly. It was their fault sending someone with famously bad charisma to talk, so they could deal with my blunt report about how me attempting to use Redmund to push things forward peacefully instead backfired spectacularly. Our mage used a spell that transmitted all sounds within a given radius, but the messages being sent from the other end were coming through a relay. They came out rather dry, but I could easily imagine Jovan being red-faced while he dictated to an intermediary.

I was sitting in my cabin with Hali, Drese and Marcus while I passed my report. Drese crossed his legs and merely listened, but the other two didn’t hesitate to throw out unsolicited opinions and conjecture to add to my report. It probably didn’t help the king’s blood pressure that they were right.

“The coup happened before we even arrived,” Hali said. “Probably over the last several months. When all-hands knew what was going on with just one signal, you can confidently say their loyalty was already shot.”

“Likely the only thing that could have kept Michaels from following through with this farce was a personal visit from his monarch,” Marcus added, before giving a staged gasp. “But then, I hesitate to even thinkabout what might have happened if his majesty had boarded that ship if Michaels had already made up his mind.” You could forget sometimes with the airs he put on of being a ‘respectable magic tutor’ that Marcus had made his way in a pirate town essentially scamming parents with a chance of improving their kids’ affinities. He had a sarcastic streak when he wanted. And a sore spot because of Jovan’s involvement with his missing hands.

“He was certainly prepared to assassinate me,” I acknowledged. “I did my best to merely disable his escorts, however.”

Our comms mage winced before he gave us the reply. I didn’t begrudge him his position.

To be entirely honest I didn’t begrudge Jovan his position either. On his end, the situation could only be viewed in shades of disaster. The turning of the Emerald was the obvious one, but Hali had pointed out that publicly losing such a strong asset had undermined all of the talks he’d had with the Madu matriarchs. If they wanted, they could ignore his treaty with the full confidence Jovan would be slapped down by his former allies.

They’d have to be stupid to do that given their own dire straits, but I would be surprised if the crafty matriarchs didn’t wrangle additional concessions out of this deal.

Despite how clearly upset he was, the king at least backed us. We were requested to remain at a distance from the Emerald but remain between it and the respective flagships. Our engagement showcased our ability to hold our own against the larger-than-life behemoth. Several ships from the Antaran fleet broke off and moved around us. Though they gave the Emerald a wide berth, they were still a show of force.

After a tense hour of ‘discussions’ and ‘debriefing’ with the king that felt like they would have been a good hide-stripping if we were underlings instead of powerful mercenaries, we settled in to wait.

Darkness came and Jovan’s ships attempted to communicate with Michaels while the diplomats went at another round of negotiations to hammer out a deal before anything else could go awry. I swam over to the Raven to congratulate Jack on a job well done and otherwise let my crew know that they had done well and were appreciated.

Only one casualty.

That one casualty meant there would be sadness for many over the loss of a comrade rather than pure jubilation, but they all knew the score. Our ships might have lost a lot more durability, but it was the crews of the three enemy ships that had paid in blood.

When I returned to the Tempest I found that Gnar had squashed an attempt by some to get drunk before I returned with my ‘all seeing eye’. Gnar had the orcish view on alcohol – lots of it and for any occasion – but knew my rules and denied the crew the chance to get sloshed when another battle might come with the dawn.

When I asked the names of the guilty though, I only got ‘it was handled’. I decided to let Gnar’s judgement stand. It was a coin flip whether his justice would have been rougher than my own anyway.

I required that sleep shifts be taken, but before a certain youth got the chance to crash into his blanket I summoned him to my cabin.

To say that Redmund had a rough day would be an understatement. He was frankly dead on his feet and I wondered if this wasn’t a talk that had better wait, before deciding waiting was the cowards way out.

He stood just inside my cabin door with his arms at his side in a rendition of the military propriety he’d been raised with. Being summoned seems to have impressed on him that he was speaking with Captain Seaborn rather than ol’ Dom. His eyes kept wandering to the planks laid over the damaged floor, though. The back of the cabin remained an open hole with a wall of seawater just waiting.

I let several moments drag by as his awareness and comprehension waxed and waned before it seemed to catch up to him. I gestured for him to have a seat – the seat in question being a chair turned into an odd stool by the day’s activities – and pulled out a bottle and two small glasses. His eyes widened when I handed him one. “Mind you, it’s for slow sipping.”

He nodded and accepted. I slouched back into my own chair behind my desk and propped both feet on it casually before sipping my own watered-down booze. “Did I ever tell you about my ma?” I started.

It was several bells later when I trundled him off to bed with a head unlikely to have dreams or nightmares. I wiped at the dried tear tracks on his face. The gesture was utterly foreign, I’d only interacted with a handful of cabin boys since I’d outgrown my own boyhood, and I’d never been anything to them except another deckhand. Yet I liked to think the gesture was … paternal. Something that might have meant something to a younger Domenic.

I couldn’t fix the rejection Redmund had been dealt any more than I could lead my crew on a cross country expedition, but I’d see to it he didn’t grow up adrift.

The dawn brought a flurry of activity, but thankfully no battle. The Emeraldhad decided to quit the area. Her first escort had regained her maneuverability as soon as the frozen bolts the Ravenhad hit her with thawed, and that ship accompanied her. The other ship that we’d disabled was left behind. Admiral Michaels decided to use that one as a dumping ground for the crew from all three ships that had decided against joining the mutiny against the crown. King Jovan immediately reclaimed them and began having them interviewed to determine what had been happening aboard their prized ship these last months.

I wasn’t invited. Instead we were politely asked to patrol for sea monsters, and since the congregation of ships was attracting attention I sent the Tempest to do so with Travis at the helm, Gnar commanding the marines and Sadeo the artillery. Because it was a shorter foray that shouldn’t require any technical maneuvering I put Gnar in overall command.

The ship functioned largely the same as when I was on board, just without me. I took it as a mark of pride that they could do so.

Meanwhile I joined Jack on board the Dark Raven. She was the better ship to intimidate both the brave and the foolhardy into compliance if the occasion arose. It was also good to remind everyone she was my ship just as much as the Tempest.

After Jack had the chance to sail under me and understand my methods and desires I had given him some space to go with his command of the Raven. We’d frequently mixed up the crews for training purposes, but I wanted all to understand that while I wasn’t on board, Jack was Captain. He acted with my authority. If I was mother hen-ing him all the time then a crewmember might look at an order he gave and say ‘are you sure Captain Seaborn would want that?’

If Jack was going to run the ship aground then he’d be answering to me, not the crew.

Still, the betrayal of Burdette had marked me, and I kept a finger on the pulse of things. Jack was aware of this but said nothing of it. When I stepped aboard he gave me a salute and asked if I wished to take command. When I declined he ran the ship as he would if I wasn’t around.

He had a practical and mercenary mindset even now. Given the nature of things, I thought he was perfect for the position. I hadn’t forgotten his request for his services though, it was written down along with all the others in my little book. Once Jovan and the matriarchs had finished their business I’d ask the Madu if they had any intelligence on the location of the Gull, so I might arrange for Jack to see his brother again.

“It’s dangerous letting enemies leave like that,” Jack said quietly to me.

Unaware of my musings he had watched the Emerald disappear over the horizon, flanked by a trio of Antaran ships. Jovan seemed to have decided reducing his fleet was worth keeping tabs on his former admiral and ship for the time being.

“You’d rather kill all enemies to the last man?” I asked wryly. “Maybe have the prisoners walk the plank?”

“Of course not Captain,” he said, ignoring the irony of our conversation. “Just be a bit more selective in which snakes we allow to slither away.”

“Hmm. As I see it he’s still Jovan’s problem for today. I don’t have any illusion he’ll ever be an ally of mine – and I want blood in return for the soul he took from us – but he might be like Davy Jones: fulfilling a needed role even if we’re at cross purposes.”

“You’ve been listening to the elf to much,” Jack grumbled. “He’d let a dog eat him if he thought it was his place in nature. I won’t badger you with my advice, but I’ll tell you now we should shadow them and remove them from the seas before they have a chance of regrouping.”

“No,” I said, before reconsidering. “Maybe. Following them at least. I’d like to know what they get up to next. I’m not sold on forcing a conflict when we can just avoid them, though. The oceans are massive.”

“Are you afraid of a fight?”

If this weren’t a quiet conversation between us I’d have thought he was trying to undermine my authority, but he was trying to understand me. “No, though I don’t think we could do it without severe casualties and maybe the loss of a ship. They hooked us good last night. We didn’t scratch their durability.”

“Durability isn’t everything. Jovan lost the ship without Makam losing anyone. We can turn the Emeraldinto a ghost ship, trust me.”

“And then add the Emerald to my fleet?” I asked. “Believe me, Gnar already brought that argument up. And we’ll need to restock on your special armor-piercing bolts if we want to go with that strategy.”

He sighed. “We’re too late. If we let them go they’ll develop a counter to those bolts. If we chase them now, we lack the munitions to use the one winning strategy we have.”

I chewed on my cheek for a moment. “That about sums it up. If it makes you feel better Gnar eventually agreed with Arnnaith that not pushing the issue is the right call. We’ll see what Michaels does … you never know what the tide might bring.”

I assumed because both parties involved fundamentally agreed on a need for peace that the signing of the treaty would be a foregone conclusion that wouldn’t take more than a day (I thought ‘a day’ was a conservative estimate from the ‘couple hours’ I thought reasonable).

Imagine my horror when we spent another day and a half sitting in the middle of the ocean while talks continued, for a total of three days. Three days! Were the diplomats deliberately dragging things out to grind experience while the world moved on without them?

The time allowed for other things to happen. The crew redeemed from the Emerald’s defection was vetted and reintegrated in the remaining ships of the fleet according to some balance of politics and logistics I cared nothing about.

The Tempest engaged a megalodon in the second day and Travis lured it into a trap where multiple ships could fire on it from the surface. The successful encounter came at the expense of more durability, as the creature rammed the quarterdeck in an attempt to eat Marcus. The ship was now in need of more significant repairs.

As soon as the big shark wasn’t trying to eat us any more, we began eating it! Large cuts were butchered and distributed to all ship’s cooks for an impromptu dinner celebration. The politics continued during it of course, but the hunt impressed enough people that when the Tempest resumed her patrol she had a group of both Madu and humans. They were there for seamanship training and that alone – the whole affair seemed to be only dubiously approved by the higher ups and that for reasons incomprehensible – but the lads were rank-and-file that were more than willing to enjoy the boost in leveling.

After he avoided being eaten, I had a longer chat with Marcus about magic. It was the first opportunity we’d had to talk about my lightning duel with the other mage, and I was eager for his input. He thought I was an idiot. Then he became jealous that my Thunderous Performance title had such a benefit to handling lightning, and immediately set my sights on my next spells.

Casting lightning had been my goal from when I first started. Now he wanted to make sure I understood there was further to go. He tried to incentivize me by describing a casting that would launch a ball of lightning that would shock anyone within a given radius of its path. I described for him the lightning storm I’d seen while incognito aboard my father’s Carpathia. He grumbled and described for me a storm conjuration that sent a wall of water and lightning rolling across a battlefield. He described it vividly, and with the perspective of someone who’d seen an entire flank of their army destroyed by it. I began imagining what it might do to a ship.

Goalpost successfully moved, Marcus.

Finally the deliberations were over and they had a small ceremony where they signed the treaty. I was invited to witness that as well, and the event was unremarkable besides having taken three days to set up and the food selection they once again prepared.

The pulse of light that shot from the parchment to the respective rulers was neat too, I suppose.

With the end of the negotiations came an end to my contractual arrangement with Jovan. I had specifically been hired as a protector/deterrent to facilitate these discussions and no mention had been made of escorting the human armada back to port. I might not have minded before, but now my sights were again set towards the southeast.

Fearing Jovan would cry foul at this arrangement I went over the whole thing extensively with Hali to try and prepare for the argument. Jovan did not cry foul, however. In fact he did not seem sad to see me – or my ships – go at all. He gave me official sounding thanks and recommendations in the presence of his nobles and that was that. Our pay had already been stowed.

I thought it meant he was a lot more sore about how I handled Michaels than he let on. Hali thought it meant there were things back in Antarus he was going to do that he didn’t want us around for. That suspicion made me almost curious enough to check, but other priorities came first.

While I completed the arrangement with Jovan, Hali followed through with several Madu who’d previously hinted they might know something about the location of the Gull. They’d been waiting for the negotiations to complete before giving us a lead on something that might pull us away.

Surprise, surprise, the Gullhad last been seen off of Carr, the occupied home country of the lizardfolk. It seems the human war with the elves stopped going so well for them as soon as the armies stepped foot in the ancestral forests, and disgruntled troops relieved their stress by ‘pacifying’ the occupied countryside. It was a reasonable place for Jack’s piratical but patriotic brother to be. The trouble was Makam ruthlessly controlled those waters with their puppet navy from Andros, so keeping the Gull afloat without the Raven’s support was likely a challenge for him.

The Madu intelligence lacked anything as convenient as a port of harbor, but even a coastline was a good starting point. We could narrow down from there where the strongest military patrols were and rule those waters out, as the Gull was running supplies and weapons rather than ambushing the coastal guard.

Jack’s knowledge was unhelpful in this regard. Not only had he and his brother operated much differently and in different regions when they were running together, but the organizational changes brought on by new rulership and the increased sea threat would have completely redrawn the map as far as safe havens and preferred routes went.

He did point out that there was a stationary man who would have his finger on the pulse of such operations: Donovan. As I’d fled the town, the tavern keeper of Tulisang had revealed himself to be involved in the anti-slave movement and smuggling. Jack elucidated that he wasn’t just involved … he was the central figure of the city. He willingly dealt with pirates and government alike and with his business had both money and excuse to expand; gobbling up rivals, subsidiaries, and old smuggling tunnels under the city that he fashioned into a proper network.

The friendly neighborhood tavern keeper was secretly a kingpin. It amused me to hear his background now and I agreed with Jack that it would be a worthwhile stop. Makam may have cracked down hard on Tulisang to impose their own order, but harsher restrictions typically just bred more cunning thieves.

We had a plan, which were able to sail on after one final transaction with the matriarchs. The Tempest desperately needed repair, and while we didn’t need a dry dock to conduct them we did need timbers. I could try and find suitable wood from previous wrecks – there were plenty along the cliffs of Nilfheim’s coast – but that was a scavenger hunt for secondhand materials.

I purchased them instead.

Davy Jones had unleashed one of his chained Berserkers to create a localized tidal wave upon one of Nilfheim’s shipyards. Nilfheim lacked the might to protect it from incursions as they attempted a rebuild, so it laid to waste until the war situation changed. For a chest of gold, I received a writ signed by multiple matriarchs that authorized me to take from what was sitting there. It was a good deal for both of us, though it struck me that this was the first time I was paying a nation for their goods with coin.

I was a bit flush with cash, so I may have been generous with the payment to buy some goodwill. Overpaying still somehow gave me a level in Trade.

Our itinerary then looked like this: travel west-southwest to the Nilfheim coast to source our repair materials. We’d do the major repairs immediately and the rest while underway. From there we’d make a stop by Tralni, the island trading post was directly in our way going to Tulisang and it would be good to check in on them and see how they were doing after our previous help. At Tulisang we hoped to find information on the whereabouts of Jack’s brother, as well as get a better picture for the war as a whole.

Antarus was withdrawing, their previously dominant naval might now needed to secure their own shores rather than be spent halfway across the world. What were the other human alliance nations intending to do? Would the confederacy let them withdraw or retaliate in kind?

Even as a child I’d noticed the advantage of spending months at sea was that during those months you didn’t need to hear about all the latest rumors and woe-sayers. The disadvantage of it was the same.

“They’re just … all leaving?” Redmund asked. He was staring over the gunwale through the rain at the Antaran armada as they moved in formation back to the east. The Madu had departed hours earlier, their sails still visible through the weather.

“Did you expect them to all to join up and sail the seas together?” Arnnaith answered from by his side. I was proud that he’d dropped the sarcastic edge to his words and made his statement merely rhetorical. “They came here with an explicit purpose and they did it. Typically the reward for a successful job is returning home better off.”

“I know that!” Redmund said. “But we were sailing with them for so long, I thought we were on their side …”

“They agreed to see our side, for this trip at least.” I interjected. “But we’re not Antaran, Redmund. Not anymore. They’re going their own way, to their own problems and decisions.”

He mused on that. “And we’re following uncle south.”

“We’ll wind up shadowing him at a distance, certainly.” I agreed. “Right now I just want to know what he gets up to.”

Redmund didn’t say anything, but his jaw clenched and his fingers gripped the gunwale tighter.

Arnnaith noticed – anyone would expect the strategically minded pickpocket to notice – but rather than helpfully redirecting the conversation he jovially launched into a curse on all fathers, uncles, and other good-for-nothing family members.

He’d been shadowing me for a while, his cursing was quite good.

Redmund was shocked, but Arnnaith ignored his reaction to meet my glare with good cheer. In the end, I had to sigh. Arnnaith was also an inducted member of the poor parental figures club, having been born from a nobleman forcing himself on an enslaved elf.

“Did someone tell you that you’re good at cheering people up? They lied to you.”

“I feel better!” Redmund said immediately in the defense of his friend/bad influence.

I rubbed my eyes wearily. “Go find some mischief to get up to before I have you scrubbing the decks.”

Author's note:

Wow, 100 chapters.  Over half a million words.  Glad to share this with you! (Though I wish chapter 100 was something a bit more momentus, this became something of a transitory chapter.)