A Subtle Treasure

"I am a MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL!"

The voice was familiar, but how come was it Roinar who came up with a declaration like this?

"Move! I SAID MOVE, YOU VERMINS! I need to take a look at him. Applies to you, Captain Adams, just as well! Get out of my way!"

Well, of course a witch could as well be a medical professional. It was the work of wisewomen in primitive villages, anyway, so it all sort of figured out.

A new kind of grim determination overcame Mariana that day as she waited for news about her first mate and his condition. She walked around on the deck and tried to clear her mind so that anything resembling baseless anger would dissolve, but she was unsuccessful.

Why was she so certain that this accident had been Daniel's work? It felt so obvious, but what did she have to show as proof?

She didn't sleep for the following three nights, and to make matters worse, they were still chasing a treasure and the men needed to be functional. She could not let just anyone deal with the first mate's duties, and this gave her a whole stack of responsibilities to take care of before she could even think about sitting down and fashioning a plan of vengeance. It seemed like she always had something to avenge, but if it had been merely her, she would have coped much better.

No, Daniel had to hurt everyone she loved. What a bastard.

And what a bastard he was for making himself impossible to hate…at least, it was impossible for her to hate him with all of her heart and mind. There was always just this great barrier between her and the place in her soul where she had hid the symbolic red dragon of wrath, the part of her that wanted to kill and drink blood.

She couldn't take this anymore.

One morning, when they were just a bit short of catching up with the treasure galleon, she collapsed on the deck in a hysterical heap of tears and limbs that the grief and anxiety of the situation had rendered powerless.

She could have cared about people seeing her like this. She didn't. Mariana did not have anything left in her, she was constantly in mourning, she had insomnia, she was so tired of everything and she just wanted to be treated like a stupid baby and carried into a comfortable armchair.

This was so unlike anything a good captain would do, so weak, so unfitting for a great pirate - and yet she hoped that someone would comfort her and understand what this was all about.

She didn't get what she wanted. No one came, no one even touched her, and since Wolfe was still unconscious, it was up to her to save herself and make things right.

She dried her tears and glared at her men.

"We are hunting big game once again," she said. Her own voice sounded so bleak right now. "We are going to take everything by force, and we will not care about those who speak ill of us. Because…"

She paused. This was one anemic speech! She had never failed to impress herself like this.

"We are going to get a boat, full of gold, and we are going to buy so many nice things for ourselves. End of story."

That was it, but it got a better reception than she would have hoped for. The men were clapping their hands and laughing. It seemed like this had been a reasonably good idea, after all.

They stalked the galleon in the shallows for a while, unbothered by the cannons that seemed to lack accuracy - or maybe the shots splashing into the waves next to them had another explanation, one that was sinister in nature…

Maybe Daniel did not want anything to happen to Mariana directly. She did not know what other reasons he would have had to spare her. It was entirely possible that he had put some spells on her to keep her from harm.

Then she remembered the Potion of Life. Did it also protect her from bodily harm done by cannon shots and that stuff? If it did, then it wasn't exactly a huge wonder that the musicians who knew the song preferred to hide from the world.

Paying customers would have torn them apart.

The Good Wife managed to blow a massive hole into the escaping treasure galleon, but now they needed to unfurl a sail in order to be more nimble.

They crossed a dangerous area that did not, to everyone's great relief, hide a reef, and again, the enemy ship fired at them and missed them by an inch.

"Go for it! Go for it, boys!" Mariana yelled to her men. She jumped aboard the treasure galleon among the very first of the invaders, piercing, stabbing, swirling around as the horrified sailors realized that they would have to fight a woman or die from her blade.

The battle was so short-lived due to some insurance weirdness on behalf of the treasure galleon that to call it anticlimactic would have been an obscene insult towards the Sennite Dullmundanism literary genre. Mariana knew about anticlimactic and disappointing things, after all, she had been engaged.

They looted everything they could find. There was plenty of stuff down in the hold, mostly gold and pearls, and the other goods were reasonably nice, like silk, and dried fruits. The assortment was just as chaotic as one would have expected it to be this far up north, where all kinds of plants flourished in the warm climate.

Mariana saw it as the best course of action to search the cabin herself. Although she did trust her men with whatever was in the hold, she knew that they did not necessarily know a subtle treasure from plain trash, which were the two most common findings in the cabins of sea captains.

She found two dice with strange symbols on them, lines crossing in ways she had never seen before.