"May I ask why -"
"No, Captain, you may not. Go away," the woman said.
It didn't look like she was doing anything to stop the fire from spreading.
At first, Mariana had no idea how the woman had discerned her status as a captain. Then she realized that there were items placed in the middle of the pyre that were obviously of magical nature.
Little wooden toads with mirrors on their bellies, charms that had an inverted number eight…one did not have to ask twice how eight could be inverted, it was simply a matter of seeing the form of the symbol. Impossible on paper, but quite easy for a proper witch.
Mariana, lacking the ancient knowledge of the creative work that the woman was now destroying, had to take a step back so that she would not breathe any cursed smoke into her lungs.
"I am not going away," she said with her softest, most amicable tone. She could not let this opportunity slip from her hands.
Firstly, the pyre was constructed in accordance with the Royal Standard Banishment Ritual. It was a fancy word for placing a dollop of a salty, peppery sauce called King's Sweat in every direction, north, with a piece of aquamarine covered with the sauce sitting in that corner, west, with a pearl and a drop of sauce guarding that corner and so on and so forth. The initial cost of these stones was a hefty price to pay, but a witch could reuse the stones, although King's Sweat ran out from every culinarist's household quickly.
It was simply just a great recipe for a universal sauce.
"That is the definition of wastefulness," Mariana commented, anguish squeezing her lungs so that her words became a whisper as she counted the material value lost in the flames of the pyre.
"Splendid, skipper, I do not care about wastefulness. All of this stuff has been cursed."
Cursed, so, Mariana had been right about many things.
"Who cursed them? Is there anything I can do to help you?"
She heard a story that bordered on incredible. Having experienced things that could turn a brunette into a blonde from the sheer shock of witnessing the terrifying underbelly of the high seas, Captain Mariana Adams believed every last word that this witching wisewoman spat out.
There was a certain male witch, a businessman who sold all kinds of magical services, and he was largely responsible for the financial state of calamity that this port now suffered. He had driven out all competition in his own field. When random businessmen like regular merchants and such people had tried to intervene, the witch had placed a draining curse on their endeavors that placed all their hard-earned gold into his own pockets. It was such an intricate and intelligent curse that one had to be impressed. It took such magical strength to go from simply hexing a headache into someone to actively drinking the life force out of the victim and making their business fail.
These were the signs of someone who was competent enough to divert any path of fate. From the vague descriptions, Mariana could also deduce that the man was Karshaan and very likely to have some sort of a weather manipulation skill woven into his craft.
"So, what you can do for us, dear skipper, we'd like to see that man driven out of here and also killed with a hundred stabs of small needles," the wife said, smiling with a mortifyingly dissonant look on her crazed face.
"I will…see what I can do about it," Mariana muttered. "Magic rarely stops guns and knives from turning someone into minced meat. I am coming out of the left field, so to speak, and surely, he has not foreseen a lot about me, because I did not expect to end up coming here, either. Where can I find this man?"
"Likely to be sleeping near the volcano at this hour. He likes to nap, but he will always sleep somewhere dangerous, both to increase his power and decrease the chances of being attacked. Don't breathe the smoke…"
It was true that a volcano overshadowed the port, but as far as Mariana knew anything about it, the mountain had not been spitting out anything too dangerous in a century. It merely bubbled with lava that was slow to move and usually stopped before even reaching the farms in the middle of the island. One could argue that sleeping next to the mouth of a fiery mountain was never safe to begin with, of course.
The captain took Callow Charlie with her and took a trip towards the so-called mainland. The island was tiny, but due to the peculiar dip in altitude, the mountain of fire could hardly be seen from the shoreline.
They walked past green and idyllic pastures, bothered by sheep and goats on the way. A couple of suspicious farmers came to check out the matter with them, but after seeing Captain Mariana, they all blushed and gave up. She even received a single yellow rose from a young gardener as they proceeded towards the bay near the mountain that was likely to serve as a pillow to the evil witch businessman.
They saw Daniel's ship anchored there, in the middle of the dangerous, mangrove-like shoreline trees.
Mariana froze. A lump was quickly rising inside her throat. This had not been her intention. How come was he always able to know where she was? Was he not over him?
Something worse than fear threatened to conquer Mariana's mind. It was the overwhelming anticipation of that dark-haired head peeking from behind the mast, her desire to wave at him and blow a kiss through the air.
Really, a stomach that was full of fluttering butterflies was worse than an empty one, or one pierced with a blade for that matter.
Mariana swallowed that pesky lump and motioned towards Charlie so that he, too, would hide behind the relative safety of a thick trunk of a tree.