They caught a ship near Ra Vana, that pesky little port that had started to serve as some kind of a pirate sanctuary.
It was a most uninspiring fight in the sense that it was more like an unconditional surrender. The spirit of the crew would have improved, had there been a fight against the gallant northerners, but instead they got a white flag and loot for nothing at all.
Still, both the first mate and Mariana agreed that it was good to remind the crew of the positives of such an easy catch.
They sailed towards the island that housed most of the musicians who knew the Potion of Life by heart. The harps were quiet during that dusky evening. Fireflies glimmered between the trees. The tropical darkness was so hot that it felt nearly suffocating, but they pushed onwards into the jungle, following a barely visible path into the heart of the coming night.
Mariana had spent a decent amount of time hacking at branches with a machete in her past, but some of her men, mostly those slow, silent southern types, were baffled by just how hard it was to walk normally in a tropical jungle. Accustomed to pines and spruces, they claimed that the earth itself was conspiring against them. This was a bit amusing, but Mariana could not laugh at anyone - after all, she had caused this entire mess and she didn't want to act like she was better than anyone else just because she had traveled around the world.
Just before it got too dark, they found the musicians.
They were not making much music, those slothful bastards.
The obvious leader of the pack was hairy from head to his exposed chest - he had quite an obscenely revealing ruffled shirt that had, by some miracle, remained relatively clean in the throes of jungle living. The other one was a beautiful, dark woman, and she was more decent in her taste when it came to fashion. They had barely started to exclaim things about what a big surprise it was to bump into privateers in the jungle when the third musician came. He was a somewhat scruffy man with his ribs poking out of his tight undershirt. He was surely not that thin due to starvation; the other musicians were quite well fed.
"I apologize for intruding so rudely into what must be your dear home," Mariana said, not entirely sure that politeness was the way to go. Perhaps these people appreciated crude responses more? They had to live extraordinarily weird lives, hunting and gathering in the jungle while making music for the birds in the treetops.
"You mustn't be sorry," the leader said, dissolving her thoughts faster than sweat evaporated in this overpowering heat. "Our lives are, at times, so dreadfully dull that I sometimes wish we had never escaped from the court at all. My name is Jimmies."
"Not Jim, or Jimmy, but Jimmies. I understand."
"I used to have a twin," Jimmies said and then just left that notion lingering in the air without any attempt to explain himself. "Yes, we were court musicians until the new rules about no rhythmic sequences came and we were forced to -"
"Jimmies, you are boring the captain to death," the woman interrupted him. "My name is Madeliene, and we all play string instruments and stuff like that. The rules were an excuse. No one likes us, that is the real reason, because we all have horrible personalities."
"I am quite satisfied with this candid honesty," Mariana said, trying to keep her smirk from being visible on the side of her face that met the light of the moon and the few torches they had bothered to put blazing into the night.
She really liked the musicians. It could be so, of course, that she, too, had a horrible personality and that this made it easy to get along with these castaways.
"I came here to talk business," Roinar said. "And I would love it if Captain Adams would introduce to you our…offer."
"Just say that you are dying and that you need to hear the Potion of Life," Mariana said, because she was already tired from the exhausting walk through the jungle and she wanted to get the negotiations started.
"My, he is…dying. He looks like a proper witch," the skinny musician said. "My name is Thomas, but I will not be of any use to you. These two are the only ones here who know that song."
Mariana raised an eyebrow. "Why are you here, then, if I may ask?"
"Goodness, Captain, he is our friend," Madeliene said, and for a moment Mariana was very much ashamed of her own cynicism.
"Well, then, erm…"
She tried to save herself, but nothing witty came out of her mouth and she embraced the awkwardness before offering the musicians the goods they had stolen.
There was plenty of food, some tobacco, and quite an obscene amount of coffee, but the musicians wanted more, and so the deal was made.
She would have them as well on her ship, as permanent members of the crew. They would not have to participate in fighting. If they were to be captured by a hostile force, the musicians could always claim that they had been forced to entertain the cruel privateers at gunpoint.
"I don't know about guns, but Jimmies might benefit from a slight slap on the cheek," Madeliene mused.
Gods, she was just a real gem. On some level, Mariana had to agree that she had a certain premonition about Jimmies needing to be slapped on his face.
She shrugged it off. It was not like she could trust her instincts or her intuition too much, having messed her life up in such a short time.
Had it not been for Daniel, she could have lived normally, peacefully…and married a man she barely even tolerated. And done some other things that normal people thought of as worthwhile business.
Gods, even love was simply a pragmatic decision that normal people made. Actually, if she was completely honest to herself, she didn't care much for that kind of life.