Mariana didn't know what she was doing. Her body seemed to move on its own, without her commanding to place her hands behind his neck and reach towards him.
"Look at you," he growled. "All bothered because of a filthy pirate. How can you live with yourself when you clearly want me so much?"
"I don't want you," she said, and it was the most blatant lie she had ever told anyone.
"Yes, you want me," Daniel whispered in her ear. "You want to feel my stubble on your smooth cheek. You want to kiss me until you forget your name. Just do it, let go, and I will show you who you really are."
It was true. She was itching to get close to him, and they were still too far apart from each other for her liking, but good girls didn't initiate such things and Mariana wanted to be good to contrast him better.
He swooped down like an eagle towards a rabbit, all of a sudden, like he was too hungry for her kiss to wait. She opened up her mouth for him, just a narrow passage.
They were one for a split second. His lips were the sweetest, kindest part of him; his hands still felt rough as they traveled in her hair, caressing every part of the outline of her skull that she had thought she'd been saving for the embrace of her pillow.
He was so strong against her, stronger than an old oak tree, he was so fresh and wild and she was so fragile, but then they both pulled away from the kiss, perhaps because she heard something and he heard it, too.
The witch had arisen from his slumber.
"Captain ADAMS! Come talk BUSINESS! IMMEDIATELY!"
She walked away from the pirate king.
"Daniel, be here when I return," she told him. "You are the one for me. Don't screw this up, please."
He smiled and waved at her as the witch took her towards a grove of mostly dead trees.
"I don't know what you are doing or trying to do with him and I would like it if you didn't tell me the details," Roinar said and whacked away a branch that was blocking his view.
"I am not one to brag about my hunting trophies," she shot back at him. "But I assume that this is not why you asked me to come."
"You don't trust him completely, do you?"
They sat down on the black volcanic sand.
"Of course not," she said quietly. "He is too much for me to take like I would take a treasure galleon. He is so wild, so unpredictable."
"Then I can say with certainty that you should take my deal."
Mariana perked up immediately. She liked deals. She liked having some backup.
They exchanged a whole lot of information.
For one thing, Roinar the witch was able to banish Dars entirely. Probably.
Secondly, he asked for such an obscene price that the entire loot of the last mission was not enough to cover one fifth of it.
Thirdly, Roinar was willing to agree to a deal - he would stay aboard the Good Wife for as long as it took Mariana to gather the funds to pay off her debt to him.
There was a catch, though.
The banishment needed someone to stay with Mariana and cast spells during each and every full moon so that the powerful magic of the ghost could be kept away from her. This meant that Roinar would have to become her own personal witch doctor.
She agreed to this, although not without reluctance. She didn't like the witch, and she liked having a gold drain aboard her ship even less.
"There is another thing that I need to tell you." The witch shuddered, as if he was about to tell her something terrible.
Like she hadn't desensitized herself to that stuff already…
"If I die before you die, the banishment will not work any longer, not after I draw my last breath."
"And are you going to die soon?"
"Yes," Roinar said bluntly. "I have made peace with it, don't get me wrong, Captain, but you may not like the consequences."
"And is there any way I can help you outlive me?"
"Not without the Potion of Life, no."
The Potion of Life had to be something awfully expensive.
Turned out that it was not an actual potion, though. It was a spell that consisted entirely of music, and only a select few musicians were able to replicate it, for there was…some business about tuning a harp just right and intervals changing in the middle of the magical song. Or something like that. Frankly, Mariana only liked to sing and dance, she was not big on analyzing music. This all meant that the banishment could work, though, for the Potion could be played as many times as one needed to artificially prolong someone's life. The Potion song did not have any significant magical drawbacks except for the obscene amount of gold the musicians required as payment for that wretched piece. It was insanity, but it was a madness that Mariana was willing to accept.
"Sure thing, we will find someone to finger a harp for you," she said, rather sharply, because she felt like all these creative people were going to sing and dance her entire ship into bankruptcy. "I can pay you, and you will be alive for the rest of my life. Heaven knows I will not be as miserable as you."
"Am I miserable?"
"You brought this island to the brink of destruction. Yes, I think someone must be a little bit miserable to be so hungry for power."
They agreed on the deal and shook hands.
When they came back from the grove, Daniel had left, and Callow Charlie was lying on the ground in a pool of blood.
Now it was hatred that flushed Mariana's cheeks with a reddish shade of pink.