They were prowling the southern parts of the ocean. The winds were favorable for anyone who ventured east. If one wanted to go west, it was much harder, and any ships that couldn't do it with full sails in at least two masts were out of luck. This meant that they were not at risk of encountering small-time privateer raiders in their tiny vessels. This, in turn, meant that they were spared from being pestered by these gadflies with too much time on their hands. A sloopette was such a popular - and fast - choice for these entrepreneurs that Daniel already had a plan of action in case they were about to aim their guns at one of them.
The plan was to simply sail with the wind in a way that the privateer was not able to replicate with its one mast and shallow hull. Even the bravest of these raiders realized by then that they were facing someone with too much maritime expertise and firepower. The bastards relied on their newfangled guns that could tear smaller ships down in a matter of minutes; this, in turn, had given them too much courage and confidence.
Mariana settled into her new role. She took over the captain's duties whenever Daniel had to take time to navigate and do his thing with the charts, and for a while, this worked amazingly well.
Then he came up from his cabin with a huge pile of papers and said that Mariana was to do his work for him.
"I don't even know the new Exilla charting system," she complained to him. The standard ocean maps had changed, according to new measures given out from the crown, but she really didn't know why it was so crucial for pirates to follow this trend. She only knew that Daniel didn't write his logs the way he had written them before; he used the new numbering system and new symbols to keep up with the current way of putting distances, locations, and coordinates on paper.
"But I -"
He just pushed another pile of charts and books into her arms.
"You will learn from these books, or you will cry and learn," he said bluntly. "I can't do all the dull work and have you just mingle with the men and look and sound good to them. For one thing, they will get too attached to you, and they will start to favor one over the other. You need to take your turn in the cabin as well."
"Oh, all right." She didn't feel comfortable taking responsibility for their course, let alone for putting it all down in a coherent, standardized form. She loved books and reading, she merely happened to hate navigation too much when it had to happen with the precise rules that the pirate king adhered to.
It wasn't always fun to be a captain of a ship.
Still, she retreated from her social duties and put her mind to work. For one thing, she really did not understand why Aja Vana had two sets of coordinates in the new system, and neither did she get the reasoning behind using thirds, or a system based on the number three in the new way of doing things. It was not just annoying. It was hurting her head.
"If this is…two and two thirds away from the Passage…"
She was scratching the paper with her quill. She knew that Daniel would eventually chastise her for messing up her initial notes. He could be awfully stern.
She needed to clear her head, though, and this absent-minded sketch allowed her to do just that.
"Then it would logically follow that we are…"
She tapped a place between an abandoned military base and the supposed deepest point in the ocean.
"Here by fifth day, but we are quite obviously further than that." She smacked her lips disapprovingly. "Why is that? We're going too fast."
Then she realized that she would have to ask about the wind jars. Why had Daniel failed to remind her of that? She had to talk to the weather witch immediately.
The weather witch was only half Karshaan, and she was quite unlike any witch that Mariana had ever met; gray and dull, even to the point of being a bit invisible, middle-aged and adorned with a quiet, unassuming speaking voice that drowned in the roars of the waters below.
"I have seen to it that the jars are all of the same strength," the witch said. "They are very much potent; it would be good if you could multiply our expected knots by four point nine."
"Four point nine, thank you. That's a whole lot of knots."
The witch smiled, and it was the only thing that could make her face stand out from the environment a bit. She had a great smile.
"Thank you, Captain Adams, I am quite good at this."
"You are." Mariana returned the smile. "I will go do everything…all over again."
The witch grimaced. "Ow. There might be something else I could help you with."
Captain Mariana raised her eyebrows. "And what is that?"
The witch glanced around them. "You may want to learn how Captain Brandon finds clues for the next catch…"
Really? Daniel had said nothing about that, either. Just how much work was he going to put on Mariana's shoulders in vain? It was almost as if he was trying to break her somehow, with all these calculations and logs and stuff that he simply refused to share with her.
Emboldened by her annoyance, Mariana took the witch to the captain's cabin. She poured them both some tea and sat down.
"So, I hope you are allowed to talk to me about this," she said.
"It is my duty."
That didn't answer the question at all, but Mariana considered herself a brave woman.
"So, how does he do it?" she asked.
The witch bit her lower lip and avoided Mariana's gaze.
"You ever heard of the watersight, Captain?"