The Marooned Captain

The shoal named on the bounty poster is a bleak hump of mud and stone crowned by a single dead tree. There is no pirate sloop moored here—only a lone woman standing beside a wrecked skiff, waving a red kerchief. "I'm Catrin Corran!" she shouts across the water. "I can see the bounty poster in your hand from here. My first mate threw me overboard nine days ago. He has the Brass Petrel now—and he's the one who raided those last barges!"

The approaching sail belongs to a rival bounty cutter, the Fair Reckoning, which has been staking out this shoal longer than you have. Her captain, Dov Kessler, hails you across the channel. "That's my quarry you've got in irons! Hand her over, and I'll toss you a few coins for hauling her off the mud."

From your deck, Corran mutters under her breath: "My mutinous mate Rudd Lowry is raiding from the old stone weir right now. My name is on the poster, but his hold is the one stacked with Guild plunder."

Corran eats like someone who has counted every mouthful for a week. "I robbed Guild strongboxes, sure—but I never touched a family barge. My mate, Rudd Lowry, called me soft for it, and most of the crew backed him." She wipes her bowl clean with a crust of bread. "He hides the Petrel below the old stone weir between raids. Put me alongside her rail, and half the hands will remember who their real captain is. There's a full strongbox in the cabin—you won't walk away empty-handed."

The Guild factor checks Corran's face against the bounty poster feature by feature, like a clerk inspecting a crate against a bill of lading. "Six plundered barges," he mutters. Corran says nothing. He dips his quill in ink. "Delivered alive. Good—the Guild masters enjoy a public trial."

A crumbling wall of dressed stone spans a half-dry riverbed, and the Brass Petrel lies moored in its deep shadow with all her lanterns dark. A captured grain barge is lashed to her port beam. On the Petrel's quarterdeck, a man is barking orders in a voice that expects instant obedience, while the barge's civilian family sits lined up on the mudbank with their hands laced behind their heads.

Battered into submission, the Brass Petrel has surrendered. Mutineer captain Rudd Lowry lies groaning on the deck with a heavy wood splinter through his thigh, while the freed barge family wastes no time poling their grain boat clear. Inside the Petrel's cabin sit a heavy strongbox, a locked weapons rack, and Lowry's logbook—recording every barge he plundered and what he did to their crews.