in which maggie starts gathering her navy

The Black Lightning continued on towards Port Doras, and by the time it put in to the harbor, Maggie was up and about and had reclaimed her hat and her position from Abna. Abna gave both up with good grace and told Maggie that she would like a ship of her own, if Maggie's dream of a pirate navy came true.

"I have gotten used to wearing the hat," Abna added, "but your head is too large."

"It is all the hair," Maggie said. She tossed her head for good measure, and a breeze picked up and blew her hair around, as if in agreement.

( The ship sat docked in port for merely a week )

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total words: 35,387

in which maggie actually raises a navy

Maggie continued to try to get pirate captains to meet her and to talk and argue and discuss once they did. Several of them proved slippery and cagey and hard to pin down - paranoia was perhaps an understandable reaction to knowing there was a price on your head - and then she got a note that Bernade's brothel girl and the other working girls and boys at Madame Lilyet's were keeping their ears open for any news, so as to help her cause.

Bernade was still captain of the Cormorant and still sailed in and out of Port Doras. She was illiterate and so had to dictate all her correspondence, which was unsurprisingly written in a variety of hands with varying degrees of legibility. Maggie knew she should consider them both lucky that there were enough people in Port Doras who could read and write and were willing to pass notes between pirates.

Maggie let her crew repeat gossip and did not correct them when the facts got a bit out of hand or were ignored altogether. She was constantly amused to hear these tales about her repeated back to her stripped of many recognizable elements. She heard that she herself had killed the captain of the Aconite after he had run her through with his poisoned sword, and she laughed at every variation of her relationship with the priest. There were a number of stories told about the two of them, all no doubt invented by her own crew.

( She spent her money wisely, paying bribes when she thought she would be granted an audience )

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total words: 37,535