[Wild Roses] before the wars
Title: knot a rope 'round my temper
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Niamh Manannan
Prompt: 23D "distasteful"
Word Count: 912
Notes: She's not the smugglers' terror Gideon is, or the sailors' legend Giovanni is. She doesn't need to be.
It's not enough to be a good sailor.
It's sometimes enough to be a good navigator, a gunner, a wind-caller, a sea-reader, a storm lover, but as often it isn't.
Storm lovers make bad captains, and most of them are smart enough to know it--Giovanni certainly does, and he's among the eldest, the strongest, the one who walks with lightning in his eyes and a breath of ozone on the hottest, stillest day.
Gunners and navigators get trained to think in small patterns, see things through their vocation and their power, and it makes them solid if limited captains--navigators map, track, chart. Gunners run blockades, bring down prey the navigators flush.
If Gideon wasn't a pirate--for all he flies a Navy banner and fully holds the rank his age implies, Gideon's a pirate through and through--he'd be called a gunner-Captain and no one would be lying.
Their father's a sea reader, a navigator, a wind caller, a sailor. Nobody doubts that his mother--whoever she was--was one for the sea herself. The man loves the sea and for all anyone can tell the sea loves him back, in as much as the sea loves anyone.
There's those that say Niamh's too young for her rank, that their father promoted her because he's got a soft spot for the girl who grew up under his feet.
(There's those that say it's anything but a soft spot but that he's too much a Sabaey to actually send her out to die. He just makes it a better possibility by giving her a command and minimal sheeting.)
Then there's those who listen to Giovanni's laughter, or Gideon's silence, and start to wonder what Niamh would be like as someone's second, someone's gun-captain, someone's note-taker until she hit her second century, her third.
She grew up on the Navy's ships, ran powder and danced the yards as soon as anyone would let her, learned to read from her father's charts for all she lets the navigators detailed to her chart her courses, watched wind and sea and sky from a hundred different worlds and a hundred different decks, let her hair tangle in a thousand different breezes and soaked the hems of her trousers in a thousand different waters.
She was a captain by the time she was eighty, and she knows exactly how far she can heel one of her ships over before she hits the point of no return, can feel a storm forming in her skin before the first cloud boils over, knows the hiding places of every island for months out from her home ports, and for all her rank she's hardly above occasionally joining her brother Gideon on a venture their father turns a carefully blind eye towards.
She's no madder than any other captain, and far less mad than some, half-sibling or nobility.
Which is why she's not taking a potshot at the tubby galleon carefully skirting the shoals off Janvier Cey, no matter how much she wants to. She's not even muttering about how a rescue in the event of an emergency would improve conditions immensely in the overcrowded hold. Her ship's bigger than the galleon, differently laid out within the hull, and surely she could find places for people to lie down, and more than enough space to sit, which she's willing to bet the galleon hasn't bothered with. They're even running light for this patrol, a third of her crew ashore and spending their pay among the pretty girls and boys of the harbour, and her crew would gladly make space for those poor bastards for the days it took to get them somewhere better than that.
She's not equipped to fight a war, not today, and her father wouldn't back her, because his father has trade agreements that include noninterference in local shipping.
Leaning harder into the rail, she hopes, quietly in the back of her head, that the King her grandfather hadn't known what cargos the locals carried until after the bargain was struck.
No matter when he'd known, because he did, or someone high up enough to command deshae had added the orders that any Navy boats patrolling this area carried extra carvings in their rails, the sort that catapulted anyone who hit the water to the shore of the nearest land with potable water--but only if they weren't Navy personnel.
Fortunate, that--she'd have earned herself at least one involuntary leave her first few tours here if they hadn't included that restraint.
Wood creaks under her fingers, and she carefully lets go, stretches her fingers out in the first of the desh-blooded exercises, then cracks her knuckles in the manner of the first gun-captain she'd followed around like a remora.
Wishes, just barely too gently to be accused of deliberately pushing, for a storm, so she'd have an excuse.
Wishes Gideon was around, because he is enough of a pirate to just pounce and give their father the flat look of 'yes, and?' when there was token protest.
Wishes Gio was around, because he'd snap, too.
Her brothers predate the Navy, and sometimes she envies them that.
She's a captain. She's got no wish to meet her grandfather the King--except maybe to steal a girl from under his nose, but that's an ambition she's got for nearly all her relatives, Manannan and Sabaey alike.
So she grits her teeth and wishes, instead of hauls her sails and roars for her gun-captain.
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Niamh Manannan
Prompt: 23D "distasteful"
Word Count: 912
Notes: She's not the smugglers' terror Gideon is, or the sailors' legend Giovanni is. She doesn't need to be.
It's not enough to be a good sailor.
It's sometimes enough to be a good navigator, a gunner, a wind-caller, a sea-reader, a storm lover, but as often it isn't.
Storm lovers make bad captains, and most of them are smart enough to know it--Giovanni certainly does, and he's among the eldest, the strongest, the one who walks with lightning in his eyes and a breath of ozone on the hottest, stillest day.
Gunners and navigators get trained to think in small patterns, see things through their vocation and their power, and it makes them solid if limited captains--navigators map, track, chart. Gunners run blockades, bring down prey the navigators flush.
If Gideon wasn't a pirate--for all he flies a Navy banner and fully holds the rank his age implies, Gideon's a pirate through and through--he'd be called a gunner-Captain and no one would be lying.
Their father's a sea reader, a navigator, a wind caller, a sailor. Nobody doubts that his mother--whoever she was--was one for the sea herself. The man loves the sea and for all anyone can tell the sea loves him back, in as much as the sea loves anyone.
There's those that say Niamh's too young for her rank, that their father promoted her because he's got a soft spot for the girl who grew up under his feet.
(There's those that say it's anything but a soft spot but that he's too much a Sabaey to actually send her out to die. He just makes it a better possibility by giving her a command and minimal sheeting.)
Then there's those who listen to Giovanni's laughter, or Gideon's silence, and start to wonder what Niamh would be like as someone's second, someone's gun-captain, someone's note-taker until she hit her second century, her third.
She grew up on the Navy's ships, ran powder and danced the yards as soon as anyone would let her, learned to read from her father's charts for all she lets the navigators detailed to her chart her courses, watched wind and sea and sky from a hundred different worlds and a hundred different decks, let her hair tangle in a thousand different breezes and soaked the hems of her trousers in a thousand different waters.
She was a captain by the time she was eighty, and she knows exactly how far she can heel one of her ships over before she hits the point of no return, can feel a storm forming in her skin before the first cloud boils over, knows the hiding places of every island for months out from her home ports, and for all her rank she's hardly above occasionally joining her brother Gideon on a venture their father turns a carefully blind eye towards.
She's no madder than any other captain, and far less mad than some, half-sibling or nobility.
Which is why she's not taking a potshot at the tubby galleon carefully skirting the shoals off Janvier Cey, no matter how much she wants to. She's not even muttering about how a rescue in the event of an emergency would improve conditions immensely in the overcrowded hold. Her ship's bigger than the galleon, differently laid out within the hull, and surely she could find places for people to lie down, and more than enough space to sit, which she's willing to bet the galleon hasn't bothered with. They're even running light for this patrol, a third of her crew ashore and spending their pay among the pretty girls and boys of the harbour, and her crew would gladly make space for those poor bastards for the days it took to get them somewhere better than that.
She's not equipped to fight a war, not today, and her father wouldn't back her, because his father has trade agreements that include noninterference in local shipping.
Leaning harder into the rail, she hopes, quietly in the back of her head, that the King her grandfather hadn't known what cargos the locals carried until after the bargain was struck.
No matter when he'd known, because he did, or someone high up enough to command deshae had added the orders that any Navy boats patrolling this area carried extra carvings in their rails, the sort that catapulted anyone who hit the water to the shore of the nearest land with potable water--but only if they weren't Navy personnel.
Fortunate, that--she'd have earned herself at least one involuntary leave her first few tours here if they hadn't included that restraint.
Wood creaks under her fingers, and she carefully lets go, stretches her fingers out in the first of the desh-blooded exercises, then cracks her knuckles in the manner of the first gun-captain she'd followed around like a remora.
Wishes, just barely too gently to be accused of deliberately pushing, for a storm, so she'd have an excuse.
Wishes Gideon was around, because he is enough of a pirate to just pounce and give their father the flat look of 'yes, and?' when there was token protest.
Wishes Gio was around, because he'd snap, too.
Her brothers predate the Navy, and sometimes she envies them that.
She's a captain. She's got no wish to meet her grandfather the King--except maybe to steal a girl from under his nose, but that's an ambition she's got for nearly all her relatives, Manannan and Sabaey alike.
So she grits her teeth and wishes, instead of hauls her sails and roars for her gun-captain.