Yrae Chronicles ~

Twenty-Ninth Birthday

A mild tropical breeze wafted down over Freetown, carrying the spice of the island’s cinnamon and clove forests and the electric tang of a storm, as yet unseen, but always on the horizon at this time of an afternoon. A Llayan guitarist played at the corner of the Kazinian-styled bar, lilting voice singing in the praises of her homeland in Tsaythi.

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Twenty-Eighth Birthday

Tu wouldn’t let them leave right away. She insisted on showing Sen around the islands properly. She would, after all, be ruling these islands in a year or so.

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Twenty-Seventh Birthday

The sky was suitably dark when the Red Cacao and Cocoa Black sailed into Freetown. The sea was steely grey and white-capped and Sen could see the dark smudge of a storm on the western horizon. The Orana was in port, rocking against the most favoured of the docks, closest to the centre of town. Behind it, palm trees whipped back and forth in the stiffening wind.

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Twenty-Sixth Birthday

Sen and Kaiji tried to celebrate their first bounty as best they could. It wasn’t large, only enough to cover a month and a half of wages for a voyage that had taken a year to accomplish, but Sen knew they would improve. For more dangerous crews, those whose ships were confiscated when the crew was imprisoned, Sen would have been offered the captured ship, too, but these were minor pirates, not much worse than tax evaders. Captain Hin and her crew would be fined and sent on their way once they had paid it. In any case, Sen knew she wouldn’t be able to crew a second ship. Her first was barely trained yet.

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Twenty-Fifth Birthday

Sen and Kaiji used the full three months Tu had given them to find a crew for Red Cacao. The problem with crewing her ship with bastards, Sen found, was that none of them had any experience at sea. None had so much as rowed a fishing boat before. Even Kaiji suggested that they might bring experienced sailors on board, just until they were able to train some of their own, but Sen refused to compromise. They were experienced enough now to train new crew. What they did ask of their new crew, though, was fighting experience. That much they could learn on land.

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Twenty-Fourth Birthday

Sen didn’t tell Tu of her plans immediately, just in case she reacted poorly and left them stranded. Instead, she and Kaiji agreed to tell her when they were in Ryas, hoping she would be too distracted by her negotiations to want to deal with her rogue crew.

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Three years into living as the Orana’s crew, three more years into Tu’s impossible plan for the Pirate Isles, and Tu’s exuberance was only building.

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Twenty-Second Birthday

Sen felt numb for days after Tu’s admission. She didn’t know what to feel and so opted to feel nothing. Kaiji recognised the conflict in her mind and just stayed close, holding her hand, hugging an arm around her stomach as she slept. She didn’t try to convince Sen of anything, not yet.

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Twenty-First Birthday

Back when Sen and Kaiji had first joined Captain Gendas’ crew, he had admitted he—and just about every other bounty hunter at the time—had greatly admired Captain Tu and the Horizons. Even when she continued to evade him, there was still a begrudging respect in his words. When Sen saw him standing at the prow of Cocoa Black, floating alongside the Orana without so much as a bad word between them, she knew he had always planned this. He’d always planned to meet Captain Tu.

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Twentieth Birthday

They agreed to meet in a year, mostly so Captain Gandas could send messages across the world and move all his pieces into place in time. They first hunted down the closest of Tu’s remaining allies, according to the tax office’s list, then made off for the meeting.

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