HASA Yule Challenge 2005 Entry: "Seventeen Cunning Corsairs"

Every evening just before sunset the girl went down to the sea. She'd gaze at the horizon and pretend she could see them, ships looming against the pink and blue sky. They weren't the bulky but serviceable merchant ships of her father's fleet, laden down with goods for cities far away. They weren't the beautifully sinous ships like Elves were supposed to sail, like the ship that beckoned to Amroth in the tales that most of her friends loved.

No, she dreamed that she could see the ships from the land her parents threatened to send her to when she misbehaved. Black and stiff like a skeleton, they loomed great in her imagination. Seventeen cunning corsair ships they were, heading toward her at great pace, sailing within a hundred yards of the shore, throwing anchor, and then lowering row boats full of evil seadogs for the invasion.

At the lead would be their captain, a tall man with olive skin and short, curly dark hair. He'd brandish a broad knife in his teeth as he jumped from his boat to the shore. Then he would come up to her, take off his hat with a great, sweeping bow, and then pick her up in his arms, all with his ferocious knife still in his teeth.

Her parents would never have to send her to Umbar for bad behavior. Instead, the pirates had come for her. They recognized her as one of their very own kind, and there, far away the captain would raise her...

"Lothiriel, get up now, there's a good girl. It's dinner time."

Lothiriel, daughter of Imrahil, picked herself up and kicked at a stone on the sand before she followed her father home. Good girl? He called her a good girl. If only he knew his daughter was the one and only Queen of the Corsairs.

** This story was also inspired by the song "Pirate Jenny" from "The Threepenny Opera."