"On the Account": Kingmaker, Kingbreaker Part 1 (Session 2.2)

Saint-Barthlemy, February 1651: In a jungle clearing on the south side of the island, a haze of gunpowder smoke finally clears...

Taking stock of their enemies, the pirates find that Shaytan and twelve of his highland clansmen lie dead, ten are badly wounded, and five are unwounded. This last group includes Shaytan's lieutenant, Pen, who wears blue feathers in a pair of pieced cheeks.

As the warriors begin to retreat, Samedi calls out an offer to negotiate further regarding Shaytan's plan to expel Hisene's men from Le Carenage, and sets up a midnight meeting with the lieutenant. At the same time, Guillaume and Joe plan to return to the beach, gain support from the other pirates, and hopefully attack Hisene from both sides at once. The next day is spent in frantic diplomacy and clandestine meetings as the two sets of negotiators make imperfect progress:

• Guillaume and Joe are able to convince around half of the pirates that storming Le Carenage would gain them a decent treasure, but fail to gain an outright majority of the crew. They are forced to sweeten the deal by promising some of the as-yet-unspent plunder taken from the Estrella to key crewmembers as bribes. But one dilemma remains: take the risky but profitable course of storming the beach and fighting hand-to-hand for whatever riches are hidden inside the mercenaries' stronghold, or stay in the bay, forget the treasure, and just let the Folly and Estrella's cannons do the talking?
• Meanwhile, Guillaume notices five new faces among Hisene's men, and becomes convinced that Japheti, the surgeon and second-in-command at Le Carenage, is concealing some secret about these men.
• Samedi is able to convince Shaytan's lieutenant that they are not enemies, but the negotiations for a joint attack on Hisene founder on Pen's demand that the pirates help the highlanders continue to use the lowlanders as slaves even after the island is liberated. This is necessary, claims Pen, to realize Shaytan's dream of a stone fort to keep future invaders at bay.
• Amongst all this Red Knife bids farewell to his fellow pirates, buys a simple sea canoe from one of Teiha's brothers, and sails off to the West in search of his sister.

A great many proposals and counter-proposals later, with it almost seeming that the pirates will have to just leave Saint-Barthelemy for the time being and return later when they have more options available to them, a cunning compromise is reached: Pen and his inner circle of warriors will be offered places in the crew of the Fortune's Folly, thereby giving them a chance to continue stockpiling heavy weapons and trade goods without having to sell the lowlanders as slaves to do it. The pirates will still attack Hisene - albeit from only one direction instead of two - but the highlanders will fight with them, and even if the attack fails, Hisene will no longer be able to count on the highlanders to capture slaves for him.

As events slowly move towards an epic confrontation on the beach, Samedi learns that Nzuzi considers the Folly and her dead captain to have been the subject of a demonic curse, physically manifested in the form of a small green snake. She claims to have captured the demon in a coconut shell and bound it by inking a Bible verse (Acts 19:13 - Te ato por el Jesús que Pablo proclama) into the container; claiming to want nothing more to do with such an unclean thing, she entrusts it to Samedi and asks him to see to its destruction, or at least its removal from the island. Samedi now wears the strange vessel on his person while considering where to find a priest of sufficient power to proceed with such a task.

On to Session 2.3!