Stavanger Bay Where is your rider

“Their Captain wos called The Banshee, an’ they said he could roll in wit the fog an’ take any life he wanted. I wos young an’ I looked up to ‘im… thought he was the fiercest there was, y’know? I wanted to believe that he had this… power,” he sighed and shook his head. It was foolish to think that he was admitting it to his First Mate and that he hadn’t given himself the time to consider how foolish it might have seemed. All he knew was that he had taken advantage of the wrong person, and he had yet to be punished for it.
 
Drawing his tongue across his lips with a shrug, the pale young Captain cast a forlorn look to the woman he had come to admire so well. “I called his bluff. Got too big fer me britches an’ I took off after usin’ up his hospitality. I said I’d make meself a better crew an’ I’d be a better Captain than he ever wos,” Smokestep explained to her with a frown. “But I ain’t. An’ I never will be. But, I’ll tell ye this, Roz… I won’t have someone like me come through an’ take advantage o’ the things we got to offer here.”
 
There was something in his tone that seemed to carry a lot of weight for one so young. He could feel it in his shoulders – the mistakes he’d made – and how those actions would lead to a punishment in one way or another. It had burned a hole in the pit of his stomach that seemed as though it would eat through every last inch of him. There was an underlying fear in everything that he had done to create the Ironsea crew. He knew that there would come a day when the Banshee returned to claim what was rightfully his. Smokestep did not want anyone to feel the way that he did; he would just as soon send them to Davy Jones and know that they had nothing to fear. Smokestep did not tell her how he was hunted, or how he had fled in the night to escape the harsh clasp of the Fenriver jowls against his flesh. Roz did not need to know that his days were numbered.
 
Breathing a heavy sigh, the yearling gritted his teeth together, fighting the words that were scorched against him. “I don’t ask a lot o’ the crew, an’ I do me best to make sure they’re happy here. I don’t lure ‘em in wit false pretenses, aye? Ye live an’ ye die by the crew; that’s always been the first rule,” he growled softly. There had not been a single joiner who had not been warned of their abandonment policy. Smokestep had done what was right in giving them a chance to back out before they had pledged themselves. If they should see him as unfit, there were means to overthrow him. It was no easy feat, though, to run a crew and ensure their happiness. It certainly was not as easy as he had imagined it to be when he’d abandoned the Fenriver wolves.
 
“Once a pirate…”
 
It had been a prized saying when he had first joined, but as he had skirted the hands of death and the punishment of desertion, the truism had warped into nothing more than an omen.