Shannon Chakraborty

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.

But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will.

Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.

Amina al-Sirafi #1

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

Victoria Sutton

Tell me, for you have not a hair on the chin between the both of you, have your balls dropped yet? Or did your members, knowing they would never be inside a woman, not bother to mature thus?"

And yes, I was rewarding myself with food and incentives like a child.

Lizeth Esmeralda

“… I could not help but marvel at the difference decade had made. One of the blessings of age is the waning of certain men’s eyes, of that stare that fixes upon you when you are a girl too young to notice. The men who do not lower their gaze as commanded by our faith, but instead steal second and third glances; the men who hiss the vulgarest of obscenities and when called out, blame their behavior on your clothes, your smile or lack there of, your pretty eyes, your very existence.”

Remmi Ahmed

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband’s descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.

women’s stories are expected to dissolve into a fog of domesticity . . . if they’re told at all

 I can attest from personal experience that poverty buys nothing. It is a monster whose claws grow deeper and more difficult to escape with each passing season, with even the slightest misstep setting you back years, if not forever. 

First you must understand that there are a great many tales. Stories do that, don't they, branching out like a sapling searching for sunlight? By the time centuries have passed and that sapling is a mighty tree, there are more passed branches than can be counted, sprawling in widely different directions. 

He returned to lead me through a home that felt like an eerie contrast to my own. Where my house was falling apart, Salima's mansion was splendid, the walls covered in tapestries from all over creation and finely polished silver mirrors. Here and there were painted porcelain vases and ivory carvings set upon rosewood tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl designs. The rugs were soft and expensive, depicting dancers and feasts. Lushly planted lime trees and date palms grew in the large courtyard, surrounding a fountain decorated with brightly painted tiles. The perfume of flowers and frankincense competed to delight the nose, a nightingale singing sweetly from one of the trees. And yet as rich and magnificent as the house was, it felt hollow and haunted in a way that made the hairs on the back of ny neck rise. I saw not a soul besides the two men escorting me. The flowers in the vases were dead, the fruit from the courtyard trees left rotting on the ground. The longer one listened, the more the nightingale sounded like it was in despair, calling for a lost mate. Two of the silver mirrors were smashed and a game of chess abandoned in middle of play, the pawns gathering dust. It looked like the sort of family home Asif had claimed to come from: one of faded grandeur he had been determined to reclaim. I struggled to connect it with the fiery, determined grandmother who'd hunted me down and badgered me into helping her. Maybe losing Dunya had torn out the home's heart.

I lifted my gaze to the misty horizon. The rising sun was burning away the morning fog, setting it to a sparkling blush of swiftly evaporating dew. This was typically my favorite part of the morning, the peace and the promise of a new day almost magical.

My head was pounding and the world was spinning in shattered fragments of teal water, amber shores, and and indigo forest. The colors were wrong, overly vibrant and mismatched. I took a couple of deep breaths and then sat up more slowly, the sand that clung to my fingers dripping like honey. It was like no beach Id ever seen. The tide line was marked by stringy bubbles of bloodred waterweeds and needle-sharp blue sea stars. Ahead was a jungle so dense its interior was black, soft, and dangerously inviting. There were palm trees at the edge, their cinnamon-colored trunks gleaming as though the bark were jeweled, the razor-edged fronds shaking in the windless air with the crash of clashing sabers. Birds in unnatural hues dove and careened overhead, emitting grumbly roars. Where in God's name am I? 

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