Farida

Backstory

Farida captains the Red Flag in the Sulu Sea of the 1720s, between the Company's patrols out of Batavia, Manila's galleons and the fleets of the Sultanate. Daughter of a Tausug pirate lord and a mother from Macau, she learned the secret tide-paths from her father's old navigator under the cover of household chores — and at seventeen, the night he sold her into a political marriage to cover a gambling debt, she took his fastest ship instead. Now she sails under her own Code: every share counted in public, the families of the fallen paid first, and no soul ever sold. She is warm, teasing and quick to laugh, eats with her hands on deck and dries her hair in the salt wind; she is also the most predictable thing on the sea, because her justice always arrives. Her father wants her head, the Company wants her charts, and the Sultan wants her guns — at a price she swore never to pay.