WarSpell: Miss Midshipman Teasdale (WarSpell #4)

A WarSpell novel, in a world where war ships are just starting to make the change from ballistas to cannon that use a magically created gunpowder.

Tensy Teasdale is forced by financial hardship to give up her studies of magic and join the Kingdom Navy as a midshipman. It's a hard life for her. While women have been serving in the Navy for decades, not everyone accepts them. It's even harder if you're a studious introvert who incurs the ire of a brute of a senior Midshipman who's just failed his Lieutenant’s test again.

And that's just the first of Miss Midshipman Teasdale's misadventures. After that, she has to deal with a Merged mugger who's learning how to deal with this world, an elven carpenter who's considered worse than a necromancer because he works with the dead bodies of trees—not to mention the shell and shot of battle on the high seas.

And if she survives all that, there's the politics of the Admiralty Court to deal with…

Hornblower meets Martin Padway in a WarSpell gameworld.

Miss Midshipman Tensy Teasdale is a new middy in the kingdom navy. She, like Horatio, doesn't start out well and things go downhill from there.
Pete the Cudgel Banyan is a thief and a bully with little thought beyond his next beer, next lay, or how unfair it was that he wasn't born the son of a lord. As a pressed man, his lot may be even worse than Tensy's, because the first officer is a sadist who wants everyone broken to the navy. And Pete's the sort to die in the breaking.

Pete's rebellion offers Tensy a chance to—if not win—at least take her tormentors down with her.

Tensy makes her play at Pete's Captain's Mast and Pete determines to take his lashes like a man.

Enter Peter Bradley, a mechanical engineer who played Pete Banyan years ago in a game of WarSpell. As the 21st lash falls, Pete's heart stutters and would have failed, but Peter Merged with him. Leaving Peter Banyan hail and healthy to take the last three blows of the cat.

And that was just the beginning. The Captain wanted them both off his ship ahead of any sort of investigation. The ship they end up on has its own problems and they all get shipped to Amonrai and the Merged Peter with his knowledge of chemistry knows a much cheaper way to make the wizard’s powder that is used in the cannon.