“For the women who do right.
For the women who do wrong for the right reasons.
For the women who burn it all down, find beauty in ashes.
For the dreamers left behind—keep sailing.”
That is the dedication of Fire Sword and Sea. Four lines that came to me as a battle cry. It’s a reminder that womanhood, especially when tied to leadership, has never been a straight line. It bends, curves, breaks, and rebuilds. It demands courage. It requires clarity. And sometimes, it lusts for fire.
Recently, a friend—someone who does not read much historical fiction—got an early look at Fire Sword and Sea. She’s a reader of self-help, of business strategy, of the occasional thriller you can sneak into her hands. But she said something that stopped me cold:
“Vanessa, you wrote a book about leadership—about women’s leadership.”
At first, I blinked. That wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Yes, my heroine Jacquotte Delahaye is a pirate captain. And yes, pirate captains are leaders by definition. But what my friend saw was something deeper—something I wasn’t consciously aiming for but had apparently woven into every scene, every strike of a sword.
On a pirate ship in the 1600s, leadership wasn’t inherited; it was earned. Pirate vessels operated like meritocracies—any race, any nationality could join, as long as they could pull their weight. Jacquotte rises the only way a woman in that era could: in disguise. Hidden behind lies, she relies on her skill with a rapier, her mastery of the sea, her stamina and grit, and her ability to steer a stolen ship through storms both literal and moral.
Pirates didn’t buy their ships. They took them. And Jacquotte climbs the ladder of command one impossible task at a time.
Through Fire Sword and Sea, we see her rise, her missteps, her victories, her bruises—physical and spiritual. And that, my friend said, is leadership.
But leadership—especially women’s leadership—is a complicated beast.
We often talk about the women who lead in boardrooms, in startups, in medicine, in politics. But historically—and even now—women occupy the caregiver role by default. According to the report released in March by US Healthcare Workforce, 87 percent of nurses are women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 80 percent of healthcare workers are women. We are the hospice nurses, the physician assistants, the physical therapists. The ones tending to the young, the old, the fading, the forgotten. And in the 1600s, this was even more pronounced. Before physicians, there were women who gathered herbs, mixed tinctures, whispered prayers, held hands, and ushered people into life and into death and sometimes back again.
To lead, sometimes that caregiving must be set aside. And that choice weighs heavy on nurturers.
Then there is modernity:
How does being a mother affect leadership?
How does being a wife?
How does being the one expected to build the home, nurture the family, care for the elders and in-laws?
I remember climbing the corporate ladder and watching women I admired—women who mentored me—delay motherhood until the last biologically viable second. One of my favorite bosses, a brilliant Irish PhD in physics, once had suits tailored specifically to hide her pregnancy. Because at that time, maternity leave and career advancement could not coexist in the same equation.
This is the landscape women navigate. A landscape Jacquotte would have known in a different form, in a different century—but it’s still hauntingly familiar.
My friend, though, wanted to talk about the dedication.
For the women who do right.
For the women who do wrong for the right reasons.
Because in leadership, there is always a moment—a crossroads—when doing the right thing may mean becoming complicit in something that isn’t right. Sometimes survival demands choices you would never make in a perfect world.
We see the consequences of hubris and hard choices in our real world today. Not to get too political, but right now there is a crisis in the Caribbean that breaks my heart. U.S. forces have fired on fishing vessels, claiming they carried drugs. But no proof has been given. Witness accounts suggest at least one boat was attacked without cause, leaving two people clinging for life. It seems a second strike was orders to kill defenseless victims.
If drugs were aboard, they now sit at the bottom of the sea—destroyed by the same guns that struck the fishermen. This needless killing violates the Geneva Convention, the rules of war and basic humanity.
And now investigations must happen to see how leadership failed and who was complicit in illegal orders. It is a horrible situation when the people in all levels of the chain of command fail. It’s horrid, that those below followed orders that were illegal. Leadership—good or bad—always has accomplices.
And that is part of the burden.
In Fire Sword and Sea, Jacquotte and her crew face their own moral storms. In the 1600s, the “currency” of the seas was not just gold or silver. It was people. African people. A horrid truth I confronted in my research was located in merchant records.
I saw 17 guinea for a pewter bowl.
At first, I thought they meant the coin minted for King Charles II with gold from the country Guinea. But the coin of popularity in the Caribbean. The Spanish silver pieces of eight were. It was upon further digging that these records were referring to people. Everyone from Africa are commonly called Guinea in the 1600s.
So a pewter vessel was valued at seventeen Guinea. Seventeen human lives.
Imagine a world where a pewter bowl was worth more than a child.
So yes—Fire Sword and Sea has action and saga and mystery. But beneath the adventure, it wrestles with leadership, complicity, survival, and the cost of chasing freedom in a world built on stolen bodies.
This book asks questions:
What does it take to lead?
What is the price of doing the right thing?
What happens when you must choose between your principles and your people?
And how do women—across eras—navigate these impossible intersections of duty, ambition, and care?
I cannot wait to have deeper conversations with you about these choices and about leadership.
And so I return to Fire Sword and Sea’s dedication:
For the women who do right.
For the women who do wrong for the right reasons.
For the women who burn it all down, find beauty in ashes.
For the dreamers left behind—keep sailing.”
Books to get us diving deeper into leadership are:
The Soul of a Woman — Isabel Allende
A reflective nonfiction exploration of feminism, aging, ambition, and the fight for autonomy across a lifetime.
Take Care of Them Like My Own — Dr. Ala Stanford: A powerful memoir of a Black woman surgeon who turned grief, racism, and systemic neglect into a movement that vaccinated and cared for thousands during COVID‑19. Soror Ala is running for congress to lead the 3rd congressional district of Philadelphia.
The Broken Earth Trilogy — N.K. Jemisin
A brilliant speculative saga about oppressed women who wield world-shaking power, exploring trauma, leadership, survival, and righteous destruction.
I, Medusa — Ayana Gray
A bold, haunting retelling that gives Medusa her voice back, revealing the girl behind the myth and exploring power, wrath, injustice, and the cost of becoming the monster the world insists you are.
Birth of a Dynasty — Chinaza Bado (AKA JJ Mcavoy)
A sweeping tale of ambition, generational power, and the women who shape empires from the shadows, exploring the sacrifices, strategies, and emotional costs of building—and defending—a legacy.
We are six weeks away from the release of course Fire Sword and Sea on January 13th, 2026. Caribbean women pirates—Black women pirates join French and Indigenous women to sail the seas. Review this novel in Edelweiss and NetGalley. Vote for it on Goodreads. Help me get folks talking about this novel.
This week, I’m highlighting Baldwin and Company through their website and Bookshop.org .
Consider purchasing Fire Sword and Sea from Baldwin and Company or one of my partners in the fight, bookstore’s large and small who are in this with me.
Come on my readers. Let’s get everyone excited for truth.
Show notes include a list of the books mentioned in this broadcast.
You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com under the podcast link in the About tab.
Don’t let this be a one-time thing—like, share, and subscribe to join the growing family at Write of Passage. Welcome aboard this ship. I heart you.
Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you’ll come again. This is Vanessa Riley.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe
