Daughter of the Pirate King

Daughter of the Pirate King (2017) is the first installment in a young adult fantasy duology by Tricia Levenseller. The high seas adventure follows Alosa, a teenage captain who allows herself to be kidnapped by enemy pirates in order to locate and steal a legendary treasure map for her father. While in pursuit of this scheme, however, she falls in love with her captor, Riden, and must chart a course between her obligations to her family and her newfound romantic attachment. Daughter of the Pirate King is Tricia Levenseller’s debut novel and combines her love for pirates with an epic romantasy plotline.

This guide refers to the hardback edition published by Pushkin Press in 2022.

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide feature descriptions of mild violence and combat, kidnapping and captivity, and attempted sexual assault.

Plot Summary

Long ago, a legendary map detailing the route to the treasure-filled Isla de Canta was split between three pirate lords—a Kalligan, an Allemos, and a Serad—and the three pieces were passed down separately in each family for generations. Now, 18-year-old Alosa Kalligan, the daughter of the notorious pirate king, Byrronic Kalligan, captains her own ship, the Ava-lee. She has been sent on a secret mission to retrieve the Allemos third of the map. In the process, Alosa allows her ship to be captured by Draxen and Riden Allemos, the two sons of the infamous and recently deceased pirate lord, Jeskor the Headbreaker. However, the mission is not the only secret she’s keeping; she also happens to be half siren, one of the magical female creatures that roam the sea and guard the Isla de Canta, eager to seduce sailors to their deaths.

Draxen and Riden Allemos are young but eager to prove themselves. As the newly appointed captain of the Night Farer, Draxen yearns for a reputation even fiercer than his father’s. He plans to achieve this by holding Alosa for ransom in order to acquire Byrronic Kalligan’s third of the treasure map. Riden, on the other hand, is simply glad to be free of his father’s cruel abuse and is grateful to Draxen for saving his life. Now, all Riden cares about is repaying this life debt by showing unerring loyalty to his older brother, even if it means renouncing his own desires and ambitions. However, he has not anticipated how difficult it will be to prevent Draxen from following in their father’s dark footsteps.

After negotiating the terms of her surrender, which allows her crew to go free and her various belongings and accessories to be transferred to the Night Farer, Alosa is escorted to a dirty cell in Draxen’s brig. (Unbeknownst to the crew, Alosa’s belongings conceal many hidden tools, such as daggers, poisons, and other contraband.) When Riden begins his interrogations, Alosa gives evasive answers, but Riden nonetheless gleans more information than she intends to reveal. She nonetheless manages to rile him up with sarcasm and wit, luring him close enough to allow her to steal the key to her cell, replacing it with a false key so that he will not notice the theft. After Riden departs Alosa’s cell, a man calling himself Theris visits her and claims to be one of her father’s spies sent to look after her. When night falls, Alosa breaks out of her cell using her stolen key and searches Draxen’s chambers for the map, but Riden discovers her as she returns to her cell and confiscates the real key from her. Alosa is then assigned two guards—Kearan and Enwen—to watch over her at all times, and she slowly becomes fond of them. Soon, Riden arrives for another day of interrogations and discusses the rumors surrounding the pirate king’s reputation. Alosa denies the rumor that her father seduced a siren but claims that the other rumors detailing Byrronic Kalligan’s ruthlessness are true.

One day, when the Night Farer comes across a seemingly abandoned ship, Draxen sends Alosa over with Riden to investigate, but the two are surprised by three men hiding belowdecks. The men hold Riden at sword point, and when Alosa uses her keen fighting skills to kill one man and incapacitate the other two, thus saving Riden’s life, he becomes suspicious of her true intentions aboard the Night Farer. After taking the remaining two men captive and stealing the ship’s gold, Draxen decides that his men deserve to spend their spoils on land. Alosa is left under supervision of a salacious pirate named Sheck while a sadistic pirate named Ulgin tortures the captive pirates to death for entertainment. Knowing that Riden is suspicious of her failure to take advantage of several opportunities to escape, Alosa decides to engineer her own escape and then purposefully orchestrate her recapture, thus allaying Riden’s suspicions of her true motive for remaining aboard the Night Farer. To put this plan into action, she sneaks into town, but when Sheck assaults her there, she kills him. Alosa then engages Riden in a sword fight, which he wins. They return to the brig, where Riden finds and confiscates the contraband hidden in her books and other belongings. Fortunately, she has already hidden one set of lock picks within her cell, and these he does not find.

The next night, Alosa heads straight for the edge of the ship to continue her search for the brothers’ third of the map. Riden catches her and decides to take her to his private quarters, as her cell is clearly insufficient to hold her. Alosa is forced to use her siren song to lull him into a deep sleep so that she may continue searching the ship at night. As the days progress, the forced proximity causes Riden and Alosa to struggle with their growing romantic feelings, which put their loyalties to their respective families and their devotion to their own motives in question.

One day, Alosa refuses Draxen’s order to swab the deck with the rest of the crew, so he orders her to be hung from the rigging by her manacled wrists. Afterward, Riden tends to Alosa’s wounds and apologizes for his brother’s actions, but Alosa is disgusted with his cowardly inability to stand up to Draxen. The next day, Draxen summons Alosa and tortures her to learn her father’s location. She eventually gives up a location—an island that lies two weeks’ sail northeast of Lycon’s Peak. She then returns to Riden’s room, satisfied that Draxen has bought her performance; in reality, however, she has given him the location where her father waits in ambush with enough forces to overtake Draxen’s ship. Meanwhile, she worries that she is now running out of time to find the map and have it ready for her father; if she fails, she will risk his wrath.

One day, Riden kisses Alosa, and although she initially reciprocates with enthusiasm, she pushes him away to keep her mind clear of distraction. She once again risks using her siren song to lull him to sleep and gain time to search the ship, but he wakes suspicious. Later, when Riden admits that his father always kept valuable things on his person, Alosa wonders if the same is true of Draxen and decides to search him for the map. Alosa subtly uses her siren power to seduce Draxen, luring him back to his chambers, where she knocks him unconscious and searches his body for the map. However, she finds nothing, and Riden soon comes to check on her. Alosa manages to coax Riden back to his room, where she uses the last of her siren song abilities to render him unconscious. (She has no access to seawater, so she is unable to replenish her exhausted abilities.) When a thorough check over his clothes and body produces no map, she resorts to searching the outside of the ship.

Alosa finally finds the map in the eye of the ship’s wooden siren figurehead, but when she returns above deck, Draxen and Riden are waiting to confiscate it from her. Draxen orders Alosa to remain in his quarters where he can punish her at leisure. Unwilling to be complicit in whatever punishment Draxen plans for Alosa, Riden tells her that he’s willing to get a boat ready for her escape, but he begs her to leave Draxen alive if possible. Once alone with Draxen, she manages to incapacitate him, and when she rejoins Riden on the deck, she confirms that she is half siren. Alosa attempts to locate the map before escaping but is surprised and knocked unconscious by Theris, who reveals that he is not a spy for her father but instead owes his loyalty to the third pirate lord, Vordan Serad.

Alosa awakens in a cage on land, in the company of Theris, Vordan, and their cronies. Riden has been taken captive as well, and the men threaten to harm him in order to compel Alosa to display her siren powers. Alosa is forced to show all aspects of her power in detail, which is torturous as she both hates and fears the way that her siren half erases her humanity. Eventually, Riden comes up with a plan to give Alosa sufficient seawater to rejuvenate her siren powers and escape her cell. Alosa kills Vordan while Theris runs to his ship for help. Alosa retrieves the map that Vordan stole from Riden but does not find Vordan’s third of the map on his person. Alosa and Riden are forced to escape from Vordan’s crew by swimming through the sea, but Alosa’s siren half takes over. Overcome by her siren instincts to lure sailors to their deaths, she drags Riden under the surface. By the time she remembers her humanity, Riden is no longer breathing. She sends out a distress call with her siren song, hopeful that the men in her crew on the Ava-lee will hear and send reinforcements. She then hauls Riden to Draxen’s ship and saves his life. Draxen locks her in the brig again, but she’s not there long before battle breaks out above deck, signifying the arrival of her nearly all-female crew.

She escapes her cell and joins the fray, but the battle is soon interrupted by the arrival of her father, the pirate king. Alosa delivers the map to him and recounts her experience. Her father’s descriptions of Vordan allow Alosa to realize that the man who called himself Theris was actually Vordan all along and that the man she thought to be Vordan was merely an impostor. Alosa’s father allows her to take captives from Draxen’s crew before killing the rest. Alosa spares the lives of Enwen and Kearan and recruits them to her crew as her designated thief and navigator, respectively. She also spares the children among Draxen’s crew, whom she plans to release at the next port, and she also takes Draxen and Riden as captives. She does not know what she plans to do with Draxen, but when Riden finally admits his feelings for her, Alosa is intrigued by what lies in their future together.

When Riden asks about her heritage, Alosa tells him the story of how her father and the siren queen really met and how she came to be. Upon following his section of the map as far as it would take him, the pirate king and his crew came upon beautiful women inhabiting an uncharted island. When they jumped in to join the women, they were dragged under by sirens. The pirate king was seduced by the siren queen herself, but instead of fighting her, he returned her affection. As a reward, she brought him to land where they conceived Alosa, and afterward, the pirate king boarded his ship and returned home. Now, when Riden falls asleep, Alosa turns her attention toward her next mission: completing the map.