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Here is my post for the save space.... Pio, could you paste this in?
Marreth had never suspected Lord Castamir to be spying on himself. Had he always been monitoring Marreth, or was this an extra precaution that had been taken to safeguard the Palantiri? Marreth had never been focused on the Stones themselves, because his use for them was limited. He did not have political aspirations, preferring to voyage the sea in search of lute and plunder, rather than hatching schemes inside an office. Vengeance welled deep in his heart against the Gondorians, the murderers of his father, and the personal glory he would gain both mattered much more to him than actually using the Stones. But betrayal, either by Lord Castamir or his agent, made Marreth’s blood boil like the water in his tea kettle. Marreth vowed to seize these powerful weapons and use them against Gondor, because of the anguish he knew it would cause to Castamir, watching his most desired treasure being reaped by another.
His eyes scaned the horizon, and Marreth began to pull his thoughts away from the vile Castamir and focus on the immediate task of securing the Palantiri. Marreth had not succeeded so far, but he realized that his mission must continue, whatever the betrayal Castamir had made, since the thought of allowing the Stones to reach Gondor caused a visceral pain in his stomach.
As he sat weighing yet another tactic to use against the Elves, he saw something sparkling in the dull blue waters. Marreth turned his head and watched in horror as the Elvish ship pulled a large opaque stone from the sea using a winch and nets. Beside the ship, Marreth noticed a seal barking towards one of the Elves on board who then flashing a big grin, which he thought was rather odd. The seal, once on board the smaller ship, changed shape into a man with brown hair and olive skin before Marreth’s very eyes. Marreth had heard of shapechangers before in tales told on his travels, but he had never actually seen one. So that’s how they found it, thought Marreth. Even with the most trained seal, a human would be able to search out the Stones and find them faster than the Corsairs ever would.
After he stopped cursing and kicking furniture, Marreth calmed down enough to realize that if the Elves have found one Stone, the other probably would not be far away. All they had to do was find it, it, attack the Luindal's ship, capture the other Palantiri, and send those on board to a grave on the ocean floor below the wall of ice which would soon cover the water’s surface. Marreth was confident of his victory because, although he could handle the sword deftly, his greatest strength lie on naval warfare, where his ship was swifter than a shark.
With a holler, Marreth blared to the ship’s crew, “Boys, it was a bad bit of luck that the Elves got the first Palantiri, but there’s still another one out there. And we are going to go out and get it before those stinking Elves do. It probably isn’t too far from the spot that they found the first one. After we take the other stone, we will launch an attack on those Elvish vermin so hard that their ship will be shattered into driftwood. Let’s get moving.”
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