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abc prompts; k+s: pirates [unfinished]
Only half an hour after the earthshaking boom of the cannons startled her from a deep sleep, the Princess of Rosemead finds herself thrown on her knees on the fog-damp deck of a ship, wearing naught but her nightgown. Her hair is a tangled mess about her face as she tosses her head back to look her captors in the eye.
They're layered in rags, their hair dreadlocked and braided and beaded and wrapped, jewelry on their ears and necks and hands. Pirates. More than one of them leers in her direction, eyes raking over her, and she fights the urge to wrap her arms around herself. She wants to stand, but she's outnumbered five to one. They won't let her keep her feet or her dignity.
Raising her gaze past their sneers and smirks, she squints up at the mast. The only light this moonless night comes from the fires the pirates set in the town, but she can make out the stark black and white of the Jolly Roger, flying just below another flag in black and gold. As the breeze whips the tattered banner out, the lines of the emblem become clearer: a dragon, rearing back, a massive broadsword planted in its breast. The crest of Dragonfell.
Her stomach twists with anxiety. Dragonfell are the long-sworn enemies of Rosemead, their adversaries in the Twenty-Year War into which she was born. When their king and queen had fallen and their kingdom was occupied three years ago, most of the surviving people of the city of Dragonfell proper had fled by way of sea. The villages and towns were annexed into Rosemead and remain occupied to prevent uprising.
Though most survivors had found their way into pirate crews that flew only the skull and crossbones, there is one ship on the water that sports the only remaining flag of Dragonfell: the Lindwyrm, where the princess finds herself now. There is no land left that belongs to Dragonfell, but there are many coves and ports that will house them. The crew of the Lindwyrm spends their time pillaging Rosemead's port towns and plundering their ships.
Rumor has it, she recalls, her heart sinking frightfully low in her chest, that the Lindwyrm is captained by the last living member of Dragonfell's royal family, the only son of the king and queen Rosemead slew.
"Don't look so scared, lassie," comes a gravelly voice too close to her ear for comfort. She jerks away, skin crawling, and whips her head around to face a man with a deep face scar and a full beard. He grins with too few teeth. "The cap'n's a handsome lad. Sure you'll enjoy his plans for ye."
Frightened but defiant, she bares her own teeth. "Not as much as I'll enjoy my father's plans for you," she hisses. "Rosemead gives no quarter to pirates."
"You'd do well to hold your tongue," says another of her captors. His accent is crisp and his words clear, drawing her attention. "Pirates give no quarter to princesses, either."
She recovers swiftly from her confusion. "If you'll have me silenced, peasant, then silence me," she spits. A hand takes purchase in her hair, yanking her head back. She closes her eyes in preparation for a blow, but whatever retribution had been coming is stopped abruptly by a new voice.
"Enough."
The single word scatters the men around her, freeing her from the hand in her hair. When her eyes open, only one remains: the well-spoken man, who stands now at attention, watching the captain's approach. Seething resentment, the princess, too, turns her head to look.
He walks with a long, graceful stride, and though he wears the same rags and jewelry as his men, his very carriage sets him apart from them. Without a doubt, he is royalty. His dark skin and hair mark him as a son of Faircoast, the land his mother had hailed from, where Rosemead can no longer trade or travel, since the war's end. It was, her father had said, the worst of the sacrifices they had made for peace.
"You will not lay a hand on her," the captain continues, coming to stand before her and surveying the dispersing crowd. "If you seek to swim back, you need only ask."
He turns his dark, kohl-lined eyes on her, inscrutable, moving a tide of fear and hatred within her. She rises up on her knees, tilting her chin in contempt. "The pirate king wishes to speed his execution," she sneers. "If you seek a beheading, you need only ask."
"Do not presume to know what I wish, Princess."
She bristles at the address, having expected more from a man who would protect her from ruffians in his own crew. "Then tell me," she demands. "Do you desire riches? My father will make you the wealthiest man on the seas."
Before he kills you, she adds privately. Her father will not stand for this, she is certain. It is only a very small matter of time before Rosemead's navy boards this ship to retrieve her.
A commotion starboard prevents the captain's reply. A man scrambles up the gangplank, clutching a bleeding shoulder. "They're loadin' the guns, cap'n!"
The man at her left looks perturbed. "Surely they won't fire on us with their princess aboard."
"Ye want to be the one to tell 'em?"
"They don't know she's here," the captain says grimly, and spins on his heel. "Weigh anchor! Take the girl to my cabin!"
Amid much protest from the princess, it is done.
The cabin is spacious and surprisingly well-decorated, she discovers once she acquires a lantern to light. She supposes it's the way of a pirate captain who was raised by a king. A pouch of jerky tempts her stomach, but she resists. What she does pick up is a heavy knife, pulling it free from the wood of the table with no small amount of effort. The blade shines dully in the lantern light.
She sits down at the table. The roll and toss of the ship doesn't trouble her so much as the way the deck shakes beneath her when the cannons fire. She's spent many a day on the ships of Rosemead's navy, but never during wartime.
They are well out to sea, she thinks, before Rosemead's fleet gives up the chase and the chaos finally subsides. Some several minutes more pass as they sail through calm waters before anyone recalls she is there. The door to the cabin finally swings open, and she scrambles to her feet, the knife behind her back.
"No need to stand, Princess," the captain says, voice dry with sarcasm and rough from shouting. "We wear no crowns here."
Scowling, she palms the grip of her weapon and wills him closer. "Will you have your way with me now? Satisfy yourself with taking Rosemead's daughter and dignity, since you couldn't win the war?"
He sits at the far end of the table, out of her reach, and slouches low, stretching his long legs in the very picture of a lazy pirate. "Would you like me to?"
The fires of her anger ebb, giving way to cold spite. "Now you've got me out to sea, what else would you do?"
"Keep you as a good-luck charm." He picks up the pouch of jerky and confiscates a piece for himself before offering her the rest. She ignores it. "We had an ocean wyvern hatchling, but he outgrew the ship."
"Quite the expensive good-luck charm," she remarks archly.
He squints at her, eyes roaming her from head to toe. She suddenly recalls her dressing-gown and draws herself upright, appalled.
"You can't eat nearly as much as the hatchling did."
If she'd thought her righteous indignation had reached full mast, she was mistaken. This new slight wrings an incredulous, haughty sound from her throat, which in turn pulls a spark of amusement and something like a smile from the captain.
When she recovers, she says, "Your men did not simply stumble upon me. You sent them to take me from my bed. You must have had a much more compelling reason than that."
The captain is dismissive in expression and gesture, but his voice, at least, is serious. "I intended to ransom you."
"You still can." She moves closer, then stops, the length of the table still separating them. "When they find I'm missing, they'll know it was you. They'll come looking."
"And when they find me, they'll kill me on sight," he cuts in. "Don't worry, I won't be letting that happen."
"What, then, will you do with me?"
"Whatever I like. You're out to sea with a crew of pirates," he points out reasonably.
Her expression clouds. "A crew of pirates and at least a few noblemen, I'd wager." He doesn't reply.
Would he or his men really have their way with her? The pirates among them, perhaps, but those men who sailed from Dragonfell? She doesn't want to imagine that they would stoop so low.
Slowly, she skirts the end of the table and comes to stand an arm's length from the captain. A gurgling growl from her stomach sounds beneath the rush of water outside, as if on cue, and she takes the opportunity.
"I suppose if I'm to be kept here, I may as well eat." She turns her left hand over, palm up, while her right remains behind her, knife clenched tightly under white knuckles.
Obligingly, the captain fishes a generous piece of jerky from the pouch and lays it in her hand. Quick as she can, she twists her wrist and grabs his hand in hers, the knife flashing out from behind her back. She aims for his chest.
He doesn't even flinch. His free hand catches her by the forearm and holds her steady, keeping the blade from his breast, and the hand that she thought she'd captured turns the tables as well. Struggle though she might, she cannot break free.
"Let me go!"
"And they call us ruffians," he says, unyielding. "Offer a Rosemead lady some sustenance and she tries to stab you with your own knife."
Her temper flares through her fear. Using his grip on her as leverage, she draws herself closer, leaning sharply in so that she can see the warm flecks in his eyes by the lantern light. Still he does not waver.
"What would you have me do?" she demands. "Sit and wait prettily for your men to have at me? Smooth my gown while you prepare my cell? Eat from the hand of my captors?"
She wrenches her arm in his grip, but he holds fast until she releases the knife from her hand in her thrashing. When he finally surrenders her, the pitching of her weight and the roll of the ship throw her to the floor, and there she sits, eyes ablaze, hair and gown tangled, watching as he retrieves his knife.
Turning the blade in his hand, the captain uses it to shave a thin strip of jerky off the piece she'd abandoned during their struggles. He says nothing for several long minutes. At last she can take no more of the creaking silence of the ship, and she says through gritted teeth: "I will do nothing quietly."
"Evidently." He stands, then, taking the piece of jerky and the knife with him, but leaving the pouch that is still half full. "I'll have someone bring you a proper dress, so you'll have something new to scream about."
It doesn't occur to her, in her fury, that the jerky that scatters on the floor as she throws the pouch at the closing cabin door might be the only thing she's offered to eat for some time.
As promised, she is furnished with a dress — a rather fetching turquoise gown, in fact, fit for a courtier. It boasts the low neckline, plunging backline and high-gathered side of the skirt that the ladies wear in Wildehaven, where the days are scorchingly hot, the nights balmy and the atmosphere much looser, much lazier than in Rosemead.
Revealing though the dress feels, it's better than her dressing-gown, and Kiersten laces the bodice as snugly as she can with no assistance. (She's quite sure any of the Lindwyrm's men would have been happy to help, but she would just as soon do it herself as let any one of them lay eyes on her half-dressed again.)
As it turns out, she needn't worry about scavenging her meals off the dirty deck. That very morning as the sun reappears, she's given an invitation to dine with the captain. Belligerently, she obliges, taking a seat at the table in his quarters, where she'd been left to her own devices since her last encounter with the man. He joins her shortly, accompanied by a platter of salted meats and a basket of surprisingly fresh fruit.
"Should be to your tastes," the captain remarks when he sees her dubious glances at the gleaming red apples. "They were just liberated from one of the markets at Rosemead."
Her face grows stormy once more. "Stolen goods are hardly to my tastes."
He takes a sharp, crunching and utterly tempting bite. She can almost taste it. "Then I'm afraid there won't be much on board you'll find palatable," he answers dryly around the fruit.
Putting the apple and her empty stomach from her mind, she focuses instead on making her distaste for him as clear as possible. "A prince who speaks with a full mouth. How charming."
Something in his eyes sharpens, but his expression remains frustratingly cavalier. "I'm no prince."
"All rogue and no royal, are you?" She raises her eyebrows. Surely he had not so readily cut ties to his bloodline. He is, after all, the last of the royal family of Dragonfell.
"Can't be a prince without a king or a queen," he remarks. "Can't be a king without a kingdom, either."
"So then all that's left is to be a pirate." She folds her arms against the remorse that tries to soften her words. "You could have died honorably like your parents."
The captain turns his gaze to the apple in his hand, but he seems to have lost his appetite. "There is no honor in defeat."
"Are you not defeated? You have no kingdom, no people." She sits forward, unable to remain passive when an argument feels on the horizon. "If not death, is this not defeat?"
He abandons the apple on the table and stands, making his way to a cabinet to fetch an unmarked bottle. Some kind of rum, no doubt. "I have this ship," he says as he resumes his seat. "And I have my crew, and my life, and my freedom. I daresay you're more defeated than I am." As her anger gathers into a fit, he adds, "Drink?"
She ignores the question, and he pours one for her, anyway. "I have a title," she snaps, "a home. My people love me."
"My title is Captain Shayne Trenowyth, the Wyvern-Tamer. The Lindwyrm is home enough; I take it with me everywhere. And ask any man on deck — every one of them loves me, or they wouldn't be here." He looks at her steadily as he speaks.
Princess Kiersten Harte of Rosemead (Daughter of Blackmere, Child of the Twenty-Year War, Once and Future Queen of the Golden Age)
They're layered in rags, their hair dreadlocked and braided and beaded and wrapped, jewelry on their ears and necks and hands. Pirates. More than one of them leers in her direction, eyes raking over her, and she fights the urge to wrap her arms around herself. She wants to stand, but she's outnumbered five to one. They won't let her keep her feet or her dignity.
Raising her gaze past their sneers and smirks, she squints up at the mast. The only light this moonless night comes from the fires the pirates set in the town, but she can make out the stark black and white of the Jolly Roger, flying just below another flag in black and gold. As the breeze whips the tattered banner out, the lines of the emblem become clearer: a dragon, rearing back, a massive broadsword planted in its breast. The crest of Dragonfell.
Her stomach twists with anxiety. Dragonfell are the long-sworn enemies of Rosemead, their adversaries in the Twenty-Year War into which she was born. When their king and queen had fallen and their kingdom was occupied three years ago, most of the surviving people of the city of Dragonfell proper had fled by way of sea. The villages and towns were annexed into Rosemead and remain occupied to prevent uprising.
Though most survivors had found their way into pirate crews that flew only the skull and crossbones, there is one ship on the water that sports the only remaining flag of Dragonfell: the Lindwyrm, where the princess finds herself now. There is no land left that belongs to Dragonfell, but there are many coves and ports that will house them. The crew of the Lindwyrm spends their time pillaging Rosemead's port towns and plundering their ships.
Rumor has it, she recalls, her heart sinking frightfully low in her chest, that the Lindwyrm is captained by the last living member of Dragonfell's royal family, the only son of the king and queen Rosemead slew.
"Don't look so scared, lassie," comes a gravelly voice too close to her ear for comfort. She jerks away, skin crawling, and whips her head around to face a man with a deep face scar and a full beard. He grins with too few teeth. "The cap'n's a handsome lad. Sure you'll enjoy his plans for ye."
Frightened but defiant, she bares her own teeth. "Not as much as I'll enjoy my father's plans for you," she hisses. "Rosemead gives no quarter to pirates."
"You'd do well to hold your tongue," says another of her captors. His accent is crisp and his words clear, drawing her attention. "Pirates give no quarter to princesses, either."
She recovers swiftly from her confusion. "If you'll have me silenced, peasant, then silence me," she spits. A hand takes purchase in her hair, yanking her head back. She closes her eyes in preparation for a blow, but whatever retribution had been coming is stopped abruptly by a new voice.
"Enough."
The single word scatters the men around her, freeing her from the hand in her hair. When her eyes open, only one remains: the well-spoken man, who stands now at attention, watching the captain's approach. Seething resentment, the princess, too, turns her head to look.
He walks with a long, graceful stride, and though he wears the same rags and jewelry as his men, his very carriage sets him apart from them. Without a doubt, he is royalty. His dark skin and hair mark him as a son of Faircoast, the land his mother had hailed from, where Rosemead can no longer trade or travel, since the war's end. It was, her father had said, the worst of the sacrifices they had made for peace.
"You will not lay a hand on her," the captain continues, coming to stand before her and surveying the dispersing crowd. "If you seek to swim back, you need only ask."
He turns his dark, kohl-lined eyes on her, inscrutable, moving a tide of fear and hatred within her. She rises up on her knees, tilting her chin in contempt. "The pirate king wishes to speed his execution," she sneers. "If you seek a beheading, you need only ask."
"Do not presume to know what I wish, Princess."
She bristles at the address, having expected more from a man who would protect her from ruffians in his own crew. "Then tell me," she demands. "Do you desire riches? My father will make you the wealthiest man on the seas."
Before he kills you, she adds privately. Her father will not stand for this, she is certain. It is only a very small matter of time before Rosemead's navy boards this ship to retrieve her.
A commotion starboard prevents the captain's reply. A man scrambles up the gangplank, clutching a bleeding shoulder. "They're loadin' the guns, cap'n!"
The man at her left looks perturbed. "Surely they won't fire on us with their princess aboard."
"Ye want to be the one to tell 'em?"
"They don't know she's here," the captain says grimly, and spins on his heel. "Weigh anchor! Take the girl to my cabin!"
Amid much protest from the princess, it is done.
The cabin is spacious and surprisingly well-decorated, she discovers once she acquires a lantern to light. She supposes it's the way of a pirate captain who was raised by a king. A pouch of jerky tempts her stomach, but she resists. What she does pick up is a heavy knife, pulling it free from the wood of the table with no small amount of effort. The blade shines dully in the lantern light.
She sits down at the table. The roll and toss of the ship doesn't trouble her so much as the way the deck shakes beneath her when the cannons fire. She's spent many a day on the ships of Rosemead's navy, but never during wartime.
They are well out to sea, she thinks, before Rosemead's fleet gives up the chase and the chaos finally subsides. Some several minutes more pass as they sail through calm waters before anyone recalls she is there. The door to the cabin finally swings open, and she scrambles to her feet, the knife behind her back.
"No need to stand, Princess," the captain says, voice dry with sarcasm and rough from shouting. "We wear no crowns here."
Scowling, she palms the grip of her weapon and wills him closer. "Will you have your way with me now? Satisfy yourself with taking Rosemead's daughter and dignity, since you couldn't win the war?"
He sits at the far end of the table, out of her reach, and slouches low, stretching his long legs in the very picture of a lazy pirate. "Would you like me to?"
The fires of her anger ebb, giving way to cold spite. "Now you've got me out to sea, what else would you do?"
"Keep you as a good-luck charm." He picks up the pouch of jerky and confiscates a piece for himself before offering her the rest. She ignores it. "We had an ocean wyvern hatchling, but he outgrew the ship."
"Quite the expensive good-luck charm," she remarks archly.
He squints at her, eyes roaming her from head to toe. She suddenly recalls her dressing-gown and draws herself upright, appalled.
"You can't eat nearly as much as the hatchling did."
If she'd thought her righteous indignation had reached full mast, she was mistaken. This new slight wrings an incredulous, haughty sound from her throat, which in turn pulls a spark of amusement and something like a smile from the captain.
When she recovers, she says, "Your men did not simply stumble upon me. You sent them to take me from my bed. You must have had a much more compelling reason than that."
The captain is dismissive in expression and gesture, but his voice, at least, is serious. "I intended to ransom you."
"You still can." She moves closer, then stops, the length of the table still separating them. "When they find I'm missing, they'll know it was you. They'll come looking."
"And when they find me, they'll kill me on sight," he cuts in. "Don't worry, I won't be letting that happen."
"What, then, will you do with me?"
"Whatever I like. You're out to sea with a crew of pirates," he points out reasonably.
Her expression clouds. "A crew of pirates and at least a few noblemen, I'd wager." He doesn't reply.
Would he or his men really have their way with her? The pirates among them, perhaps, but those men who sailed from Dragonfell? She doesn't want to imagine that they would stoop so low.
Slowly, she skirts the end of the table and comes to stand an arm's length from the captain. A gurgling growl from her stomach sounds beneath the rush of water outside, as if on cue, and she takes the opportunity.
"I suppose if I'm to be kept here, I may as well eat." She turns her left hand over, palm up, while her right remains behind her, knife clenched tightly under white knuckles.
Obligingly, the captain fishes a generous piece of jerky from the pouch and lays it in her hand. Quick as she can, she twists her wrist and grabs his hand in hers, the knife flashing out from behind her back. She aims for his chest.
He doesn't even flinch. His free hand catches her by the forearm and holds her steady, keeping the blade from his breast, and the hand that she thought she'd captured turns the tables as well. Struggle though she might, she cannot break free.
"Let me go!"
"And they call us ruffians," he says, unyielding. "Offer a Rosemead lady some sustenance and she tries to stab you with your own knife."
Her temper flares through her fear. Using his grip on her as leverage, she draws herself closer, leaning sharply in so that she can see the warm flecks in his eyes by the lantern light. Still he does not waver.
"What would you have me do?" she demands. "Sit and wait prettily for your men to have at me? Smooth my gown while you prepare my cell? Eat from the hand of my captors?"
She wrenches her arm in his grip, but he holds fast until she releases the knife from her hand in her thrashing. When he finally surrenders her, the pitching of her weight and the roll of the ship throw her to the floor, and there she sits, eyes ablaze, hair and gown tangled, watching as he retrieves his knife.
Turning the blade in his hand, the captain uses it to shave a thin strip of jerky off the piece she'd abandoned during their struggles. He says nothing for several long minutes. At last she can take no more of the creaking silence of the ship, and she says through gritted teeth: "I will do nothing quietly."
"Evidently." He stands, then, taking the piece of jerky and the knife with him, but leaving the pouch that is still half full. "I'll have someone bring you a proper dress, so you'll have something new to scream about."
It doesn't occur to her, in her fury, that the jerky that scatters on the floor as she throws the pouch at the closing cabin door might be the only thing she's offered to eat for some time.
As promised, she is furnished with a dress — a rather fetching turquoise gown, in fact, fit for a courtier. It boasts the low neckline, plunging backline and high-gathered side of the skirt that the ladies wear in Wildehaven, where the days are scorchingly hot, the nights balmy and the atmosphere much looser, much lazier than in Rosemead.
Revealing though the dress feels, it's better than her dressing-gown, and Kiersten laces the bodice as snugly as she can with no assistance. (She's quite sure any of the Lindwyrm's men would have been happy to help, but she would just as soon do it herself as let any one of them lay eyes on her half-dressed again.)
As it turns out, she needn't worry about scavenging her meals off the dirty deck. That very morning as the sun reappears, she's given an invitation to dine with the captain. Belligerently, she obliges, taking a seat at the table in his quarters, where she'd been left to her own devices since her last encounter with the man. He joins her shortly, accompanied by a platter of salted meats and a basket of surprisingly fresh fruit.
"Should be to your tastes," the captain remarks when he sees her dubious glances at the gleaming red apples. "They were just liberated from one of the markets at Rosemead."
Her face grows stormy once more. "Stolen goods are hardly to my tastes."
He takes a sharp, crunching and utterly tempting bite. She can almost taste it. "Then I'm afraid there won't be much on board you'll find palatable," he answers dryly around the fruit.
Putting the apple and her empty stomach from her mind, she focuses instead on making her distaste for him as clear as possible. "A prince who speaks with a full mouth. How charming."
Something in his eyes sharpens, but his expression remains frustratingly cavalier. "I'm no prince."
"All rogue and no royal, are you?" She raises her eyebrows. Surely he had not so readily cut ties to his bloodline. He is, after all, the last of the royal family of Dragonfell.
"Can't be a prince without a king or a queen," he remarks. "Can't be a king without a kingdom, either."
"So then all that's left is to be a pirate." She folds her arms against the remorse that tries to soften her words. "You could have died honorably like your parents."
The captain turns his gaze to the apple in his hand, but he seems to have lost his appetite. "There is no honor in defeat."
"Are you not defeated? You have no kingdom, no people." She sits forward, unable to remain passive when an argument feels on the horizon. "If not death, is this not defeat?"
He abandons the apple on the table and stands, making his way to a cabinet to fetch an unmarked bottle. Some kind of rum, no doubt. "I have this ship," he says as he resumes his seat. "And I have my crew, and my life, and my freedom. I daresay you're more defeated than I am." As her anger gathers into a fit, he adds, "Drink?"
She ignores the question, and he pours one for her, anyway. "I have a title," she snaps, "a home. My people love me."
"My title is Captain Shayne Trenowyth, the Wyvern-Tamer. The Lindwyrm is home enough; I take it with me everywhere. And ask any man on deck — every one of them loves me, or they wouldn't be here." He looks at her steadily as he speaks.
Princess Kiersten Harte of Rosemead (Daughter of Blackmere, Child of the Twenty-Year War, Once and Future Queen of the Golden Age)