Voyage (Book 1 of The Pirate, The Professor And The Princess)

The Ship, The Chapter Nine

Stupid sun.

Ligh shifted to lay on her side but something held her back.

Uhhh.

She moved her face away but the yellow light still penetrated her eyelids.

Stop it. Shoo. Shoo.

As if the sun would tolerate being shooed away by her.

It stayed adamant on shining right at her face.

Ligh wanted to cover her eyes but when she tried to reach up with her hands, she realized she couldn't move them at all. She tried to wriggle away from this constricting bind, but her upper body didn't move much without something digging into her abdomen tightly. When she pulled too hard, it drew the breath out of her and the stinging pain in her wrists just added to it.

This woke her up.

Ligh's eyes flew open.

Stupid, stupid sun.

She looked around in confusion and dizziness for a few seconds, seeing a blur of colors filling her vision. Her skin felt sweaty and clammy and her breath heavy. Her head pounded and throbbed. When she desperately tried to rub her temples, her arms still prevented her. Ligh opened his eyes a little more and squinted at the foreign surroundings: wooden floorboards, painted low walls, strange weirdly-dressed people...

Ligh frowned, looking down at herself and pulling at the ropes that bound her, then grimacing when they dug into her skin. She grunted in frustration, then slumped against the floor. Her eyes roamed the place, then shifted a little upwards to see that she was not in a brightly-lit room.
Instead, she was out in the open beneath the clear blue sky and torturous sunshine.

Her mind cleared, taking note of all the details, and her eyebrows bunched together.

What the heck am I doing on a ship?

"What the heck am I doing on a ship?" She whispered out loud.

Stuck in sheer bewilderment.

She ran her eyes over the place, trying to make sense of all that seemed to happen at once in the small quarters of that area. People walked about the deck with hurried, loud footsteps and sweaty bodies. At a distance a group of people erupted into laughter, and a girl Ligh's age passed by her.

"Hey," Ligh breathed, her voice puffing out in a pathetic whisper.

The girl glanced at her.

They shared a look, then the girl widened her eyes and ran away.

Ligh sighed in irritation, then looked around to see if anyone else had seen her awake.

No one had noticed.

The ship carried on with its routine activities without anyone paying any attention to the prisoner now awake. Ligh looked around herself frantically, craning her neck to have a look over the edge of the ship, but she could see no land. Her breathing stuttered. There was no land.

"What-" Her voice picked up its sharp edge. "-the heck? What the heck?" She blurted out loudly, catching the attention of all those around her. It was like an upsurge of energy she now had to make sense of what was happening and get out of here. "What's going on?"

Instructions, commands and insults, which were until now being yelled one after the other as if to overlap the previous one's sound, dimmed a little. The people grouped at the other side, near the edge, now stopped laughing and a few of them noticed her. Ligh stared at them, then at all the other onlookers who were gawking at her like it was a specimen they had present among themselves for the very first time.

This was seriously creepy.

Some of them walked a little closer to get a better look of her, and Ligh again picked up the struggle against her binds, thrashing around wildly.
"Who are you?" She demanded, asking no one in particular. "Why am I here? Answer me."

She thought she had carried it forward pretty well how she was the princess, a royal both by power and by birth, and thus it was never wise to mess with her and think you'd come out of it alive. They had to be afraid of her after knowing this.

But then Ligh heard the sound of laughter. It was just an individual laughing, but it soon gave way to loud guffaws that rose out from the crowd, almost mockingly.

Then the few people at the front stepped away and the crowd parted to reveal a middle-aged man advancing towards her.

Ligh stared at him, noticing his clothes and the way he was approaching her with his jaw clenched, and a form of decisiveness in his step. He had a frown etched on his bearded face.

She wondered what she did to upset a stranger.

This brought back to her the questions of what had happened yesterday night that had led to this moment precisely: with her tied up in the middle of a ship in the middle of nowhere with people who seemed to be holding grudges.

The man didn't stop until he was so close that Ligh had to tilt her head up to look at him, and then she was just staring right into the sun behind his head. The man crouched down to come face-to-face.

"Who are you?" Ligh growled, yanking against her binds for emphasis. "And untie me this instant."

He exhaled a soft snort at this but made no move to obey her command. "Don't you think you're a little too delusional to believe we would listen to you?"

"Of course you will," she said, frowning. "Obviously."

Ligh tried to look threatening but the act was all too soon deflating at noticing how none of them looked terrified of her.

The man sighed, then looked down at his hands. "I hate to break it to you, Princess, but maybe you don't realize that you're not in Gontas anymore."
Ligh blinked. "...what does that..." she trailed off.

Ship, weird crew, bad smell, rough and battle-worn faces, ropes...

"Have you kidnapped me?" She ventured, and the man actually look surprised.

There was a moment of silence, among which she heard whispers from the people.

"Wait, you're not afraid? You should be afraid." He fumbled for his side and pulled out a dagger from his scabbard. "I could kill you right now. Slit your throat. Stab your gut. Rupture a lung or two. Cut off a limb. Take off an eye..." he trailed off too, receiving the blank look from her.

Ligh stared at the dagger in his hands, stained with dark caked blood as if he didn't bother cleaning it, then she looked at his face. "Though you won't," she pointed out. "I am the Princess. Princess Ligh of Gontas. If my parents get to know this, all this..." she moved her shoulders, looking at her condition. "You would never survive long enough to even think about going on with your life and having a family."

They stared into each other's eyes, then the man arched an eyebrow. "Who said a pirate is bothered enough to have a family?"

Silence.

"Pirate?" She echoed in confusion and amusement at the same time.

No one shared her joke. Thick silence blanketed the atmosphere.

"Pirate?" Ligh repeated, her smile fading. Her eyes roamed the man, then the others present there nearby, then the deck of the ship.

"Oh..."

The man just offered her a shrug and a sly grin.

Oh, I'm doomed.