A/N: My English teacher gave us an assignment where we had to write a creative piece in order to devlop our style and voice. In other words, we could write whatever we wanted. Instead of writing a ten line poem, like some kids, I decided to write a story that was twelve pages when typed double space. It probably would have been better off as the start of a novel, but it had to be a short story for the good my teacher.
The Heir to the Sea
The waves lulled against the boat, a calm ever-present music that accompanied life at sea. Some of the new sailors found it annoying, but Roenn did not mind it, just as she did not mind scrambling around at frightening heights in the rigging, or being the only female crewmember on the Red Dawn, the infamous ship that she sailed on. As the daughter of the feared Captain Redbeard, the King of the Sea, the crewmembers knew better than to treat her the way they would treat the scantily clad serving girls in the low lying inns and taverns in ports that the Red Dawn would stop at, and more importantly, they knew to simply treat her as they would treat a fellow male crewmember, as opposed to treating her like a highborn lady, that many of them thought to treat her as because she was the captain’s daughter. The ordinary treatment was something that Roenn had wanted, not her father.
Roenn stood at the bow as she watched the sunset as her fiery red curls billowed around her, and she smiled, but not without a reason. Tonight was the third night after the full moon, and a royal ship was on its way. Its course would take it directly to the Red Dawn.
A command rang out from the first mate, the crewmember that gave the majority of the commands to the crew because Captain Redbeard would frequently spend most of his time in his cabin and only come out when the situation really required. That did not make much a difference to the crew, because huge first mates that are giants of men, tattooed, bearded, very muscular, and have loud menacing voices tend to be very effective. After the first mate gave the command, all of the lights on the ship went out. That was Captain Redbeard’s style for attacking ships. The Red Dawn would go into a stealth mode, almost vanish, and then appear with a burst of light to the victim ship.
“SILENCE!” Roenn heard the first mate roar, and the crew became silent. The whole irony of the command amused her, because screaming silence most certainly did not in any way follow the command, but it did work, however. The crew knew stopped making noise whatsoever.
Roenn then crept lightly from the bow with cat-like grace towards her father’s cabin. She could not help but notice a few of the sailors’ eyes follow her steps. It must have been hard for them as sailors to be deprived from any intimate female contact while the captain’s daughter lived among them, but Roenn could not help that she was beautiful, with her fiery red curls, blazing gold eyes, angular face, and woman’s shape that no amount of men’s clothing could ever hide. Roenn knew that the sailors would never pose any threat to her. They had seen her slit the throats of many men, and Roenn knew that they feared her just as much as they feared her father and the first mate.
Roenn slipped into her father’s cabin and looked at the captain. Her father was called Redbeard for a reason, for his most prominent feature was the red tangle that extended from his face and stretched all the way down to his waist where it was tucked inside his belt. It seemed that Roenn had inherited just about all of his characteristic, with the exception of her golden eyes and more feminine features that she had received from her mysterious mother, a woman who Roenn had never met.
Captain Redbeard looked at his daughter in an acknowledgement of her presence, and he calmly moved his hand brushing away a curtain from the wall, which revealed a beautiful painting, and Roenn was nearly overcome with anticipation and excitement, for the painting depicted her birthday present.
