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The hold of a regular passage ship was starting to look pretty good now. These women probably did some piracy on the side and thought he was an easy victim.
They let him be for the rest of the day. At one point after dark, he heard them singing and playing instruments for about an hour as if they were having a grand old time out there on the deck while their prisoner sat in a dark cabin. Worn out from panic, he remained on the floor and didn’t move while he hoped he could black out and not know whatever was happening later if it was painful. The only time he got up was when he knew he couldn’t hold his piss anymore. The ship had grown quiet, and he tried yanking on the chain again, but that thing wasn’t coming off anytime soon. Sliding his foot was impossible too.
He assumed he must have slept since the door banged open later. He blinked at the sun coming through the porthole and curled up tighter in his corner as his chest constricted again.
Captain Kalani came in with a couple of water skins that she tossed near him. His mouth was dry, but he was too stiff with terror to reach for them as she moved away from him. The chain went to a metal plate on the floor, and he only had a few feet of slack.
“It smells like piss in here.” She wrinkled her nose.
It wasn’t like he'd had much of a choice, and the dark stain on the floor was obvious.
Captain Kalani straightened her red sash and folded her arms. “If you’re good, you can go free later once you do what we want. We’ll dump you off on shore with your horse, and you can go on your merry way.”
“Wh-what do I have to do?”
“Just pretend it’s a little game of dress-up to help us out.” She narrowed her gold eyes. “As long as you don’t scream and make a fuss in here like yesterday, we’ll feed you and water you, and we won’t hurt you.”
She gave him a hard look as he remained hunched in the corner. “Oriel will find you and kill you.”
“I don’t know or give a fuck who your buddy Oriel is, but he won’t find us.”
“He’ll hunt you down-”
“Pfft. Whatever.”
She slammed the door on her way out. A couple of the women brought him a bucket for pissing and a bowl of stew. Aspen forced down a few bites and drank some water before he curled up on the floor again.
Why did nearly everyone always want to use him?
He barely ate even though they brought him regular food. They gave him enough water too which interested him more, but he mostly stared into space. A couple of the ladies gave him pitiful looks which he ignored because it was fake. They didn’t give a shit about him. He had no idea what they meant about dressing up, and quite frankly, he didn’t give a fuck.
It was evening on the second night when the ship grew noisy, and Captain Kalani came in to throw something at him. Two women loomed behind her.
“Take off your clothes.”
Aspen stared at the dirty yellow linen shirt. A dark yellow dandelion was stitched onto the chest. “Why?”
“Do it or else.”
He reached for the shirt. Might as well get this over with so he could get to the dying part faster. She snapped her fingers.
“Clothes off first, stupid.”
“Wh-why?”
“Because I said so.”
He noticed one woman had a case, and his heart quickened, but she opened it and pulled out a brush which would be a strange thing to torture him with. “You need some special marks, and I can make it look like you’ve been brutalized.”
“Or we could actually beat the shit out of you,” said Captain Kalani. “Make your choice.”
Aspen started unbuttoning his shirt. She’d said earlier to think of this as dress-up. He had a feeling they had something humiliating planned, but he couldn’t imagine what. At least they weren’t stuffing him into a dress.
He couldn’t properly take off his trousers with the shackle on his ankle, but one of the women came forward with a dagger to cut them off along with his drawers. He shrunk into the corner, afraid she would use it in other ways, but she sheathed it, and the other came closer.
“Come out of the corner and sit up properly. We’re not whacking off your dick.”
“What are you doing?”
