New Horizons

Liam scrubbed the planks with a filthy rag and embraced the pain of the blisters on his hands and the unbearable ache in his back caused by kneeling and bending over the sun-cooked deck all day, not to mention yesterday's painful welcome. The physical pain helped distract him from the greater emotional pain he was feeling inside. In the same day he had lost his mother, father, and little brother. The blasted siltinians had even killed his dog Manela. The thought that he would never be able to tease his father about his old age again, or to wrestle with his brother over who would tend to the turnips that day, or to taste his mothers delicious cooking, that he would never be able to do any of those things ever again felt like there was a gigantic gory hole in his chest and the wound was filled with salt. The fact that he also discovered on the same day that they weren't his real family, he was adopted, and that he had a brother somewhere his parents thought it was important he found was a trivial side note, compared. Never the less, every so often, when he thought no one was looking, he removed from a hiding place in his wasteband the strange leaf which seemed freshly fallen and almost alive even at this time of year when most trees were bare. His parents had told him that the one who had taken his birth brother away had given it to them, which would make this leaf almost 17 years old. And that was impossible. He banished the leaf from his mind, and tried not to gaze longingly at the sliver of land visible on the horizon.

Too late he lowered his gaze to resume scrubing and a familiar pair of boots appeared at his side, tracking dirt once again on his recently scrubbed poop deck ( a recently learned term for the deck above the captain's cabin ). Liam's gaze followed the black polished boots up past a garishly ruffled white shirt and fixated on the white bearded man's icy blue eyes.
"Thinking of tryin' to escape again?", asked the captain. The deck hands stopped their work to stare at the inevitable conflict with the newcomer and their leader. "Because if you are, you should know that I have other skills besides fist fightin' to keep you from doin' it. And you'd like my other skills even less."
"Save your skills you filthy monster! I wouldn't think of leaving this ship until I had spilt some of the Siltinian blood here.", Liam retorted, unable to keep his rage from breaking forth. He heatedly sprung to his feet. "Take me back to shore and maybe I'll spare you and your crew!"
"Bloody..." The captain cursed and brought back his arm as if he would strike Liam. Liam gazed unflinchingly into his eyes. Apparently dissapointed at Liam's reaction, the captain lowered his arm and chuckled.
"Aye, you have some fire in you, that much is clear. But you know as well as I that even if you were able to kill the whole lot of us, you'd never be able to bring this boat to shore. Look where you are!", he opened his arms indicating their surroundings, "This is the sea! Old disagrements have no place here if you want to survive. The sea makes no differences between taking a Marovian man or Siltinian one to a watery grave! Both kinds hold places here on my ship and they either work peacefully together or I make them get along." His tone of voice made it clear that being made to cooperate was the least favorable choice.
"So, young man" the captain's face neared Liam's ",why don't you get into the nautical spirt" they were a finger nail's width apart now but Liam refused to back down defiantly ", try to forget your differences with our siltinian crew mates" a pause ", and GET BACK TO SCRUBBING THIS DECK BEFORE I BEAT YOU UNTIL YOU'RE BLOODY UNCONCIOUS AGAIN!!! RIGHT! BLOODY! NOW!"
Liam managed to remain defiantly still despite the spittle which now covered his face, but something in the captains' gaze caused him to slowly sink back to the deck, dip the rag in the nearby bucket and to start scrubbing. The crew members chuckled, proud with how their leader handled things, and went back to work, more often than not to his prompting curses.
Still scrubbing with his right, Liam's left hand fingered the place on his jaw where the captain had knocked him out yesterday, his first day on the ship. A painfull reminder that he had some things to learn before he could kill Siltinians, much less hold his own with a hardened ship crew.

After angrily pushing past the worried protests of his friends and neighbors, the day before his abduction he had started out along the nearby rocky coast line, his face set in murderous rage and his vision blurred with angry tears, his sole purpose being to keep on living so that he might kill siltinians. He knew that the Siltinian border would not be closely watched along the coastline because the jagged rocks of the beach went all the way up into the nearby dense forest and made it impossible for an army to infiltrate Siltinian territory that way. And so it was that he made his way north plodding doggedly across the slick rocks and stopping only once to brutally fling a stone into the sea and scream vehemently at the sky before collapsing into sobs upon a moist boulder. He drove onwards into the night until he fainted from exaustion in the shelter of two pine trees, the only trees still green for miles around. He awoke to several strange things in the morning. The first two being that eggs were cooking on a fire in front of him and that he seemed to be covered with Merian the village healer's cloak. The next two oddities being that Merian was lying face down in the dirt a knife in his hands and blood covering his head, and that someone was holding Liam's arms to his side while a large dark-skinned man rose a club over his head. He had just enough time to realise something was wrong before the club came down and he went out like a candle. He was awoken for the second time that day by someone pouring a bucket full of salty water on his face as he lay unrestrained on the ground. Liam felt the wooden floor and thought that he'd been taken to a house somewhere, and that the rocking of the floor was due to his dizziness after the blow to his head. Vaguely he heard the dark-skinned man who had clubbed him tell the bearded man in front of him that they had found the prisoner just like he said they would. Liam assumed that meant they were siltian border patrollers and thought his assumption confirmed when he heard them call the bearded man captain.
He rose shakily to his feet.
"You infernal Siltinians! You take even the life of the defenseless doctor who followed me all this way to look after me!", he screamed at their captain, quite beside himself with anger.
The captain looked at the heavily muscled men questioningly.
"Is this true? You were only to take this man, not to kill anyone!"
The heavies looked flustered.
"Sir! The other man was not dead! We just conked him like we did this guy!"
No one was paying attention to Liam while the captain dressed down his lackeys, and Liam, his vision red with fury, was too far gone to hear the words of the cursed siltinian leader. Spittle covered his chin and he muttered something about this siltinian having killed his last innocent as he rushed the captains back, his fist ready to bash the murderer's head in. To his surprise his fist hit nothing but air and as he passed through the space the captain had occupied less than a second before an arm grabbed his shoulder and threw him crashing into an empty barrel, shattering it. Liam shook his head attempting to clear his double vision, sprung to his feet, and in one smooth move grabbed a board from the remains of the barrel and swung it wildly at the relaxed-but-ready captain. And again the captain did his deplacement trick, the board shattering against the wood floor. This just seemed to make Liam even angrier and the air seemed to grow thick with his wild punches, the captain always managing to duck, sidestep, or otherwise deflect the blows, an amused smile on his face, moving with a youthful agility which belied his gray hair. Suddenly the captain seemed to tire of their game and sent Liam flying backwards with a fierce uppercut which made even the more hardened deck hands wince. As he lay on his back Liam fought to stay conscious, and the captain proudly accepted the applause of the crew. A young looking face marred by an eyepatch appeared above Liam.
"No one can beat the captain. Even if he fought like a new born girl-child, you still wouldn't be able to. The captain has ways."
This last was spoken almost reverently, and the clean shaven face was the last thing he saw before he passed out.

And then he awoke this morning to a rag and bucket being pushed upon him and was told to scrub. And so he did, noticing for the first time that he was on a ship. From before the sunrise until now, when the sun almost brushed the horizon he had been slaving away at the deck eating nothing as the crew openly gorged themselves on freshly caught fish. Liam's stomach grumbled but he didn't want to risk another casual blow like he recieved last time he went to get food.
"Hungry?"
Surprised at having his thoughts seemingly read so easily, he turned to see the eyepatched face he saw before he blacked out yesterday. Strands of blond hair escaped a bandana, framing the most beautiful face Liam had ever seen, with or without an eyepatch.
"Ya-you-you're a gir-yes! I am hungry!" Liam stammered before noticing that the eyepatched girl carried a plate of piping hot fish.
The girl chuckled. "You catch on quickly don't you?" Liam took the plate and commenced to stuff his face under the amused gaze of the girl. Her smile was a great comfort to Liam who had become numb after so much trauma in the past few days. Liam attempted to smile back, but only succeded in making a grimace. The girl laughed.
"You've been through much lately, haven't you?" she asked.
Liam suddenly remembered were he was, and that despite her kindness, this girl had been part of kidnapping him. And so it was with some guardedness that he answered that maybe he had been through more than she knew.
"Well you know, we're not all as bad as you think we are. Some of us disagreed with your, um, ...coming here."
"Is that so? Really. So why am I here? Huh? Just needed someone to CLEAN YOUR FLOORS?" Liam shouted at her.
"That's a kind manner to treat someone who gave up her dinner for you! But since you put it so kindly, I don't know why your here, only the captain does. Why don't you ask him?"
The girl took his empty plate and pranced back below decks. Suddenly left alone, Liam gazed at the setting sun and thought that maybe he would do just that.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hey guys! I have finally got around to writing my bit here, and I hope you liked it! Please tell me your thoughts, I always am gratefull for constructive critisim!]