Stolen

"Well, well, well. The Sleeping Beauty finally awakens. Not much of a princess with that hair though." She heard a voice say, before he laughed raucously.

Alicia raised her head and realised that it trobbed like a mothertucker. Her eyes were watery and a head throbbed. The last time she had felt this was was when she had been a party-animal popular kid and woke up with a hangover from hell from a particularly wild night. She had vowed that she'd never party that hard and thus, she'd never feel that way again, but alas.

"Wha..." She squinted her eyes and saw that she was on the freaking sun. It was so bright, she thought she might really need permanently need prescription shades after this. The next thing she realised she was on moving, though it didn't feel like she was on a car or anything. In fact, it looked like--

"Why am I hanging on a horse in the middle of a desert like a bag of sand?"

The men laughed loudly in amusement. As she rose from the horse, where she had been lying indeed, like a bag of sand, and....fell hindfirst on the hot desert sand. She squinted up at her capturers because she knew the only way she'd be in a boiling furnace was if it was against her will. Placing a hand over her eyes, she looked at the...one, two men. The men were dressed in Arabian attire like the kind she saw in travel magazines posed and smiling next to camels and sometimes, an oasis in the middle of the Kalahari or something. But...the last thing Alicia remembered was a crossbow pointed at her in a forest....in Alfairia. She glanced around; she didn't remember Alfairia being so dry and humid. This was probably the Outskirts, but last she checked, no-one lived here. It was too desolate, too infertile and apparently, wayyy too hot to be habited; as queen, she'd know this. Speaking of which,

"Excuse me, but did Phillips set you up to this? Because I find that being a cool desecluded prison cell would have been so much better."

They laughed again. Alicia found that she was slightly annoyed by these people who made nothing but an amusement out of her. She glared at one of the men until he finished laughing and said,

"Whomever your Phillips is, he isn't here any more, girl. You're all alone and after this, you'll really wish for that prison cell."

Alicia blinked. So Phillips didn't do it. Maybe these were rebels too. She wouldn't be too surprised to know if there was now more than a single group of rebels, what with her luck.

She stood, slightly dizzy suddenly feeling the swollen bump on the back of her head before she dusted the sand of her being.

"And why have you kidnapped me? You know, you didn't have to hit me in the head, I would have come when I saw the crossbow only."

"This idiot," the man said, gesturing to the man on his left. "Hit you with a rock. Probably to scare you. How many times must I tell you Shahid, that they are scared when they see the weapon already? Look at the horse; look at it. Its tired for carrying her like a sack of cement--"

"Dasem, you know I told you we were doing the hit-on-the-head today. She's stubborn, you're stubborn," the guy on the left, Shahid, said, turning to her. "Right? You would have resisted."

Now if Alicia hadn't had real scares in her life time, she would have been at least a little nervous but she wasn't. It probably didn't help that Dasem and Shahid argued like toddler siblings.

Alicia looked around the desert while they bickered but there was nothing to see but dunes and dunes of sand and the endless wide blue sky in every direction. There was no getting out of this.

"That's enough!" An authoritive voice commanded. Alicia turned to the voice and saw that he was a man that she had not seen; he had stood apart from the two. Alicia saw that below his garments, he was pretty well built with a scare trailing from the below his eye to his jawbone. His one eye was a storm of grey when the other was a shocking blue. She could automatically that this guy was the leader of this tiny group and the other two men were clearly his sidekicks or his henchmen. He fixed his hard mix-matched set of eyes of her and said,

"You can run in any direction, but we would still catch you, it is not recommended."

So someone had seen her looking for a way to get away.

"What do you want from me? Where are you taking me?" Alicia inquired, seriously now.

"Keep quiet! You are now property of the His Highness, King Gordan, and property does not speak unless spoken to. Dasem, tie her to the horse. She'll be walking."

"I'm not going anywhere until someone tells me what's going on." Alicia said, stubbornly.

What she really meant was that she wasn't going anywhere with anyone no matter what. But she wasn't going to tell them that.

The leader of the gang swung his rifle to this hands, where it hung on his torso and pointed it at her. Nevermind; this guy was pretty hardcore.
"You are sick, we see it in your face. And you are small and skinnier than our women. You will not be hard to kill if you are a problem. Now Dasem," he said eerily calmly. "Tie her to the horse."

Of course, with a gun pointed at her head she wasn't going to run or do anything funny, so she let Dasem tie her hands to the horse she had been "riding". Perhaps, this was some silly joke by Phillips, maybe she was dreaming and maybe this was a nightmare, but she couldn't help by notice how real the rope around her arms felt and how cracked her lips felt and how much the back of her head throbbed.

"Where's my bag?" Alicia asked, thinking out loud as she walked and as they rode. She had come to Alfairia carrying her bag, so of course it should have been with her.

Dasem tilted his head indicating the side of horse, where her bag hung. She didn't know whether to sigh in relief or stress more; if her crown - the Great crown - was found on her, she'd either be identified as a monarch....or a thief. She didn't know what was worse.

"At least tell me where I am, please? Where are you taking me and why and then," she said quickly and desperately now as the leader pointed his gun at her again. "And then, I'll be quiet for the rest of the journey, you won't even notice my presence."

The leader nodded once at Shahid; he would never stoop as low as answering his own captive's questions.

"You were found close to the borders of this kingdom and therefore, you are the property of the king....or whomever finds you. Trespassers are slaves here, therefore you will be sold to the highest bidder when we reach the main city of Traléva. Lastly, this kingdom is a joint kingdom with the one named Alfairia, the one ruled by the prophesied child queen. Welcome to the great kingdom of Narvíana."

~~~~

Mind = blown
Thanks for reading.
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