The protagonist's parents try to arrange a marriage for the protagonist, who is in her teens, and the suitors are mostly adult men. They engage her to someone without her knowledge, but she escapes. The other main character is an enslaved girl who escapes with the protagonist to become pirates together. An overseer character tries to punish the protagonist by selling this enslaved girl, who is also a teenager, to a brothel. The protagonist intervenes as this overseer tries to rape the enslaved girl. We later find out that the enslaved main character was conceived through the protagonist's father raping the enslaved girl's mother. It is not framed as rape in the book, and the gravity of that revelation receives scant consideration. While pirates, the two girls dress as men to blend in. Often, when someone finds out they are actually girls, they make lewd comments or threaten to sexually assault them.