Page 10 of The Discount Damsel

From its size and the way it had fallen when he’d stretched out his neck to retrieve the money purse, he guessed this cerulean coin was one of the scales normally hidden beneath his mane feathers. So the gap would go unnoticed by Bradley and easily forgotten by him—out of sight was out of mind, after all. Just like the two scales before it.

He poked it around in his paw with a claw, searching for deformities or any hint as to why he was suddenly shedding scales. And by sudden, he meant one scale about every month since their arrival in Ashburnum. To his knowledge, dragons didn’t shed their scales; their scales grew with them. But not many dragons of his particular species ever traveled west of Bellafont’s moist climes, so maybe it was the new environment? Or secondhand pressure from Bradley’s curse research and remedies? Was he expending too much luck?

His feathered mane flared and flattened on repeat for a few cycles with each speculation. He really ought to confide in his best friend, but the sorcerer apprentice wasn’t a dragon expert, and if Dirk knew anything about Bradley Donmarin, it was the intensity of his OCD. And his heart. He’d become fixated on trying to help Dirk at the expense of breaking his own curse, and that simply would not do. Half their time in the tower was already gone.

It would be best for Dirk to keep this to himself.

The baby dragon’s scales grew itchy, so he shimmied between the bigger roots to alleviate the discomfort. Then he slipped the blue scale into his satchel along with the coin purse. The jingling of coins brightened his mood considerably. More treasure for his tub; a morning well spent indeed.

And a prosperous afternoon to be had, if he could shake off the misgivings brought on by the shed scale.

It’s just stress, he told himself, wiggling free of the roots. How many baby dragons do you know who’ve started their own racketeering business before they were four years old? No one, that’s who. Why, you don’t even have your barbels yet. You’re a pioneer, Dirk my lad, and blazing a new trail is not without a few hiccups. Plus this desert air isn’t doing you any favors.

Bolstered by his pep talk, the baby dragon checked both his wings and scale coloration—all was in order—before following the cracked riverbed further inland in search of more enterprising opportunities.

CHAPTER 4

ANEMIC CAULIFLOWERS, MERCENARIES WITH NO MORALS, AND NEW TAFFETA

Dust stirred in the wind of Dirk’s passage; a flick of his feathered tail whipped up little dervishes. They seemed to give chase, pulled along in his wake, and there was nothing a young dragon loved more than playing tag.

Before he’d been plucked from the swarm and assigned to Bradley by Master Excelsior, he and his littermates had spent the days streaking the sky trying to grab each other’s feathered tail tufts. Or rather, he had given chase while the others had done their best to fly away from him, jeering at the colors of his scales. Now, he only had weak dirt devils to dance after him.

The barren river must’ve been a major waterway before the dragons had been expelled from this kingdom, for it cut deeper into Leighton than Dirk expected. Flecks of gold no larger than mustard seeds sometimes glittered in the cracks of the riverbed, sometimes bits of ruby and emerald. Nothing worth his attention or anybody else’s for that matter.

Soon he abandoned curiosity for caution—it would be foolish to be caught too far from the safety of the desert waste of Ashburnum and the sorcerer apprentice in the tower. He slowed to a hover and discovered the sounds and smells of a nearby village.

Dirk abandoned the empty river and silently whooshed from petrified log to scraggly scrub brush to bramble thicket until he was on the outskirts of the sprawling village nestled in the glen of a drought-choked forest. A guard relaxed on the bench by the stone well, reminding everyone he meant business by sharpening his dagger with long shhhicks of his whetstone.

It was market day, and a line had formed for the water trough. Wagons snaked through the trees, laden with wilted produce, hay bales, and wicker baskets of nervous cockerels. Mules shifted in their harnesses as their ears flicked with every clink of coin exchanged, the creak of the well rope, the thunk of the bucket hitting the edge of the trough, and the sluice of cold water.

It was a target-rich environment, but Dirk also wasn’t notorious enough to intimidate the whole of them at the same time. He’d have to pick off a weakling.

Sliding through the trees, Dirk wormed around to where a straggler was pulling up to the end of the caravan queue. The man was exhausted, having no mule himself and a cart full of anemic cauliflower. Sweat slid through the fine lines of his face like melted wax from a candle, dripped off his bony chin to soak the front of his shirt. With gasping breaths, he eyed the wagons as they crawled forwards for their turn at the well.

It was the perfect time for Dirk to strike. The cauliflower farmer had not yet reached the herd of wagons, there were still plenty of trees between the end of the queue and the market to hide him, and the tavern on the other end of the square was in full swing with visitors and vendors alike forgetting both their thirst and troubles with brown ale.

The baby dragon slipped another two wafers into his mouth to enlarge his size and deepen his voice, then dropped from his hiding place in the branches.

The farmer yelped as the weight in his cart suddenly increased and the handles jerked up hard into his armpits. Whirling, he caught sight of a magnificent red dragon perched on the far edge of his cart. Paws settled on two of the larger cauliflower and squeezed until the leaves squeaked like trapped mice.

“My cauliflowers,” the farmer whimpered.

Dirk, having been reminded of the stupidity of humans earlier that morning, forewent the small talk about his love of cauliflower (they were excellent when sliced into steaks and braised with cream and Parmesan) and went straight for the threat. “Hand over your coin purse, or your cauliflower⁠—”

“Here!”

“Oh.” He hadn’t expected it to be this easy and reared back to catch the coin purse.

The cart jerked with the sudden shift in weight, and the cauliflower eagerly sprang free of their imprisonment in a tumbling avalanche.

The farmer shrieked and chased after the runaway vegetables.

Dirk cried out as he disappeared under the onslaught of buffeting brassicas. The coin purse slipped from his paw. Growling, the dragon shoved with horn and claw until he emerged from the offending produce like a gopher from a collapsed burrow.

The farmer collected his cauliflower and wiped the dirt from their leaves as tenderly as if they were tears on his child’s face. Neither the farmer nor the dragon initially noticed the strange man in the cloak until he jingled the wayward coin purse by its strings.

Dirk’s gaze traveled from a shiny boot braced on an overlarge cauliflower, over a cloaked knee, paused on the leather pouch, then darted up to a hooded face where hard eyes like chips of obsidian gleamed out of the darkness.