Page 12 of The Discount Damsel

From the bewildered expression on the dragon’s face, she realized she’d caught him off guard. Clearly this was his first princess-napping. All the more reason not to succumb to hysterics—she didn’t need him making any rash decisions out of panic that might result in her accidental dismemberment.

“Why aren’t you, uh, screaming in terror?” the dragon asked, confused.

“Why would I?” she replied.

The Amberlian royal family had excellent relations with the local dragon population, after all. None of them would ever dream of kidnapping her, so this one was either a rogue or foreign. She certainly didn’t recognize him—larger than the Shire horses who plowed the grain fields, ruby scales, yellow horns sprouting like a crown from his forehead, a spiked tail. In fact, he looked like one of the legendary Great Reds. Yes, it would be best to err on the side of caution and treat him with the utmost respect, even if he was here to abduct her.

Her question seemed to stump the rogue dragon, and since she didn’t want to risk aggravating him, she chose another question that had an easy answer to set him at ease.

“I don’t suppose I have time to pack a suitcase?”

Just because you were about to become a hostage didn’t mean it was acceptable to forgo basic hygiene, and that included a change of clothes and a toothbrush, and if the kidnapper was exceptionally gracious, deodorant.

“Um . . .” The dragon clicked his front claws together and cast a worried glance below.

Upon the ramparts, the guards scuttled about like beetles as they shouted their heads off and did their darndest to realign the cannons. In the courtyard, those with longbows were already firing. Arrows skipped off the stones and zinged through the air. The dragon ducked.

“Oh, how silly of me.” Millie tapped her temple with a self-depreciating smile. “Amberlian guards are fantastic shots and they’ll have those cannons prepped to blast this balcony to bits in just a few more seconds. Of course you’re in a hurry. Now, you mustn’t hold it against me when I wake tomorrow with absolutely rancid morning breath because you didn’t afford me the moment to retrieve a toothbrush.”

At least she had her reticule strung upon her wrist and the few amenities it contained—mostly makeup, perfume, breath mints, a few other odds and ends including a small tin of goose-liver pâté for Duchess, but every little bit helped. She tucked the Persian cat firmly under one arm.

With a few crisp clicks of her shoes, she approached the dragon and held up her hand to be whisked away. “Well, I’m ready to be kidnapped. Do mind the taffeta though, it’s new. Shall we?”

CHAPTER 5

IT’S BEST NOT TO BE NAKED WHEN ENTERTAINING GUESTS AND THE CLEANING WONDERS OF GREASE

Bradley scowled and plunged his soiled robe back into the washtub. Suds sloshed over the rim, staining the manilla stone of the western balcony for only a few seconds before the heat of the desert stole the moisture away. Better out here than in the tower where the stink threatened to suffocate him.

With no one around for leagues and leagues, the sorcerer apprentice worked only in his boots and spectacles as he tried to rid his robe of the filth from Trial Forty-Three for the third time that day. He’d managed to get the gunk out of the floorboards with the help of the workroom’s environmental wards, but his robe was a different matter.

The fibers seemed enamored with the black goo, a true Romeo and Juliet love story where they would rather die than live without each other. His underwear had joined the torrid affair to create a toxic ménage à trois that made everything uncomfortably sticky. The sorcerer apprentice had tried an expecto spell, but his stutter had rendered the incantation inert. Which was its own frustration.

The expecto spell was a lesser form of the oblivatus spell, one that repelled an object or expelled a substance versus obliterated it entirely. He’d used the oblivatus spell not three months ago to great effect, but now, he couldn’t manage its lesser form. His curse was getting worse by the day.

When Gladstone had first cursed him, the stutter had only affected his ability to speak the advanced spells required of his Master’s exam. Then the curse had spread like a plague to the lesser spells, rendering his High Aetherial completely unintelligible. It hadn’t stopped there, poisoning his tongue from speaking any language without a stutter. It was a miracle at all he could still manage the occasional monosyllabic utterance.

Without the aid of a spell to salvage them, the ruined boxer briefs had met their untimely end in the flames of the portable hearth in the workroom. Bradley had flung the offending robe out onto the balcony and went about his day naked as a jaybird, aside from his boots and spectacles.

Why naked? Because he and Dirk were bachelors who never had visitors aside from the griffin and her rider, and they weren’t due to arrive with more fruits and vegetables for another week. Besides, who didn’t find fresh air and sun on their bare skin refreshing every once in a while?

And Bradley could use every mood-booster he could get as he fought to rid the black goo from his robe and rescue what he could out of this disastrous day. He was a man of routine, and any disruption outside the normal deviation left him frazzled—scrubbing floors and robes when it wasn’t Sunday was such a deviation.

Every morning began with physical training, a trip down to the enchanted spring to check on the shrimps, lots of coffee, and potion-making. Breakfast was supposed to follow the failed potions attempt, not cleaning up a catastrophe of this magnitude. Then counter-curse research until luncheon, studying for his Master’s exam until supper, an hour of free time to accomplish menial tasks and general tower upkeep, and the day concluded with a relaxing soak in his tub. Every Sunday, he’d take half a day off to perform any time-consuming tasks like fishing and laundry. That was the routine. Soaking and scrubbing his only remaining robe three times in one day was not part of the routine. It gnawed at him, convinced him he was wasting time when he should be focused on memorizing spells or discovering a counter-curse.

In fact, since the failed experiment of the morning, the day had not adhered to Bradley’s routine whatsoever. In the snatches of time not spent in direct combat against the black goo, he’d read page after page of old sorcery tomes just to discover his mind had wandered and he hadn’t retained a single thing. He’d scorched the ham and lentils he’d made for luncheon, the ham black and stiff as shoe leather and the lentils like pea gravel. As someone who worked hard for every morsel of knowledge and food, Bradley found the waste intolerable. And all the while, the knowledge that his curse was worsening had festered like a sore he couldn’t stop picking at until he’d given a despairing shout and went to beat his frustrations out on his robe once again.

He was in a foul mood, hungry and hot, too, and in need of a friend. Not that he’d ever admit it—acknowledging any weakness, even one for platonic affection, was a death sentence for someone like him. There’d been no place for it aboard the fishing vessels of the Cut, not when sea monsters and pirates alike plagued the waters, and no allowance made for it in the College where his noble-blooded but talentless peers sought any opportunity to humiliate the beast-size freak with the wild magic. Yet Bradley yearned for one of Dirk’s hugs. His luck aside, the baby dragon made Bradley feel less alone, less judged, like he could just be his broken, desperate self without any expectations.

The robe not getting any cleaner and the wash water in dire need of a change, Bradley abandoned the laundry and leaned out over the railing as he had done earlier that morning. His voice cracked. “Dirk!”

“Incoming!” came an unfamiliar deep voice.

Bradley’s gaze swung upward. A red dragon was rapidly losing altitude. The sorcerer apprentice flung up a hand to shade his eyes. What was that pink thing riding on his back?

“I say,” chastised a feminine voice. “Out of the way, woman! Can’t you see we’re going to crash?”

The sorcerer apprentice dove for the archway as his enormous friend, a fluffy white cat, and a young woman spilled onto the balcony, the three mercifully missing the washtub. Then he lunged right back onto the balcony to catch the highborn lady—for no one else could afford to dress in rose-pink taffeta these days—before she could slide head-first into the wrought-iron railing and receive a laceration in addition to the bruises she no doubt had already sustained. He caught Dirk’s tail, too, in an attempt to slow him down before the exhausted dragon bashed through the railing and plummeted to the sands two hundred feet below. (The cat, of course, had landed on fluffy white paws, completely unperturbed.) And there he stood, frozen in place, one hand on a dragon’s tail, the other clasped around a lady’s ankle, as his mind whirled to catch up with recent events.