Page 209 of The Discount Damsel

“I told you I’d be right back,” Bradley said defensively.

“Not you. Them.” Prince Henri flung a webbed finger towards the western balcony. “You couldn’t hear that competing rumbling trying to mess up my timing? The audacity!”

Them?

Bradley rushed to the balcony. The Leightonian army had arrived and Dirk wasn’t ready. Hells of the deep, the ink wasn’t ready. Despite the desert heat, a chill sent a shiver from the nape of his neck down into his toes at the sight of that gigantic crossbow. As the company charged down the dune, a small crew and two officers stayed back to prepare it for its first assault.

Bradley barely registered the howls of the soldiers as they encountered the princess’s boobytraps. He didn’t even notice when Sir Roger, Pocket, and Duncan began lobbing Master Excelsior’s old potions out the windows. His ears were deaf to the shouting match between Sir Eustace and the army captain. Bradley’s entire being was focused on that young man beside the crossbow in the amethyst-colored jerkin.

Clutching the railing, Bradley leaned forward and squinted. He knew that face. That elitist sneer. “Gladstone?”

Bradley had forgotten his rival’s family was from Leighton. Everyone in that kingdom—the land of gems and precious stones—had a petrographic surname. The trend was similar in all the major countries, even along the Cut. His own name Donmarin was a bastardization of don marine, meaning “of the sea.”

And Gladstone, upon his expulsion, had had nowhere else to go except home. Where the wretched blighter had obviously ingratiated himself with the prince if he’d been given this assignment. But he didn’t even have a staff, so what good was he as a sorcerer without the amplifier? Had he gone rogue and found another source? Or was he here because he knew what the other Heroes had never discovered—that Dirk the Dangerous was a luck dragon in disguise? And his tower companion was a sorcerer who couldn’t tap into his magic?

They had left the College on the same day, after all, Gladstone to a life of dishonor and Bradley, cursed, to the tower. And juicy rumors spread amongst the dormitories faster than pixie dust on a summer breeze.

The answer revealed itself the moment Gladstone placed his hand on the arrowhead and molten black magefire bubbled up beneath his palm.

“We’re not here for the princess, you overgrown gnome,” the captain shouted. “Leighton’s already got one of those on the hook. We’re here for that dragon’s heart.” He turned back to the crew and sliced his hand through the air. “Fire!”

The burning arrow launched through the air and buried itself into the tower wall.

Thrown violently off his feet, Bradley sailed through the air to crash against the smooth planks of the workroom floor. Before he had even slid to a halt, the apprentice was clawing at the floor with his fingernails for purchase. He found it, launched upright, and dashed back out onto the balcony.

Black magefire from where the bolt was buried in the masonry spread like rot across an apple’s skin. It ate away at the wards protecting the tower, dissolving them into steam before gnawing away at the stone beneath.

When Bradley lifted his eyes from the black fire—the flames of the damned—they were bright and burning as two blue suns.

Gladstone had taken his magic, stolen his future. Bradley could forgive that—maybe—after a dozen decades and about a billion kegs of ale, but he could never forgive Gladstone coming here to steal Dirk’s. That luck dragon was a pure soul who deserved the best this world had to offer. Gladstone would not take that away. No one would.

Blood roared in Bradley’s ears, thundered down his veins. A wind rose from beneath his feet as the apprentice stalked to the old folding table. Upon it, resting side by side, was the cherrywood box and the papyrus spell pinned down by one of the scroll tube’s ornate end caps.

The silver end cap rattled in the tumultuous wind of his approach, and the papyrus took flight. Bradley caught it out of air with the precision of a striking falcon. He held it between both hands, the light from his eyes bathing the beige parchment in blue.

For Dirk.

His heart burned with purpose. Indomitable will.

Tethers snapped within him. Invisible chains sundered and scattered their links.

Bradley felt his chest expand as something that had been imprisoned and compressed burst like a flower from a tightly wound bud.

Wild magic, his magic, coursed down his limbs and warmed his soul like a hug from a very old friend.

His gaze sharpened on the High Aetherial in front of him, and his mouth and tongue spoke the words into being with flawless pronunciation.

The renovatio spell complete, the words disappeared as if they had never been written, and the papyrus drifted from his grasp to the ground. The silver magic of the spell spread over Bradley’s palms, clung to his fingers like glue. He need only place them on the object of his desire and see it restored to its former brilliance.

Then, in the strange quiet that sometimes inserts itself in the midst of chaos, the apprentice heard the princess’s cries from far below.

The wind beneath his feet intensified, and Bradley shot out of the workroom.

He didn’t take the stairs. The apprentice arrowed down the core of the tower where the princess’s training rope had once hung. The frightened hermit crabs peeked out of their shells as a blur of silver and blue lights and brown homespun shot past.

There, at the bottom of the tower, the princess defended the almost-wyrm from the gluttonous mouths of the giant groupers with swipes of her cutlass. She was soaked, ragged, her face contorted with the agony of fatigue and despair.

“Bradley!” Her greeting was half cry, half whimper.