Page 47 of The Discount Damsel

“You don’t want to be rescued?”

She shook her head, and that’s when Sir Roger really saw it: the silk headscarf, the blouse, the plaid skirt. The fingernails with the chipped paint and the long hair made wild by the wind and heat. She was unlike any princess he’d ever met.

His white eyebrows shot upright like swans taking wing. “You’re serious.”

“I am, Sir Roger.”

His old eyes flickered across her face, judging her sincerity. To his horror and delight, he found it pure and unwavering. To mentor a young mind as eager and unjaded as this . . . Sir Roger swallowed thickly. “To abandon Demir and work for you would make me no less than a sellsword, and you don’t want that kind of man to be your mentor.”

“How do we free you?”

“Short of returning to his court and slicing my hand on my own sword to relieve me of my oath? Death.”

Millie sucked in her upper lip for a contemplative gnaw, resembling a pensive pug with a considerable underbite, and since no princess would deliberately or unconsciously do anything to make themselves less attractive, much less relatable, the hedge knight reaffirmed his conclusion that she was not like any princess he’d ever met.

“But even if I were to train you,” he pressed, “what of the dragon?”

“One moment, if you please, Sir Roger.”

Baffled, and realizing this probably wouldn’t be the last time this princess had that effect on him, he recovered quickly and tapped the stopper knot. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She shimmied back into the gloom of the bedroom and turned, yelping when she found Bradley standing there and not up in the kitchen writing spells into pancakes as she’d instructed.

“Your Highness?” Sir Roger asked, peering inside, but his sun-scorched vision saw nothing but darkness.

“A spider,” she lied. Turning back to Bradley, she whacked him in the arm and hissed, “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in the kitchen⁠—”

“What the hells are you doing?” he signed.

She straightened her blouse with a tug and lifted her nose into the air, though it was impossible to look down it towards someone of the apprentice’s height. “You should be pleased that I took your inquisition in the workroom to heart. I have the desire to become a pirate, but not the training. Sir Roger is the key to solving that. Or one of them, at least.”

“One?” he blurted aloud. Then, signing: “That knight is from Merle, Leighton’s neighbor and ally. He would’ve grown up with the legends of the Cursed Lands. He’ll know a luck dragon when he sees one and⁠—”

“Oh shush. If he’s progressive enough to train a princess he only just met, he’ll take no issue with the dragon. Besides, he never said he was from Merle, just that he’s bound to one of its barons. Honestly, you’re a sorcerer apprentice. One would think details were your bread and butter lest you bungle a spell and detonate something.”

She turned to said luck dragon hovering nearby. “Master Dirk, you are a fine luck dragon, a master of the wind and rain. If Sir Roger were to fall from this height, could you catch him with a wind so he doesn’t splatter like bug when he hits the sand?”

“Uhhh . . .” Dirk clicked his claws together as he mentally computed some rapid-fire calculations. He brightened. “Yes, I think so. If I go to one of the windows halfway down the tower, I can buffet his fall and then catch him the rest of the way.”

“No!” Bradley protested. He could see where this was heading—another mouth to feed, another noise nuisance, hells of the deep, maybe another bedmate.

The two schemers ignored him.

“You have to be sure, Master Dirk. This is a man’s life.”

The luck dragon nodded. “I can do it.”

“It has to look like he died,” Millie specified.

“I can make that work. Do you think he’s willing to suffer a few bruises, just in case I’m, uh, late in catching him?”

“I believe so.”

“But what about his honor? He seemed pretty set on preserving that.”

“It won’t be a problem if he is a true follower of the Knightly Code of Conduct, specifically Section Three.”

She had her first etiquette tutor, Miss Josephine, to thank for drilling that codex into her brain. Though, at the time, Miss Josephine couldn’t have known that Millie would use it to terrorize the visiting dignitaries’ knights to the very limits of their oaths.