Page 53 of The Discount Damsel

“What?” Bradley sputtered. “How?”

“I can pick locks, remember?” The princess waggled her letter opener then threw the padlock at him. Bradley ducked.

“And I flew them up here,” Dirk said proudly. “Sorta. Think running up the stairs meets an enthusiastic tailwind. With pulling.”

“Speaking of, never ‘sorta fly’ me anywhere ever again,” the hedge knight informed the baby dragon. “Ever.”

“I won’t.” Dirk wove a complicated twist through the air. Vertebrae popped. “You wiggled so much I nearly threw out my back.”

The three humans spilled onto the floor when the tower quaked again.

“I am too old for this,” Sir Roger muttered, righting himself and yanking a rattan cane loose of the workroom’s mountains of clutter.

Bradley was about to protest the acquisition of his master’s possession, but the bigger, more immediate problem was outside attacking the tower. The very assembly of stones he was responsible for. He abandoned the others to collect themselves and caught the wrought-iron railing of the western balcony just as the tower shivered.

The princess was the next to reach the balcony, and when she didn’t immediately anchor herself to the railing, the apprentice placed a hand on the small of her back and shoved her forward so she would have no other choice. She tsked at his manhandling and elbowed him in the ribs. Bradley bared his teeth at her but her attention was already far below.

“Crone’s Crooked Tits,” she whispered. “What is that?”

Bradley would’ve taken great satisfaction in correcting her improper usage of the pronoun, as the mountain of a man at the base was definitely a who, except he had to agree with her. That who was definitely a what because no one grew to that height and breadth and musculature who wasn’t a giant, and they had gone to sleep under the hills long ago.

“Barbarian,” Sir Roger answered from her other side. “Juggernaut class, I suspect, given that warhammer.”

The weapon in question was a block of stone veined with green light and strapped to a wooden shaft that had once been the heartwood of an ancient redwood. It must have weighed as much as Bradley, but to the barbarian it was hardly heavier than a toothpick given the ease in which he swung it around to rest upon his thick shoulder. The gargantuan Hero waved at Millie.

“Ivar the Bane,” Sir Eustace heralded, and, his duty done, retreated to his desk to record the details of the ensuing rescue attempt. Ivar’s desert guide already sat in the desk’s meager shade and sipped from a canteen.

“Hello, future wife,” the barbarian boomed. “Though you do not have hair as bright as the sun and are a bit too plump to march across the permafrost without slowing down the whole caravan, I will still call you my ice flower.”

Ivar flung his long black hair back over his shoulders to show off his massive chest, which he promptly puffed out. When Millie didn’t immediately swoon, he pulsed his pectorals like an amorous sand grouse.

“I have come from the land of snow and ice to battle this dragon, to rip his guts out of his belly for my bootlaces, to hollow out his horns for my vodka, to make a mighty offering of his heart’s blood to my warhammer Alfalas, to fry up his testicles in his own fat⁠—”

“What?” Dirk squeaked.

“—and devour them so I may be imbued with the strength and stamina of a dragon as I endeavor to sire a new generation of barbarian blessed by Skadi the Icemother by relentlessly ravishing your womb day and night⁠—”

“I beg your pardon?” Millie yanked the cinquedea letter opener from her belt.

“—morning and evening, in the stream, in the tundra meadow, with your ankles up by your ears, with you bent over my sled or straddling me in the saddle of my reindeer, or pressed up against a tree, on your hands and knees with your child-bearing hips quivering for each mighty th⁠—”

“We get the picture, man!” Sir Roger bellowed.

Sir Eustace’s head snapped up from where it was bent over the chronicle. “Stop everything!” He jumped out of his seat and thrust his quill up at them on the balcony. “You there. How are you still breathing? You were dead just a few hours ago.”

Three out of the four tower residents shared a trepidatious look; Millie’s whole plan to become a pirate hinged on her talent stable, Sir Roger had a life debt to pay the dragon, and Dirk had already gotten in trouble with the ministry official over his valet.

The hedge knight bowed low to Sir Eustace. “Apologies, Sir. Apparently I was just stunned. But I was almost dead because of the, uh⁠—”

“The barbecuing,” Millie reminded him.

“Yes, that’s it. Just as I was about to be spitted and roasted, I awoke, and, well . . .”

“Now he’s my manservant.” She gave the ministry official her most winning smile. “Certainly that’s not against the rules, is it? His life and property are forfeit if Dirk wins, which he did, and he just chose to keep him alive. He’s a dragon, remember? He can do what he w⁠—”

“You know I’ll have to change my report to reflect this. Tell that Dragon I loathe addendums.” He spat the word out with the same revulsion of a lady flicking out a fly that had fallen into her soup. “They make for very messy recordings and reflect poorly on my ability to be precise and succinct.”

“He’ll be more forthright in the future.”