Page 56 of The Discount Damsel

“N—”

Gurgling rose from the dragon’s stomach, and at the exact moment Dirk burped, he was engulfed in a puff of hissing smoke. When it cleared, a luck dragon with magenta scales, a nubby crown of horns, and butterfly wings hovered in front of them.

Millie’s hand shot to her open mouth, and Bradley paled.

“What?” The dragon looked down at his front paws, shrieked, twisted around to examine his faux wings, and screamed.

It was a well-deserved scream, too, for not only did he have the wings of a swallowtail, which were carnation-pink and dappled with lavender spots, all of which did not match his new magenta scales at all, one wing was much smaller than the other.

Dirk the Dangerous burst into tears.

Millie rushed forward to console the little dragon. “Now, now, I’m sure Bradley can fix this. Right?” she flung at him.

The apprentice had indeed wanted to sabotage their endeavor, but not like this. He quickly sat and got to scribing upon another pancake. The quill caught in the porous crumb, dragging and bleeding too much ink, yet again. He threw that pancake away and started on another, writing as lightly as he could with extra-large letters to increase the chances of legibility.

The three of them jumped as the piolet clanged against the wrought-iron railing and caught.

Bradley offered the pancake, and Dirk ate. Another puff of smoke, and now he had two butterfly wings of equal size.

Millie whacked him in the shoulder.

“It’s the pancake!” he signed. “It bleeds the ink and muddles the spell. I can try again.”

“I don’t feel so good,” the baby dragon moaned, clutching his distended stomach.

“You’re going to pop his stomach at this rate before you get it right,” Millie snapped at the apprentice. “Let’s look for something small and less squidgy.” She attacked the cupboards with the ferocity of a starving wolverine.

Rice, beans, nuts, flour, coffee beans, tea leaves. Millie snatched up the box of saltine crackers and upended it. Nothing came out, not even after a good shake. She righted the box and peered inside, verifying it was empty, then hurled it at Bradley. “What kind of lazy heathen leaves empty boxes in the cupboards?”

He smacked the cardboard box away from its trajectory to paper-cut his face.

“Do you have any crackers leftover from yesterday?” Dirk sniffled. “You were snacking on some this morning in bed.”

“I might!” She darted out of the kitchen.

While she was gone, Bradley raced up to the sorcerer workroom to buy them some time. The ice axe rattled and clinked with every foot the barbarian climbed. Flattening himself against the wall, the apprentice inched to the edge where he could sneak a quick glance without being seen. Ivar had mistaken him for a handmaiden, a mistake Bradley didn’t want to correct without his incantations to defend him.

The barbarian was making good progress. Too good. So long as the ice axe held, which it was, against all odds, for it wasn’t even curved like a hook, Ivar the Bane would be breaching the tower balcony in minutes.

Bradley lurched forward and seized the piolet. One mighty twist of his shoulders freed the axe from the railing and sent the barbarian plummeting into the sand below.

Ivar bellowed on the way down, groaned when he landed, cursed, “Stupid tower!” when he rose to his feet, and spun his ice axe for another attempt at hooking the railing. The barbarian was insufferably determined to ravish a princess.

With a sharp exhale, Bradley turned on his heel to find both luck dragon and princess in the workroom, a sole cracker cradled in her palms and the inkwell clutched in his. The apprentice shook out his arms to dispel his nerves and indicated that they should join him at the desk.

He cleared a space, throwing whatever he could find that was flat and bookmarkish into the open books that had survived the book-a-lanche before shutting and stacking them off to one side. Sitting down, he worked on sharpening the edge of new quill as the princess and dragon laid their cracker and inkwell in the space in front of him. Bradley swiveled the standing omnidirectional magnifying glass into an optimal position just as the ice hook caught the railing once more.

With delicate swipes of his quill knife, Bradley carefully scraped away all the salt from both sides of the cracker as gently as if he were descaling a thin-skinned minnow. A few sweeps of his hand cleared the workspace of quill shavings and salt granules, and the lack of debris cleared Bradley’s mind for the task ahead.

The warhammer slammed into the tower, and Bradley pitched over the precious cracker to shield it with his body. He lifted a murderous glare at the western balcony. “I c-c-can’t wr-wr-write w-w-with⁠—”

“On it.” Millie dashed to the balcony and flattened herself against the curve in the wall just as he had done moments ago and chanced a glance below. “He’s climbing again. Oh my, look at him go. I’ll let you know when he’s prepping another strike with the warhammer. What are you waiting for? Write already!”

Bradley dabbed the quill into the ink, tapped the tip clear of drips, and began to write.

It was a painstakingly slow process, writing each letter so tiny and precise upon the sole cracker in the tower. This spell needed three words of power, and each letter was an opportunity to mess it all up. Sweat began to bead against his forehead, which the luck dragon fanned away.

After a few letters, the princess called for a pause. Bradley braced himself and protected the cracker as the tower shook and groaned.