Page 72 of The Discount Damsel

“Your. Word,” he insisted.

“You have my word.” She stuck her tongue out at him. The princess relaxed, leaning back on her hands upon the mattress. Her expression turned curious. “So what is a magical artifact doing here, in an obscure bedroom? Olabeus would never dream of leaving something so precious outside his workroom.”

“Master Excelsior hasn’t been here for over fifty years,” Dirk told Bradley, “and who knows when he last cleaned the place up before that? You’ve seen his office at the College—the man’s a hoarder. Do you think he missed it? Do you think he missed anything else?”

Yes, and yes. That parchment with the dark magic instructions on it was proof enough. But there was a more important question on Bradley’s mind. “I felt the magic inside that jewelry box from across the room. You were three feet away from it. Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I—” Dirk coiled in on himself, unsure. Why hadn’t he sensed the magic? He was a dragon for Caelus’s sake. He was magic made flesh. If magic were truffles, he and his kind were champion truffle hunters. “I don’t know.”

“It could’ve been booby-trapped, Dirk! Your princess could’ve gotten hurt. It could’ve hurt all of us!”

“I made a mistake.” A ripple of navy coloration darkened his scales from his neck down to his tail. “Skin my scales, Bradley! It won’t happen again.”

Even as he said the words, Dirk wasn’t so sure. First he was losing his scales, now his senses were dulling to magic? He needed those to battle the Heroes, more of which were sure to come. And very soon.

“I’m going to my room,” he blurted, and fled the room without a backwards glance.

The princess rose and whacked Bradley in the arm. “Nice going.”

“Me?” He hefted the jewelry box. “Your. Fault.”

“Somebody would’ve discovered that sooner rather than later.”

In what world? Neither he nor Dirk had felt any need to explore beyond their respective suites. He thrust his finger towards the stairwell with a scowl.

“I know, I know,” the princess groused as she stomped past him. “No chaperone, no looting. I’m going. But don’t expect me to go fast. My legs are— Ah!”

Bradley pressed his free hand into the small of her back, pushed, and kept pushing all the way up the stairs.

CHAPTER 32

NOT QUITE A GLOBAL EXTINCTION EVENT, WHO CARES ABOUT THE CAT, QUESTIONABLE FORETHOUGHT—A HECTIC MORNING INDEED

“. . . deep in . . . dungeons dank.”

Bradley awoke with a snort to the distressed cooing of an attic’s worth of pigeons. The cry of a desert hawk still echoed through the air. His head lifted off his arm, a string of saliva linking the corner of his mouth to his sleeve. Blinking through blurry and slanted vision, he realized his spectacles were askew on his nose.

He was in the workroom. And it was morning.

The apprentice lurched upright, knocking over the nearby mug and spilling the half-drunk tisane over the edge of the desk. “Gah!” Bradley quickly yanked the nearby books out of range, righted the mug, and when he happened to look up, it was into the garnet carbuncle eyes of the stone frog statue across the room. Its gaping mouth seemed to laugh at him. How an inanimate object could make him feel embarrassed was hardly logical, so he took a moment to wipe his mouth, straighten his spectacles, and collect his wits.

After locking the princess in Dirk’s bedroom for the night (a futile gesture, he understood, but one he couldn’t help), he’d started drawing water for his own bath before returning to the kitchen. He’d wanted to brew some of that tisane the princess had given him that morning. He hadn’t imagined its concentration- and memory-enhancing effects. While Ashburnum coffee had quite the kick, he needed something that would do more than just keep him awake as he snuck in some make-up studying time. Except he couldn’t remember the ratios of the ingredients she used. So he’d guessed . . . and overdosed himself on the chamomile enough to redefine “relaxation” as “coma-like sleep.”

Thank every one of Caelus’s stars his drool and the tisane hadn’t ruined the priceless books, and thank every one of Caelus’s stars again that the tub faucet was enchanted to turn itself off before the bath could overflow.

The pigeons started to flap and flutter as well as coo, raining bits of dust from the attic into the workroom that were quickly incinerated by the environmental wards. The desert hawk cried again, a piercing sound like wind through a reed.

That’s a griffin, Bradley realized. Miss Penelope!

The sorcerer apprentice shot upright and bolted for the northern balcony. The sun was only halfway over the horizon, the desert waste awash in muted colors, and the griffin was a dark blot that was growing larger with every heartbeat.

This was bad. Very bad. Somewhere past “spilled milk” but not quite “global extinction event” bad. Dirk and Bradley usually devoted an entire day preparing for Miss Penelope Shrewsbury’s arrival, but now, he had fifteen minutes at best.

Just as Dirk was his sometime spy on the princess, so was Miss Penelope Shrewsbury agent and spy for Master Excelsior. How detailed the reports were that she delivered to him after her visits to the tower, Bradley couldn’t be sure, but she would certainly note the disarray of the workroom, not to mention the presence of two extra persons and one cat who were not authorized to be here, and strip him of his privileges faster than a blue heron plucked a fish from a pond, or approximately one-thirtieth of a second.

Bradley fled for the desk and set to organizing it with all the haste and care of a tornado. The gold jewelry box with its nautical nightmare necklace was shoved into some nondescript portion of the workroom clutter. Arms laden with books, he hustled to the shelves to return them willy nilly—he could organize them later—and found Small Magicks unable to fit in the gap meant for the thinner Nuances of High Aetherial. It served him right, but there was no time to backtrack and do it all properly. It was the last book to be shelved, so Bradley gave it a shove. It pushed in halfway and no further. Miss Penelope had an eye for detail as good as her seat for griffin riding, and she would surely notice a book sticking out of the shelves and dock him points for tidiness.

He yanked Small Magicks free and tucked it under his arm. He could hide it under his pillow again—Miss Penelope never looked there.