Page 8 of The Discount Damsel

Bradley heaved and heaved, eyes screwed shut, limbs trembling. Tears from the strain mixed with tears of shame and sizzled against the black goo. He could hear the voices of his fellow students now, his noble peers who had never seen fit to befriend a lowborn fisherman like him. Freak. Unworthy. Peasant scum.

Failure.

The last of the goo erupted from his throat, and Bradley slumped to the side, defeated.

“For the love of— Oh that’s never coming out of your clothes, is it? I think we’ll have to burn that set like we did with Trial Seventeen. Or was it Thirty-Seven?” Dirk coughed as the odor of Bradley’s failed experiment reached his haven. “Skin my scales, you’re on your own!”

The dragon shot out the nearest archway and fled across the desert.

And that was why Bradley never ate breakfast first thing in the morning.

CHAPTER 3

ROASTED BEANS, PANIC ATTACKS—A LOVELY MORNING INDEED

Halfway across the desert, Dirk realized the sorcerer apprentice had never given him a replacement fire spell. He couldn’t conjure flame on his own, and he wouldn’t be taken seriously as a credible threat if he couldn’t breathe fire or at least appear like he could.

The baby dragon contemplated turning around. Should he return to the tower, Bradley might ask for his help in cleaning up that wretched mess he’d vomited all over the floor, and as his Designated Sorcerer Companion, never mind his friend, Dirk would be bound to do it. Though, the sorcerer apprentice had never once invoked the obligation of that bond, not even in the aftermath of Trial Seventeen. Or was it Thirty-Seven?

Either way, that stench had been beyond tolerable, and frankly, Dirk didn’t want to spend the day cleaning up sludge or washing clothes or watching his friend mope or catching another sheep from Calumbria for Bradley to turn into wool and thus another robe. (He’d return the naked sheep to its shepherd as he always did, fret not.) Dirk was a baby dragon, and wrangling an obstinate sheep with a fear of flying was pushing the limits of his physical abilities.

Shirking his responsibilities always made his scales itch, so he dropped down to skim across the sand for a good exfoliating scratch. Feeling refreshed, he continued at this lower altitude until he reached the barren wilds of neighboring Leighton.

Ah, Leighton. The cursed kingdom was perfect for extortion. Hunger reigned here, and want, unfulfilled desire, and jealousy—the ideal environment for a dragon to take advantage of and grow his treasure.

But it was not without danger for the little dragon. If his wings should fail and his true nature be revealed, the citizens would stop at nothing to capture him and use his heart to heal their land.

He avoided the little hamlet with the smoldering pig shed and snuck through the scrub to a bourg on the fringes of nowhere particularly important. On the southern edge was a quaint thatch-roof cottage, a hard-earned flower garden, and a crisp patchwork of cropland. Bean pods, already yellowed from the heat, rattled on shriveled vines in the arid breeze. The fields were ripe for fire.

But Dirk didn’t have another fire spell. Nor did he really want to set the fields aflame—he was a dragon, not a monster. But the bean farmer didn’t know that.

Quickly, for the little dragon was very excited, he rooted around in his satchel for the appropriate spells. They were clever pieces of magic: incantations inscribed with edible dye on thin coin-like wafers of rice paper. Dirk, being magical himself, could simply ingest the spell and abracadabra! He could breathe fire, disguise the color of his scales, grow wings, appear seven times his original size, or whatever he and Bradley could think up. Incredibly handy and convincing when extorting country bumpkins. He let two wafers dissolve on his tongue, swallowed, and got to work.

Dirk landed loudly in the front yard, a nice solid whump that was sure to be heard across the flat cropland. Digging his claws into the parched ground, he threw his head back with a robust roar that shivered the beans in their pods. Then he mimicked the famous pose of Tamzerin the Terrible: wings half-spread, chest out, neck arched like that of a cobra about to strike, teeth bared.

As expected, the bean farmer, his wife, and three little ones raced out of the cottage. The bean farmer immediately snatched up the pitchfork leaning against the siding, and, after the wife screamed in surprised, she snatched up her gleeful children—“Mumma! It’s a dragon!”—and fled back into the cottage, slamming the door shut behind her. Locked it, too, much to her husband’s chagrin. She did the same with the cottage shutters, yanking each set closed with military speed and precision. In seconds, the whole cottage was as impenetrable as a coiled aardvark’s armored shell.

The bean farmer turned a milk-white face from the locked abode towards the dragon and tightened his grip on the pitchfork.

“Good morning,” Dirk greeted, his voice three octaves deeper and impressively resonant. “Nice day for a fire, isn’t it?”

“No.” The bean farmer shook his head. “It’s much too dry out.”

Dirk rolled his eyes. He’d forgotten not all humans were as brilliant as his friend in the tower. “Then it would be a shame indeed if I, a dragon, set your beans on fire, wouldn’t it?”

Now that it was spelled out for him, the bean farmer went ghostly pale. His gaze darted from the dragon to the beanstalks. To the kindling. “No!”

Dirk leaned forward, running a red tongue across sharp white teeth. “Oh, but I love a roasted bean.”

“Y-you do?” A frantic gleam shone in the bean farmer’s eyes before he whipped around and slammed straight into the front door, which was still locked. His beat his fist against it. “Open up, woman!”

“No,” came the immediate and muffled reply. “He’ll not be eating the children. Stay out there and die like a man.”

“Woman!” He crouched down so he could whisper frantically through the keyhole.

Though Dirk strained to hear what was being said, it was all nonsensical gobbledygook. To both the dragon and the bean farmer’s surprise, the door opened, just a crack, and a heavy sack was thrust through the gap. The door shut with another resounding thump, the scrape of a key in the lock following shortly after.

The bean farmer lurched to his feet, clutching the sack to his stomach. With an audible swallow, he thrust it out towards the dragon waiting in the yard. “Here! Roasted beans. They were for this week’s ration of soup, but please, take them.”