Page 85 of The Discount Damsel

The arrogant apprentice would probably stutter on purpose instead of giving her life-saving instructions and she’d drown for sure.

“You don’t have to know how to swim,” Dirk said. “Think of this as a really big bathtub—it’s only twelve feet across.”

“A bathtub with no bottom.”

His mane flared and ruffled—his equivalent to waving her protest away. “What do you have to fear with a luck dragon, a master of the wind and rain, nearby?”

Well, when he put it that way. And the coolness of the water was too heavenly to resist. Millie shucked her corset and eased into the glowing turquoise water up to her neck.

She couldn’t bring herself to release the wall entirely, so she folded her arms upon its ledge, pillowing her chin on top of her forearms, and pointed out, “You know, Master Dirk, Sir Roger is currently attempting to surpass the record of most snores in sixty seconds. You can stop training now.”

The luck dragon continued his undulations. “You didn’t have to fight Ivar the Bane, did you?”

“I shot him in the eye with my panties, didn’t I?” She winked at him. “But I see your point. I admire your dedication, Master Dirk.”

“I’m glad somebody does,” he muttered. Bradley distributed rice paper spells with a miserly hand, still not entirely supporting Dirk’s ambitions to become a Great Red.

“Just don’t exhaust yourself so much that you can’t save me,” Millie said. “In I go!”

With one hand on the rim, Millie pinched her nose shut with the other and submerged her head. Auburn hair swirled dark like tea poured into cream. She caught no sight of Bradley, but something much more fascinating. Motes of white light—bubbles, perhaps—drifted up from the luminous depths below.

When she surfaced, she held one such bubble in her cupped palm. “Dirk, look! It’s a tiny shrimp.”

“Of course it is. Now put it back into the water before it suffocates. It hasn’t grown its wings yet.”

She quickly obeyed, and the luck dragon flew over to verify that the shrimp was safe and sound. The mote of white light reformed around the tiny creature, the little thing sank deeper into the water.

“It was no larger than a sesame seed! It was a wonder I could discern it was a shrimp at all.”

“They come to the surface to spawn, but they’re not ready for it yet,” Dirk said. “Little ones need to be the size of peanuts for that. Soon, though.”

“What are they?”

“Remnants of a bygone era. You didn’t think this tower was built in the middle of nowhere for no reason, did you?”

“So this tower protects them? Why?”

For one thing, after the shrimps spawned, they used whatever energy they had left to fly as high as they could. Those who made contact with the tower walls cemented there, entwined with their mates forever. Their wings formed a sort of chrysalis around them, and from that chrysalis grew the crystals that all sorcerers embedded in their staffs as amplifiers. It was one of the College’s best-kept secrets which Master Excelsior had entrusted them with so they might understand the shrimps’ importance and the gravity of keeping them safe.

Dirk replied with, “Why not?”

Millie couldn’t find a rebuttal worth voicing—did a thing need more than its inherent worth to earn the right to exist? Instead, she asked, “Won’t you join me, Master Dirk? All these little bubbles are so ticklish. You’ll love it.”

The luck dragon landed on the wall and slumped onto his stomach. He dangled a paw over the edge, claws only an inch or two above the surface of the water. “Wish I could.”

“Do you not know how to swim?”

He snorted. “Of course I know how to swim. But there are more than harmless little shrimp fry in that spring, Millie.”

She gave a panicked look down into the turquoise depths and screamed.

A second later, Bradley broke the surface with a loud inhale. He swept his dark curls away from his face, blinked away the water. “What?”

Chest heaving, Millie clung to the side of the spring and fought to rein in her runaway heartbeat. “I thought you were a sea monster coming up to eat me!”

Bradley snorted at that absurdity, and he looked to Dirk for an explanation.

“I was just telling her there are more than just shrimps in the spring,” the dragon said.