Page 86 of The Discount Damsel

The apprentice mimed a biting mouth with his hand and laughed. An easy kick or two brought him to the opposite side of the spring, and jealousy replaced Millie’s irritation and fear. The man moved so effortlessly through whatever world he found himself, stairwell or spring. She would’ve admitted she didn’t mind watching him, not in the least, if they weren’t at war and she hadn’t vowed to loathe him for all time.

“So?” she prompted pissily. “What is down there?”

“Nothing that’ll bother you,” the dragon assured her. “Don’t worry.”

“Too late for that. What bothers a dragon but not a human?” she demanded, hauling herself out of the spring all the same.

Crone’s Crooked Tits, that’d taken a lot more effort than she’d thought, with a bunch of ungainly flailing, too. And in front of a very physically capable man, which brought a stain of embarrassment to her cheeks. Curse him.

“That,” Dirk said, “I’d have to show you.”

Millie sensed the dragon was teasing her. “Go on, then.”

Dirk swung a look at his friend. “Wanna?” His rump gave a little cat-like wiggle in excitement.

Did Bradley want to take the opportunity to show the tula just how out of her depth she was, that she didn’t have what it took physically? Absolutely. Plus, it would take care of the food problem Sir Roger had posed to them. What they couldn’t eat fresh or store in the icebox could always be dried—deserts were good at that.

In one fluid movement, Bradley hoisted himself out of the spring. He dropped down onto the ground and paced over to the pull-up bar. After a running start, he jumped, grabbed the bar, and yanked.

A harpoon dropped down with him into the sand.

Millie was only able to keep her expression neutral from the years of instruction by the continent’s finest etiquette tutors.

“A princess should never be too enthusiastic or too impressed about anything,” Miss Josephine had told her. “In fact, she must keep her emotions close to the vest lest she insult a foreign dignitary, reveal state secrets, or, worst of all, unintentionally encourage an inadequate suitor to keep pursuing her. They’re more clingy and tiresome than an opposing army laying siege to a castle.”

Bradley swaggered over to the spring, but he didn’t bounce his pectorals like Ivar the Bane had. That kind of physical display wasn’t needed here. Just honed power and indomitable will, the same requirements for not only surviving the sea, but mastering it.

The apprentice nodded to the little luck dragon, and Dirk made a show of stretching and limbering up before he sprang into the air and tucked his body up tight.

“Cannon ball!” Dirk sank below the surface of the spring, uncoiled, and swam out of sight.

Millie’s gaze flicked only to register that Bradley had jumped up onto the stone wall before she peered deeper into the water. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of ogling him like she had that morning when she’d learned about push-ups. Even if he was wet and his black hair framed his face in artful curls and his boxer briefs clung to his thighs and everywhere else in a most pleasing fashion. It wasn’t hard to ignore him—he was a contemptible snob and she really was concerned for the baby dragon.

“Where is he?” she worried after a few fretful minutes. “Oh!”

A curtain of bubbles rose from the bottom of the spring. True bubbles, not the little motes created by the shrimp, which were suddenly nowhere in sight. Where had they gone? Were they hiding?

Without their light, the spring had grown dark. No longer turquoise, the waters had darkened to cobalt, and a navy blotch at its bottom was growing larger with every second.

Something was rising, and it wasn’t Dirk.

She seemed the only one worried about it; the apprentice leaned forward, calm but watchful, harpoon at the ready.

A six-foot noodle with pearly white horns and claws shot into the air with a lively, “We got a big one!”

A gigantic mouth followed.

Millie screamed and fell off the wall into the sand as a grouper with speckled scales and eyes as big as her fists gulped after the baby dragon. She’d read accounts of such monstrous things lurking in the watery depths of the world, but she’d never seen one before. Only momentarily embarrassed by her outburst, she rationalized it as her first lesson in Sea Monster Desensitization 101.

Bradley’s strike was the epitome of precision.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the enormous fish was impaled by the harpoon and tacked against the opposite wall, right between the seams of two stones. The harpoon bowed under the weight of the man-sized fish, but it didn’t break.

Millie rose cautiously, darting a glance into the spring for any more grouper that could be lurking. The water was turquoise again, the tiny shrimps circling ever closer to the surface. Relieved that the danger was over, she lifted her eyes to find Bradley looking down at her.

His gaze was intense. This was it. This was the dedication needed, the grit, the will.

Mutineer Millie met his challenge with a grin. “When do you teach me how to do that?”