The Dragon's Discount Damsel

Chapter 1

SPILLED TEA AND SQUISHY CAKES

Miss Sicily Whitewhistle was the current etiquette tutor to Her Highness, the princess Mildred Angelique Tisane of Amberly, the thirteenth tutor, in fact, to bear the title in half as many years, and was just about to meet her demise in a most spectacular fashion.

She just didn’t know it yet.

The princess’s reputation for shocking offensiveness aside, that number alone (thirteen, that is, which is wholly unlucky to anyone but bakers) should have sent Sicily running for the hills of Calumbria.

Even though those rolling slopes were entirely populated by speckled goats and fluffy sheep, their shepherds, and a blanket of cheery oxeye daisies, with absolutely zero opportunities for an etiquette tutor of Sicily’s education and experience to ply her trade, it still would’ve been the wisest decision of her professional career.

She’d been warned by Miss Violeta Castille, the princess’s ninth tutor, after all: A disarming smile hid the cunning of a snake.

Bright, inquisitive eyes masked the machinations churning beneath beautiful auburn hair.

Polite and, dare I say, musical speech disguised the vulgar tongue that waited behind white teeth for the perfect opportunity to strike.

In short, she was as cheerful as the sun and just as scorching.

Princess Mildred Angelique Tisane of Amberly was determined to become a pirate, you see, though she had never even seen the ocean, and she would use every trick in the book to get her way.

Which was completely expected, since royals, as a rule, were vain and ambitious individuals with little regard for their effects on the citizens of the working class.

Miss Sicily Whitewhistle, a summa cum laude graduate of the Esteemed School of the Delicate Arts, second in reputation only to the Prestigious College of Sorcerers, had laughed upon reading the ninth tutor’s warning letter.

Violeta, while a dear friend, did not possess the academic credentials Sicily did, nor had Violeta passed Intellectual Manipulation and Mental Warfare with grades above Satisfactory.

Sicily had passed with an Exemplary grade in each of those courses, and when she’d arrived at the castle three months ago, she’d quickly brought the princess to heel.

Mildred, only nineteen, was nothing more than a spirited filly chafing under the bit of expectation as heir apparent and just needed a firm but encouraging hand to guide her.

And so she had guided, sometimes with the cane, and drilled the princess from sunup to sundown in the Delicate Arts until she was pliant, obedient, and as perfect as a chubby but sweet-faced girl could get in a dangerously tight corset.

Or so Sicily had thought.

Now, as Mildred excused herself from the cluster of suitors for the tea service at the other end of the greenhouse parlor, Sicily noticed a gleam in the princess’s eye she’d never seen before.

There was an eager but restrained clip to the sound of her heels as she crossed the tile floor.

The faintest anticipatory gasp between barely parted lips.

The dance of a pulse in the subtle vein along her neck, half-hidden by the strand of pearls.

A slight tremor in her fingers that vibrated through the teapot and caused the amber liquid to slosh inside the teacup.

Not splatter or spill—she was an Amberlian princess trained in the fine art of pouring tea, after all.

But said tea did not demurely swirl as it should have.

Sicily recognized the signs of delayed gratification no longer postponed, but finally within grasp.

She herself had played the long game to survive that hellish crucible of a school with its insufferably high standards, conformist ideology, and grueling course load.

One entered as a na?ve girl romanticizing the genteel manners of propriety and emerged a world-wise iron matron of decorum who knew the true worth of the Gentle Arts—a weapon against the collapse of civilization.

Lace gloves were gauntlets; rouge and lipstick, warpaint; long skirts that hid the ankles, the finest armor; a polite smile and flashing eyes, a lady’s poison and saber.

Hardened as she was beneath her demure outward appearance, Miss Sicily Whitewhistle’s stomach shriveled like a peach abandoned to the heat of the summer sun, flesh desiccating and skin shrinking tight against every ridge of the pit.

The pathetic thing dropped down into her toes with all the sudden force of a cannonball breaching a castle wall, and the tutor gripped the back of the nearest chair to steady herself.

Mildred had fooled them all once again. That wasn’t a princess pouring tea for the suitor who’d caught her eye. That was Mutineer Millie, and that tea was her cutlass.

Sweat erupted from every pore, darkening Sicily’s fine golden hair to drossy bronze and absolutely ruining her makeup.

Violeta had warned her, but in her hubris, Sicily had dismissed the tenacity of the young princess. She should’ve known there was nothing more powerful than a woman with a dream.

Neither the king nor queen, both seated on the opposite end of the table, noticed the sloshing tea or the abrupt faintness of the etiquette tutor. They themselves were wholly committed to maintaining an air of forced optimism.

This wasn’t their daughter’s first assembly of suitors, nor even her second.

But they hoped it would be her last, for once a princess turned twenty, she was labeled “old” and then all the bottom-of-the-barrel lords and princes and kings of backwater countries would flock like beetles to dung in hopes of a reduced bride price.

Amberly was a small but prosperous country of tea, grain, and cattle, and the Tisanes had worked hard for it to become so.

They would rather ship Mildred off to the Tower of Spinsters until she reached the ripe old age of thirty than have a ruffian marry into the family and ruin its prospects.

At that advanced age, Mildred would be classified a thornback and have her priorities finally straightened out and could inherit the throne without need of a consort.

(How she would produce an heir to carry on the Tisane royal line without a consort was a bridge they would cross later. One problem at a time, as they say.)

Of course, in the interim, alliances could be made through Mildred’s younger sister, the woolgathering simpleton Princess Rosamund Evangeline Tisane, aged fourteen and three-quarters, and three months from the marriage mart herself.

The king and queen shuddered at the thought.

Their forced smiles tightened down and brightened as Mildred finished pouring the tea and returned the pot to its doily on the silver tray.

It was Amberlian tradition for a princess to offer a cup of tea to the suitor who’d caught her special attention: an invitation for furthering their acquaintance, be that at the parlor table with more tea and an assortment of little sugared cakes, or in the darker parts of the greenhouse with considerably less clothing.

At this rate, the king and queen were willing to accept any outcome that gained Mildred a proposal and wiped the thought of piracy from her mind.

With bated breath, they watched as their daughter lifted the cup and saucer from the tray. All their hopes were riding on that one piece of bone china with its whiskered pansy motif. Pansies were, as everyone knew, the flowers that cultivated love opportunities.

The queen had packed the greenhouse parlor full of them specifically for this occasion—purple, white, yellow, orange, pink. Or rather, she’d instructed the master gardener to nestle them amongst the fronds and citrus trees and everywhere in between.

The addition of the whiskered pansies, in both the china and the greenhouse, hadn’t been lost on the princess.

Mildred was educated—her tutors had seen to that—and that included floriography.

While she appreciated the intent behind the flowers, she wasn’t looking for love (the Ultimate Distraction), nor an engagement, nor anything that wasn’t furthering her goal of becoming a pirate.

And yet what a marvelous day for an engagement it was: a patchwork of clouds floated across the blue sky that arched over the glass dome of the greenhouse, the few birds that had snuck inside were twittering prettily and keeping their droppings to themselves, and the springtime sun warmed the air to a temperature that could only be described as delicious.

Such an environment, plus the pansies, could only promote success.

Or so the Amberly court sorcerer, Olabeus the Ostentatious, had assured her parents when he thought the princess couldn’t hear him.

“Good luck, Sissy,” Rosamund chirped from her chair, biting into a petit four and smearing rose-and-raspberry jelly across her chin.

A reddish glob dropped onto the fluffy white head of the Persian loafing on her lap, but Duchess was used to sticky things in her fur after her many (nonconsenting) adventures into the nearby forest with Mildred.

The elder princess winked at the younger, and when she turned with a gentle rustle of orange silk, teacup and saucer gently in hand, Sicily found her voice.

“Mildred.” It came out more of a frog’s croak than a tutor’s reprimand. Sicily desperately tried to clear her throat, to find the words that would sway Mutineer Millie from her present course, but all she could manage was a whiny, “You promised.”

Just forty minutes ago, Miss Sicily had adjusted the lay of the dragonheart amber pendant upon the princess’s bosom while the two of them waited on the opposite side of the glass doors for the herald’s announcement.

When the princess hadn’t acknowledged Sicily’s command, the etiquette tutor had flicked Mildred under the chin. “I’m waiting, child.”

Mildred had sighed, “Yes, Miss Sicily. I shall curtsy politely while screaming obscenities only in my head.”