Chapter 1 #2
“Quite right.” Miss Sicily had nodded sharply. “One must never let on what one is really thinking.”
Now the princess’s face half-turned, the corner of her lips quirking up so mischievously quick, Sicily could’ve sworn the smirk was just a figment of her imagination.
The scheming light in Millie’s brown eyes as their gazes met convinced her otherwise, along with Millie revealing a set of crossed fingers from behind her back.
The brat had lied to her!
The exchange lasted only the span of two heartbeats, then the princess was striding smoothly away, taking the fate of Sicily’s employment, and her reputation, with her.
The suitors, who had been feigning interest in the nearby greenery and fragrant flowers, abandoned the foliage much the way a toddler does with a toy that no longer interests him: an abrupt cessation and a diversion to more interesting things.
And an Amberlian princess with a teacup in hand was a very interesting thing indeed.
With a jostling of elbows and a stepping on toes, plus one or more hissed threats, the suitors created a loose crescent.
It was much more preferable than a straight line, for the curve allowed them more ease to witness and gloat at any snubbing, or to peacock before the others as the princess’s chosen, and all without the uncouth rubbernecking most common to the peasantry.
Mildred’s gaze swept over the gentlemen one final time, realizing that, despite the multitude of colors, fabrics, and adornments, they were all tiresomely the same.
There was no adventure here. No promise of starry skies, the rush of wind against her face, or even the sound of her own voice.
Here, there would only be plastered smiles and toe-destroying shoes and silence.
What her parents never understood, and certainly none of her etiquette tutors who were slaves to the demands of society, was that she was a woman who desired. Craved. And she would not go through this life to be told “no” at every turn.
She refused to grow old and look back upon her life and wonder what could have been.
So she would take what she wanted, just like a pirate.
Millie stepped up to the first suitor, teacup poised precisely three inches from her stomach as she’d been taught. “Lord Corydon.”
Pressing a hand against the paisley pocket square over his heart, the lord bent from the waist in a textbook bow. His brown toupee flopped to the side in its own version of a bow. “Princess Mildred. Is that tea for me?”
“Absolutely not.” He wasn’t like the others, merely a bore, and she simply refused to lead an uneventful life. Without elaboration, she side-stepped to the left to the next suitor in line.
As Lord Corydon stared at the vacant spot before him, lashes blinking rapidly as his brain fought to comprehend the princess’s succinct dismissal, Mildred addressed the next gentleman. “Viscount Saltreave.”
The viscount was her best chance at a life near the sea, but it would be a life chained to a hedonistic coward. The spineless man sported a truly impressive red mustache, whose tip he twirled with a flourish of manicured fingers.
He swept into a perfect bow. “Princess Mildred.”
“I would rather be stripped buck naked, doused in honey, and abandoned in the forest to take my chances with a bunch of grizzly bears than marry you.”
Princess Rosamund giggled, and the queen promptly fainted. The king flung up a hand to cover his gasp, the dragonheart amber of his signet ring winking and reflecting a dot of red light on the forehead of the next suitor. His eldest daughter homed in on the beacon like a mischievous cat.
“Baron Oremaster, I suspect marrying you would be equivalent to the experience of a strumpet fornicating with a pimpled pervert wearing a sandpaper condom: unpleasant.”
The Merlish baron’s round olive face turned the exact shade of a bruised pomegranate as Millie sashayed to the left.
“Miss Sicily,” the king growled icily, “is this what you’ve been teaching my daughter? The Delicate Art of sass-mouthing?”
“Your Majesty,” the tutor protested, truly surprised by this sudden accusation.
He knew better, had witnessed some of Mildred’s lessons himself.
But she didn’t get the chance to defend herself, as Millie was already taking another quick step to the left and focusing that vile tongue of hers on a new target.
The princess continued to greet and insult each suitor in turn, the teacup never wavering from its perfect position three inches in front of her stomach.
She never raised her voice, and she never added cruelty to her tone—her words were abrasive enough.
One suitor lost his composure so thoroughly that he momentarily forgot her rank and called her a spiteful bitch right to her face.
Such is the noun always used to describe a woman who spoke with an unfiltered, unapologetic mind, regardless of conversation topic.
But it was all justly deserved, before you go thinking too poorly of Mutineer Millie.
Could she have been more polite? Assuredly.
But you were not with her hiding amongst the greenery and spying on the suitors in the hour before her expected arrival.
Men say the most incriminating things when they think they’re alone, and even more so when amongst their peers.
And besides, the more thoroughly she insulted them, the sooner they would leave her kingdom, and the sooner her parents would truly understand that she was better suited to be a pirate than a princess.
They really should have listened to her the first dozen times she’d begged for a buccaneer from Pierpont to properly train her in the ways of swashbuckling instead of a pony for her many birthdays.
They had thought her obsession with the black sail to be a momentary and passing fancy, that she would come to heel when she realized there was no way in Caelus’s name that they could leave the fate of Amberly in her simpleton sister’s hands.
At present, the younger princess clapped those hands with glee at another of her elder sister’s stinging rebuffs.
Neither the king nor the etiquette tutor interfered with Millie’s rejection campaign, partly because they still harbored the hope that the princess would come to her senses and choose one to marry, but mostly it was because of the shock.
The princess delivered her assessment with the confidence of a general and the cutthroat accuracy of a pirate captain.
Soon the suitors were no longer snickering at their insulted colleagues, but waiting for their own verbal evisceration.
Some stormed right out of the greenhouse without bidding their hosts a pleasant afternoon, bellowing for their carriages.
More than one sent a vile look in Sicily’s direction, each one a knife to her reputation.
Others cast pleading looks to the king, begging him to intervene.
But he caught none of these glances, busy as he was with Olabeus trying to revive the queen.
The woman seemed impervious to pinching, smelling salts, and being fanned by the king’s newspaper, and now they had to resort to sorcery to drag her from unconsciousness.
Secretly, the king believed his wife was deliberately clinging to insentience to spare herself the embarrassment of her daughter and kicked himself for not thinking of it first.
Her slippered feet swinging through the air a few inches above the tile floor, Rosamund sat back with another giggle and her third petit four as Millie approached her final suitor.
Prince Chandler Stonevein of Leighton lifted his chin so he could look down his nose at this beautiful imposter of a princess.
There could be no other reason for the haranguing she’d just unleashed upon his peers—she had to be an imposter.
A vicious joke at their expense. And if his kingdom didn’t need hers, or rather, the grain and cattle it provided (forget the grass clippings they called tea), along with another rare resource never mentioned, he would’ve walked out long ago.
Millie tilted her face so she could assess the whole of the man before her.
This was her parents’ choice, from a desire to secure a tap on the Leighton gem mines to fund the desperately needed expansion of Amberly’s trading enterprise into the Duchy of Evertea.
In short, they needed a bribe the duke couldn’t afford to refuse.
At first glance, this suitor cut a fine figure, if a vain one.
Blond and beautiful Chandler was well-built, smart, and absolutely dripping with jewels, but his persona was as carefully curated and shaped as his clothes.
As someone who spent the bulk of her time hiding her true self and presenting a facade to the world, she could recognize the same lie in others.
The other suitors had been prideful, disillusioned by their own grandeur, or buffoons, but this prince was of a different caliber.
Leighton was different. That kingdom hadn’t been carved out of the land by hard work and community, it had been stolen from the dragons.
And the last creature you wanted to offend was a dragon.
Upon hearing word of their impending and forced exile, an ancient and powerful luck dragon named Huang Fu cursed the land to never be healthy and green again until a Worthy One drew a soup spoon out of a petrified loaf of bread.
Why a soup spoon and a loaf of bread? Because Huang Fu had been enjoying a lovely wild boar curry at the Cuke and Snail Pub when he’d heard the news.
So heartbroken was he, so bitter and aggrieved, he slammed his spoon down into the nearby loaf of bread.
His luck became a curse, petrifying the bread to stone, as well as the table it rested upon and the half-eaten bowl of curry.
It remains in the Cuke and Snail today, and students on their winter break love to try their hand at pulling the dragon-sized soup spoon from the dragon-sized loaf of bread after they’ve had a few glasses of mulled wine.