Chapter 4
ANEMIC CAULIFLOWERS, MERCENARIES WITH NO MORALS, AND NEW TAFFETA
Dust stirred in the wind of Dirk’s passage; a flick of his feathered tail whipped up little dervishes. They seemed to give chase, pulled along in his wake, and there was nothing a young dragon loved more than playing tag.
Before he’d been plucked from the swarm and assigned to Bradley by Master Excelsior, he and his littermates had spent the days streaking the sky trying to grab each other’s feathered tail tufts.
Or rather, he had given chase while the others had done their best to fly away from him, jeering at the colors of his scales.
Now, he only had weak dirt devils to dance after him.
The barren river must’ve been a major waterway before the dragons had been expelled from this kingdom, for it cut deeper into Leighton than Dirk expected.
Flecks of gold no larger than mustard seeds sometimes glittered in the cracks of the riverbed, sometimes bits of ruby and emerald.
Nothing worth his attention or anybody else’s for that matter.
Soon he abandoned curiosity for caution—it would be foolish to be caught too far from the safety of the desert waste of Ashburnum and the sorcerer apprentice in the tower. He slowed to a hover and discovered the sounds and smells of a nearby village.
Dirk abandoned the empty river and silently whooshed from petrified log to scraggly scrub brush to bramble thicket until he was on the outskirts of the sprawling village nestled in the glen of a drought-choked forest. A guard relaxed on the bench by the stone well, reminding everyone he meant business by sharpening his dagger with long shhhicks of his whetstone.
It was market day, and a line had formed for the water trough.
Wagons snaked through the trees, laden with wilted produce, hay bales, and wicker baskets of nervous cockerels.
Mules shifted in their harnesses as their ears flicked with every clink of coin exchanged, the creak of the well rope, the thunk of the bucket hitting the edge of the trough, and the sluice of cold water.
It was a target-rich environment, but Dirk also wasn’t notorious enough to intimidate the whole of them at the same time. He’d have to pick off a weakling.
Sliding through the trees, Dirk wormed around to where a straggler was pulling up to the end of the caravan queue.
The man was exhausted, having no mule himself and a cart full of anemic cauliflower.
Sweat slid through the fine lines of his face like melted wax from a candle, dripped off his bony chin to soak the front of his shirt.
With gasping breaths, he eyed the wagons as they crawled forwards for their turn at the well.
It was the perfect time for Dirk to strike.
The cauliflower farmer had not yet reached the herd of wagons, there were still plenty of trees between the end of the queue and the market to hide him, and the tavern on the other end of the square was in full swing with visitors and vendors alike forgetting both their thirst and troubles with brown ale.
The baby dragon slipped another two wafers into his mouth to enlarge his size and deepen his voice, then dropped from his hiding place in the branches.
The farmer yelped as the weight in his cart suddenly increased and the handles jerked up hard into his armpits.
Whirling, he caught sight of a magnificent red dragon perched on the far edge of his cart.
Paws settled on two of the larger cauliflower and squeezed until the leaves squeaked like trapped mice.
“My cauliflowers,” the farmer whimpered.
Dirk, having been reminded of the stupidity of humans earlier that morning, forewent the small talk about his love of cauliflower (they were excellent when sliced into steaks and braised with cream and Parmesan) and went straight for the threat. “Hand over your coin purse, or your cauliflower—”
“Here!”
“Oh.” He hadn’t expected it to be this easy and reared back to catch the coin purse.
The cart jerked with the sudden shift in weight, and the cauliflower eagerly sprang free of their imprisonment in a tumbling avalanche.
The farmer shrieked and chased after the runaway vegetables.
Dirk cried out as he disappeared under the onslaught of buffeting brassicas. The coin purse slipped from his paw. Growling, the dragon shoved with horn and claw until he emerged from the offending produce like a gopher from a collapsed burrow.
The farmer collected his cauliflower and wiped the dirt from their leaves as tenderly as if they were tears on his child’s face. Neither the farmer nor the dragon initially noticed the strange man in the cloak until he jingled the wayward coin purse by its strings.
Dirk’s gaze traveled from a shiny boot braced on an overlarge cauliflower, over a cloaked knee, paused on the leather pouch, then darted up to a hooded face where hard eyes like chips of obsidian gleamed out of the darkness.
“That’s mine,” Dirk protested and wiggled free.
“This?” The hooded man swung the pouch into his fist, his boot crushing the vegetable into a curd-like pulp as he straightened. “This is chump change.”
“Is there no decency left in this world?” the farmer wailed.
The stranger ignored him and rubbed the stubble on his chin with bejeweled fingers. “I’ve heard about you, Dragon. Dirk the Dangerous, right?”
Finally, someone had gotten it right. “Yes!”
“You’re new here, aren’t you? Young, too, right?”
Had his enthusiasm given him away? Dirk replied to that probing question with an unblinking stare.
“No matter. Quite the protection racket and extortion business you’ve made for yourself over the past few months.” He tossed the coin purse into the air and caught it once, twice. “Feel like upgrading to princess-napping?”
Dirk’s ears pricked. Kidnapping a princess? That was the big leagues. Not even Valafor the Vile had kidnapped a princess before he was five hundred pounds. Probably for good reason, since one needed fully developed chest, back, and wing muscles to manage the weight and thrashing of the unwilling.
But to this hooded stranger, Dirk looked every inch a capable dragon.
“Follow me.” The man turned for the forest, heading in the direction of the tavern.
Dirk stalked away from the whining cauliflower farmer and his strewn vegetables and followed after the man.
He tried his best to keep his gait a professional stride and not an eager prance.
Not only would the act of kidnapping a princess secure his reputation amongst the other Great Reds, the princess herself could help Bradley!
How many times had he heard the other sorcerer apprentices complain that they needed to “get laid” to clear their heads and make their magical breakthroughs?
And not just the male students, the females, too.
The baby dragon wasn’t sure how lying down on a bed with a member of the opposite sex at night enabled such feats, but the apprentices swore by the method.
Maybe it wasn’t one Bradley had tried yet?
It took maximum effort not to skip at the revelation.
When they were a little ways from the market square and the raucous music from the tavern was close enough to befuddle the ears of any eavesdroppers, the stranger turned.
It was a fluid motion, effortless, and Dirk understood then he was in the presence of someone who had either been trained to dance or to use a sword, though he saw no outline of such a weapon under the cloak.
Swordsmen were cunning, devious, and this one knew how to move silently, too, if he’d been able to sneak up on the dragon and the cauliflower farmer and nick the coin purse without either of them noticing.
So the stranger was either a courtier or a swordsman or maybe both, definitely a sneak, and he had an offer to make.
A lord’s second son turned mercenary, perhaps?
Mercenaries had no morals, so Dirk kept his distance and his expression hard.
Inside his chest, beneath the enlargement spell, his little heart beat a wild staccato.
So long as his spells and enchantments held, the dragon was safe.
But stress or excitement could cause him to burn through the magic faster, and he was both equally stressed by the mercenary’s presence and excited by the mercenary’s offer.
“So?” Dirk prompted, eager to get this exchange over with.
The hooded stranger tossed the cauliflower farmer’s leather pouch onto the orange pine needles at Dirk’s feet. A velvet purse followed, four times the size and pleasantly plump.
Dirk hooked the purse strings with a claw and lifted it to eye level, wiggled it loose to discover gold sovereigns and an assortment of emeralds, rubies, and sapphires.
The sum inside was worth more than the whole of his treasure tub!
His lips threatened to split into a grin of childlike delight, then he remembered he was a very professional and mature dragon and set the purse down with only a grunt. “Acceptable. Who am I kidnapping?”
“The princess of Amberly.”
Dirk recoiled at the venom in the stranger’s voice.
“The elder, Mildred,” he specified, “the one with brown hair.” His emerald gaze raked over Dirk’s chest and wings. “I’d say you look strong enough for the journey, but is that a fanny pack strapped to your chest? This is a serious undertaking—”
“And this is a satchel, thank you very much.” To which Dirk stuffed both coin purses inside, crumpling the remaining rice paper spells. “I don’t question your methods, so I would appreciate it if you didn’t question mine. Unless you would like to kidnap the princess yourself?”
“Not at all,” he spat. The cloak swished as he crossed his arms over his chest. “It needs to be done today, Dragon. Take my coin and run, and I’ll get the prince’s guard to hunt you down and skewer your wings with their crossbows. You’ll never fly again.”
The mercenary’s threat was laced with the same vitriol Dirk had heard when he’d spoken about the princess.
The dragon stood his ground, though his innards scuttled about like frightened cockroaches.
Crouching down, he prepared himself to launch into the sky.
He was eager to be rid of the mercenary.
“I’ll have your princess in a tower by nightfall. ”
The princess heard the flap of wings before she heard the screams. Intrigued, she pushed away from her melancholy (her father had grounded her, after all) at the balcony railing of her private suite and lifted curious eyes to the sky.
It was a beautiful day for a kidnapping, the evening heavens blue as cornflower and the underbellies of the puffy cumulous clouds streaked with the first blush of sunset.
The breeze was robust and fragrant with the scents of supper, and the red dragon approaching her suite did an admirable job navigating the currents.
There seemed to be something off about his wings: they flapped independently of each other instead of in a concerted effort, and their membranes were far too translucent, hardly thick enough to capture enough wind to maintain lift.
The red dragon released a roar meant to terrorize, but Millie only smiled. She snatched up the Persian cat before it could even think about skulking for the safety of the bedroom and the darkness under the bed. “Now this is an adventure, Duchess,” Millie whispered.
It wasn’t the same as a pirate galleon on the ocean, but the wind surely would be blowing in her hair, for how else would a dragon bring her to its tower? And she’d never been kidnapped before, so that was something definitely new and very exciting.
“Good evening,” Millie said when the dragon landed on her balcony, performing the deep bow with the accompanying elaborate hand gestures one did when formally greeting dragons.
From the bewildered expression on the dragon’s face, she realized she’d caught him off guard. Clearly this was his first princess-napping. All the more reason not to succumb to hysterics—she didn’t need him making any rash decisions out of panic that might result in her accidental dismemberment.
“Why aren’t you, uh, screaming in terror?” the dragon asked, confused.
“Why would I?” she replied.
The Amberlian royal family had excellent relations with the local dragon population, after all.
None of them would ever dream of kidnapping her, so this one was either a rogue or foreign.
She certainly didn’t recognize him—larger than the Shire horses who plowed the grain fields, ruby scales, yellow horns sprouting like a crown from his forehead, a spiked tail.
In fact, he looked like one of the legendary Great Reds.
Yes, it would be best to err on the side of caution and treat him with the utmost respect, even if he was here to abduct her.
Her question seemed to stump the rogue dragon, and since she didn’t want to risk aggravating him, she chose another question that had an easy answer to set him at ease.
“I don’t suppose I have time to pack a suitcase?”
Just because you were about to become a hostage didn’t mean it was acceptable to forgo basic hygiene, and that included a change of clothes and a toothbrush, and if the kidnapper was exceptionally gracious, deodorant.
“Um . . .” The dragon clicked his front claws together and cast a worried glance below.
Upon the ramparts, the guards scuttled about like beetles as they shouted their heads off and did their darndest to realign the cannons. In the courtyard, those with longbows were already firing. Arrows skipped off the stones and zinged through the air. The dragon ducked.
“Oh, how silly of me.” Millie tapped her temple with a self-depreciating smile.
“Amberlian guards are fantastic shots and they’ll have those cannons prepped to blast this balcony to bits in just a few more seconds.
Of course you’re in a hurry. Now, you mustn’t hold it against me when I wake tomorrow with absolutely rancid morning breath because you didn’t afford me the moment to retrieve a toothbrush. ”
At least she had her reticule strung upon her wrist and the few amenities it contained—mostly makeup, perfume, breath mints, a few other odds and ends including a small tin of goose-liver paté for Duchess, but every little bit helped. She tucked the Persian cat firmly under one arm.
With a few crisp clicks of her shoes, she approached the dragon and held up her hand to be whisked away. “Well, I’m ready to be kidnapped. Do mind the taffeta though, it’s new. Shall we?”