Chapter 12
A BARRAGE OF PIGEONS, brUNCH PROVES A DISASTROUS AFFAIR, AND WAR
The pigeons that roosted in the attic were complete imbeciles.
Perhaps the desert heat had fried their neurons.
Perhaps a diet of janky cactus juice and crickets wasn’t sufficient enough to promote intelligence, though it provided incredible heat tolerance.
How else could you explain how they clustered tight along every crossbeam, stuffed themselves into every nook and cranny, and thrived in a hot and humid oven of feathers, droppings, and dander without suffering from heat stroke or asphyxiation?
No bird would willingly remain in such conditions unless it was stupid.
Their stupidity persisted even in the face of Bradley’s nest raiding.
He could take any egg he liked so long as he never approached the southwest wedge (for a circular tower’s attic does not have corners, you know.) The boundaries of this wedge were not distinctly defined, and the apprentice currently made the egregious error of crossing it.
The pigeons went wild. Flapping, shitting, pecking, squawking curses in their own native pigeon language—the whole insufferable bit.
From the safety of the workroom below, Millie and Dirk heard the assault, the shouts, the thumping of boots as Bradley beat a hasty retreat to the attic hatch. The apprentice emerged a moment later, basket clutched to his chest.
Dirk flung a gust of wind at the pigeons who sought to dive through the hatch and drove them back.
Bradley slid down the ladder as the magical wind shut the hatch behind him.
A symphony of little sizzles and pops followed him as the environmental wards incinerated the downy feathers before they could land upon and soil the delicate instruments in the workroom.
Bradley smacked the cobwebs from his hair and scowled at the princess as if his recent trauma was entirely her fault. “Don’t get used to eggs for breakfast, Tula,” he signed.
“Maybe the pigeons just hate you.” Flicking her hair over her shoulder, Millie started for the trapdoor and the kitchen beyond.
Dirk snickered, until Bradley withered him with a look.
The sorcerer apprentice still hadn’t forgiven the luck dragon for that stunt with the rice paper, and Dirk was still sour that Bradley didn’t support his dream of becoming a Great Red, or at least something Great Red adjacent.
But in the face of hunger, the three-way truce Millie had constructed held.
All hurried for the kitchen where they proceeded to get in each other’s way setting the table, unloading the dish drainer, brewing tea, boiling the eggs, and other preparatory activities.
Millie hovered like a gnat the whole time Bradley cooked, peppering him with questions. “Why did you add baking soda to the beans? How long does one boil an egg to get that jammy yellow center? Why does the pita puff and make a pocket?”
While she would definitely be hiring a cook for her future pirate galleon, it was best to know these things in the interim.
Finally the apprentice caught her shoulders, spun her about, and shoved her towards the breakfast table. “Go over there and sit down. Or fold the napkins into swans. Whatever you princesses do. Just get out of my way.”
Honestly, he’d never met a more inquisitive princess in his entire life, and he couldn’t decide if the personality trait was preferable to aloofness.
At least with the latter, she would never deign to speak to him unless it was entirely necessary, and thus leave him alone.
Neither breakfast nor brunch had ever been so chatty an affair, and Bradley was already wishing it to be over before he’d even filled his stomach.
Maybe when she started eating, she’d finally shut up.
Not soon enough, he thumped three bowls down onto the table: bean pottage seasoned with salt, garlic, spicy peppers, and ham bone served over rice with soft-boiled eggs, slivered spring onions, and pita.
He reached for the coffee pot, thanking every one of Caelus’s stars that Dirk had had the foresight to turn the coffee maker on.
Just as he was about to pour the life-giving brew into the Lip Cutter—the princess had once again claimed his mug for her own—he caught whiff of an imposter in the coffee pot.
An indignant flick opened the percolator hatch to reveal a mass of wet weeds and a dried apricot—now plump and revived—clumped upon a filter.
Tea. That Major Inconvenience had made tea in his coffee maker. Hells of the deep, it would take all the cleaning vinegar he had left to get the taste out. And then what would he use to get the scuzz out of his tub after the princess made merry with his bath accessories again?
“Oops! I almost forgot about that.” Millie extracted the coffee pot from his white-knuckled grip and brought it over to the table. “Who’d like some tea? Master Dirk? Mr. Donmarin?”
“No,” he snarled. He thumped down onto the salt barrel that served as his stool. “Eat.”
“Hmm, not scones and marmalade.” Millie sniffed cautiously. “I suppose it might taste better than it looks. Or smells.”
The apprentice glared at her. Where he came from, if someone offered you food, you ate it and were happy about it.
Millie picked up her spoon and held it in both hands as she peered down at the glop of smoky bean pottage on its bed of steaming rice. Peasant fare.
She had grown up her whole life without the different components of her meal touching one another.
Each had its own plate, saucer, bowl, or cup.
Not because she had such a preference or a disorder, it was just the way things were done in the Amberly court.
One-pot meal was a phrase entirely foreign to her, both in definition and in practice.
“Excuse me,” she ventured, “how does one eat this?”
Dirk didn’t look up from his bowl. “With your mouth, silly goose.”
Well, she most certainly wasn’t going to eat like the young dragon: claws clamped on either side of his bowl and distending a throat pouch like a pelican and just horking it down. Gone was the dainty sesame-cracker nibbler of yesterday.
Bradley rolled his eyes. “What? You don’t know how to eat breakfast without three forks and five spoons?”
He leaned over, plucked the spoon from her hands, and stabbed at all the eggs in her bowl until the yolks leaked into the little valleys of pottage.
Then he tore off a wedge of pita, created a scoop, and swooped up a collection of yolk-laced beans and rice.
Before Millie could stop him, he pinched her chin, opened her mouth, stuffed the morsel inside, and shut her jaw with a tap to the underside of her chin. “Chew.”
Dirk, who had looked up at the sound of Millie’s squeak, choked on a laugh. “Sorry, Millie. It’s good though, right?”
The princess chewed and swallowed her breakfast without looking at either of them. “Since apparently we eat this with our hands, I suppose this spoon will only be getting in the way now, won’t it? Best to remove it, yes?”
Mutineer Millie’s fist slammed down on the end of her spoon, effectively removing it from her bowl and simultaneously hurling a glob of beans right into the side of Bradley’s face.
“Oh dear!” Millie snatched up her napkin and wiped the breakfast from the apprentice’s face, or really smooshed it into his pores, hair, and left ear—it was hard to tell. “I guess I don’t know what to do with my hands if I’m not managing three forks and five spoons.”
In one fluid, visibly restrained movement, Bradley stood.
“Bradley, come on,” Dirk cajoled. “You had your bit of fun and Millie returned fire, as any good pirate would. Sit down and—”
Ignoring the baby dragon, Bradley took his breakfast elsewhere.
Master Excelsior had strict rules about food entering the sorcerer workroom as he had with books being removed—“Not ever.” But since Small Magicks was still safe and sound in Bradley’s bedroom, stuffed under his pillow to protect it from the desert wind that swooped in from the window and from the snooping nose of that insufferable pirate-wannabe, and he hadn’t suffered any ill effects from breaking the rules, Bradley decided he could risk it.
He sat cross-legged in the very center of the workroom, just in case, with his bowl carefully balanced in the valley of his legs.
There would be no errant splatters or drips, not on his watch.
It was strange to eat in the workroom, stranger still for the luck dragon to be in residence and not accompanying him.
Probably still pandering to his princess—
Bradley’s mood lifted with the squeaking rise of the trapdoor.
“There you are,” Millie said, and Bradley’s hopes deflated. “I brought tea.”
He wanted coffee, not whatever inferior herbal brew she held in her hand. But he was thirsty, the bean pottage thick and sticking to his ribs as well as his throat.
Millie handed him his mug, clean of the apricot-flavored black tea from twenty minutes ago and steaming with something earthy and floral and not entirely unpleasant.
He sipped cautiously and watched with growing trepidation as Millie dragged two mismatched chairs from the clutter to the center of the workroom.
“Hunching over like troll is just as bad for your digestion as it is for articulation. You’re going to sit up straight.” She plucked his bowl from his lap and snapped her fingers at him in an imperious prompt to rise off the floor.
He launched upright, set his mug on the seat of his chair (carefully, so it would not become like the Lip Cutter), and signed angrily, “I’m not a dog for you to command.”
“And yet like a very good boy, you are off the floor and nearly ready to begin. Now finish your tea.” She sat in her own chair with hands folded in her lap and, with perfect posture, waited for him so they might continue.
Bradley sat, but he didn’t drink his tea on principle. She was too much like the professors at the College who expected to be obeyed without question simply because they were in a position of authority, not because they were right. The notion had gotten him kicked out of the classroom many a time.
After a prolonged silence where he’d only drilled her with a frosty blue glare, which she hadn’t found intimidating in the least, she prompted, “We can’t help Dirk until you finish your tea.”
He took an obscenely loud slurp, then signed, “Don’t pretend this is about Dirk. You need to him to fend off the Heroes so you can become a pirate.”
“Of course I do. But I can still care about Dirk at the same time.”
“You just met him!”
“We became quite close on the flight over here. He’s considerate, charming, and what monster could look at him and not fall immediately in love?”
“Then you’re off to a pretty bad start to becoming a pirate. They only love treasure.”
Millie gave a delicate snort, one her fifth etiquette tutor, Miss Dama, would’ve been most proud of, for it was the perfect combination of derisiveness and class. “I sincerely doubt that.”
“Have you even met a pirate?”
“Have you?”
“Of course.” He took another swig of tea and shook his head. “So you want to be a pirate, but you’ve never met one?”
How very much like a princess—diving in head-first without any previous study or scrap of planning, knowing Mummy and Daddy’s coffers could bail her out whenever this current fancy no longer interested her. With no never mind paid to the taxpayers who filled those coffers.
“How do you know the pirate life is for you?”
“I suppose piracy is a spectrum, much like many professions.” She squared her shoulders with a brilliant smile. “I’m confident I’ll find my niche.”
“Not as spectral as you’d like. They’re all the same—sea rats. Speaking of, have you ever seen the sea?”
As Amberly was a kingdom of tea, cattle, and grain and landlocked, it was a valid question. Though, she was a princess and royalty were known to go on an obscene amount of seaside holidays.
“No, but I’ve heard it’s lovely.”
She’d seen pictures of it, of course, read hundreds of poems extolling its beauty and treachery, had even been gifted a red scallop shell from the Duke of Evertea’s son when the two countries had tried to force an alliance between them through marriage.
Bradley continued his interrogation. “Can you even swim? Sail?”
“I’m willing to learn.”
“Tie knots?”
“I’m an excellent embroiderer and know many decorative knots. I’m sure it’s a transferable skill.”
He leaned back, baffled. “You’re delusional.”
“You mean determined.”
Bradley snorted in such a fashion that would’ve had Miss Dama reaching for her fan to thwack him. “It’ll take more work than you’re prepared to give.”
“If a peasant like you can make a new life as a sorcerer,” she said reasonably, “then it’s not farfetched to believe a princess can do the same.”
In fact, Millie was counting on it. It’d been evident to her from the very beginning that Bradley Donmarin hadn’t been born to the privileged life of a sorcerer. No sorcerer’s son ever became that muscled, tanned, or worldly shrewd. He must have wild magic, latent until stimulated.
Bradley wasn’t sure what rankled him more: that she had guessed his lowborn origins correctly or she was comparing her work ethic to his. They were nothing alike.
The hand that the gripped the mug shook. “A new life you’re making at the expense of my friend!”
“I didn’t asked to be kidnapped. I’m making the best of the opportunity given to me.
As you should be.” Her chin jutted elegantly towards the mug.
“And the tea works best when it’s consumed warm.
Now, once you’ve finished, I do believe we’ll start with an alliteration exercise, since you’ve demonstrated some mastery over monosyllabic words.
It is important to focus on the word first, not the sentence, otherwise your mind is just rushing ahead of your mouth and you’ll get frustrated.
Oh! Here’s an applicable one: Dirk the Dangerous dozes dreamily deep in dungeons dank.
It’s a strange but musical combination of both trochee and dactyl meters, but—”
Bradley hurled the remaining tea onto the floor.
As the liquid soaked into the worn floorboards, the burnt umber darkening to ebony, the princess moistened her lips against the dry, wicking air of the desert. Her fingers clenched in her skirts just once before they splayed in forced relaxation. When she lifted her gaze, Bradley recoiled.
Her cheerful demeanor had vanished like the sun behind a hurricane. In its place wasn’t disappointment or contrition, as expected, but the cold severity of a queen at the very end of her magnanimous patience.
“I should twist your nipples for that and teach you some manners. Or have you squealing for your mother, at the very least.” She stood with cold, effortless grace. “So, you’ve chosen war.”
Bradley swallowed. War?
Without another word, Millie disappeared through the trapdoor. She didn’t look back.