Chapter 18
GIRDLED LIZARDS, RUSSIAN ROULETTE, AND A PROMISE OF ECCENTRIC TORTURE
When the dunes blushed with the first rays of dawn, Bradley knew something was amiss. Perhaps it was the faint, rhythmic breeze caressing his neck, or the strange bands of warmth that striped across chest and thigh. Or, most likely, it as the tickling sensation of silken threads upon his cheek.
His blue eyes snapped open.
That wasn’t a breeze against his neck or two girdled lizards that had somehow snuck into the tower and claimed his chest and thigh as their preferred sleeping roosts or silk against his cheek.
It was the exhales, limbs, and hair of a princess who had not only snuck into his bed in the dead of night like a thief of peace and tranquility, but who had picked the lock on his door to gain entrance.
After he’d slammed his door shut last night, Bradley hadn’t taken two steps into his room before he’d turned around and twisted the key in its lock. A glance at the door revealed the aforementioned key on the stone floor directly below the door handle, wiggled loose.
And there, draped over his chair, was that stained taffeta dress and those soiled silk stockings.
“Tula!” he roared.
Millie came awake with a start, her whole body jerking in alarm. Which meant her hand on his chest clamped down on a nipple just as her knee bucked into his groin and her hair lashed him across the face like a cat-o’-nine-tails.
The sorcerer apprentice wheezed, and the princess rolled over with a groan. “What time is it?”
Bradley kicked himself free of the quilt and sheets and tumbled out of bed. The princess yawned and snuggled into the heat he’d left behind. She winced as the shutters flew open and cracked against the stone walls, opening a single eye into a slit that grew wider and wider with each nanosecond.
Standing off-center of the meager sunlight so Millie could see his hands, Bradley signed, “What are you doing here? You were rooming with Dirk. And how did you open the door? It was locked!”
Millie realized returning to sleep would be an impossible task now.
The apprentice was madder than Duchess on bath day and would undoubtably seize the bed frame and simulate an earthquake if she tried to catch a few more winks.
But that wasn’t the reason for her alertness.
No, that was entirely the fault of Bradley Donmarin standing there in the sunlight in nothing but his boxer briefs.
She knew knights trained to get muscles that big and sharply defined, but no sorcerer apprentice had any business being that chiseled. It simply wasn’t fair to the knights.
So, a mite flustered for the aforementioned reason, and a smidge grumpily, as she was unused to rising until after the sun had made a good and proper appearance, she dragged herself upright into a seated position.
“Firstly, that bed in Master Dirk’s room is sized for a child, or a dwarf, and my legs were starting to cramp most terribly,” she said. “Secondly, you should hear the snores that come out of that little dragon. It should be physically impossible and yet, against all odds, it isn’t.”
Millie had meant what she’d said yesterday, that under no circumstances would she ever share a bed with the grouchy apprentice ever again, but that was before she understood what it felt like to sleep with her knees tucked up by her ears.
Not to mention she hated the idea of sponge baths.
What was the point of bathing if you couldn’t do it properly with water you could submerge yourself in and an obscene amount of bath bubbles to keep you company?
She couldn’t very well sleep anywhere else, for none of the other rooms had met her standards.
Nor the standards of any person alive, for that matter.
That first night with the apprentice had been intimidating, but he proved himself such a gentleman (in this matter only), that it’d been worth risking it a second time.
And she couldn’t undergo the metamorphosis from princess to pirate without her beauty sleep, could she?
“And the door?” the apprentice demanded, still irate, still distractingly shirtless.
“I picked it, obviously.” She leaned back on the heels of her hands.
“My fifth etiquette tutor, Miss Dama, thought I indulged my sweet tooth too often and locked up all my favorite chocolates in her desk drawer. Then, if she thought I misbehaved that day, she would eat one right in front of me at the end of lessons. So I learned how to pick the lock on her desk, indulge my sweet tooth, and replace a chocolate with a block of polished mahogany. She left the same afternoon she lost that game of Russian roulette.”
His eyes rounded like twin blue pools. “You’re insane.”
“That’s never been diagnosed. Just never mess with a woman and her chocolate stash, especially during that time of the month, Mr. Donmarin. You’ll live longer.”
Given the serious delivery of that last statement, he made a mental note to add chocolate to the blackboard in the kitchen and hoped Miss Penelope could be persuaded to bring the luxury item. Perhaps if he told her why he needed it—
Sweet mother of pearl, he wasn’t allowed to have guests at the tower.
The last few days had been a whirlwind of change and he hadn’t given it a lick of thought until now.
Could she even be classified as a guest?
Surely she was more of a squatter. For sure a Major Inconvenience, as he’d classified her before, and a female one at that. What would Master Excelsior think?
The Prestigious College of Sorcerers was actually two in one, the young men and women apprentices being trained separate from one another, lest youthful impulses impede their concentration and magical maturity.
If Miss Penelope discovered the princess, she would surely tell Master Excelsior, and then the grand master would think Bradley wasn’t taking his studies seriously.
That he was on a six-month holiday funded by the College and his master’s coffers.
Doubly—no, quadruply—so if Master Excelsior knew they were sharing the same bed.
“Get out of the bed,” he ordered. “I am going into that bathroom to shower and shave, and when I’m done, you’d better be out of that bed and dressed. If not, I will forcibly remove you.”
Spurred on by the uneasy thought that Master Excelsior would just appear out of nowhere to check on his apprentice, even though he had no history of doing so, Bradley kept his morning ablutions quick and efficient.
When he emerged from the steamy bathroom toweling his hair, he found the princess dressed in an outfit he didn’t recognize with her hair tamed by a headscarf, the previously missing hairpin now serving as a decorative brooch pin in her plaid skirt.
She was still abed, this time sitting atop the quilt. She wasn’t alone, either.
Arrayed upon the bed were various items, presumably the contents of the carpet bag which lay open beside her on his pillow.
The offense to his bed compounded when he noted she wasn’t just sitting there with her pilfered possessions and admiring them.
Oh no. She was polishing them. Which meant dust and grime and sand and probably lice and flesh-eating bacteria were making themselves quite cozy and snug in the fibers of his bedspread.
The horrors persisted. The princess was snacking as she polished!
A napkin draped across her lap like a picnic blanket, half the snacks he’d given her yester-afternoon positioned in the valley of her crossed thighs.
She’d just taken a bite of cheese when he’d open the bathroom door and hadn’t even bothered to stop chewing in the heat of his glare.
His mouth opened once, twice, but nothing but a strangled gargle emerged.
He slammed one hand against the doorframe so it wouldn’t take a fistful of her long auburn hair and drag her down to the dungeon for this assault against his sacred harbor of repose.
The doorframe, which was solid oak, creaked under his grip as he fought for calm.
“What, did you want me to faint again today? And you didn’t make us dinner yesterday.” She plopped a roasted almond into her mouth.
Bradley’s head snapped up, eyes flicking from the clutter on his bed back to the princess. “Tula,” he growled.
There was a knock at the door then, and the sorcerer apprentice’s stomach tightened like a fist around an orange desperate for fresh juice. Master Excelsior!
“Bradley?” came a muffled voice. “Wake up! I think Millie was right about you talking in your sleep and this is twice now I’ve heard you shouting about tiny pink octopuses. Also, my princess is missing again.”
The apprentice held up a finger at the princess—they were not done here—and crossed the room to open the door.
Dirk swirled under Bradley’s arm and maintained a hover near the threshold, as it was rude to progress further into someone’s private abode without invitation.
His golden gaze flicked to Millie snacking on the bed to Bradley’s flushed face and mist-speckled spectacles. “Oh my.”
His scales immediately rippled with soft white light. Luck, for an outcome that didn’t involve Millie draped over Bradley’s shoulder, kicking and screaming, and for Bradley’s eyes to remain in his head where they belonged if he tried to do such a thing. He’d seen Millie handle a hairpin. Savage.
The little dragon swirled over to the bed. “When did you find these little treasures?”
“When I got up to stretch my legs last night.”
Only Caelus knew what else she’d gotten up to unsupervised.
Master Excelsior wasn’t going to kill him when he found out, no, his master was far too eccentric for that.
The sorcerer had a reputation for creating the most harebrained assignments, the most outrageous exams, and the most ludicrous chores, so it only made sense that whatever torture he would inflict upon Bradley would be just as unique.
What a terrifying thought.
Bradley pressed a hand against his chest to slow his galloping heart and took deep breaths so has not to hyperventilate.
He’d never been so anxious in his entire life, not even when battling sea monsters or evading pirates, but the very thought that his master would strip him of everything he had worked so hard to achieve threatened to undo him. He had escaped the Cut and he was never going back.
“The bed’s too small, isn’t it?” Dirk was saying. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry, Master Dirk, Mr. Donmarin here had plenty of room to share.”
“That really was very nice of you, Bradley,” Dirk told him.
The apprentice threw up his hands. “I d-d-didn’t—”
“Ooo! I love that headscarf,” Dirk exclaimed.
Millie tossed the silken tails over her shoulders. “It’s all the rage with pirates, I’m told.”
Bradley rolled his eyes, a gesture that was slowly manifesting a headache from its frequency.
“And look at that compass!”
Millie tossed it up to him to get a closer look, and Dirk adjusted his altitude to angle the compass into one of the gentle shafts of sunlight filtering in from the shuttered windows.
Like the little hoarder dragon he wanted to be, he withdrew a jeweler’s loupe from his satchel to determine the quality of treasure in his paw.
“Hmm,” he mused, “maybe I should dabble in antiques, too. They’re far more fascinating than copper pennies and unpolished gemstones. What else did you find?”
Millie rocked forward to touch a brass letter opener shaped like the triangular sword popular in the Italian court, the cinquedea.
“I found this hidden beneath a lovely nightgown. Do you think maidens used to live here, and if so, were any in arranged marriages and nervous about their wedding nights?”
She didn’t wait for a reply from the menfolk, one of whom had a hand clamped over his eyes while the other looked innocently confused.
“I found another shirt, this glorious cloak of black velvet, an opal ring that’s much too big for my ring finger but I think it’ll fit on my thumb, a book of poetry, some socks, and”—she plucked up a pair of black leather boots (mercifully) from the floor—these gorgeous boots! ”
Dirk swirled a corkscrew. “No more pointy shoes with terrible arch support. Jubilations!”
“You couldn’t clean and categorize all this junk on the floor?” Bradley demanded.
“Have you sat on this floor for more than ten seconds? Harder than a virgin’s cock at a brothel. No, thank you.”
The sorcerer apprentice’s cheeks ignited.
“Oh! And I found this room—”
“Then why the hells aren’t you in there instead of here?” he signed angrily.
She pursed her lips, her excitement deflating. “It doesn’t have any furniture—”
“I’ll find you some immediately.”
“—or plumbing,” she finished.
“Eww.” The little dragon shook his head. “You’ll want that. Even if you don’t sleep in a tub.”
“Thank you, Master Dirk.” She brightened. “I also discovered a kind of open well at the bottom of the tower. It’s walled in against the sand and is delightfully cool. It even glows!”
“That’s the spring where we go fishing.” Dirk swooped low to nibble on the princess’s bare toes. “No big fish gave you a nip, did they?”
Giggling, she shooed him away with a fan whose lace had escaped the ravaging mouths of hungry moths. “Did you know there’s a dungeon down there? Surprisingly clean and cool. This tower’s base must penetrate deep into the sand for them to be so insulated from the heat.”
“We could fix you up a room down there,” Bradley suggested eagerly. “Think about it, no more fainting spells, the heat wouldn’t frizz out your hair, ample personal space—”
“Hmm, no. Too far away from the kitchen. And the toilet doesn’t work. Don’t ask me how I know.”
Bradley finally left the threshold, moving into his space. Claiming it. “You are finding a room tonight, Tula. No more excuses.”
“You think I want to sleep in here? You talk in your sleep and fart under the covers! But until a room can be procured that won’t give me gangrene, you’re stuck with me.
Maybe if you’d let me help you with your stutter, you could clean a room with your magic—which was how Master Dirk said you had to clean your room initially.
So, Mr. Donmarin, in the end, it’s your fault I’m sleeping here. Don’t like it? Do something about it.”
The moment he took a lunging step forward, she snatched up the cinquedea, and a voice shouted from outside, “Come out, Dragon, and meet your doom!”