Chapter 21 #2
By now the knight had reached her window, but he did not presume to force his way inside. He tied a stopper knot to maintain his position on the rope and gripped the sill for good measure as he paused to catch his breath.
Though it was only mid-morning, the Ashburnum sun did not know that.
Only moments after the dawn it was at eighty percent of its intensity, which meant Sir Roger was roasting beneath his padded leather and chain mail.
Frequent breaks were necessary, and if the dragon was indeed timid and hiding, then all the better.
He could rest here a moment then recover fully upon the balcony before engaging in mortal combat.
But the dragon was furthest from his mind now that he was close enough to look the princess full in the face.
Her round cheeks were pink from the sun, and her full lips were pressed in an expression he was familiar with—propriety-suppressed ire.
Highborn ladies, princesses, and queens weren’t supposed to lose their tempers. That was for the men.
“And may I assume from your sudden silence, Your Highness,” he ventured, “that you are familiar with the baron?”
Millie lifted eyes that had fallen to the cracks in the tower windowsill, unfocused with introspection. She wet her lips against the desert dryness and answered his question with one of her own, “Do you have any daughters, Sir Roger?”
After a heavy silence where nothing sounded but the creaking of his rope and the sigh of sand shifting under the wind, he answered quietly, “Aye. Two, grown and married to good men, thank Caelus’s stars.”
“And if I was your third daughter, would you marry me to Baron Demir?”
The hedge knight was silent again, honor-bound not to speak poorly of his liege and equally bound not to lie. “Nay, Your Highness, I would not wish that fate for you.”
“Then don’t win me for him.”
“I can’t—”
“Why do you fight for him?”
“Because a man has to eat and provide for his family.” Bitterness rose, and the hedge knight hissed, “Desperation will make you swear any number of oaths, and I was a fool to think he was anything like his father, the late Oremaster. This baron wants no counsel, no training, no betterment.”
“Well I do.”
A pause. “What?”
“The kingdoms are strangled by their own system, their own rules—yes, even the wondrous Amberly. We are small, and thus bullied. I will not sit upon the Amberlian throne as a chess piece to be moved about by others who think that because they are bigger or wealthier that they have any say what happens to me and mine. So I need training. I need counsel.” She covered his hand with hers, fingernails indenting against worn, leathery skin.
“If you battle the dragon and rescue me, you’re condemning me to a broken system that will never see change. ”
“You don’t want to be rescued?”
She shook her head, and that’s when Sir Roger really saw it: the silk headscarf, the blouse, the plaid skirt. The fingernails with the chipped paint and the long hair made wild by the wind and heat. She was unlike any princess he’d ever met.
His white eyebrows shot upright like swans taking wing. “You’re serious.”
“I am, Sir Roger.”
His old eyes flickered across her face, judging her sincerity.
To his horror and delight, he found it pure and unwavering.
To mentor a young mind as eager and unjaded as this .
. . Sir Roger swallowed thickly. “To abandon Demir and work for you would make me no less than a sellsword, and you don’t want that kind of man to be your mentor. ”
“How do we free you?”
“Short of returning to his court and slicing my hand on my own sword to relieve me of my oath? Death.”
Millie sucked in her upper lip for a contemplative gnaw, resembling a pensive pug with a considerable underbite, and since no princess would deliberately or unconsciously do anything to make themselves less attractive, much less relatable, the hedge knight reaffirmed his conclusion that she was not like any princess he’d ever met.
“But even if I were to train you,” he pressed, “what of the dragon?”
“One moment, if you please, Sir Roger.”
Baffled, and realizing this probably wouldn’t be the last time this princess had that effect on him, he recovered quickly and tapped the stopper knot. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She shimmied back into the gloom of the bedroom and turned, yelping when she found Bradley standing there and not up in the kitchen writing spells into pancakes as she’d instructed.
“Your Highness?” Sir Roger asked, peering inside, but his sun-scorched vision saw nothing but darkness.
“A spider,” she lied. Turning back to Bradley, she whacked him in the arm and hissed, “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in the kitchen—”
“What the hells are you doing?” he signed.
She straightened her blouse with a tug and lifted her nose into the air, though it was impossible to look down it towards someone of the apprentice’s height.
“You should be pleased that I took your inquisition in the workroom to heart. I have the desire to become a pirate, but not the training. Sir Roger is the key to solving that. Or one of them, at least.”
“One?” he blurted aloud. Then, signing: “That knight is from Merle, Leighton’s neighbor and ally. He would’ve grown up with the legends of the Cursed Lands. He’ll know a luck dragon when he sees one and—”
“Oh shush. If he’s progressive enough to train a princess he only just met, he’ll take no issue with the dragon.
Besides, he never said he was from Merle, just that he’s bound to one of its barons.
Honestly, you’re a sorcerer apprentice. One would think details were your bread and butter lest you bungle a spell and detonate something. ”
She turned to said luck dragon hovering nearby. “Master Dirk, you are a fine luck dragon, a master of the wind and rain. If Sir Roger were to fall from this height, could you catch him with a wind so he doesn’t splatter like bug when he hits the sand?”
“Uhhh . . .” Dirk clicked his claws together as he mentally computed some rapid-fire calculations. He brightened. “Yes, I think so. If I go to one of the windows halfway down the tower, I can buffet his fall and then catch him the rest of the way.”
“No!” Bradley protested. He could see where this was heading—another mouth to feed, another noise nuisance, hells of the deep, maybe another bedmate.
The two schemers ignored him.
“You have to be sure, Master Dirk. This is a man’s life.”
The luck dragon nodded. “I can do it.”
“It has to look like he died,” Millie specified.
“I can make that work. Do you think he’s willing to suffer a few bruises, just in case I’m, uh, late in catching him?”
“I believe so.”
“But what about his honor? He seemed pretty set on preserving that.”
“It won’t be a problem if he is a true follower of the Knightly Code of Conduct, specifically Section Three.”
She had her first etiquette tutor, Miss Josephine, to thank for drilling that codex into her brain. Though, at the time, Miss Josephine couldn’t have known that Millie would use it to terrorize the visiting dignitaries’ knights to the very limits of their oaths.
“You must be the one to initiate his fall,” Millie impressed upon the dragon. “Sir Eustace must give you credit for his defeat.”
Dirk withdrew a small handful of cochineal shells from where he’d stashed them in his satchel and powdered his muzzle and face red. “Ready when you are.”
When she turned back to the window, Bradley made to catch her arm and put an end to this ridiculousness, but either she ducked or Dirk sent an air current to sweep his hand away, and he missed.
She leaned back into the light with an eager smile. “Sir Roger—”
“You’re in league with the dragon!” he blurted, having overheard part of the conversation. He had the good sense to blurt at a volume no louder than a mouse’s squeak, lest the ministry official overhear.
“Yes I am,” she replied. “And why wouldn’t I be? We Amberlians have always had excellent relations with dragons. Now, it’s best if you relax.”
“Wh—”
Dirk snaked out from under her arm and severed the rope clean in half with a single snap of his jaws.
No sooner did a blood-curdling scream split the desert sky did the luck dragon zoom out of the bedroom and down the tower.
Bradley crowded Millie at the window, and the two watched the aged hedge knight drop over a hundred feet to impact the desert below.
A plume of orange dust shot into the air like a geyser, forcing the two humans back into the tower to protect their eyes and throats.
They weren’t deterred for long.
Millie adjusted the tails of her headscarf to cover her mouth and nose, and Bradley lifted the collar of his robe to mask the lower half of his face.
Within a second, the two stuck their heads back outside and waited with bated breath to see if Dirk was as good as he said and if Sir Roger Ferris had survived.
The knight wasn’t moving.