Chapter 24
BUTTERFLY WINGS, AN ASSAULT OF LACE, WONDROUS FOREPLAY
Bradley caught the stone archway and swung himself into the kitchen, narrowly avoiding the carving knives that shot across the room with the warhammer’s latest strike.
The drainer had tipped the dishes back into the sink, whose faucet, soap, and sponge were cleaning on repeat, for each plate and mug slipped right back into the suds the moment it was placed in the off-kilter drainer.
Miraculously, Dirk’s brown sugar carving was still intact in its corner, and, mercifully, the cupboard doors were all still shut, as was the door to the icebox, though Bradley dreaded to look inside.
The apprentice righted the salt barrel that had served as his breakfast stool and sat.
The pancakes had jumped free of their plate and stained the linen tablecloth, but at least they were still accounted for.
The ink well had a stubborn stopper, which he yanked free now and snatched up his quill.
After the warhammer assaulted the tower once more, he bent over a pancake and got writing.
No matter how delicately he wrote, the ink bled far too much.
The spells were still legible, as in the way a child practicing the alphabet is legible.
These spells were short and sweet, one word per pancake, and he managed to finish them all before the tower shook again.
The tins of coffee and tea and all the rest rattled like the rocks of an avalanche; Bradley clapped his hands over his ears.
When all had quieted and stilled, he discovered the little dragon hovering over his shoulder and the princess releasing her death-grip on the kitchen counter.
Dirk nudged Bradley’s cheek with his nose, similar in gesture to an affectionate cat head-bunting its master’s chin, then gobbled down the pancakes.
The spells didn’t dissolve on his tongue like the rice paper wafers and needed further digestion, so the three of them waited with growing apprehension as they listened to the sound of . . . nothing. The barbarian had abandoned his attack. But why?
Millie craned over the kitchen table to peer out the window, only to fling herself back as an iron piolet whizzed by. “He’s using an ice axe as a grappling hook.”
“It was only cool when Sir Roger had one,” Dirk groused. Then he brightened. “I can just wait for him to climb really high like Sir Roger and then cut the line again!”
The princess pointed to the black chain halving the view from the window. “Can you bite through chain? And can the tower survive long enough for you to do it?”
“N—”
Gurgling rose from the dragon’s stomach, and at the exact moment Dirk burped, he was engulfed in a puff of hissing smoke. When it cleared, a luck dragon with magenta scales, a nubby crown of horns, and butterfly wings hovered in front of them.
Millie’s hand shot to her open mouth, and Bradley paled.
“What?” The dragon looked down at his front paws, shrieked, twisted around to examine his faux wings, and screamed.
It was a well-deserved scream, too, for not only did he have the wings of a swallowtail, which were carnation-pink and dappled with lavender spots, all of which did not match his new magenta scales at all, one wing was much smaller than the other.
Dirk the Dangerous burst into tears.
Millie rushed forward to console the little dragon. “Now, now, I’m sure Bradley can fix this. Right?” she flung at him.
The apprentice had indeed wanted to sabotage their endeavor, but not like this.
He quickly sat and got to scribing upon another pancake.
The quill caught in the porous crumb, dragging and bleeding too much ink, yet again.
He threw that pancake away and started on another, writing as lightly as he could with extra-large letters to increase the chances of legibility.
The three of them jumped as the piolet clanged against the wrought-iron railing and caught.
Bradley offered the pancake, and Dirk ate. Another puff of smoke, and now he had two butterfly wings of equal size.
Millie whacked him in the shoulder.
“It’s the pancake!” he signed. “It bleeds the ink and muddles the spell. I can try again.”
“I don’t feel so good,” the baby dragon moaned, clutching his distended stomach.
“You’re going to pop his stomach at this rate before you get it right,” Millie snapped at the apprentice. “Let’s look for something small and less squidgy.” She attacked the cupboards with the ferocity of a starving wolverine.
Rice, beans, nuts, flour, coffee beans, tea leaves.
Millie snatched up the box of saltine crackers and upended it.
Nothing came out, not even after a good shake.
She righted the box and peered inside, verifying it was empty, then hurled it at Bradley.
“What kind of lazy heathen leaves empty boxes in the cupboards?”
He smacked the cardboard box away from its trajectory to paper-cut his face.
“Do you have any crackers leftover from yesterday?” Dirk sniffled. “You were snacking on some this morning in bed.”
“I might!” She darted out of the kitchen.
While she was gone, Bradley raced up to the sorcerer workroom to buy them some time.
The ice axe rattled and clinked with every foot the barbarian climbed.
Flattening himself against the wall, the apprentice inched to the edge where he could sneak a quick glance without being seen.
Ivar had mistaken him for a handmaiden, a mistake Bradley didn’t want to correct without his incantations to defend him.
The barbarian was making good progress. Too good. So long as the ice axe held, which it was, against all odds, for it wasn’t even curved like a hook, Ivar the Bane would be breaching the tower balcony in minutes.
Bradley lurched forward and seized the piolet. One mighty twist of his shoulders freed the axe from the railing and sent the barbarian plummeting into the sand below.
Ivar bellowed on the way down, groaned when he landed, cursed, “Stupid tower!” when he rose to his feet, and spun his ice axe for another attempt at hooking the railing. The barbarian was insufferably determined to ravish a princess.
With a sharp exhale, Bradley turned on his heel to find both luck dragon and princess in the workroom, a sole cracker cradled in her palms and the inkwell clutched in his. The apprentice shook out his arms to dispel his nerves and indicated that they should join him at the desk.
He cleared a space, throwing whatever he could find that was flat and bookmarkish into the open books that had survived the book-a-lanche before shutting and stacking them off to one side.
Sitting down, he worked on sharpening the edge of new quill as the princess and dragon laid their cracker and inkwell in the space in front of him.
Bradley swiveled the standing omnidirectional magnifying glass into an optimal position just as the ice hook caught the railing once more.
With delicate swipes of his quill knife, Bradley carefully scraped away all the salt from both sides of the cracker as gently as if he were descaling a thin-skinned minnow.
A few sweeps of his hand cleared the workspace of quill shavings and salt granules, and the lack of debris cleared Bradley’s mind for the task ahead.
The warhammer slammed into the tower, and Bradley pitched over the precious cracker to shield it with his body. He lifted a murderous glare at the western balcony. “I c-c-can’t wr-wr-write w-w-with—”
“On it.” Millie dashed to the balcony and flattened herself against the curve in the wall just as he had done moments ago and chanced a glance below.
“He’s climbing again. Oh my, look at him go.
I’ll let you know when he’s prepping another strike with the warhammer.
What are you waiting for? Write already! ”
Bradley dabbed the quill into the ink, tapped the tip clear of drips, and began to write.
It was a painstakingly slow process, writing each letter so tiny and precise upon the sole cracker in the tower. This spell needed three words of power, and each letter was an opportunity to mess it all up. Sweat began to bead against his forehead, which the luck dragon fanned away.
After a few letters, the princess called for a pause. Bradley braced himself and protected the cracker as the tower shook and groaned.
“He’s over a third of the way up,” she informed testily. “How’s it going?”
Bradley didn’t reply. He was dabbing his quill in the inkwell and preparing to write the second word.
“I’m coming, wifey!” Ivar called, and the piolet’s blade grated against the wrought-iron railing as the barbarian resumed his climb.
Millie watched in dismay as the barbarian paused at each window he encountered to slam his warhammer against the sill, seeking to widen a port of ingress without having to climb the entire length of the tower.
But whatever magic or miracle of architecture kept the tower from collapsing under the strikes of the enchanted weapon also fortified the windows, and none broke under his assault.
Undeterred, Ivar continued to climb up the chain and roar his encouragement to her that soon they would be making vigorous love on whatever surface was closest after the defeat of the dragon.
“How long does it take to write a spell?” she demanded.
Her palms had started to sweat, and the calm assurance and bold confidence she had in her dream to become a pirate started to waver.
She did not possess the skills (yet) to defeat that thing if Dirk and Sir Roger failed, and if marriage was the furthest thing from her mind, rearing children was in the next galaxy.
“High Aetherial has many diacritics,” Dirk snapped back. “Lots of curls and dots. It takes time!”
The two humans clung to the wall and desk, respectively, and the luck dragon maintained a hover when the warhammer struck again.
“Ugh, he’s two-thirds of the way up now! I can’t believe it’s come to this.” Millie thrust the cinquedea letter opener into her belt and marched out onto the balcony.
“My sweet ice flower,” the barbarian crowed. “Prepare your loins, for our coupling is imminent!”
“Can’t wait.” Millie fussed with her skirts, wiggled her hips, and shucked something pink and lacy out from under her hem. She drew back like she was sighting with a slingshot and fired.
The barbarian yelled as he was struck in the eye.
He lost his grip on the chain, falling thirty, maybe forty feet until, strictly by chance, the desert wind blew the chain back into range and the brute caught it between his thighs.
They clamped shut like the mouth of a saltwater crocodile, that is to say, with a force equivalent to approximately 3700 pounds per square inch, and smoke rose from his groin where his hide trousers melted from the friction.
Then his meaty hand seized the chain. Ivar slid another yard before his callused grip tightened hard enough to arrest his fall, grunted when he bounced against the tower before regaining his footing. His other hand remained firmly, stubbornly around his warhammer.
But now there was a pair of pink panties hooked over one ear and clinging to the bristles of his beard.
Ivar the Bane’s eyes sparkled with delight. “I love the way you foreplay!”
“Piss and plagues,” she muttered, retreating into the workroom.
Bradley and Dirk were staring at her, the apprentice’s blue eyes wide as a cloudless sky behind his spectacles, the luck dragon’s jaw slack and dangling.
“I did not just use my only pair of panties as a projectile weapon so you two could waste the time advantage I earned us by staring at me.” She clapped her hands to snap them out of their stupor. “Finish the spell!”
Bradley shoved the thought of the princess’s panties from his mind, pushed the stress aside, and focused on the third and final word. Dirk fanned more briskly.
The apprentice shouted, “Done!” just as the princess said, “Brace for impact!”
Once the tremors had subsided, Millie rushed away from the balcony as Bradley handed the cracker ever so carefully into Dirk’s paw. The luck dragon didn’t wait. He crunched down, and smoke puffed almost instantly.
Two impressive dragon wings sprouted from Dirk’s shoulder blades. His mane and tail tuft were gone, and an impressive crown of yellow horns sprouted from his forehead. The amplio spell he had reserved in his satchel would do the rest.
“I’m still pink,” the baby dragon whined.
“Dark pink,” Millie said. “Who really knows the developmental cycle of dragons anyway? Red dragons could start out pink and mature to that deep ruby as they age.”
“But dragons stay the same color as they are when they hatch,” Dirk protested.
She waved that aside with her customary hand flick. “Does Ivar the Bane know that? I doubt it. Now it’s time to grow big and strong and show that barbarian what’s what.” She leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek for good luck. “You’ll do wonderful, Master Dirk, you’ll see.”