Chapter 29
LOOSE SCALES, VANILLA ICE CREAM, TRANSFORMATION IS AN UGLY BUSINESS
The door creaked open, echoing through the tower like the cry of a street cat gearing up for a spat with a rival over some choice morsels of garbage.
Mane flattening in an anxious whoosh, Dirk stole a quick peek outside his bedroom.
It was quiet, the crystals embedded hither and thither within the stonework muted with the spiraling slants of morning sunlight forcing their way through the portholes and arrow loops.
Silent as breath, he slunk out of his bedroom into the stairwell just to make sure.
Below in the pit of sand, the walled spring glowed with a faint blue light, and a soft grunting was barely audible from the training room—Sir Roger, performing his morning stretches.
Above, there was the gentle clink of earthenware mug against patio table and Bradley stumbling through, “Dirk the Dangerous dozes dreamily deep in dungeons dank.”
I what now? the baby dragon thought.
There was no historical evidence whatsoever of luck dragons ever sleeping in dungeons.
They slept in clouds, and more recently, in bathtubs full of pennies.
He’d have to have a word with his princess about what she had Bradley recite, lest their speech exercises lead to false rumors about his species.
Dirk shook his head and returned to his room, confident in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be disturbed in the next few minutes.
The amplio spell had worn off, so a Dirk-sized magenta dragon flew back to his bathtub full of treasure.
The warhammer Alfalas was too big to fit in the tub, so it hung from the nearby towel hooks.
It liked to whisper, but whenever Dirk paid it any mind, the whisperings ceased.
The green light veining through the hammer still flashed on occasion, and the baby dragon wondered if Raegon the Rabid’s collection of enchanted swords was this spooky.
Ignoring the warhammer, Dirk landed on the edge of the claw-foot tub.
The copper coins and cloudy gemstones inside were dazzling in the sunlight, but their beauty didn’t fill him with a sense of accomplishment like they normally did.
After another furtive glance over his shoulder, the luck dragon dropped onto his treasure and rooted like a hog for a pouch he’d hidden by the drain.
It was the canvas pouch from the bean farmer, selected for its material because it would be the least eye-catching should someone decide to dig through his treasure.
No one would give a rat’s fart for a canvas sack when they could snoop through the leather pouch he’d taken from the cauliflower farmer or the velvet purse from the mercenary.
His yellow claws wiggled the strings loose, and he dumped the contents into his paw.
Six cerulean scales glittered in sharp relief against his magenta palm.
He’d shed the last three in quick succession, one after the defeat of each Hero.
Dirk’s stomach twirled a succession of pirouettes as the unknown sparkled up at him.
He was shedding his scales—it wasn’t an odd occurrence anymore.
Dirk dumped the scales back into the canvas pouch and fled for the mirror over the sink. He pawed at his mane, flattening the feathers until the six gaps in his hide beneath his jaw showed like dark tiles amongst a floor of blue. Was Bradley’s curse truly affecting him, too?
He didn’t feel any different, except for an unsettled stomach, but that could just be the matter of this moment.
Overall, he felt excited now that Bradley was finally on board supporting his dream and that old hedge knight was here to coach Millie and him.
And maybe fighting the Heroes was exactly what he and Bradley needed.
As dragons aged and grew stronger, so did their magic.
If he threw himself into his training, maybe he could beat back the curse and even eradicate it from the apprentice himself!
So long as Miss Penelope and her griffin arrived with more rice paper before another Hero attempted to rescue Millie, everything would go swimmingly.
“Egad!” he exclaimed. “Miss Penelope can’t see me like this.”
The griffin rider might just pose as a groceries delivery girl, but everybody knew she was a snoop for Master Excelsior.
The grand master wanted monthly reports on both his charges, and that meant laying eyes on him.
Miss Penelope would surely notice the change in his scale coloration and the addition of Draco typhonus wings, and the secret of the rice-paper spells and his extracurricular activities would be exposed.
Skin his scales, would they make him return all his hard-earned extortion money?! As if magenta coloration wasn’t already damaging to his reputation, that would ruin him!
He had to burn through the duration of these spells quick.
Dirk shoved the canvas pouch of scales back towards the drain, kicked the pennies and jewels this way and that in the tub to obscure any tracks, and fled for the suite door. He nearly barreled into Millie on the other side.
She had her fist raised to knock, two bowls of food balanced in the crook of her arm, and her brown eyes widened first in surprise, second in alarm as the luck dragon flew straight for her.
With a yelp, the princess spun to the side and grabbed the guide rope as the wake of Dirk’s flight tugged her taffeta skirts towards the edge of the landing and its nasty drop over the side. Pottery shattered, food slopped, and the raw egg yolk ruptured and dripped thick and yellow.
“Millie!” The luck dragon flattened his tail tuft into a blade-like rudder and whipped around. “Are you alright?”
“I am, but your breakfast isn’t.” She released the guide rope with a shaky inhale and sorted out the hang of her skirts with a sharp tug.
Yanked the waterskin strap and reticule strings back into her elbow.
“And serves you right for charging out of your room like a crazed bat from a belfry. Why the architect of this spectacular tower didn’t see fit to build an actual railing to prevent accidental deaths is beyond me, but you know to be careful, Master Dirk. ”
“You . . . brought me breakfast? Why?”
She gave him a quizzical look. “You slept in. I thought it would be nice to bring you— Are you alright?”
He. Slept. In?!
Luck dragons were masters of the wind and rain and, by extension, the sky itself. They were in tune with everything celestial, which meant, most obviously, that their circadian rhythms were infallible, even more so than a hamster’s.
Dirk plastered his eye against the nearest porthole window, marked the position of the sun, and gasped when he realized that the coins and jewels in his bathtub had had no right whatsoever to be that sparkly if it were dawn and not two hours past!
“To put it mildly, yesterday was pretty exciting,” Millie consoled him. “You must’ve been exhausted, and your body was just getting the nourishment it needed.” Her gaze dropped to the floor. “In part.”
“Y-yeah,” he replied shakily. Dirk fanned out his mane and tail a few times to restore a sense of balance, the equivalent to a human shaking the tension from her shoulders. “Thanks for breakfast, sort of.”
“That is your own fault, and you can take your eyes off this bowl. It’s for Sir Roger.”
“Okay,” he grumbled, swooping low to see if there was anything he could salvage off the stone steps.
Aww, she’d even made his breakfast in the style of tamago kake gohan, just like they did back home in the misty mountains of Tianzi, minus the beans, of course.
He could kick himself for ruining such a thoughtful gesture.
His nostrils flared. “Are there oranges in your pockets?”
Millie flicked her fingers at him in a shooing motions.
“Anti-Fainting Noshables. They’re for later.
I’ll not be assisted up the stairs by that grump anymore.
I can practically see his skin crawling anytime he finds it necessary to touch me.
Honestly, I touched his hand this morning and you would’ve thought I’d just slathered him with latrine filth by the disgust on his face. ”
Until now, Millie hadn’t realized how scalded she’d been by Bradley’s revulsion on the balcony.
Though, she shouldn’t been surprised—the man was a cur.
She hadn’t meant to touch him, except empathy had risen at the sight of his struggling.
She might have a vulgar tongue at times, but she wasn’t heartless.
And the way he’d looked at her—like a princess (even a retired one) was reaching beyond her station to touch someone like him.
“Bet he loathed every minute of it,” the little dragon agreed. “Though I don’t know why. You have very soft hands.”
That was a very nice thing of him to say. “Thank you, Master Dirk. Though”—her shoulders slumped—“I’m not sure for how much longer.”
Dirk abandoned his salvage search to cup one of her hands in his paw. “Oh, Millie.” He gave her bandage a sniff. “I wouldn’t fret. This is the kelp Bradley keeps by the stove for little burns and cuts. It’s good stuff.”
“He wouldn’t have had to use it if he hadn’t been such a high-handed tyrant.” Her mouth twisted into a frown. “He thinks he’s so superior, like he sweats vanilla ice cream and shoots rainbows out of his bung hole.”
“That’d be an unfortunate place to find a pot of gold, that’s for sure.” Dirk nosed around the broken remnants of breakfast. “And as far as ice cream goes, I think he’d rather sweat strawberry.”
A portion of his breakfast was still edible, though not with any of the egg, and Dirk cleaned the rest off the stairs with a flick of wind and rinse of water.
Eating from half an earthenware bowl, he flew on Millie’s left side as she descended the steps to the training room with all the resolve of a giraffe calf newly born in lion territory, that is to say, with some gangly coordination and a willpower derived from existential crisis.
A gentle wind steadied her wobbling gait; it was the least Dirk could do.
When they entered the training room, they found Sir Roger tapping the rattan cane against his thigh as he scrawled a nearly indecipherable to-do list upon a vacant piece of blackboard. He turned to greet them with a warm smile. “I see you survived.”
“Of the four of us in this tower, I think I’m the only one who’s not surprised,” she said loftily as she handed him his breakfast. Then she pulled out her headscarf from her reticule and bound up her hair.
“I’m not,” he assured her. “I know what I saw when I met you. Grit. That doesn’t crumble away after one crappy morning.”
Sir Roger retreated to the window with the hourglass, turned it over so the red sand could spill, and leaned against the sill to eat.
“It’s time to warm those muscles back up, though.
A nice easy jog around the room should do that nicely.
Off you go. You, too, Dirk. Didn’t see you sweating with Miss Millie this morning. ”
So his students went. Neither made small talk; Millie was concentrating on getting her rubbery legs to do as she commanded and Dirk was wrestling with the double-whammy of six scales hiding in his tub and his unusual sleep pattern.
As much as he loathed using his paws for menial tasks, such as running like a flightless animal, Dirk had to admit the exertion it required would burn through the spells faster than flying.
So he huffed and puffed, even snagged the hem of Millie’s taffeta dress with his fangs so she could help haul him forward, whether she agreed to it or not.
“Stop free-loading.” Still performing her pitiful excuse for a jog, she turned and swatted at his muzzle (lightly) until he let go.
“But I’m so weak,” he moaned, his jog devolving into a slither. “I only had half a breakfast.”
“Like I’m not suffering?” The desert heat had forced her to loosen her corset strings so she could breathe deeper, and she now jogged with her hands clamped over her ample breasts to keep them from bouncing up and clubbing her in the chin.
“Ugh, taffeta was not the outfit to wear today.” When she was a pirate captain, she would wear loose-flowing silk skirts, cut scandalously above the knee, maybe even to mid-thigh if she was feeling particularly roguish, and a corset with gentler boning.
And boots with a wide toe box. Millie abandoned her pointy shoes with a hearty kick.
“Why did you wear it?”
“Because I wanted to look professional for my first lesson with Mr. Donmarin.”
Millie had styled her hair and put on her makeup and jasmine perfume, too. She believed maintaining her beauty standards, regardless of circumstance, would not only make her feel better, it would show the uppity sorcerer apprentice that he hadn’t beaten her.
The dragon wrinkled his snout. “But you didn’t want to smell professional?”
Millie looked down at the stained taffeta, held her breath against the ripeness that was festering in the pits of the dress.
There were no servants here to launder her clothes, and her cleaning education began and ended with the removal of pine resin out of cat hair.
Of course she knew soap was involved, and something called a washboard, but the technique was beyond her.
And besides, as far as she knew, pirates didn’t have designated washrooms on their galleons.
Maybe all that salt spray sanitized everything?
“Transformation is an ugly business,” she said stoutly, “but worth it in the end. That’s when it’s beautiful.”
Dirk remembered the dark gaps in his scales. Was that what was happening to him? Not a curse, as he first suspected, but transformation?
“Dirk, keep moving,” Sir Roger called around a mouthful of pottage.
The baby luck dragon jumped, realizing he’d come to a standstill. He scurried after the princess.
“You really think so?” he asked when he drew even to her ankles. “About what you said, the transformation?” It was a far more palatable idea than Bradley’s curse leaking into him.
“Of course,” his princess assured him. “It takes effort. Struggle. And those are never as pretty as the bards make them sound to be in their songs. They glorify the outcome rather than the work that went into it—all those busted knuckles, smelly clothes, empty bellies, and these infernal laps.”
She flashed Sir Roger a pointed look; he waved his spoon at them to keep going. “But it sucks less when you have a friend going through it with you, doesn’t it?”
Dirk felt the anxiety vining in his stomach halt its nefarious climb. “Sure does.”