Chapter 31
HOW DARE YOU STEAL FROM A PIRATE, UNSAFE MAGIC, AND CHEESE GRATER FUN TIME
In the end, it was Bradley who took Millie “shopping.” It was bad enough for a princess to be snooping about Master Excelsior’s things, and entirely unacceptable to let a foreign hedge knight join her.
Sir Roger was dismissed to his cell for the remainder of the day, which was just fine with him.
Rarely was a hedge knight, and an old one at that, afforded to nap as much as he been able to since coming into the dragon’s employ.
Bradley was an absolute bore to shop with, always sulking and hulking about, but he was very handy against anything creepy crawly that had no right to be lurking in bedrooms or storage rooms or in any part of any domicile, period.
He had little to contribute conversation-wise, so Dirk and Millie chatted amongst themselves as she discovered a plethora of serviceable outfits for training in, plus a few things for Sir Roger.
Since her carpet bag was in the bedroom, Dirk practiced his flight maneuvers, particularly his loop-de-loops and sidewinders, by whisking all her discoveries to their respective locales.
He didn’t know where best to put Millie’s things, since Bradley was so particular, so he piled them according to type—footwear, outerwear, underwear, and miscellaneous—under the bedroom window for her to sort through later.
Sir Roger’s he just dumped on the floor at the foot of the snoozing hedge knight’s cot.
They were exploring their fifth room (which, like all the others, proved uninhabitable by any standard of living), when the unthinkable happened.
In order to drown out the princess and dragon’s vapid chatter, the apprentice had taken to reciting the tongue twister he’d learned that morning.
Dirk the Dangerous dozes dreamily deep in dungeons dank.
His words were soft yet confident, muttered under his breath so as to not attract attention, and since he was just slouching against the doorframe after clearing the room of creepy crawlies, it was easily done.
Dirk and the princess raided wardrobe, dresser, and closet with the aid of cinquedea letter opener and claw, and the princess discovered a salt-weathered chest tangled in a bunch of fishing gear under the bed.
It was a strangeness that had become commonplace—there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to any of the storage decisions in this tower whatsoever.
Well, no one hid anything under the bed that wasn’t valuable or personal, so of course she had to open it.
Since no key could be found, Millie inserted her letter opener into the lock and gave it a wiggle. After a click, a pop, and a hiss of pressurized air now released, the sea chest opened. She replaced the letter opener in her corset, lifted the lid, and gasped.
Dirk immediately abandoned the wardrobe, a silk scarf tangled in his pearly horns. “What is it, Millie? What did you find?”
From across the room, Bradley quieted as the princess lifted a gold jewelry box into the sunlight. He straightened immediately, sensing a hum of power. Magic. What was a magical artifact doing outside the workroom?
“It’s gorgeous,” the princess breathed, turning it towards the window to reveal its details.
Whelks and scallops and sea grass decorated the top and sides, and if Bradley didn’t know any better, he would’ve expected to discover pearls inside.
But he did know better, thanks to his Lost Relics course at the College, and he lurched out of his slouch.
His long legs had him across the room in a second, and he yanked the jewelry box out of the princess’s hands before she could open it.
“Hey!” The princess jumped and flailed for the box, but he merely held it above her head, out of reach. “That’s for my little treasures and keepsakes. I chipped two nails digging this out from that pile of fishing gear. Get your own!”
Millie elbowed the apprentice in the gut, and when he doubled over with a wheeze, she grabbed the jewelry box.
Bradley had been clobbered before when fighting marlin and sea monsters, so while he gasped for air, his grip never once released the box.
“The gall of you, sir, to think you can steal what a pirate has already procured for herself!”
With one hand still fighting to wrest the jewelry box free, Millie unsheathed the letter opener from her corset. She wouldn’t deliver a mortal strike, but she would pepper him with a vast amount of very inconvenient holes. The first one indented the meat between Bradley’s forefinger and thumb.
“Gah!” The apprentice lurched back, bumping into the dragon.
Dirk careened into the open wardrobe. Vintage ballgowns, bonnets, and shawls sprang off their hangers and hooks and buried the poor little creature under pounds of silk, tulle, linen, and lace.
“Just let go,” Millie shouted.
In their skirmish, the jewelry box latch popped free and the lid sprang upright. A nautilus shell necklace, beautifully polished and preserved, seemed to jump off its velvet cushion and into the air.
Millie’s eyes sparkled with delight at the sight of such a beautiful thing, but the sorcerer apprentice knew its true danger. He caught the necklace by its chain, stuffed it into the pocket of his robe, and shoved the empty jewelry box into the princess’s stunned hands.
She threw it over her shoulder where it landed on the fishing gear piled atop the bed. “How dare you.”
The princess plucked the hairpin from her coiffure. Her auburn hair tumbled against her shoulders and down her back, giving her a wild look that was very distracting when combined with her corset and his boxer briefs.
Now that Millie was armed with something pointy in each hand, the hairpin and the letter opener, she had a desire to revisit her previous training in Stabbing a Yellow-Bellied Cad in the Guts with a Cutlass, for Beginners.
She advanced upon him, seething. “First you humiliate me and now to try to rob me of what happiness I can find in a simple jewelry box! Just because you’re a miserable grump doesn’t mean you have to pollute everyone else’s lives, too.
Piss and plagues, I bet you can’t take any pleasure from this world, can you?
You probably masturbate with a cheese grater! ”
Bradley dodged the stab of the letter opener and the slash of the hairpin, caught Millie’s wrist, and flung her over his shoulder. She landed on her back on the bed amongst the fishing nets with a surprised, “Oof!”
Feather stuffing long since decomposed to dust rose in a mushroom cloud to the ceiling.
The apprentice kicked away the objects of impalement that had fallen from her hands. Finally, he could explain to her the danger she knew nothing about without getting shanked in the kidneys.
Sneezing, the princess emerged from the dust cloud.
She attempted to jump onto his back like a wildcat, but her foot got caught in a crab trap.
Bradley seized the net and yanked. Millie fell again and rose to find herself shrouded by in a bedsheet like a child’s ghost costume for Samhain and what felt like a band of iron trapping her arms against her body.
The apprentice was insufferably strong, and without the use of her elbows (or teeth, as they were blocked by the sheet) to harass the softer parts of his body (if they even existed), she had to resort to wriggling.
Unfortunately no amount of wriggling would free her, but she refused to give up.
“Let me out and fight me like a man, you steaming heap of goblin turds!”
At this moment, the luck dragon finally freed himself from the wardrobe. A bonnet now joined the shawl tangled amongst his horns. Dirk, caught up in the moment, shouted, “Remember your training, Millie! Make his instep your bitch!”
The princess obeyed, with the same vehemence of an ornery donkey, and the apprentice staggered back with a smarting foot.
Millie yanked the sheet off her head, her auburn hair sticking out at every angle like the quills of an enraged hedgehog.
“Thank you, Master Dirk.” She whirled on the apprentice. “You.”
Millie threw the sheet aside, snatched up her cinquedea letter opener, and leveled it at him. “Try that flip move again.”
Bradley couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He could out-maneuver her, out-strength her, and he certainly outweighed her, and yet there was no ounce of quit to be found in her. Not even with her blistered and bandaged hands. She was infuriatingly tenacious.
Switching tactics, the apprentice yanked the nautilus necklace from his pocket by its chain. The jumbling about it had experienced in his pocket had only polished it to an even more alluring luster.
As expected, its appearance refocused the princess pirate’s attention.
“You will return my property to me at once,” Mutineer Millie demanded, stomping forward.
“Skin my scales,” Dirk whispered.
The fishing nets, the salt-weathered chest, the marine decorations on the jewelry box, it all made sense now!
“No, Millie. Don’t touch it!” With a distressed cry, he sent the princess stumbling back with a whoosh of wind from his tail.
She caught herself by seizing one of the bed’s posters and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Crone’s Crooked Tits, why not?”
“Touch this,” Bradley shouted, “a-and it will steal your v-voice! If that’s what you w-want, then reach for it. Caelus knows I c-could use some p-peace and quiet around here!”
“Mr. Donmarin!” Millie straightened out of her crouch as quick as the darkness that chases an extinguished light. “You barely stuttered just now.”
The apprentice touched his throat, suddenly self-conscious and bewildered and hardly daring to believe. “I-I—”
No other words were forthcoming. He released a frustrated sigh. He’d had it, just for a second, and lost it, whatever it was. His fingers slipped from his throat to clench the collar of his robe. Dammit!
The spell of his momentary victory gone, the princess eyed the necklace in his hand. The apprentice squared off, ready to truss her up in that fishing net if she charged him again.
“Let’s all take a breath,” Dirk suggested.
The princess pushed her bottom lip out in disgruntled consideration, then threw up her hands. “Fine.”
As Bradley replaced the necklace in the jewelry box, Millie fished around under the discarded sheet to reclaim her hairpin.
After twirling her hair up into a bun and securing it, she sat on the edge of the bed with her letter opener once again sheathed.
Another, much smaller, dust cloud rose from the mattress with a light foom. “I want a new necklace.”
“What?” Bradley and Dirk asked.
“By the laws of piracy, that shell necklace, enchanted or not, rightly belongs to me. I need it for my brand.”
“Your . . . brand?” the apprentice echoed.
“Precisely. Not only will I be the one-in-ten pirate captain Sir Roger spoke of, I will also be the best dressed. And that means accessories.”
“Oh, good for you.” Dirk clapped.
Bradley glared at him, and the applause petered out.
Turning back to the princess, the apprentice made a few calculated decisions in rapid-fire succession, and they all revolved around the fact that there was a magical artifact, and a dangerous one at that, outside of the sorcerer’s workroom.
Given the princess’s stubbornness, she might just go behind his back to reclaim what she thought was rightfully hers.
Furthermore, she might not reveal to him any other magical surprises she found, possibly endangering not only herself, but them all.
A compromise was needed here. “You can have any necklace you find,” he signed, “so long as it’s not a magical artifact. You can keep anything, so long as it’s not magical.”
Her fingers drummed against the crook of her elbow as she thought. “I find your terms acceptable.”
“Your. Word,” he insisted.
“You have my word.” She stuck her tongue out at him. The princess relaxed, leaning back on her hands upon the mattress. Her expression turned curious. “So what is a magical artifact doing here, in an obscure bedroom? Olabeus would never dream of leaving something so precious outside his workroom.”
“Master Excelsior hasn’t been here for over fifty years,” Dirk told Bradley, “and who knows when he last cleaned the place up before that? You’ve seen his office at the College—the man’s a hoarder. Do you think he missed it? Do you think he missed anything else?”
Yes, and yes. That parchment with the dark magic instructions on it was proof enough. But there was a more important question on Bradley’s mind. “I felt the magic inside that jewelry box from across the room. You were three feet away from it. Why didn’t you stop her?”
“I—” Dirk coiled in on himself, unsure. Why hadn’t he sensed the magic? He was a dragon for Caelus’s sake. He was magic made flesh. If magic were truffles, he and his kind were champion truffle hunters. “I don’t know.”
“It could’ve been booby-trapped, Dirk! Your princess could’ve gotten hurt. It could’ve hurt all of us!”
“I made a mistake.” A ripple of navy coloration darkened his scales from his neck down to his tail. “Skin my scales, Bradley! It won’t happen again.”
Even as he said the words, Dirk wasn’t so sure. First he was losing his scales, now his senses were dulling to magic? He needed those to battle the Heroes, more of which were sure to come. And very soon.
“I’m going to my room,” he blurted, and fled the room without a backwards glance.
The princess rose and whacked Bradley in the arm. “Nice going.”
“Me?” He hefted the jewelry box. “Your. Fault.”
“Somebody would’ve discovered that sooner rather than later.”
In what world? Neither he nor Dirk had felt any need to explore beyond their respective suites. He thrust his finger towards the stairwell with a scowl.
“I know, I know,” the princess groused as she stomped past him. “No chaperone, no looting. I’m going. But don’t expect me to go fast. My legs are— Ah!”
Bradley pressed his free hand into the small of her back, pushed, and kept pushing all the way up the stairs.