Chapter 38
Bradley resembled a sulking orc as he traipsed after the princess: shoulders bowed, bottom lip jutting, brow so furrowed it halved his sight.
How dare she insinuate he couldn’t keep his hand off her?
Did she think that because she was royal and he more common than grass that he couldn’t be trusted to keep his hands to himself?
His parents had raised a gentleman, and one with standards, thank you very much.
He only put his foot on her backside so it’d stop popping up during her planks, and he only gripped her waist to help her with pull-ups.
The ire of his outrage challenged the heat brought on by the sandstorm and roiled off him so intensely, even Dirk avoided him.
The luck dragon busied himself conversing with the princess, thick as thieves. Just as they were at their lessons. Just as they were at every waking hour of the day.
The princess and Dirk. Dirk and the princess.
They were social butterflies, both easily excitable and chatty and wholly engrossed with discussing all the new things they were learning.
Bradley was their exact opposite, quiet and reserved even before he’d been cursed with a stutter.
It wasn’t hard to feel ignored, dismissed to the background.
It’s how Viscount Saltreave treated his village on the Cut. It was how his fellow students had treated him at the College. Why not here, too, in what was supposed to be a sanctuary?
At the bottom of the tower, Bradley stripped off his robe with a vicious yank. He took greater care folding it, setting his spectacles on top. Then he dove head-first into the spring as far away from the world as he could get.
Millie craned over the side of the stone wall, watching the apprentice disappear with effortless kicks of his long legs. Maybe there was a channel down there that led to an underground cave. With or without an air pocket. She could do with some time without his looming and blazing blue eyes.
“He’ll be down there a while,” Dirk told her, practicing his undulations in a circle around the spring. “You can sneak in a swim before he comes back if you’re nervous about him seeing you naked or something. I can close my eyes. I’ve flown in the dark loads of times.”
“The only one nervous about getting naked is him. He sees one glimpse of my ankle or a peek of my shoulder and the man almost faints. Ridiculous.”
She shooed a few hermit crabs aside and perched on top of the stone wall. Carefully, she lowered her legs into the water. A moan escaped her. But caution overrode desire.
“I’m not a very good swimmer, though. It’s why it’s on the chalkboard. And I’m definitely not asking him for lessons.”
The arrogant apprentice would probably stutter on purpose instead of giving her life-saving instructions and she’d drown for sure.
“You don’t have to know how to swim,” Dirk said. “Think of this as a really big bathtub—it’s only twelve feet across.”
“A bathtub with no bottom.”
His mane flared and ruffled—his equivalent to waving her protest away. “What do you have to fear with a luck dragon, a master of the wind and rain, nearby?”
Well, when he put it that way. And the coolness of the water was too heavenly to resist. Millie shucked her corset and eased into the glowing turquoise water up to her neck.
She couldn’t bring herself to release the wall entirely, so she folded her arms upon its ledge, pillowing her chin on top of her forearms, and pointed out, “You know, Master Dirk, Sir Roger is currently attempting to surpass the record of most snores in sixty seconds. You can stop training now.”
The luck dragon continued his undulations. “You didn’t have to fight Ivar the Bane, did you?”
“I shot him in the eye with my panties, didn’t I?” She winked at him. “But I see your point. I admire your dedication, Master Dirk.”
“I’m glad somebody does,” he muttered. Bradley distributed rice paper spells with a miserly hand, still not entirely supporting Dirk’s ambitions to become a Great Red.
“Just don’t exhaust yourself so much that you can’t save me,” Millie said. “In I go!”
With one hand on the rim, Millie pinched her nose shut with the other and submerged her head. Auburn hair swirled dark like tea poured into cream. She caught no sight of Bradley, but something much more fascinating. Motes of white light—bubbles, perhaps—drifted up from the luminous depths below.
When she surfaced, she held one such bubble in her cupped palm. “Dirk, look! It’s a tiny shrimp.”
“Of course it is. Now put it back into the water before it suffocates. It hasn’t grown its wings yet.”
She quickly obeyed, and the luck dragon flew over to verify that the shrimp was safe and sound. The mote of white light reformed around the tiny creature, the little thing sank deeper into the water.
“It was no larger than a sesame seed! It was a wonder I could discern it was a shrimp at all.”
“They come to the surface to spawn, but they’re not ready for it yet,” Dirk said. “Little ones need to be the size of peanuts for that. Soon, though.”
“What are they?”
“Remnants of a bygone era. You didn’t think this tower was built in the middle of nowhere for no reason, did you?”
“So this tower protects them? Why?”
For one thing, after the shrimps spawned, they used whatever energy they had left to fly as high as they could.
Those who made contact with the tower walls cemented there, entwined with their mates forever.
Their wings formed a sort of chrysalis around them, and from that chrysalis grew the crystals that all sorcerers embedded in their staffs as amplifiers.
It was one of the College’s best-kept secrets which Master Excelsior had entrusted them with so they might understand the shrimps’ importance and the gravity of keeping them safe.
Dirk replied with, “Why not?”
Millie couldn’t find a rebuttal worth voicing—did a thing need more than its inherent worth to earn the right to exist? Instead, she asked, “Won’t you join me, Master Dirk? All these little bubbles are so ticklish. You’ll love it.”
The luck dragon landed on the wall and slumped onto his stomach. He dangled a paw over the edge, claws only an inch or two above the surface of the water. “Wish I could.”
“Do you not know how to swim?”
He snorted. “Of course I know how to swim. But there are more than harmless little shrimp fry in that spring, Millie.”
She gave a panicked look down into the turquoise depths and screamed.
A second later, Bradley broke the surface with a loud inhale. He swept his dark curls away from his face, blinked away the water. “What?”
Chest heaving, Millie clung to the side of the spring and fought to rein in her runaway heartbeat. “I thought you were a sea monster coming up to eat me!”
Bradley snorted at that absurdity, and he looked to Dirk for an explanation.
“I was just telling her there are more than just shrimps in the spring,” the dragon said.
The apprentice mimed a biting mouth with his hand and laughed.
An easy kick or two brought him to the opposite side of the spring, and jealousy replaced Millie’s irritation and fear.
The man moved so effortlessly through whatever world he found himself, stairwell or spring.
She would’ve admitted she didn’t mind watching him, not in the least, if they weren’t at war and she hadn’t vowed to loathe him for all time.
“So?” she prompted pissily. “What is down there?”
“Nothing that’ll bother you,” the dragon assured her. “Don’t worry.”
“Too late for that. What bothers a dragon but not a human?” she demanded, hauling herself out of the spring all the same.
Crone’s Crooked Tits, that’d taken a lot more effort than she’d thought, with a bunch of ungainly flailing, too. And in front of a very physically capable man, which brought a stain of embarrassment to her cheeks. Curse him.
“That,” Dirk said, “I’d have to show you.”
Millie sensed the dragon was teasing her. “Go on, then.”
Dirk swung a look at his friend. “Wanna?” His rump gave a little cat-like wiggle in excitement.
Did Bradley want to take the opportunity to show the tula just how out of her depth she was, that she didn’t have what it took physically?
Absolutely. Plus, it would take care of the food problem Sir Roger had posed to them.
What they couldn’t eat fresh or store in the icebox could always be dried—deserts were good at that.
In one fluid movement, Bradley hoisted himself out of the spring. He dropped down onto the ground and paced over to the pull-up bar. After a running start, he jumped, grabbed the bar, and yanked.
A harpoon dropped down with him into the sand.
Millie was only able to keep her expression neutral from the years of instruction by the continent’s finest etiquette tutors.
“A princess should never be too enthusiastic or too impressed about anything,” Miss Josephine had told her.
“In fact, she must keep her emotions close to the vest lest she insult a foreign dignitary, reveal state secrets, or, worst of all, unintentionally encourage an inadequate suitor to keep pursuing her. They’re more clingy and tiresome than an opposing army laying siege to a castle. ”
Bradley swaggered over to the spring, but he didn’t bounce his pectorals like Ivar the Bane had. That kind of physical display wasn’t needed here. Just honed power and indomitable will, the same requirements for not only surviving the sea, but mastering it.
The apprentice nodded to the little luck dragon, and Dirk made a show of stretching and limbering up before he sprang into the air and tucked his body up tight.
“Cannon ball!” Dirk sank below the surface of the spring, uncoiled, and swam out of sight.
Millie’s gaze flicked only to register that Bradley had jumped up onto the stone wall before she peered deeper into the water.
She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of ogling him like she had that morning when she’d learned about push-ups.
Even if he was wet and his black hair framed his face in artful curls and his boxer briefs clung to his thighs and everywhere else in a most pleasing fashion.
It wasn’t hard to ignore him—he was a contemptible snob and she really was concerned for the baby dragon.
“Where is he?” she worried after a few fretful minutes. “Oh!”
A curtain of bubbles rose from the bottom of the spring. True bubbles, not the little motes created by the shrimp, which were suddenly nowhere in sight. Where had they gone? Were they hiding?
Without their light, the spring had grown dark. No longer turquoise, the waters had darkened to cobalt, and a navy blotch at its bottom was growing larger with every second.
Something was rising, and it wasn’t Dirk.
She seemed the only one worried about it; the apprentice leaned forward, calm but watchful, harpoon at the ready.
A six-foot noodle with pearly white horns and claws shot into the air with a lively, “We got a big one!”
A gigantic mouth followed.
Millie screamed and fell off the wall into the sand as a grouper with speckled scales and eyes as big as her fists gulped after the baby dragon.
She’d read accounts of such monstrous things lurking in the watery depths of the world, but she’d never seen one before.
Only momentarily embarrassed by her outburst, she rationalized it as her first lesson in Sea Monster Desensitization 101.
Bradley’s strike was the epitome of precision.
Between one heartbeat and the next, the enormous fish was impaled by the harpoon and tacked against the opposite wall, right between the seams of two stones. The harpoon bowed under the weight of the man-sized fish, but it didn’t break.
Millie rose cautiously, darting a glance into the spring for any more grouper that could be lurking. The water was turquoise again, the tiny shrimps circling ever closer to the surface. Relieved that the danger was over, she lifted her eyes to find Bradley looking down at her.
His gaze was intense. This was it. This was the dedication needed, the grit, the will.
Mutineer Millie met his challenge with a grin. “When do you teach me how to do that?”