Chapter 41
ROWDY RANDY RABBITS RUT REALLY RAPIDLY, IMPROPER THOUGHTS, AND MORE JEALOUSY
In the weeks that followed, the tower residents adapted to a new routine.
Bradley still tortured Millie every morning with physical training, she retaliated with vulgar tongue-twisters designed to emasculate or embarrass him, and the Heroes were let out of the dungeon one at a time to train the princess how to be a pirate while the sorcerer apprentice hunched over his books in the corner and glowered out under lowered lashes.
Dirk had become somewhat of a recluse when he wasn’t training with Sir Roger or defeating another Hero, spending his free time sleeping in his claw-foot tub of treasure.
To this day, Millie still struggled to lift her chin past the pull-up bar. If there was a verbal method of expressing agony more potently than screaming, her muscles were doing it now.
Her shaking fingers loosened from the bar without her consent (mutiny!), and she slipped through Bradley’s grip. His strong hands slid across her ribs before they dropped away from her sweaty armpits and she landed in the sand at his feet.
Wordless and silently watching (or judging) her as always, the apprentice stepped around her, jumped up, and performed his own pull-ups with perfect execution.
She crawled out of the way and began stretching, as she always did when her body rebelled, and watched.
Gone were the days when she regarded him only with envy and stinging pride.
Now, those two emotions were equally mixed with dogged determination—she would watch, she would pick apart his movements like she was dissecting a disgusting creature (because she could not bear to imagine dissecting a frog or bunny or anything similarly adorable), and she would learn.
Millie had learned much already that way—push-ups, squats, and how to climb the winding steps more efficiently without overtaxing her muscles.
She couldn’t run up and down the stairs with Bradley’s proficiency yet, but she could definitely walk them without wanting to keel over and die.
If only she could master these pull-ups with the same quickness Bradley had mastered his stutter.
Only yesterday upon the eastern balcony, her sitting up straight and him hunched forward with his elbows digging into his thighs, the apprentice had stared into his dwindling cup of tisane, lips moving silently as he memorized the tongue-twister du jour.
Then, blue eyes brighter than the morning sky, he’d looked up at her and said, “Rowdy randy rabbits rut really rapidly.”
“Yes, they do,” Millie agreed, then she burst into applause. “Mr. Donmarin, you did it!”
The grin that had split his face and taken years off his face faltered. Had his stutter truly been a psychosis all along?
Bradley set his mug of tisane down on the patio table and plucked up a lump of brown sugar from its bowl. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he said, “Amp. Amp—” He sucked in a frustrated breath. “AMP—”
Instead of enlarging with the simple amplio spell, the sugar lump exploded.
Millie shrieked and flung up her hands, shielding herself from a spray of hard brown crystals. When she lowered them, Bradley was watching the desert wind flick scorched granules from his palm.
She leaned forward and set her hand softly upon his arm. “Don’t give up.”
“Rowdy randy rabbits rut really rapidly,” he muttered. Flawlessly. His body trembled under her hand, but he didn’t shy away from her touch. “What is this curse?”
His fierce eyes were wet when he looked at her, then he stood and strode so forcefully from the balcony, the wake of his passage nearly yanked Millie off her seat.
He’d been able to speak Commons ever since, but not a syllable of High Aetherial.
In the mornings after her soul-crushing workouts, she still coached him through another tongue-twister and many other speech exercises, just to be sure.
And they worked, on everything but the language of magic.
So long as he didn’t attempt to use his magic, no one would’ve known the apprentice had ever been cursed.
Rustling in the sand broke her studious contemplation of Bradley’s backside, which is where her attention always seemed to drift whenever his bunching shoulder muscles grew monotonous.
Bradley might be an insufferable perfectionist, but he was a handsome insufferable perfectionist. Her brown eyes strafed to the right—Fink.
The black-footed ferret in his dapper vest and enchanted collar had wormed his way through the dungeon bars and currently scampered over to her for his morning cuddle.
Achy and cross, Millie forgot all about her own troubles as the ferret crawled into her lap and promptly rolled over to expose his fat white belly.
Fink whined happily as she obligingly stroked his fur and played with his toes and rubbed his ears and tugged lightly on his tail.
He was far more amenable and personable than Duchess, who much preferred to be admired from afar. Unless you had caviar to share.
Millie scooped up the ferret and brought him close for a conspiratorial whisper. “Now he’s just showing off. Again. Care to do something about it?”
The yellow opal on his collar glowed, and Fink squeaked.
He hopped down from her hands, darted across the sand, and just when Bradley’s boots dipped low, the ferret leapt.
The apprentice was so consumed with his pull-ups that he didn’t realize the ferret was climbing up his robe until his tiny nails dug into his arm.
“Hey!” the apprentice exclaimed.
Fink reached the bar and proceeded to nip Bradley’s fingers.
“Stop that.”
The ferret squeaked a laugh and nipped some more.
Bradley released one hand from the bar to swipe at the ferret. Fink, being the exceptionally slinky and agile furry noodle that he was, easily evaded. The ferret then balanced over the hand that still held the bar, squatted, and released a yellow stream of urine.
“Ugh!” Bradley dropped to the sand and held his hand out like it had recently become possessed and was trying to strangle him. He hurried over to the spring and splashed water onto the offending liquid.
The occupants within the dungeon chuckled.
Millie rose and lifted her hands to catch Fink.
The opal glowed on his collar, and the ferret leapt into her arms. She set him on the sand with a playful swat and watched him scurry back to the safety of the dungeon before Bradley could think to catch him and feed him to the groupers in the spring.
Fink crawled into Jax’s lap, and the deckhand favored her with an appreciative smile.
“Stairs,” Bradley barked at her. “Now.”
“You know,” Sir Beauregard Beauchamp drawled, leaning against the bars, “the rest of us wouldn’t mind getting our heart rates up in the morning.” He winked at Millie.
The princess pressed her lips so she wouldn’t smile and turned away.
The knight wasn’t particularly clever in his flattery, nor subtle in the way he found a reason to be free of his shirt (and sometimes his pants) whenever she was around, but the way he looked at her .
. . The suitors her parents had introduced her to only saw her title, but Sir Beauregard Beauchamp saw her as a woman, and that was a whole other matter entirely.
She wouldn’t pursue him, of course. Sir Beauregard was clearly a rake and dallying with him would only distract her from her goal, but it was still nice to be desired.
“I very much would mind,” Duncan said, looking up from where he read a book by crystal-light. The gnome shuffled his knees closer to his chest and angled the book propped against them into the purple glow. “Mornings are for quiet reflection. Study.”
“Of course I wasn’t talking about you, Duncan,” Sir Beauregard replied amiably. “But Jax and I are used to a little exercise, not to mention the old man—”
Sir Roger cuffed the taller knight across the back of the head. “That’s ‘Sir Roger’ to you, whelp. You want a little exercise? You can do pull-ups just fine in here. Push-ups, too. Those’ll get your heart rate up in no time.”
“But what about cardio?” He slid Millie a sly smile.
She cocked an eyebrow. “What about it? These stairs would have you crying for your mother in two minutes.”
“Oh, I’ll be crying a woman’s name alright, but it won’t be my mother’s.”
“You want cardio?” Sir Roger asked. “You can run away from the foot I’m about to shove up your ass. Git.”
Sir Beauregard didn’t push himself away from the dungeon door until Bradley approached.
They were of an even height, though the knight was thicker.
Bradley’s tight jaw and burning blue eyes were warning enough, and Sir Beauregard sauntered off.
The apprentice watched him go, fingers twitching to lob a fireball at that thick blond hair, then turned to the hedge knight.
“I’ll be back with”—Bradley caught himself before he could stutter on breakfast and amended it with—“food.”
“Thanks very much,” the hedge knight said, fixing Bradley with a pointed look.
The apprentice nodded once and joined the princess on the stairs.
Her endurance had become so they could walk amicably side by side now, should they wish to be amicable or tolerate closer proximity.
Which they rarely did. But he would do so today, because she deserved chastising for that prank with the ferret.
It undermined his authority, and that simply would not do.
Nor could he ignore the risk to the princess’s safety any longer.
After Dirk had “defeated” the Heroes and the princess had assimilated them into her talent stable, the Heroes had not seen scale nor claw of the dragon.
This was to preserve the illusion that Dirk was a Great Red without the use of spells, which would wear on the luck dragon eventually.
Every once in a while, Dirk would roar and shake the tower with a silly stone, but without a sighting to back it up, the Heroes had become desensitized.