Chapter 44
MANNERLESS brUTES AND MISCONCEPTIONS
When Bradley thwacked her too hard across the buttocks during this morning’s harpoon training, Millie ignored it.
When he glowered at her during speech therapy, she thought he was just concentrating.
When he snapped at Dirk for showing up late to breakfast—again—she chalked it up to a poor night’s sleep or the unusually hot day or maybe he’d burned his mouth on his scone.
The apprentice was rather prickly that he’d had to give up his beloved pottage for breakfast, relying on yogurt drizzled with honey and nuts and scones smeared with butter and strawberry jam studded with candied lemon peel for his morning sustenance, but Millie wasn’t.
Now, during Sir Beauregard’s lesson, he hunched over his sorcery book du jour like a covetous troll and flipped through its pages noisily.
The crisp pages thwip-thwip-thwipped like linen sheets upon a clothesline in a brisk breeze.
If that wasn’t distracting enough, the apprentice was muttering to himself.
Millie could appreciate the occasional murmured outburst upon reading something fascinating or enlightening, but these were snide remarks about her lessons.
Specifically the answers to the questions Sir Beauregard posed to her.
“And if tacking means turning the bow through the wind,” Sir Beauregard said, “then jibbing is?”
Millie scrunched up her nose. Memorizing the parts of a ship had been easier than mastering the terminology of how a ship moved through the water.
In this case, she was a visual learner, and it wasn’t like they were on a dock watching the sailboats twisting and turning through the bay. “Turning the bow out of the wind?”
“Turning the stern through the wind,” Bradley muttered. “It’s not that difficult.”
She flung a glare over her shoulder, but his eyes were glued to the page in front of him.
“Turning the stern through the wind,” Sir Beauregard corrected her.
“I don’t see how you’d do that.”
The knight smiled apologetically and spread his hands. “It’s not like I have a ship to show you, Millie.”
From his post at the door, Sir Roger cleared his throat loudly.
“Miss Millie,” Sir Beauregard amended with a foul look at the hedge knight. “Let’s move on. Now, when I’m easing a sail, what am I doing?”
“I know that one! You’re letting out the sails, releasing the tension.”
“Why would you do this?”
“To—”
“Reduce power,” the apprentice snorted.
Millie shoved upright from where she sat on the floor and stormed over to his desk.
Bradley straightened out of his hunch and regarded her with a cool, unaffected expression, his hands flat on his thighs. “Yes?”
“Do you feel good about yourself?” she demanded. “Do you want a trophy for getting all the answers right? How about you focus on your own work instead of interfering with mine?”
His blue eyes narrowed.
“Well go on.” She shoved a finger at his open book. “Your expecto, indurus, and reparo spells are waiting for you.”
She knew speaking flawless High Aetherial would get under his skin, not that she had any magic to use them as a conduit, and when his mouth pursed and shoulders tightened, she knew she had.
“Or better yet, leave,” she suggested. “You’ve been an absolute beast since Miss Penelope’s visit. You can take your sour attitude back to the workroom and leave me in my training room in peace.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and sat unbudging.
“It’s my tower. I can study where I please.
Which would go a lot smoother if your fumbling wasn’t so distracting.
How hard is it to remember that you reef a sail by decreasing its surface area and you trim a sail by adjusting its angle and shape to optimize performance?
And whichever you choose is entirely dependent on the angle of heel you’re aiming for and whether the air is light or heavy? ”
“I don’t think I covered that technique yet,” Sir Beauregard said, checking his notes.
Millie’s fingernails bit into her palms. She winced, not realizing her hands had clenched into fists. That pressure point in his neck was looking mighty tempting. Hit that, and he’d pass out for ten minutes of sweet, sweet silence.
Instead, she turned on her heel and stormed out of the training room. Sir Roger quickly followed her out onto the landing. “Miss?”
“I’ll be right back!”
When she returned, she wiped the sweaty locks from her face and thrust the carving of a sailboat into Sir Beauregard’s hands. “Teach me with this.”
Bradley erupted from his chair. “Where did you get that?”
It was a pointless question—they both knew she’d swiped it off his nightstand. She ignored him and said to Sir Beauregard, “Demonstrate tacking, jibbing, heeling, and all the rest. I’m ready.”
The knight moved around behind her and put the sailboat in her hands. His hands layered over hers, and he lowered his head to speak into her ear. “Pretend the wind is coming from the right.”
“That’s starboard.”
“Very good.” He angled their hands, and thus the sailboat, towards starboard. “This is—”
Bradley plucked the carving out of Millie’s hands. Sir Beauregard straightened, but he didn’t move away from Millie. In fact, his hand landed on her shoulder.
A different fire ignited in the apprentice’s gaze. The knight should not be touching her like that. Where was his sense of propriety? Gone with wherever he tossed his shirt most days, Bradley suspected.
The sailboat creaked under the pressure of Bradley’s tightening grip.
“That’s enough for this lesson,” Sir Roger announced, striding forward.
“Our hour isn’t up.” Sir Beauregard thrust his free hand at the red sand spilling through the hourglass.
The hedge knight seized the hourglass and gave it a good shake. The red sand rushed to the bottom. “Would you look at that? How time flies! Let’s go.”
Grumbling, Sir Beauregard yanked his elbow back when the older knight reached for him. “I know how to walk.”
“And yet you’re so inefficient at it. My grandmother can walk faster than you.”
When they were gone, Bradley snarled down at her, “You had no right to take this.”
“I’ll stay out of your business if you stay out of mine,” Millie fired back.
“You’ll stay out of my business? You haven’t stayed out of my business since the day you got here, Tula.”
The venom in his voice forced her back at step. Then another and another as the apprentice advanced.
“Every dawn I wake up with you tangled around me like flotsam. Every morning I recite these embarrassing, insulting, demoralizing tongue-twisters so I don’t slip back into a stutter.
Every day I have to endure seeing you and Dirk excelling at everything you touch while I have wasted four months with nothing to show for it! ”
Millie flinched as her back hit the wall.
Although he wasn’t touching her, the apprentice had her pinned there, and he wasn’t being “nice” like he had in the alcove.
The air stirred at his feet, whisking up the sand and fluttering the hem of his robe.
His blue eyes were aflame, sparking like fireflies caught in bottles of colored glass.
Power radiated off him, something wild and unbridled.
Her hand flattened against her stomach, the decorative beading and embroidery of her corset imprinting into her palm—halfway to the cinquedea letter opener.
“And every night I have to endure the stink of your laundry!” The apprentice tore his hands through his long black curls.
“I have less than sixty days left. Two months to accomplish what I could not in four. What hope do I have? What help? Dirk used to lend me his luck, but I hardly see scale or feather of him anymore. And you—”
“What about me?” Millie shouted. “Your troubles did not begin when I landed on that balcony. In fact, maybe some of them could’ve been alleviated if we’d become friends, but you never gave me the chance!”
Instead of reaching for her letter opener, she lunged forward into his space. “I greeted you cordially, but you took one look at me and decided I was worth nothing more than the disgust and revulsion you’d give a festering sore.
“Since I’ve come here, you’ve blamed me for everything wrong in your life!
The Major Inconvenience. Tula. The hellion disturbing your peace.
This grindstone around your neck that you put there instead of trusting me to do what I said I would—mind my own business.
Without a chaperone. If we couldn’t be friends, as least we could stay out of each other’s way. ”
“You, a friend?” he scoffed, unmoving. “You treated me like a servant.”
“Well, as someone who’s never had an actual friend before, excuse me for defaulting to the most applicable etiquette I was familiar with.
You weren’t a visiting dignitary, so I didn’t have to pander, and you’re not a family member, so I couldn’t be overly familiar.
Thus, servant. Besides, Amberlian servants have rated the highest on Continent Careers’ job satisfaction and mental health polls for the last five decades because their employers—my family—treat them with kindness and respect. ”
“What do you mean, you never had any friends? You’re a princess!”
“As if that entitles me to friendship? It makes me a target.”
With an abrupt step, she turned away from him, her body in profile. Her hands rose slowly to opposite arms as if to hug herself. She caught the motion and yanked her hands back down, clasped them over her stomach instead. Shoulders back, spine straight. Armored.
In a more controlled voice, she continued, “Even in Amberly, there are rotten apples. People who think only about how my position as the crown princess can benefit them instead of being my true friend. It was safer to delve into a book or run away in the woods with Duchess. Where I could just be myself, with no one deferring to my title or cozying up to me because of it.”