Chapter 50
ARCHMASTER, LEAKY MAGIC, brADLEY IS SNEAKING AROUND
Pinching pins between his lips, Bradley carefully reattached the white lace fringe to the sleeve of a lemon-colored dress.
It was finer work than mending nets, but his father had insisted his son learn the basics so he could give his poor mother a break and upkeep his own clothes.
He sat on a stool with his back propped up against the door, when he wasn’t hunched over his work, with a pile of the princess’s looted clothes at his feet.
Every other stitch, he flicked his eyes to the men cleaning the suite.
They’d been at it for the last seven days, ever since that fight had broken out in the dungeons.
In the mornings, after the princess was safely occupied with Sir Roger, with or without the luck dragon, as Dirk was maintaining his own schedule these days, he spirited the tutors out of their cells to help him clean and furnish the princess’s new living quarters.
The Heroes had grumbled at first, of course, as this was servant work, but it did give them the chance to move around and stretch their muscles. And every once in a while when they looted a room in search of the appropriate furnishings, they got a little jolt to their heart rate, including Bradley.
While Jax got attacked by a roosting bat (which Fink valiantly fought off), and Duncan ran away from a scorpion the size of a bread plate (which Sir Beauregard tried to stomp on), Bradley discovered another magical artifact beyond the safety of the workroom—a glass slipper buried under spools of thread and fabric swatches in a sewing box.
The apprentice had quickly secured the glass slipper in the workroom, taking care not to touch it lest it irrevocably alter his physical appearance as this particular artifact was wont to do.
Bradley wasn’t necessarily vain, but he also didn’t want a beard down to his ankles or a fox tail sprouting from his rump.
Now the sewing box sat open at his feet, ready to assist him with whatever needed mending or altering. On the dresser, Prince Henri des Marais serenaded them all from his golden cage. The mundane was always far more tolerable when paired with music.
For their labor, Bradley rewarded the workers with a treat from the kitchen—usually lemonade with nutty oatcakes sweetened with brown sugar and cinnamon, sometimes a scone if the princess hadn’t eaten them all.
Henri and Fink each received a small hermit crab, but they had to return the shell, intact, to be upcycled by the other crabs.
The evening after the princess’s disaster with the lye soap, Bradley had forgone his studies in search of the princess’s suite.
You make time for the things that matter.
Well, what mattered to him was lifting that curse and keeping his magic, obviously.
Certainly not the feel of her hand on his, nor that wisp of teasing, nor any little threads of connection that might’ve formed between them as a result.
Because they weren’t even threads! They were inklings of threads at best.
And yet they had eased something tight within him.
Whatever they were, Bradley needed to clear his head, and he couldn’t do that with the tula all up in his business.
He was going to find that princess an acceptable suite, clean it, furnish it, and make her move out.
She was right, too, about how unnecessary it was for him to chaperone her any longer.
She truly had proven to him that she would not reveal Dirk’s identity, nor sabotage their stay in the tower.
She was whole-heartedly committed to becoming a pirate (the foolish woman) and even if that meant a little more cleaning up on his part, her dedication meant she was out of his hair.
He could finally turn his full attention back to his own endeavors.
And that parchment hidden in the center drawer of the desk.
No distractions, he reminded himself. It’d been his mantra all week.
Bradley flicked his gaze to the Heroes as they put the finishing touches on the princess’s suite.
Jax, the most agile of the three, strung the canopy bed with lengths of sunset-orange gauze, occasionally climbing the posts to make adjustments.
Fink challenged every spider he encountered, dancing and spitting until someone came to his aid with a boot.
Duncan polished every nook and cranny until the furniture gleamed.
And Sir Beauregard was on his hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom tiles.
Above his head, clothes hung on a makeshift clothesline and dripped dry over the tub, which was filled with the most offensive of the princess’s outfits from the other day in desperate need of another soak.
The princess had caught him by surprise the night after her unpleasant adventure with the laundry detergent, interrupting his after-dinner studies to demand a lesson.
Studies being the polite term. He’d been studying the parchment of dark magic again, trying to summon the resolve he’d felt before to commit, and waffling.
Because of her and the possibilities she’d stirred up in his mind.
Dirk, too, who had joined them for supper that evening and attacked his grouper almondine with his customary, “Yummy, yummy, yummy.” He couldn’t remember the last time Dirk had been so cheerful, which was strange, and wondered if he would see the dragon so happy again after he used dark magic.
At the interruption, he couldn’t seem to hide the parchment fast enough.
He made a mess of things, floundering and knocking over his quill and almost ruining Master Excelsior’s books.
He hadn’t been subtle in hiding the parchment, but the princess didn’t comment.
She’d decided to keep her nose to herself and doubled down on her sincere request. Whoever heard of a princess volunteering—no, demanding—to perform manual labor?
“I told you,” she said, hands on her hips and her nose lifted in the air. “I’m not selfish.”
Perhaps not. She was still bossy, however, insisting he teach her how to make the scones, too.
The threads that connected them allowed him to detect an undertone of mirth in her demand, so he tested those threads by calling her a tula.
There was no condescension in his tone, just dry humor.
Her brown eyes hadn’t ignited with indignation; they sparkled with something else entirely.
His mood, which had soured some from the parchment, brightened.
As they left the workroom, he noticed she was wearing the thick socks he’d prescribed, and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Satisfaction, and, if he was being honest, gratitude. She’d listened to him again.
“I wouldn’t wear any of your finery when you’re doing this,” he said when they were in the bathroom.
He shut off the faucet and shuttled the washtub closer to the bathroom floor drain.
Bradley dropped the bar soap into the water to soften and rubbed the residue from his fingers.
“Or anything else that might cause you to slip.”
“Right.” She shucked her socks and hiked up her skirt.
“The Kraken take me.” Bradley wrenched his gaze upward—he would never get used to her liberal flashing of flesh.
Or the unintentional exposure, either, his thoughts turning to the memory he’d tried to suppress: the princess half-naked on his bed with her legs in his lap and his hands rubbing ointment into her skin.
“. . . were wrong about the ointment.”
“What?” Startled and flushing, he chanced a glance below the princess’s raised hemline. Smooth pale skin. She was healed? That wasn’t possible!
Bradley dropped to his knees and grabbed the closest leg for a finer inspection.
“Steady on,” she laughed, grabbing hold of his shoulder when he jerked her leg up to inspect the sole of her foot. “Careful, Mr. Donmarin!”
He couldn’t believe it and ran a hand over the unblemished skin to convince himself it was true.
The seaweed from the Crystal Sea was potent, but not this miraculous.
The princess had been burned, horribly, yet her flesh held no memory of the event.
He rotated her leg, examining the creases at the back of her knee and ankle, wondering if he’d missed a spot and some remained to be healed. No, he’d been very thorough.
No ointment was this powerful, neither was his mother’s song. Something else was at play here, but what?
“But it’s impossible,” he protested. “It’s never worked that fast ever.”
The princess released a one-note chuckle. “I must be incredibly special.”
She very well could be. Amberly might be landlocked, but it wasn’t always so. Once the kingdom had touched the sea, but they had lost that territory in a war centuries ago. It was now the Duchy of Evertea and an ever-present thorn in the peaceful kingdom’s side.
“I mean,” he said, looking up, “you don’t have any merfolk ancestry, do you?”
The world froze with him kneeling in front of her, her foot balancing on the flat of his thigh, her fingers threaded in his hair.
Her brown eyes were wide, her mouth slightly parted, the candlelight shining copper in the auburn locks that tumbled loose from her bun.
He didn’t know when her fingers had moved from his shoulder into his hair, but the sensation was .
. . incredible. And his own fingers, pressing into the soft skin of her calf.
He’d felt such softness before—her lips against his neck.
An unintentional kiss when she’d been suffering from heat exhaustion.
His life had been hard on the Cut, harder still when he discovered he possessed wild magic and left the only world he knew for the entirely new world of the College.
Everything was hierarchy and power and soulless jockeying for position there—sucking the joy of magic right out of your heart, if you weren’t careful—and oftentimes having the right connections was worth more than talent.
He wasn’t used to tenderness from either world, but this moment made him ache for it.