Chapter 75
THE DANGERS OF BEING DRIVEN AND A PRINCESS GOES MISSING AGAIN
The Dreary Pelican offered no complimentary breakfast—not that they would have risked the guaranteed food poisoning anyways—so they brought their picnic basket to the beach to make a breakfast of what they could.
They dug a little pit in the sand and built a fire from deadwood, which Dirk maintained with sweeps of his tail as Bradley taught the princess to swim.
The waves were still gentle from last night’s calm, but the undertow dragged at Bradley’s feet. Millie was in front of him on her stomach learning the breaststroke. It was the most intuitive, for nearly everyone had seen a frog kicking through the water and could easily mimic it.
After only a few strokes, Millie knew she would love swimming.
There was something magical about the water buoying her body, reducing the strain of moving herself through the world.
Her limbs had been made strong from training in the tower, as had her lungs, so she did not tire quickly.
The only limiting factor would be the chill of the water.
“Easy,” Bradley laughed as she swam circles around him. “Slow and steady. Swimming is about endurance.”
“It’s also about fun,” Dirk called from the beach. “And breakfast’s ready!”
“I agree with Dirk.” Millie held her breath and dove, spinning a twist like a sea lion before breaching the surface. It was easy to be confident in the shallows when she could stand or push off the sand at any time. Easier to have fun, which she admitted she hadn’t had a lot of these days.
“Go.” Bradley pointed to the shore. “You can’t continue to train on an empty stomach.”
When breakfast was eaten and the pot scoured clean with sand, the three walked down the beach until it ended at the library estate.
The town had woken fully now, those on holiday staking their claim to little plots of beach with colorful umbrellas and the permanent residents bidding for their coin with ice cream and slushies, books, trinkets, skewers of grilled seafood, and aloe-infused sunburn lotion.
Renaldo opened the door before they could even knock, handsome face radiant as the dawn. “Good morning, Master Dirk, my lady.” There was no greeting for Bradley.
In one of the many spare handkerchiefs she’d packed in her suitcase, Millie had wrapped up a few precious teacakes, which she now gave to Renaldo as thanks for the tonics.
The Komodo’s jewel-green eyes sparkled at the gift. He handed her a small sack in return. “Ginger chews. They’re more portable than the tonics.”
She accepted them with another curtsy. “I don’t suppose your doctors have a potion in there that can cure seasickness once and for all, do you?”
“This sorcerer apprentice can’t cure you?”
“I would if I could,” Bradley snapped. “Magic can’t alter anything inherent in a creature, at least not long term. To do so would go against the natural order of things.”
“If you say so. You are the magic student here, after all.” The Komodo’s bow was nothing short of patronizing.
Bradley ground his teeth. “What are the chances you’ll actually find what I’m looking for today in your library index, Renaldo?”
His smile was thin. “Slim.”
“I thought so. Dirk, you alright if I stay behind today? She’s still got a lot to learn.”
Renaldo’s eyes slitted as Bradley stepped back to Millie’s side.
“Sure.” Dirk swirled back to give his princess a quick peck on the cheek. “Make all the fishes jealous, Millie.”
“Obviously.” She gave them both a quick smile and a wave goodbye and started down the sand path.
When she heard the door shut, she glanced over her shoulder. The apprentice had been civil with her since last night, so she attempted a chance at reconciliation.
Lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she asked, “So what did you do to piss that Komodo off?”
“I breathe.”
Millie chuckled. Sobering, she snuck another glance at him. “Are you sure you don’t want to spend the day in the library? We’re here for you and him, you know.”
“The dragon sage in residence doesn’t come back until the full moon, and so far the books have proven unhelpful.
Or rather, Renaldo has. He’ll get anything Dirk desires, but for me .
. .” He blustered a sigh. “Besides, neither of us can fully concentrate knowing you’re out here doing Caelus knows what without supervision. ”
She blew a raspberry at him. “Because I’m so irresponsible.”
“Because you’re so driven you don’t know where your boundaries are,” he said seriously.
Was he calling her reckless? Well maybe that was the price of pursuing your dream!
She stopped, turning to give him a piece of her mind, but she found no malice in his face.
And maybe it wasn’t in her best interests—for now—to confront him about it, especially since he had agreed to help her.
Millie swallowed her retort and followed the apprentice to a jetty full of tide pools.
At the edge of a large pool, Bradley stripped down to his boxer briefs.
He discarded his clothes with the same irreverence he’d shown when he’d ripped a headscarf from his robe’s hem.
Bracing one hand against the rock, he vaulted into the pool, feet pillowed against the sand that had collected at the bottom.
Millie crouched, momentarily distracted by the wee red crabs scuttling away from his toes.
The starfish clinging to the nearby rock remained unfazed at the presence of the pool’s nearest visitor.
For the next two hours, he drilled Millie in holding her breath, treading water, floating, and the breaststroke. They took the briefest break for lunch—more soaked oats and some of the perishable items she’d packed like fruit and cheese—before he had her in the water again.
“Come on,” he barked after another hour. “Kick your feet.”
“I need a break,” she gasped.
“No, you just need to concentrate. You’re getting sloppy.”
“Because I’m tired! Let me go.” She wrestled free of him, kicking fiercely to put some distance between them. “You’re being a bully. Why are pushing me so hard?”
His eyes burned with that strange intensity again. “Because you’re the tula.”
Her fists splashed in the water. “My name is Millie!”
“No.” He heaved himself out of the tide pool and shook the water from his black hair. He held out his hand to her. “Let me show you.”
Curious but mistrustful, she exited the tide pool on her own accord and followed him over the rocks as he looked this way and that before he stopped on the ledge of a smaller pool with no sand at its bottom. He crouched down and pointed. “There.”
She squatted beside him, not too close, and gripped the edge of the pool to keep her balance as she peered inside. “It’s an octopus!”
“A tula,” he corrected.
The tiny pink octopus with long trailing legs had itself wrapped around a purple scallop. Compared to the scallop, the octopus was a minuscule thing, a fact which the tula didn’t seem to notice or chose to ignore.
As Millie watched, the octopus did its darndest to pry open the scallop.
When using just its legs failed, the octopus found a rock to use as a hammer.
Then the little creature hurled the scallop into the wall of the tide pool.
When the scallop made a valiant effort to jettison away by clapping its shell, the tula hitched a ride with two legs, snatched up a piece of broken shell with another two legs, then shoved that shell between the scallop’s lips.
Unable to close and protect itself, the scallop was a goner, and the tiny pink octopus finally got to eat.
“See how tenacious it is?” Bradley’s whisper rustled the salt-crusted hair by her ear. “How ingenious? It is tiny, underestimated, and yet its will is indomitable.”
Millie swallowed, angling to face him. “So what has this got to do with me?”
“That is you.” His blue eyes burned with the fierceness of his belief. “A pretty princess in pink. You had no talent when you came to the tower, no clue either, but you didn’t let that faze you for a second.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You fought for everything, trained harder than anyone expected you to, and you never gave up. Not when I was beastly to you, not when Jax—” He swallowed thickly. “Even now, you are figuring this out. You have to figure this out, Tula, because if you can’t make it, then what hope is left for me?”
“What hope is left for you?” She straightened abruptly. “How dare you put that kind of pressure on me! My indomitable will, as you call it, is hanging on by a thread, and you put me up on some kind of pedestal?”
Bradley held up his hands, shaking his head. “No, Tula, that’s not what I—”
“Stop calling me that!” Her jaw hurt from grinding her teeth. “Oh you selfish bastard, Bradley Donmarin.”
Millie whirled away, collected her things at the training pool, and stormed up the beach.
“T— Millie, wait! Where are you going?”
“Away from you!” She broke out into a run and lost herself in the sea of tourists.
That evening, when she didn’t return to their room, Dirk was beside himself. “You lost my princess!”
Bradley threw up his hands. “I didn’t lose her, she ran away.”
“Same difference! Skin my scales, what did you say to her?”
“I thought I was giving her a compliment, but she took it the wrong way.” He raked a hand through his hair.
“More like you don’t know the difference between a compliment and an insult and you destroyed her soul.”
The apprentice glared at him. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Dirk.”
“Tomato, potato, whatever. I’m going out to look for her.”
“I’ve searched all afternoon until the sun went down. She doesn’t want to be found.”
“Not by you anyway.”
But in the end, Dirk couldn’t find her either. He returned to The Dreary Pelican, sniffling. “I left word with Nash and Renaldo. Don’t know where Jerry lives, otherwise I would’ve asked him, too. They’ll send word if they find her.”
“Dirk, I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean for this to happen.” He headed for the door. “I’ll try again.”
“Don’t. It’s already past midnight and your human eyes are rubbish in the dark. If you start hollering, someone’ll call the marines on you for disturbing the peace. Millie didn’t bring any of my rubies, so it’s not like we have bail money. We just need to wait, no matter how much that sucks.”
Bradley nodded glumly and dropped down to his sleeping spot on the floor.
Dirk eyed him for a long moment, noting the change in his friend.
Then he whisked away to the windows and ensured the shutters were secure in their open position and the moth-eaten curtains tied back.
Instead of Millie’s suitcase, he curled up on the nightstand with his jaw propped on the windowsill.
Even if he fell asleep, he’d be able to smell her if she came home.