Page 166 of The Discount Damsel

“Darling, I know you’re hurting, but this isn’t healthy.”

“Just leave me alone.”

The vehemence in his voice alerted Zora, and the griffin strode into the workroom with a hiss.

“Away, Zora,” Miss Penelope snapped.

The griffin grumbled and laid down in an alert sphinx pose instead of retreating.

“So you’ll stay,” Miss Penelope said, rising and planting her hands on her slim hips. “Very good. Now will you rise and accompany me on my inspection, or will you continue to just sit there on your ass and wallow? You have thirteen days left, Bradley, and that’s not nothing.”

He didn’t budge.

Miss Penelope’s heart cracked, and she dabbed at the corners of her eyes. This tower, The Crucible, had taken this wondrous gift of a young man and broken him. She didn’t know whether to tear her hair out and scream or break down and sob. She just knew whatever she chose, she couldn’t do it here.

“I see,” she said, voice strained. She sniffed once. “Well, I’ll go about my business and then I’ll be on my way.” She snapped her fingers at the kits rummaging around the ruins. “Zora, do be an active mother and mind your kits, would you? I’ll be right back.”

Striding to the trapdoor, she gave the room a careful, scrutinizing sweep. The desk where the apprentice studied, and where the cherrywood box had lain, was broken to bits. She couldn’t locate the box with this cursory glance, but Bradley’s eyes weren’t black, so hope remained that he hadn’t lost all of his.

In the kitchen, as Penelope took greater care than ever before to unload the supplies, she discovered two things: Bradley had baked some delicious, buttery, melt-in-the-mouth chai-spiced confections, and Lung Shang had sculpted the tower out of the block of brown sugar. The detail was as amazing as it was imaginative—there were two women, one a pirate and the other a street urchin, joining Bradley and the luck dragon, plus an old hedge knight and a bookish gnome. There was a frog, too, tanning itself upon dunes littered with weapons and knights in various poses of defeat.

“That Lung Shang really is the Great Reds’ biggest fan,” she murmured.

The luck dragon wasn’t in his room—which was oddly missing its door—and there was no whisper of him elsewhere, and she could not spare the time to search each and every room for him. Pity, for he would have loved to meet Zora’s kits. She was only mildly worried, assuming the two friends had had a spat. Bradley’s despondent nature had probably driven the sensitive baby dragon into his own depression, but the two of them ought snap out of it in time. They had to.

The shrimp had finally spawned, which was delightful to see, and she selected one new crystal from the tower wall to bring back to her husband to examine before he met his untimely end.

When she returned to the workroom, she discovered the leopard jay kits doing their best to cheer up the apprentice. Bluebell had crawled into his lap, belly up and looking impossibly adorable. Mistral was draped across his shoulders, cuddling Bradley’s head with his whole body. Iseult sat quietly and leaned against the apprentice’s unwounded side while Azura, the most rambunctious of the litter, batted at the tassel ends of his rope belt. The apprentice was so unconscionably immune to the cuteness surrounding him that Miss Penelope wanted to shake him.

Instead, she returned to her crouch in front of him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Squeezed. “Thank you for taking care of the shrimps. These new crystals will be a boon to another generation of sorcerers.”

“Glad I could help make someone else’s dreams come true,” he answered sourly.

“One of them is yours,” she said forcefully. She felt him wince under the power of her squeezing fingers. Her grip loosened only a fraction. “There is always hope, darling boy, if you choose to see it.”

When he didn’t reply, she leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on the top of his head. Rising, she clicked her tongue at the griffin kits. They left the apprentice, Azura giving the tassels one final pounce, and swarmed around her like oversized hornets. In that moving cloud of fur and feather, she mounted her griffin and turned her north.

“Ta-ta, darling,” she murmured softly, and Zora leapt into the sky.

As he leaned back with his feet propped up upon the corner of his desk, Excelsior watched the hunched, unmoving figure of his apprentice through the abalone-framed mirror. Off to the side in his office, Tianzi Twist Treasure Hunt had a line drawn through it, and the odds of the Path of Infernal Dealings had increased in possibility. Excelsior’s drumming fingers left smudges of chalk against the desk’s polished surface that he’d eventually have to wipe away, but not now.

“Don’t give up, boy,” he whispered. “You’re not broken. You’re only knocked down.”

After a long sigh, the sorcerer rose and selected the winding path through his office’s warren of clutter that led him to the wooden mannequin that wore the mithril tunic. He shrugged out of his blue robe and slipped the armor over his chest. He’d seen his wife’s face in the mirror—no doubt she would be in a stabby mood when she returned. While his body could heal almost instantaneously, he still felt pain—which he felt more acutely now that he was approaching his three-hundred-and-eleventh birthday. It was best to take precautions and hope the ride back to the College would cool her wrath.

When she arrived, perhaps he could distract her with an offer of a holiday to Lagunas? He’d heard the tangelo margaritas there were all the rage.

He supposed if the ride and the offer of a lovely holiday by the sea didn’t persuade her off her war path and she stormed his office like she would have in her prime as an elven warrior and started slinging accusations as well as her baton, he could argue that she had given his apprentice a hint without his permission—that little detail about the hag stone—and that this was all tit for tat.

But he knew his precious, beloved wife. She wouldn’t hear reason when her blood was up in defense of a noble cause. No, they would have to fight this one out, then talk when one of them admitted defeat. At least their disputes always concluded with understanding, forgiveness, and vigorous lovemaking. It was just surviving to the lovemaking stage that had him a mite apprehensive.

With another sigh, he took the mithril helmet, too, and fitted it over his white head.

CHAPTER 69

A NEW PLAN AND NO FORWARDING ADDRESS

When the griffin rider was nothing but a speck in the distance, Dirk sounded the all-clear. Millie and Pocket emerged from their room, Fink in Pocket’s arms and Duchess in Millie’s. The wandering Persian had returned when the storm had broken as if she knew a human, or a baby luck dragon recently released from the influence of a cursed warhammer, needed to cuddle her.