The Robber Knight's Protege

39 - A Hairy Situation

This was not going to be fun.

Fye muttered a string of her favorite expletives as she glared at herself in the mirror of the little room she had rented at the inn. Not only was the wrapping she had put around her bosom in an attempt to flatten herself out horribly uncomfortable, but it didn't work as well as she had hoped. She simply had too much femaleness to obscure her gender.

"This won't work," she declared. "Ugh. Why do I have to have these stupid things?"

Xander wrapped his arms around her from behind, making her go warm all over. For a fuzzy moment, she forgot about the frustrations of having two huge mounds protruding out of her chest. "I like them," he declared. "They suit you. And you have to have them because without them, our future children would have to suckle at the breast of some other woman."

Future children? She sneered at him in the mirror and wriggled out of his grasp. "If you're trying to flirt, you're not doing a very good job. Look at me. The duke is never going to think I'm a man—even with the fake beard!" She gestured at the glob of hairiness that Reuben had brought for her from a theatre troupe. It rested on the room's hard bed, taunting her.

The plan was simple. Work as a servant at the tournament. Stay close to the duke. Make sure he didn't cheat. Hopefully find out something about him that was so humiliating that it would destroy him when Fye shouted it from the rooftops.

But there was no way the plan would work—all thanks to Fye's bosom.

"I could just kill him," Xander said. As serious as Fye's hatred of large breasts.

"And end up in a dungeon yourself?" Fye asked. "No. I'll just..." She sighed. "I'll keep a leather breastplate on. That, plus this devil-sent wrapping, should disguise the shape." Reaching for her knife, she went on, "Now all I have to do is chop off most of my hair, and—"

"Wait," Xander protested, steering the knife away from her dark hair. "I think you should keep your hair."

"Xander. I don't have a choice but to keep my breasts but I do have a choice about the mess on top of my head. So let the knife go, and—"

"I like your hair," he repeated, tangling the fingers of his free hand in her hair, pulling her close to him. "It's soft and shiny, long and beautiful..."

"It can back," Fye said, her voice flat. "I might even let it grow back eventually."

Before Xander could utter another word, she started hacking away her hair. The act was third on her list of best things she had ever done. The first was becoming a knight. She wasn't sure what the second one was, but she decided to leave the spot open just in case.

Xander, forlorn, eyed the pile of hair on the floor, then looked at her. A jagged mess of hair bobbed around her chin. The disappointment in his eyes only lasted for a few seconds. A smile spread across his face. Then he laughed, a roar of laughter that Fye was sure everyone in the inn could hear.

"You look ridiculous," he breathed between laughs.

In a movement so fast Fye barely registered it herself, she put the tip of her knife under his chin. He stopped laughing.

They stared at each other.

Fye could punish him for making fun of her, but that would hardly do any good because he was right—she would have to get someone else to make her hair look halfway decent. As it was, it looked like someone had cut her hair while she was asleep because they wanted to play a cruel joke on her.

"But you're still beautiful," Xander said, seemingly unaware of the knife that was still resting against his flesh.

Her cheeks heated, and she continued to stare at him, a thousand times more captive than she had been in the dungeon.