“It looksss cooked to me.”

  Naga and Jessica were staring at what was left of the servants’ meal for the evening. There were several grilled chicken breasts which looked perfectly fine to Jessica’s eyes. The idea that someone could be so bad at cooking they instantly made a vomit-inducing dish was the kind of ridiculous trope that belonged to the sorts of shows and comics Jessica did not consume and never had.

  “How long did you cook it for?” Jessica asked.

  “As long as it takesss to cook! They look cooked to me!” the lamia said, frustration dripping from her words.

  Jessica took one over to a cutting board and sliced it open. Behind a thin shell of grill lines lay what could only be described as chicken sashimi.

  “This is not cooked, Naga. See all that pink? That’s raw. That’s why all the servants are throwing up from food poisoning,” Jessica said.

  Naga placed her hands on her snake hips. “And who’s fault is that?”

  “Yours!”

  “No,” Naga said, “it is not. Do you remember what I sssaid while you were dashing off to deal with our little fish poacher? I sssaid I do not cook my meat. How am I to know what is cooked and what is raw? Anything that isn’t bleeding looksss burnt to me.”

  Jessica groaned. Silly her for thinking she’d solved things. Admittedly, putting the carnivorous snake lady in charge of cooking was pretty dumb. She could even see her flawed train of logic, which was that Naga mentioned meat and her brain went ‘meat equals cooking.’

  “No, you’re right, Naga. We’ll figure this out. Let me talk things over with the head chef and I’ll give some more thought about where to put you,” Jessica said.

  “I wouldn’t mind babysssitting those children. I missss dearly playing with my younger brothers and sssisssters.”

  “Yeah… I don’t know about that,” Jessica said, recalling Riza explicitly telling Cappy and Katarina that the lamia would eat them.

  Naga pouted but there was little Jessica could do. Even if the kids weren’t terrified of her, convincing the king and queen to hand their progeny over to a dangerous monster was not going to happen. Although the thought of danger gave her an idea.

  “How about helping train the castle guard?” Jessica asked.

  “That would not end well,” Naga said.

  “Why not?”

  “Usss lamia are built to provide a challenge for adventurers. That is our ecological niche. Besssides keeping livessstock population down, of courssse. I don’t think the cassstle guard would care to train with me. They have no means to counter my magic and—”

  “Just go easy on them,” Jessica replied.

  Though uneasy about it, Naga accepted the task since it was getting late and she was tired from a day of laying around and sleeping. She was even tired enough to capitulate and share a room with Riza just to get out of the chilly ocean air.

  “You did not say she was allowed back inside,” Riza said when Jessica and Naga entered.

  Jessica glared at Riza and the lizard girl understood it was time to stop talking. The arrangement they arrived at was that Naga would sleep coiled up in the space created by pushing the bed up against the wall and Riza would sleep in the bed with Jessica. To make this fair, Jessica took the side nearer Naga so that her human half could lean against the bed and snuggle.

  This was how Jessica ended up in a situation where two reptile girls were each curled around an arm, effectively pinning her to the bed. Uncomfortable though it was, this was the closest thing she was going to get to domestic peace.

  The following morning Jessica unraveled herself from a knot of limbs and walked down to the castle kitchen to explain to the head chef that Naga wasn’t a saboteur seeking vengeance for the Demon King. Fortunately, the man had a good sense of humor and was able to joke about the servants being stupid enough to keep eating a piece of raw chicken. She even managed to extract a promise not to tell the castle steward from him.

  Her next task was getting Naga her new job. Hamrick, the head of the castle guard, was enthusiastic.

  “That’s just what my men need,” Hamrick said, stroking his chest-length black beard. “Practical experience against a real monster. I’m surprised Mystiferia never thought of that.”

  Probably because she wanted the monster torturing all to herself, Jessica thought.

  “So you’ll take her?” Jessica asked.

  “Absolutely. It might take a while to scrounge up the money to pay her, but—”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “She’ll work for free,” Jessica said hurriedly. “It’s uh… volunteer service. She wants to make sure she’s useful around the castle while she’s staying here. Make up for the bad reputation monsters have and all that.”

  Hamrick shrugged and said that was good enough for him. After that Jessica returned to her apartment and ordered a bleary-eyed and reluctant lamia down to the castle courtyard to get whacked by soldiers.

  Jessica’s last task before she started on her own duties was figuring out what to do with Riza.

  “I don’t see why I couldn’t instruct the guard,” Riza said as they walked past a group of guards trying to stab Naga with spears.

  Jessica looked down at the lizard girl who was a foot shorter than her and probably 20lbs lighter.

  “I’d be worried about you getting snapped in half. You already got caught and enslaved once, didn’t you?”

  Riza bared her spiny teeth. “There were three of them and they jumped me while I was sleeping! I could have defeated them in a fair fight with a sling and a knife.”

  “Either way, we ought to give you something a little easier on your body. How good are you at cleaning?”

  “I can clean myself.”

  “It’s the same principle. Soap and scrubbing,” Jessics said.

  Signing Riza up for maidly duties got Jessica out of tidying the women’s sitting room which Queen Samara had lately turned into an opium den. Freed from cleaning and not yet needed for babysitting, Jessica had time to train the cooks on how to prepare peppermint candy as a treat for both Burnish and for the nobles and visiting dignitaries who could be wowed by never-before-seen treats.

  An adventurer came through around noon who was unimpressed with the fact that the mints weren’t bleached white with little red stripes which led to Jessica having to spitball how to accomplish that.

  Regrettably, Jessica’s confectionery sidequest left her no time to think of ways to get the king’s attention, which was what she had hoped to do before watching Cappy and Katarina. She was on her way to their playroom when a guard sprinted up the hallway.

  “Miss Jessica! Captain Hamrick wants to speak with you!”

  Why, oh why, could she not get this right? Why could things not just go her way for once? Why wasn’t she in a story where every problem was a matter of chemistry? Why had she memorized all this chemistry that wasn’t even in her field if she was never going to use it?

  Jessica slapped her cheeks. The self-pitying hadn’t helped her in Barleyfield and it wouldn’t help her now. If she wanted to fortify herself and her retainers against Mystiferia, she needed to focus on what was right in front of her. That had been her strategy for Barleyfield and it panned out… mostly okay.

  She sighed. “Alright, let’s go.”

  Piles of defeated guards surrounded the yawning lamia out in the mustering field. Most lay groaning in pain, though a few were screaming and bleeding from dented armor. Only one guard was still standing and he was shaking so bad his pike looked like a flagpole in a storm.

  Seeing Hamrick’s disapproving glare, the soldier charged Naga with a battle cry, only to have the haft of his spear jarred from his hands with a flick of Naga’s tail. A flick back the other way slammed the man to the ground. Naga made it look casual, but the tail whip undoubtedly had hundreds of pounds of force behind it. Thousands, if she used more than the tip.

  Naga folded her arms. “I told you your men were not up to the tasssk.”

  Hamrick saw Jessica coming and grinned guiltily.

  “Well, we gave her a try.”

  “I'm so sorry, Hamrick! I didn’t know she’d—”

  He held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. We got exactly what we asked for: A fair fight against a monster. This little exercise made clear just how much we need adventurers. My men are lucky they didn’t get squeezed ‘til their eyeballs popped out.”

  “Eyeballs do not pop out. Bones sssnap before enough pressure builds up,” Naga said.

  Out of ideas, Jessica allowed Naga to spend the afternoon suntanning. Once again, it wasn’t the lamia’s fault. It was Jessica's for picking a bad fit.

  Jessica went up to the kid's playroom and for the first ten minutes of babysitting sat with her head in her hands. She could almost predict the next thing to happen.

  “Miss Jessica?” a maid said from the doorway.

  Jessica sighed. “Send her up.”

  A few minutes later Riza entered to the sight of Jessica being ridden by two kids using a pillow for a saddle.

  “It was not my fault,” Riza said.

  Jessica stopped the pony ride and hurled the kids off to their great amusement.

  “Do I want to know what wasn’t your fault or would I be happier not knowing?”

  "I myself do not even think it was a problem, but some fancy-dressed ladies got angry with me for taking a nap. The sofa had a beam of sunlight hitting it so perfectly, you see. I planned to clean the rest of the room once the sunbeam moved, as it seemed wasteful to ignore such a perfect napping opportunity. Then they slapped me for being lazy! I am not lazy! I would like to see them track a mooselephant across twenty miles of tundra and butcher it in the driving snow!”

  Jessica took a deep breath and leaned against the wall. What basic principle was she missing? There had to be a solution, and if she was able to break it down into its constituent laws and separate controllable variables from static givens she could give the issue another go from a scientific angle. The social sciences were, of course, not real science, but pretending for a moment they were might allow her to come up with heuristics.

  “Oh! I wanna ride her! I wanna ride her!” Katarina squealed.

  “That’d be so cool! I wanna be in the front!” Cappy said.

  Jessica looked up. The kids had run out to the corridor window and were gazing out at the courtyard where Naga was stretched to her full length and rolling herself over the grass like pizza dough.

  Riza snorted. “Sounds like a great way to get eaten.”

  “How would you two like a ride on her?” Jessica said, drowning out Riza’s attempt at sabotage.

  Not only were the kids not scared of Naga as Jessica had feared, Naga herself was fully willing to give them a ride when she took them down to meet her.

  “Really? You’re seriously fine with it? You don’t find it degrading to be ridden by humans?” Jessica asked.

  Naga laughed and the reverberations carried down her snake body, bouncing her passengers up and down as they giggled hysterically.

  “I quite enjoyed playing with my sssiblings when they were around. And children are barely human anyway. They don’t try ssstabbing me until they’re about thirteen or fourteen, and only then if they’re ssstupid,” Naga said, slinking around in a circle like some kind of snake train.

  Jessica’s anxiety wasn’t satiated yet but it was a step in the right direction. Her own efforts to put her two retainers to work had failed miserably, so she was willing to give anything a try at this point. If she gambled wrong and got butchered by Mystiferia for it, so be it.

  Leaving the kids with Naga, she turned to a fuming Riza and said, “You wanna try being a drill sergeant?”