Page 15 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Hector

Dear Rupert,

I regret missing the Prince’s Dinner last night. Unfortunately, the journey left me with a severe case of indigestion. I remained at the hotel in hopes that my health would be better for the game on Moonsday.

Sincerely,

Hector

“Your preoccupation with telling the truth is beginning to sound like I need to get you a tonic,” Tinbit yelled.

Hector groaned. A self-induced gastrointestinal earthquake had been a small price to pay for skipping out on last night’s royal dinner.

It was traditional for the crown prince to take the potion that would make him fall head-over-heels in love with the Common Princess at this event, which meant one thing.

Seeing Ida. An overdose of Hex-Lax certainly hadn’t been pleasant, but it beat the alternative.

“Hector?”

“I’m fine.” Shakily, he rose, feeling like he’d lost ten pounds. “I need to take it gently for the next hour or so.”

“So no grilled sausage with chili at the game tonight?” Tinbit asked.

“I absolutely intend to eat a sausage with chili! What’s a hurling game without that, I’d like to know?

” A huge belch escaped him. He wiped his mouth and, straightening his shirt, left the garderobe.

Indoor plumbing had been installed about five hundred years ago, but he still called it the garderobe.

“I intend to enjoy myself this evening.”

“You’ll be the only one,” Tinbit said. “Mark my words, I’ll find a letter in the mail tomorrow morning from Hari saying, ‘regret missing dinner; I got hit by a dung cart and died.’”

Hector almost quipped that lying beat hexing your own bowels to get out of a dinner date, but Tinbit didn’t appear in the mood for levity. “Stop catastrophizing. He’ll be there.”

The gnome didn’t look up from his ironing.

Hector glanced furtively at Tinbit. “Did…did he send you a letter about missing you in the garden last night?”

“No. But this is better. If he saw me in the garden and decided I was hideous, I’d rather not know. I’ll go to dinner tonight, he won’t be there, and that will be the end of it.”

“Tinbit—”

“Hector, I’m okay. You warned me. These pen-pal things never work out, not without some happily-ever-after magic involved. Love isn’t for people…like…me. I’m fine. I’m—” His shoulders started to shake.

Hector managed to rescue his jersey from the ironing board before Tinbit covered his face with it, and steered the gnome to his bed. He sat him down on the edge. “Tinbit, Tinbit, honey, don’t cry. You know what that does to your face.”

“I know, I know, but, Hector, I wanted him to be the one. I’ve waited so long.”

Hector hugged the gnome, letting Tinbit bury his face in his shoulder.

“Don’t give up hope. He might have been delayed.

The coaches were rolling up almost until midnight—I know, I was in the garderobe.

And if your poor fellow was unlucky enough to try even a bite of Ida North’s Angel’s Dream Cake at that soiree, he probably was, too. ”

Tinbit’s muffled sob became half-laugh, half-cry of misery. “Oh, Hector.”

Hector continued to hold him, feeling utterly helpless.

This was completely out of his realm of experience.

Yes, he did his part with Happily-Ever-After, but his job involved putting obstacles in the way of the magic to make it stick—that was what the black rose was for.

To make it real, there must be suffering along the way.

It was an immutable law of love. If people became friends, fell in love, never fought a day in their lives, lived a long, happy life together, and died peacefully within months of each other, what kind of a romance was that?

But he’d never wanted so much to take away every obstacle for Tinbit.

Sometimes suffering for love is just suffering.

For the rest of the day, he handled Tinbit like a bomb that might explode. Tinbit went back and forth. He would go to dinner. He didn’t mind eating alone. He’d get a table for one. He was fine.

The next minute he wouldn’t go. He couldn’t get through it without breaking down in public, and he wouldn’t embarrass Hector by doing that. He’d order room service. Eat in bed. Watch the game on the crystal ball.

Each time, Hector supported him. It took his mind off the unhappy consequences of the Hex-Lax. His stomach still wasn’t right. Or maybe it was Tinbit. The last time he’d seen the gnome so upset, Tinbit had completely fallen apart. The thought of that made him even queasier.

At precisely six, he dressed for the game, regarding himself in a full-length mirror.

A gray, tired man in faded black trousers and a vintage game jersey stared back at him.

When had he bought it? The Thieves hadn’t worn this particular design in centuries.

He was old, and tonight, he felt it. He sighed.

“I’ve decided I’m going to dinner,” Tinbit announced, handing Hector his blackthorn staff, freshly polished.

“I think that’s a good decision,” he said, wiping the extra beeswax off on his sleeve.

“I’m not staying long. He won’t be coming.”

“Would you like me to come back early? I can leave the game in the last quarter if it’s not close.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ll be fine. Enjoy yourself.”

As if he could. This Hari, whoever he was, deserved a boil hex on his behind if he was just stringing Tinbit along. Of course, given the way Tinbit acted, Hari might have been hiding in a bush somewhere.

***

Hector left the hotel in a hired coach. He’d have rather taken his own, but it was bad luck to bring bones to a Thieves game.

Once upon a time, in the year when Hector got real plumbing in his castle, the Thieves had been up on the Rogues by thirteen points, in itself a bad omen.

A fan let loose a skeleton cat, which ran across the field, stopping play.

After that, the Rogues scored. They won the game, sixteen to thirteen, and the Thieves, favored to win the coveted Golden Cauldron, lost it that year after having won it the past five.

They hadn’t won it since. The saying “when pigs fly” had been replaced by “when the Thieves win the Cauldron.” An ardent Thieves supporter, Hector wouldn’t even wear his favorite bone cufflinks to a match.

He arrived about thirty minutes before the coin toss. The moment the coachman let him out, he found himself immediately surrounded by guards.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Your Wickedness?” A mustachioed knight came forward.

“Yes?”

“Security detail,” the guard said. “King’s orders.”

“I’m more than capable of defending myself,” Hector said, irritated. “I’ve never needed a security detail before. May I ask—”

He didn’t get any further. A blinding flash of light, a puff of pixie dust, and he threw up his hand in a ward.

“No flash photography!” the guard yelled. Two knights jumped forward to deal with a rather irate photographer and his partner, a tiny green pixie with dragonfly wings doing his best to bite the knights’ fingers off.

“What in the enchanted kingdom was that?” Hector asked.

“Pixarati. We’ve had a real problem with them in the last five years.”

The remaining knights clustered around Hector like a swarm of bees, but the flashes of pixie dust continued unabated until they entered the stadium.

Hector scowled and straightened his jersey. “Pixarati?”

“For the Star ,” the mustachioed knight said. “Tabloids—worst kind of trash. They’ll lie about anyone for a story, and their photographers are the worst. You’ll be safe now.” He aimed Hector in the direction of the royal box and gave him a push.

Hector went, not without a final glare. Rupert didn’t care about tabloids. He rather liked the publicity. It was more likely he’d sent the guards to make sure Hector didn’t slip into the stadium and promptly vanish.

“Hector!” The king boomed from the first landing.

He came downstairs, arms out, dragon scale coat flashing in occasional bursts of light from above.

Hector shuddered. The garment was ancient, made in the centuries before he’d protected the dragons, but he could never look at it without wondering which poor dragon grieved themselves to death for their deceased mate or child.

But Rupert didn’t care. As long as Hector had known him, he’d never had an ounce of compassion for anyone or anything.

The first time Hector dealt with him personally was at Rupert’s Happily-Ever-After.

Rupert had been a fine, fit prince when Hector devised the traps and impediments designed to make his Happily-Ever-After stick with the Common Princess, Annabeth.

Hector had his reservations about her too—scuttlebutt said she’d bribed the committee—but after Rupert completely destroyed Hector’s troll and wounded Adair, a flagrant violation of the established rules, and then bragged about it, Hector wouldn’t have helped Rupert out of his Happily-Ever-After if it had been as easy as waving a wand.

His reservations about Annabeth slipped by the wayside as he patched up Adair and then arranged a nice retirement in the mountains for the troll, wishing he’d never tasked that gentle soul to fight a prince. He still felt horrible about it.

“Rupert.” He made no attempt to rid his voice of the stiffness.

“Come right up!” Rupert said. “Archie’s here. He wants you to give him all your pointers on fighting dragons. You haven’t seen him since he turned eight—you won’t believe how much he’s grown.”

Hector dragged himself up the stairs. Unless someone had put a shrink spell on the child, he’d have grown quite a lot.

Whether he’d grown in intelligence or morality was less certain.

Hector remembered a surly blond boy, with a pale complexion and freckles, who showed him a collection of dead beetles stuck on pins under a glass case.

Hector had asked him what kind of beetles they were.

The boy had looked at him dully. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “I just like sticking bugs on pins.”

Hector despised that kind of base cruelty. If a man must be cruel, he ought to at least be intentional about it. Evil should be an art, not a hobby.

No, he didn’t look forward to meeting Crown Prince Archibald Quentin Rupert II again.

A sudden commotion came from the stairs on the left, and he came face-to-face with the one person he wanted to see less than dear old Archie.

Ida North.