Page 25 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Ida

My dear Malia,

I’m not coming home as anticipated. Matters have arisen that I need to attend to. I expect to be delayed for at least a week, possibly longer. I’ll say no more here. I’m sure you’ve seen the news.

I’m sending Hari home. I’ll be giving him additional responsibilities at the castle that should keep him busy, but please, please, please be gentle with him.

Ida

P.S. I know your maternal instinct will be to ask him all about his trip, but I’m begging you, don’t. He’ll tell you when he’s ready.

Hari yelled at her when she told him to go back to her castle. She’d never seen him so incensed, not even when the chickens got out and tore up every last one of the newly planted pumpkin seedlings.

“What do you mean I’m not coming with you? Of course, I’m coming. I’m not leaving you to deal with Hector on your own.”

“I can handle him. I’ve always been able to handle him. I want you to manage things at home for me, particularly the garden—”

“That’s all I am to you? Your servant?” His face flamed.

“Sweetheart, you misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m promoting you. I want you to be my steward.”

But Hari looked angrier than before. “Fine,” he snapped.

“As your steward, I say someone from your estate needs to come with you to take care of things like hotel expenses, and to see that you actually eat a decent meal. Left to your own devices, you’ll forget to sleep, work all the time, and not eat, and you know it. ”

“Hari.”

His jaw jutted out stubbornly. “You’ll have to order me to go home.”

“Hari, go home.”

He gaped. His eyes widened. He’d not expected her to do it.

Ida turned away from him, empty chest aching. “I’m ready,” she said and walked around to the far side of the coach where she couldn’t see Hari’s stricken face.

The rain had slackened to a drizzle by the time Ida carried Cear’s firepot to Hector’s coach. The skeletal horses glanced curiously at her through burning eye sockets. The red glow followed her as she passed.

Hector waited beside his coach, leaning heavily on his staff. He’d not spoken to her after the meeting, only helped her with the firepot, then walked out to alert his coachman to the change of baggage.

Cear looked impassively at the bone horses. “I won’t ride among the luggage,” they said.

“Of course not, you’re riding in the coach with us,” Hector said. “And we will feed you fuel as you need it.”

“I prefer to sit with Ida.”

“As you wish,” Hector said.

Tinbit glanced down at Ida from his seat by the coachman, a mushroom-like hat pulled down almost to his shoulders against the weather.

Like Hari, he stood about two feet tall and had sharply pointed ears and a nose to match, but his expression tended toward the sour rather than sweet, like Hari’s.

She watched her carriage pull away slowly, with Hari slouched next to the driver.

It rounded the curve in the street and vanished out of sight.

She turned to face Hector sitting across from her. “I sincerely hope you don’t expect me to make polite conversation.”

“I didn’t think you could be polite if you tried.”

“Glad we have an understanding.”

“In fact, I’d like it better if we didn’t talk at all.” Hector closed his eyes and leaned against the wall of the coach. In seconds, he was snoring.

The salamander…well, did whatever salamanders did when they rested.

Burned. Smoldered. Glowed like a deep blue gem in the depths of the firepot.

Ida watched them at first, and then decided it was like watching another person sleep, and while Hector had practically invited her to watch him saw logs, the salamander had not.

Ida placed the urn slightly off to one side where she would not be tempted to look into the flame and wonder if the bright changes of color and intensity were dreams and gazed out the foggy window.

She’d not been this way in recent history.

She’d traveled it once about six hundred years ago, when consulting with a dryad queen in one of Hector’s forests as part of a National Forest Protection Act.

It saddened her to see so much of the countryside tamed.

Well-ordered farms dotted the landscape between greenbelts, and here and there, a baron’s castle jutted up from a knoll.

After miles and miles of the same scenery, she wished she’d thought to pack a few more books.

Hours later, Hector finally jerked awake when the coach hit a pothole.

He’d drooled on himself, Ida noted with disgust. He wiped his beard in a self-conscious way, smacked his lips together, and stared out the window at the gray rain falling over the fields, green with early grain.

How long they would stay that way was anyone’s guess.

Rain today—it might be snow and hail tomorrow.

“How far is it to the mountains?” Ida asked.

He stretched and his joints popped audibly. “Two days’ journey to my castle if the roads are good and the horses fresh, and a day by giant to the dragons.”

“Good. The sooner this is done, the happier I will be.”

“I assure you, the feeling is completely mutual—but we may not get as far today as I’d like. It’s not wise to push a magical repair on the first day. We’ll have to camp somewhere tonight for the sake of the horse.”

“Camp?”

“You can sleep in the coach.” Hector’s eyes glinted. “I will sleep outside.”

“Then we’d best stop in a forest—there aren’t enough trees here for you to hang from, you old bat.”

“I think we’ll stop in the Mire-Imp Swamp. I’m pretty sure you have relatives there.”

Motion outside caught Ida’s attention. She moved closer to Hector to get a better look. “What is that?” she asked first, then gasped. “What are they?”

Gruesome apparitions danced through the fog.

They looked something like giant dolls, with bodies made of fabric stuffed with straw that poked out around collars and cuffs.

Stick arms and legs protruded at awkward angles, and last autumn’s rotting pumpkins served as heads.

They galumphed happily in a ditch below a blackberry hedge where a farmer and his wife appeared to be herding them out of the damp.

Hector leaned back against the seat. “Scarecrows. The crows here are frightened more of magic than monsters, so I animated them to make them more effective.”

“Are they—are they alive?”

“Not in the strictest sense of the word,” Hector said. “Why do you ask?”

Ida’s mouth twisted. There was something about the creatures that seemed different from a typical golem: Maybe it was the light in their carved eyes, the way their mouths moved, or the way one of them cavorted closely with its companion, linking arms before crashing with it into the blackberry hedge, ripping off its plaid shirt.

The farmer’s wife yelled and beat the scarecrows angrily with her broom while the farmer tried to pry them apart with a pitchfork.

“Uh—Hector?” Ida’s face burned, but she couldn’t turn away from the spectacle.

Hector’s jaw dropped.

“If they aren’t alive—then why are they—”

Hector coughed, blinking as he turned away from her, face as red as a ripe plum. “They are capable of reproducing; it saves time and magic.”

The coach slowed and after a minute, two other scarecrows appeared, naked, trailing hay, bouncing off into the mist.

Hector’s mouth firmed. “This definitely shouldn’t be happening. The pumpkins are just now flowering. They’ll have no proper heads for their children and have to settle for turnips.”

Ida sat back in her seat, a profound sense of doom settling in her midsection. “They don’t usually breed at this time of the year?”

“No, and not so…publicly. They prefer the fields.” He sat back in his seat too, face grim and concerned.

Ida didn’t look out the window again.

Like the rain, this was part of Happily-Ever-After breaking down—the reversion of carefully choreographed seasons back to their natural rhythm, and like the weather they would be erratic.

Long ago, the world had been like this. She remembered all too clearly how the Northern winters could be long and the summers too short for enough food to be grown.

There had been nights her belly growled itself to sleep.

If Happily-Ever-After broke down altogether…

but she wouldn’t let herself entertain that possibility. It wouldn’t. She’d fix it.

***

After miles and miles of farmland, Ida was glad when the country took on a wilder look. Wasteland took over; the farms disappeared altogether. When the landscape changed to purple-green bushes and gray grass, broken by glassy mirrors of standing water, the coach stopped.

“We’ll camp here,” Hector said, standing slowly with a series of musical pops and groans. He lurched to the door, reminding Ida horribly of the scarecrows.

The chill air carried a sulfurous taint of rotting cattails and reeds.

“Be careful,” Hector said as he stepped down. “Stick to the hummocks if you need to…relieve yourself. There’s mire about.”

Oh, joy. Just what she most loved about camping, the chance to get your bare butt bit whenever you needed to take a pee.

She climbed down, hoping against hope there was a sweater in her luggage.

Hari was usually so good to think of things like that, but he’d been so distressed.

Dear Hari. Hopefully he was home by now.

“Smoke and fire!” Hector yelled.

Ida grabbed her wand and ran to the back of the coach.

A very dirty, very muddy, very tired gnome crawled in the roadway. Tinbit bent over him, touching him—

“Hari!” Ida pulled him into her arms.

Hari coughed out mud as green as frogs. “Told you, you’re not going anywhere without me,” he said. Then he fainted.

“Hari!”

“I’m going to get a fire started,” Tinbit said. “We need to warm him up. He’ll catch swamp fever if we don’t.” He ran off, yelling something at the skeleton driver in a language that sounded like fingerbones rattling together.