Page 26 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

“What’s happened?” The salamander crawled out of their jar in the form of a burning lizard when Ida shook the pot. “Why have we stopped?”

“Hari was on the back of the coach and he’s chilled through.” She pulled off her robe and tucked it around Hari.

The salamander scurried over the robe, leaving little singe marks where their feet touched the pristine white wool. “I will warm him,” they said. “But he is already warm inside.”

“You mean he’s running a fever?” She felt Hari’s forehead. As the salamander said, he was burning up. “Oh, Hari. Why? Sweetheart, why?” She patted his limp hands, feeling helpless.

The coach door opened again, and in came Tinbit with a brown bowl filled with something hot and steaming. He held it with the pinkest, softest-looking oven mitts—they looked handmade. He sat down beside Hari and gently slid one of the oven mitts off and put it under Hari’s head.

“What’s in the bowl?” Ida asked. “It looks like clam chowder. Hari’s allergic to fish.”

“I know. He told me,” Tinbit said, shooting her an angry glare. “This is mock clam chowder. I make it with potatoes, vegetable broth, and kelp.” He touched Hari’s cheek tenderly. “Hari? Hari, come on. Wake up.”

Like a narcoleptic princess being revived with a kiss, Hari opened his eyes. “Where am I?”

Ida leaned over him. “In Hector’s coach, you foolish, foolish boy.”

“You should never have left without me.” He glanced wearily at her. “Go put something on. You don’t want his Wickedly Witchness seeing you in your underwear.”

“I told you not to come after me.” Tinbit shoveled up a generous spoonful of soup. “You didn’t tell me you never listen. That wasn’t in any of your letters.”

Hari halfway smiled. “I left some stuff out.”

“You left a lot of stuff out,” Tinbit growled. “Like your employer is a good witch. The Good Witch!”

“Well, you didn’t tell me about Hector, the wicked old coot.” Hari struggled to rise, but Tinbit pushed him back down into a sitting position. “How’s that for leaving stuff out?”

“Shut up and eat.”

Hari opened his mouth to argue again and got a spoonful of chowder.

“You might want to eat while it’s hot, Your Goodness,” Tinbit said. “I brought some dry sweetgrass for you,” he told the salamander.

They blinked at him with golden eyes. “My favorite. How did you know?”

“Hector thought you’d like it and had it summoned. He’s a wonderful witch.” This last, Tinbit addressed pointedly to Hari.

Hari choked on his soup. “Did I say he wasn’t?”

“You called him a wicked old coot!”

Ida walked out to get dressed, leaving the two gnomes jawing while the salamander looked on impassively, burning sweetgrass blades one at a time and glowing brighter with each leaf.

She found Hector beside the campfire on the side of the road. The skeleton had unbuckled the horses. One of them was limping rather badly. Its front leg shone with silver.

“Will it be all right?” she asked, pulling her sweater over her head.

Hector looked up from stirring the cauldron. “Yes, I’ve reinforced the bone meld. But when I get home, I’ll need to find him a new leg in the boneyard.”

“Hari’s awake. He’s eating.”

“Good,” Hector said. He ladled out a bowl of the soup and gave it to her. “This isn’t my favorite soup. But I know better than to say that to Tinbit.”

“He does seem somewhat prickly.”

“Well, he works for me,” Hector said. “I am sorry about your gnome. If I’d known he was back there—”

“I never should have told him to go home. He’s very attached to me. And I to him.”

“I can tell.” Hector spooned up his soup and carefully blew on it to cool it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, blowing on her own bowl.

Hector blinked. “You’re overprotective of him. Of course, you believe I had a hand in Tinbit’s letters—”

“Of course, you had a hand in it. You knew it would hurt him, hurt me—”

“My dear Ida,” Hector said with a long, irritated sigh, “if we are to work well together, you must believe me when I say I had nothing to do with it. Did I discourage Tinbit from using a dating service? Yes. I don’t trust those things.

Was I worried he might find misery instead of bliss?

Yes. I care about him. I’ve known him since he was a gnomelet.

Did I attempt to stop him? No. I know better than to order a gnome to do anything he doesn’t want to do.

You’d have more success moving a mountain, which you should remember the next time you order your gnome to do something. Like seduce mine.”

“My dear Hector,” Ida said, “if we are to work well together, you’d better quit pontificating like you wrote the rules of magic with the pen shoved up your ass.”

He looked shocked. Good. He needed some shocking—the kind a nice lightning bolt called down from the sky would provide readily, were she not a good witch.

“For your information, I did everything I could to keep Hari from seeing Tinbit. When you care about a person, you intercede when they are about to make the biggest mistake of their lives! You love them enough to protect them. You don’t let them run off and break their hearts because those things can’t be replaced, and they never heal. They scar.”

Hector’s pale, thin cheeks glowed a shade of bright brick. “Where is free will in your kind of caring? Where is autonomy? Where is trust?”

“Where it belongs,” Ida said. “In myself.”

“Trusting in yourself is what got us into this mess,” Hector said.

“Now you’re blaming me?”

“Yes! I blame you. You’ve shown yourself to be irresponsible with magic, and I, for one, don’t intend to lose my job and my immortality to your incompetence, woman!”

Ida slapped him.

Hector’s spoon clattered to the ground along with his soup. He reached up for his cheek and touched the place as if it actually hurt him.

Ida’s face burned. “Call me irresponsible again, I will name you for what you really are—a farm boy with limited magic who gets by on what he learns out of books and prays to the Gods that no one ever finds out he’s a fraud.”

Hector’s voice overflowed with anger. “And I will tell the other witches what I know. You’re nothing more than a provincial girl who dreamed of being a princess but you were never chosen. That’s why you became a good witch. You didn’t have the guts to become wicked like you wanted.”

Ida gripped her bowl tightly. “I’m going to eat in the coach. The second this trip is done, you’ll go back to your corner of the world, and I’ll go to mine, and we will never speak again except in the course of our professional lives.”

“Agreed.” He turned his back on her.

She stomped off, flushed and furious. She’d never told him anything about her life before she became a witch in her letters.

He’d never told her any of his life story either, and yet his face grayed beneath the blush.

She’d deduced it from what she knew about him, about his work, and from the way he cited every rule when he was questioned.

Had he done the same? Gleaned all that from her letters?

Two people couldn’t really know each other that well when all they’d done was pour words out onto paper and stick them in the mail.

Perturbed, she closed the door to the coach. Something was going on.