Page 27 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Hector

Dear Adair,

I’m disheartened you haven’t seen scale nor tail of Alistair yet, but tell Morga not to panic.

It’s likely he and the princess are still together.

I know he said he’d come home, and you’re as worried as I am, but we’ll sort this out.

Regardless of how much trouble he can be, he’s a good dragon.

More than likely, he’s simply making sure the princess is comfortably cared for given the delay.

I’ll write to you as soon as I’m home. Best not to try to contact me again while I’m on the road. I had to extract your letter from the stomach of a fire toad when it ate the carrier bat.

Your friend,

Hector

Hector ate the rest of his soup beside the fire. Where Ida had slapped him still burned. He’d always considered her temper to be her greatest flaw as a witch—she let her emotions run away with her far too often—but he hadn’t expected to feel so angry.

She’d actually wanted to be wicked like him?

He hadn’t really known. He’d guessed at it, from the way her charms outdid his hexes, always so clever, so innovative.

Her ingenuity reminded him of first-rate wickedness.

He—well, he’d always need to back up his work with a book.

He couldn’t even curse without worrying about it.

He could almost feel the proverbial pen up his ass after what she’d said to him.

His heart was safely locked away under the apple tree at home, but the way he felt now, he could almost believe it was beating in his chest.

Tinbit appeared at the door of the coach, hopped down, and strolled toward the campfire, carrying an empty soup bowl and a spoon.

“Well?”

“I got him to eat,” Tinbit said. “Not much, but it was something anyway. I feel awful. He didn’t even call out.”

“It’s not your fault.”

The spoon clattered abruptly in the bowl as Tinbit dropped it in the freshwater tub he’d insisted Hector conjure because washing bowls in swamp water was about as unhygienic as it got.

“Yes, it is. I told him to go home. At the Happily-Ever-After, he came and found me in the stable, and I told him he had to, there was no other decision to make.”

The soft, boggy spot in his chest where his heart used to be throbbed unpleasantly. “Decision?”

“I told him it would be better if he forgot me. He said he’d make that choice for himself, he didn’t care who I was or who I worked for, he couldn’t forget me, not after we’d—well.” He blushed.

“I really am very sorry about all this,” Hector said, feeling miserable.

Ida’s philosophy that he’d so recently dismissed as overbearing manipulation seemed rather sound now that he thought about it.

He should have been much more discouraging the moment Tinbit told him he was writing letters.

That sort of thing could only end in heartbreak, hurt feelings, and the miserable wish that things could be different.

For instance, if he’d never written Ida all those centuries ago, his face wouldn’t still sting the way his ego did after her assessment of him.

How had she figured him out so well, just from his letters?

“Don’t be.” Tinbit sighed, almost as if he’d heard Hector’s thoughts like he’d heard his apology. “It’s not your fault either.”

Hector didn’t say anything. The unfortunate truth was that Tinbit was wrong.

It absolutely was Hector’s fault. A hearty young gnome should not get swamp fever from a rainy day spent on the back of the coach, no matter how lovesick he was.

Pestilence and plague—he knew them well.

They were one of his special areas of concern, and among the hardest to mete out fairly.

They’d also been one of the most challenging things to control with Happily-Ever-After—even with him handling all the details.

If the magic was broken beyond repair…but he couldn’t even bring himself to think about that right now. He already felt too unhappy.

***

Hector slept rather badly.

He never slept well away from home, even in hotels, but something about cold hard ground seeping upward through the thick down sleeping bags he’d conjured for himself and Tinbit added a whole new level of discomfort.

The horses, however, woke up refreshed and exuberant, the ground being like the comfort of the grave for them.

Napoleon even knocked Hector’s hat off with an affectionate swipe of his bony nose.

He stayed for a moment, stroking the hard jawbone of the animal affectionately.

He ought to retire the ancient horse, let him live out his magic and turn to dust. Horses weren’t meant to live forever, not even the undead ones, and Napoleon had outlived so many others because Hector kept patching him up, replacing bones, reworking sinews.

His eyes rested on the silver-coated cannon bone.

“Old friend,” he said, touching the horse’s shoulder gently, “some of us might be better off without immortality weighing us down.”

The coachman gazed at Hector with impassive hollow eyes, but he gaped in dismay.

Hector laughed. “Not you. I told you centuries ago you could stay as long as you wished. I’m not putting my best driver out to pasture.”

The skeleton raised himself on his toes, squaring his shoulders proudly, and went back to harnessing the other horses.

“We’ll go easier on Napoleon this time,” Hector said. “I want to stop in town and give him a good twelve hours rest before we set off again.”

The coachman nodded.

The door to the coach opened and Ida stepped out into the morning sunshine.

She wore a silk blouse, red, with ruffles Hector would’ve considered a laughable flamboyance, but on Ida, it looked natural, like the plumage of some bright bird.

She’d belted the long, silk tunic around her midsection with a bright purple sash bound with a gold clasp at her hip.

She was brushing her hair as she stood outside the door, fiddling with a clip and the brush at the same time, a curiously determined expression on her face.

The tip of her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth as she pulled a vast quantity of unruly waves and curls into her hand and bound it into a single ponytail, then flipped part of it back through the barrette, to give it a softer look.

In the dawn light, her hair was almost the color of bright blood, with streams of bone silver running through the red.

She startled when he approached, and her lavender eyes flashed dangerously.

“How’s Hari?”

She tucked her hair brush into a handbag she’d set on the steps behind her. “A little better,” she said. “He’s asking for breakfast anyway, which I take to be a good sign.”

“Tinbit is working on it, I believe,” Hector said, like he didn’t know that Tinbit had risen before dawn to gather early swamp huckleberries for a complicated clafouti involving eggs, honey, and rose water.

“I appreciate that. He’s been attentive and kind.”

“He’s a good gnome. He takes the best care of me and my house.”

“Hari is the same way,” Ida said. “I understand, perhaps better now, why they would find so much in common.” Her eyebrows pulled together in a grimace of pain. “Hector, can we walk? I need to speak to you.”

“Of course.” Hector gave Napoleon a final pat and the coachman led the horse away to harness him with the others. He joined Ida on the path, walking into a dawn turning the mist the color of gold.

Ida put her hands behind her back. “I shouldn’t have slapped you last night. I’m sorry.”

Hector paced beside her, facing the bright eastern sky, unwilling to trust his face. “I deserved it. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to company or withholding my opinions when I ought to. My mistake. We need to work together.”

Ida stopped in the path. “We do. And I forgot that last night. I was angry—with you, with myself, and I’m still worried about Hari. But I will not let my emotions get the better of me again.”

“The fault was as much mine as yours. I mean—it was all mine, and—”

Ida laughed. It sounded like summer birdsong; it made him want to smile, to laugh back. He had the most horrible sensation in his chest again—not the squashy, squelchy feeling he’d had with Tinbit, but something light, dancing, effervescent.

“You never could apologize properly,” Ida said.

He laughed back. “No, I suppose I never could. But I accused you of something you would never do. I blamed you for setting up my gnome to fall for yours, and for that, I apologize.” He bowed slightly.

“I can forgive you if you can forgive me.” She smiled. “After all, I thought the same thing.”

He resumed walking, and she matched him stride for stride. “I suppose the question now is what we’re going to do about it.”

She nodded. “I was up most of the night with Hari thinking about that. The thing is, I’m not entirely sure there isn’t magic involved here, and they have to be told.”

“But you just said—”

“Oh, I didn’t do anything and neither did you. I can willingly believe that they simply connected over shared interests, but if you’d heard Hari last night—”

“Heard what?”

She glanced over at him. “He’s in love with Tinbit.”

He gaped. “Surely not. You must be mistaken. They only just started writing each other—it’s not been long enough.”

“I’m not,” she said. “And from the look on your face, you believe Tinbit is in love too. Now, you tell me, is that possible without magic?”

“I wouldn’t know. That’s not really my province.” He pointedly stared down at his feet, shuffling the muddy grasses aside.

“Well, it is my province, and I’ve been thinking about something ever since I saw the scarecrows. Happily-Ever-After is…” She hesitated.

She didn’t want to say the word any more than he did. Broken. Shattered. Fractured. Whatever one called it, it wasn’t something either of them wanted to face yet.

“Well, something happened with it and things aren’t behaving the way they should be. I think it’s the love magic. It’s gone wrong along with everything else, and I think it’s affecting Hari and Tinbit.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“People can’t fall in love in a week! That’s not natural.”

“I suppose—”

“Which means we need to find Amber and the dragon as soon as we can. If we can get everyone back together where the magic went awry, we might be able to fix this for everybody, including Hari and Tinbit. But the longer they think they’re in love, the worse it will hurt when magic ends.

We need to hurry and get this sorted out. ”

“You’ll get no argument from me there.”

“They have to be told, of course.” She sighed.

Not something he was looking forward to. “Yes, I think that is probably best. It may help with the aftermath. I only wish it hadn’t happened at all. Tinbit is rather prone to falling in love. He will take it hard.”

“Hari, too, but it wouldn’t be fair to let them think it’s real.” Ida sounded sad. “It’s depressing, really. I’d like to see Hari settle down with a nice gnome.”

“I’ve wanted the same thing for Tinbit.”

She smiled. “Well, we have that in common. It’s a good thing you and I can’t be affected by love magic or we might find ourselves in the same predicament as our gnomes.”

He snorted. “Impossible.”

“I’d like to press on to your castle today. If you think your horse can’t make it, perhaps you could leave him there and we can hire a coach in the village.”

She had good sense, and if he hadn’t been so concerned about Napoleon, he might have agreed. He certainly would prefer to clamp the lid on this disaster before things far worse than love magic leaked out. “I wish we could, but hiring a coach isn’t a good idea.”

“Why not? Don’t they have stage service in the village?”

“Oh, yes. But they rob them in the Fearsome Forest and leave the bodies for the trees. It’s part of the service they worked out with the dryads. No, I think it’s probably best we stop for the night there and continue on tomorrow morning.”

She gaped. “And you mean to stop there for the night?”

“It’s far easier to hex the doors of a hotel room than to fight fifty armed bandits in the woods.

That gets messy. One night and Napoleon will be fit to make the rest of the journey without another break, providing nothing else does.

And Hari could use the rest. You know as well as I do, this isn’t a natural swamp fever. ”

She regarded him quietly, deep lavender eyes squinting as if she was considering his confession and deciding what to do about it. He’d never noticed how brightly they sparkled or how deep they became when she was thinking. “All right,” she said finally. “One night. No more.”

“Agreed.”

***

Hours later as he rocked and ruminated in the coach did he reflect that he and Ida had agreed on more in the last twenty-four hours than they’d agreed on anything in the last nine-hundred years.

Something was going on.