Page 3 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Ida

Dear Horrible Hector,

Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m healthy as a horse and so are my roses—your plagues never amount to much in the great scheme of things.

My Cinderella pumpkins are thriving and will be ready in time for the contest, not to mention the Unicorn Jubilee parade for the Common Princess. I must say that infestation of vine borers was beneath you—such a small-scale attack on your part—are you feeling well?

By the way, have you prepared the chosen dragon for his role in the upcoming Happily-Ever-After?

I expect you to uphold your end of the magic and provide a suitable reptile for the occasion, not like the miserable excuse for a dragon we had last time.

Hopefully this one will breathe a little more fire and less poetry.

Sincerely wishing you the worst,

Ida North

Hector’s letter lay open next to Ida’s mother-of-pearl penknife, stained the most appalling shade of green-black.

She’d learned to be careful opening his letters.

Hector liked to send hexes by mail and she couldn’t always remove them by first counter-cursing the envelope.

He’d always been clever, she’d give him that, even if sometimes he acted nine years old and not nine hundred ninety.

She rubbed the blister on the tip of her index finger with a smidge of calendula cream.

She rose, folded a letter precisely into thirds, and set it aside to ripen. Potent charms like the one she’d added needed time to embed properly in the paper.

“Nearly noon—oh, goodness.” She pulled her dressing gown over her shoulders and slipped out onto the balcony where she always took breakfast, a very late breakfast. At her age, she’d long since resigned herself to the flipping of her days and nights, a chronic insomnia that, over the last four hundred years, had become her normal.

She rose around eleven, ate breakfast, then saw her appointments from noon to four.

After lunch, she took a nap, and worked in her garden or greenhouses until nine, at which point she’d eat dinner and retire to her spellroom for the remainder of the evening and go to bed around three in the morning.

No one minded this unusual schedule. She was the Good Witch of the North—her castle, her rules.

Northern spring days were chilly, but the noon sun warmed her face.

The twinges of pain in her hands and wrists began to fade with the calendula cream she’d worked into her skin.

Getting old didn’t bother Ida greatly, except for the damned arthritis.

She sat in her chair and gazed proudly at her garden.

The Happily-Ever-After rose was in full bloom.

The enchanting fragrance wafted on the cool breeze, some musky, others sweet.

The red roses sprawled wildly through the trees and over the garden walls, tenacious as any weed.

It always made her happy to think how well they’d naturalized since she’d planted that seed in the ground—the first magic her mentor had entrusted her with.

Now everyone could have one of these roses in their own garden.

Granted, they weren’t magical like hers, but still, they smelled and looked good, a constant reminder of how beautiful Happily-Ever-After was.

“Aren’t they lovely, Hari?” she asked the gnome when his light footfall pattered up the stairs.

“Yes, my lady,” came the glum reply. He was definitely unhappy about something. Hari was one of the few servants who heeded her when it came to not calling her that.

She half rose from her chair. “Hari, what on earth are you wearing?”

He stood before her in a brown hunter’s jacket, a tight white shirt, brown breeches, and shiny black boots, a huge change from his usual flowing tunic and smart red-and-blue trousers.

With his long brown curls and deep brown eyes in his pale face, he resembled a pert mushroom.

She would’ve laughed if he didn’t look so miserable.

He set the breakfast tray on the table. “Will that be all, my lady?”

“Don’t you ‘my lady’ me, young man,” she scolded. “Why are you wearing that ridiculous outfit?”

“With the princesses coming this week, I was told to wear a uniform.”

Ida shook her head. “You know I don’t insist on uniforms for anyone, least of all you.”

A small smile appeared on his face. She smiled too.

Hari looked so much like his great-great-great-great grandfather.

She could admit she missed old friends. That too was one thing she didn’t like about the immortality that came with being a Cardinal Witch.

After the first eighty years or so, everyone she’d ever loved had died.

The only people left were her colleagues.

And Hector. He hardly counted. But she always made new friends. Like young Hari.

“Go change, immediately. You look like a starched fungus.”

The smile broadened to a grin. “I feel like one. I won’t bother to tell you where this outfit rides up, but it’s not pleasant.”

“I need to have a talk with the housekeeper about you.”

He winced, pouring her cup. “I wish you wouldn’t. She already calls me your favorite, and I don’t think you talking to her would make it any better. I’ll change and tell her you asked me to water the roses.”

“Well, go and do it soon,” she said. “You’re a cloud on a sunny day when you frown, Hari.”

He chuckled. “I’ll try to frown less, my lady.”

“I ought to make you wear a tie for that.”

“Don’t tell her. She’ll take it as a command. How are your hands?” He reached out and took them in his tiny ones, massaging the bones gently.

“Better,” she said. “Your calendula cream worked wonders.”

“It’s a friend’s recipe. He claimed it would even soothe a dragon burn,” he said. “Got to keep your fingers nimble if you’re going to keep writing letters to his Wicked Witchness.”

“Speaking of Hector West, did you get the last of the moth larvae out of the vines? I can’t lose anymore coaches to that pestilence of a man.”

“Done,” he said. “But the chickens are refusing to eat them now. I think they’re sick of worms.”

She sighed. “At least we saved a few of them. Of course, I told him his plan failed utterly.”

“Somehow, I don’t think it will deter him. Perhaps, for a change of pace, you could tell him what a great job he’s doing as Wicked Witch and how much you admire his nasty necomancy. See if that works.”

She drained her teacup and rose. “That will be the day. I’ll take my breakfast in the reception room. I want to see the preparations for the princesses for myself. I’m not too hungry—there is no need to bring me more than a cup of fruit and buttered toast.”

“I’ll bring it myself,” Hari said, collecting the cup.

“No. I want you go to the garden and bring me a dozen roses. Have the housekeeper bring breakfast.”

Hari glanced at her sharply. “You won’t—”

“I won’t.” She watched him go, smiling. Good witches weren’t supposed to lie, but that didn’t mean they had to tell the whole truth either. She wouldn’t consult the housekeeper . But she absolutely would talk to Hari’s mother.

***

The reception room was Ida’s favorite place in the castle. She’d designed it herself, along with the rest of the Castle Peerless. Immortality guaranteed a woman one great privilege—the delight of designing and building one’s own house. She knew every stone of this place intimately.

By day, massive skylights admitted all the glorious sunlight ceiling to floor, giving the pure white marble hall a dazzling radiance. Whenever she entered it, she thought of snow—snow and home. But home had not been a tenth of the size of this room, let alone a castle.

She’d been born in a tiny cottage with a thatched roof, coming into the world as her mother left it. Her father remarried when she was twelve. Her stepmother was a witch.

According to the new rule of Happily-Ever-After, an evil stepmother was just the thing for a girl growing up in poverty in the cold mountains of the north.

Ida jumped around, clapping her hands in joy.

Then she ran upstairs and put on her most ragged dress and grabbed a broom, ready to enter a life of servanthood until she would be chosen as the Common Princess, go to her first ball in uncomfortable glass slippers, and meet a prince.

But as soon as her new stepmother came in, she spotted the broom, grabbed her own, and took Ida out for a ride in the moonlight.

By the time they came home, windblown and laughing, Ida’s new mother was her best friend.

She taught Ida potion making, the growing of herbs, how to speak to the trees, how not to ever laugh at a dragon if you met one in the mountains, and complex mathematics, along with the reading and writing of the languages of magic.

By the time she turned eighteen, Ida was a witch herself, and apprenticed to the ancient Good Witch of the North, well on her way to becoming a preeminent sorceress.

She toured the snow-white room, breathing in the scent of roses.

Every vase in the room overflowed with them—white roses, pink roses, yellow roses, red roses, even a purple kind that flirted with being blue.

Dense fragrance surrounded her as she sat on the White Throne, a grand name for the most uncomfortable chair in the world.

Even the seats in the Witches’ Council Chamber weren’t so bad.

She might’ve padded it with a velvet cushion, but as she often told Hari, the chair served as a constant reminder that governing the balance of good and evil in the kingdom was her job, one she took seriously enough to endure the ache in her tailbone as she lowered herself onto the stone seat.

Almost a thousand years she’d been doing this, and it never got any easier.

Wicked magic didn’t take the effort good magic did, or at least Hector never seemed to exert any effort thinking up the plagues and pestilences that fueled his magic.

He wasn’t fooling her when he said he was just doing his job—the man loved it, even stuffing the more minor of his magics in an envelope simply to annoy her, and all at the expenses of someone else’s life.

Ida’s spells brought life into the world, which required more responsibility than killing for every spell you made, like Hector’s necomancy did.

With a long sigh, she sat down on her throne.

A thousand years of Happily-Ever-After, a thousand years of peace and prosperity, a fairy tale come true, and it was largely up to her to maintain it.

She was the one with the red rose. She had to arrange the happy marriage of the crown prince to a commoner, joining the two hearts required to maintain the spell.

And on top of all that, as a good witch, she had to think of something nice for the world at least once a week, not to mention thinking up new and wonderful happy endings for every farm girl with a wicked stepmother who actually was wicked, and not a witch.

And yes, she was proud to be helping to preserve the world, but there were certainly times when the weight of it felt heavy.

Meanwhile, Hector lounged around his castle for decades, waiting for the next time he got to stick his long and pointed nose into the affairs of the kingdom every time a crown prince turned twenty.

She fingered the red rose sitting by itself in the vase beside her.

One of these days, she thought, feeling rather vicious, I’d like to trade places with that second-rate witch, and make him see it’s far harder to be good than bad.

And then I’d pop a blister-butt hex in an envelope and see how he likes it.

She hoped her laughing charm made him miserable for a full twenty-four hours. Would serve the bastard right.