Page 39 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Hector

Among the most important things a Wicked Witch should consider when designing their evil lair is to include a space where they can reflect on their plans and schemes when things go awry. It’s better to break a flowerpot than someone else’s head.

A Thousand Years of Wickedness: A Memoir

Hector West

Cear vanished furtively into the coals after Ida left.

Hector was glad. He didn’t want to hear any further questions that he didn’t have answers to.

After a while, he left the window and went to his desk.

He pulled an ancient parchment folio from the drawer he’d bewitched into a never-ending file cabinet.

He opened it hopefully, but it was nothing more helpful than his mentor’s treatise on slugs and how to eradicate them from one’s flowerbeds without resorting to inviting a murder of crows every day for breakfast. He put it back before it crumbled to dust in the modern air of his library.

There had to be something he could do to save this situation.

He hadn’t given up his own life and chance for love to let everything he’d worked for crash down in ruins a thousand years later.

He didn’t like to think about that, but it was foremost on his mind now along with all the horrors he’d grown up with.

He picked up another folder of his mentor’s old writings, a collection of her gingerbread recipes.

There was a time when nothing would grow in the polluted land, and families like his, with too many mouths to feed, sent their surplus children out the door with nothing more than a crust of bread for lunch and told them to get lost in the woods.

And sometimes that was a far better option than going home…

He sighed. Even after Happily-Ever-After, healing the land had taken a long time.

Fields flourished, but without a population to work them, food was scarce.

Plague became a thing of the past, but so many people had been wounded or were already ill from the wars.

They died by the thousands. People blamed his monsters for their continued misfortune. And they died by the millions.

He rose, walked to the table, and poured himself another glass of wine.

This made three, and he seldom took more than a half glass with dinner, but tonight felt like it called for more.

The anger Ida had directed at him for not talking to her earlier rankled.

True, maybe he should have been more suspicious, but love wasn’t something he dealt in, only in ways to delay it, hinder it, to thwart it as much as Happily-Ever-After called for, and all in carefully measured and precise ways.

He deeply resented having it all upended like a cart of compost, especially by the prince.

That spoiled-rotten rich boy with a bad mother and a worse father, he’s the one who gets a choice in his life now? I never had one.

“Cear, I’m going out for a walk,” he said to the flames. “I’ll send someone in to bank your fire before bedtime.”

***

Hector’s gardens had been his sanctuary since he’d first moved into the castle, back when it was little more than a round tower built on very structurally unsound foundations by a former sorcerer who thought it had been a good idea to make his life force the cornerstone.

Along came a freelance hero with a second-hand magical sword and boom, there went his “fortress of adamant.” But the location was ideal, nestled in the bosom of the mountains, and when he’d seen the backyard and the lovely bog in the corner, he’d been sold.

Just past the stable and the field where the bone-horses frolicked, he’d planted his poisonous plant garden, a full half-acre of the most dangerous and deadly herbs and flowers from around the world, each one given its own favorite habitat.

It had taken him the better part of three hundred years to accumulate all of the seeds and raise the plants.

The corpse flower alone required regular applications of bone dust. Whole graveyards full of it, for centuries.

He’d been so proud when it finally bloomed, even if Tinbit had walked around with a clothespin on his nose for a week.

After the garden, he’d built the greenhouse.

This was his pride and joy, where he bred sentient species of plants, like the sensitive fern.

His young bat lilies were there, fluttering around and eating insects, the carnivorous sundews were happily eating careless bat flowers, and the man-eating flytrap—well, he’d probably need to see if the kitchen had a leg of mutton lying around because it might be a week before he fed it again, and maybe more than that if he didn’t come up with a way to fix Happily-Ever-After.

“Hector?”

He turned.

Ida was coming out of the rose gate that led to Tinbit’s house.

He forced a smile. “I was just going for a walk before I turned in. Early start in the morning.”

She pulled her robe tighter against the chill. “Do you mind if I walk with you? I have something I need to talk to you about. Maybe a few things.”

“All right,” he said. He almost offered his arm, took one look at her tilted eyebrow, and decided against it. “I did promise to show you the gardens after all.”

“You did,” she said. She folded her arms behind her back, pacing beside him.

“What would you like to see first? The poison garden? The greenhouse? My updated bog?”

She smiled slyly. “You were going to enter your bog into Witches’ Weeds contest, weren’t you? And here I thought it was going to be your front flowerbeds with the three-foot sword thorns.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But that was before your giant pumpkins caught my attention.”

She snorted. “To think, losing that damned contest to you was all I was really worried about two weeks ago.”

“Things change.”

They walked on in silence for a while. “Hector? Do you think anything like this has ever happened before?”

“I don’t know,” he said heavily. He opened the door to the greenhouse. “I hope not.”

“I don’t think it has,” she said, picking up a fledgling bat lily and setting it on a plant bench—not the one with the sundews, curling their leaves in excitement. “But that might be wishful thinking on my part.”

“Have you ever had a princess who hesitated before?” He surreptitiously nudged an open sack of freeze-dried mice out of sight.

Ida’s cheeks blushed pink in the sunset rays coming through the panes of the greenhouse. “Not…not that I can recall. What is that? The thing with the beetle-shaped blossoms.”

“Oh. That’s a bugainvillea—I got it to feed the bat lilies.

Don’t worry—it isn’t spawning at the moment.

Or it shouldn’t be.” He surveyed it with some anxiety, but the buds didn’t look more swollen than usual.

“There’s always a first for things. I’ve never had a dragon as reluctant as Alistair, although Adair did insist on writing a poem for his event—he was nearly late because he couldn’t get that sixtieth stanza just right. ”

“I remember,” Ida said, smiling. “Annabeth yawned.”

“Rude. And he was being nothing but polite.”

“ She was only polite when it was in her best interest. She’s nothing like Amber.”

“I’d still like to know more about that girl,” he said.

She set down the pot of serpent moss she’d been examining. “What about her?”

“Only—only that she seems a remarkable woman,” he said, surprised by her sharp tone. “I can see why you chose her. She has a wonderful sense of duty and honor.”

“Oh,” she said, reddening further. “Pity it wasn’t Caedan who I picked.”

“Perhaps after this, you can simply recruit as many men as women to select as Common Princess. Prince. Although, I must say, it would have been more helpful to have known the prince’s inclination before all of this.

” He picked a stem of blood orchid and handed it to her.

“Don’t bring it too close to your robe—you’ll never get the stain out. ”

She just held the blood orchid like she thought it might bleed all over her hand. “Well, why didn’t we?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Why didn’t we?” She gazed out through the windows at the mist gathering over the bog with a disconcerted and pained look on her face.

“A thousand years we’ve been in charge of Happily-Ever-After, Hector, and we didn’t even bother to find out if the prince was gay.

Who’s to say whether we’ve made mistakes like this before?

We may have made hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And not just in matters like this.”

“No one said we were infallible—”

“But isn’t this magic supposed to be?”

“Yes,” he said, dragging out the word. He’d seen her take this line of questioning before, in Council, usually when she wanted to get Tara on her side to go against him—Agatha nearly always sided with Ida as a matter of rivalry.

He turned to snap a few dead leaves from his vicious ficus, crooning a few words of calming to keep it from lashing out at him with all its branches.

“The magic can’t be wrong. But traditions should change, and it’s entirely possible I have been…

a bit absent in this respect—something I intend to rectify.

It won’t be that difficult to make sure we keep up with the times.

I’m quite sure many common men would jump at the chance to wed a prince in the future.

You could send them on quests to test their worth, like you test the princesses. ”

She blushed, and he thought the beauty of her face outshone the sunset. A sudden impulse seized him to pluck a flower from his blooming moon-star cactus and twine it in her hair. He shoved both hands, full of dead ficus leaves, into his pockets.

“I’m quite sure common men will jump at the chance. What I’m not sure about is how the committee will feel about it.”

“Committee? What committee?”

She set the blood orchid bloom down on the bench as it had started to drip.

The fledgling bat lily bud crawled over from behind a weeping fern to investigate.

“Do you remember when I brought that petition to the Council about the commoners wanting to streamline the process of choosing the princess?”

“Vaguely. I believe there was something about the whole picking up grains of wheat and your enchanted mice being a little frightening?”

She waved her hand dismissively. “They set up a committee to process applications and added a long questionnaire I wrote up, yes. But it didn’t stop there, Hector. For the last few Happily-Ever-Afters, the committee has chosen the Common Princess.”

“I see.” He rocked back on his heels. “Well, I wish you’d told me, but it actually might make our explanation to the Council easier, if common people, and not you, chose Amber. She’s the wrong princess.”

“No, no, no, Hector. She’s not the wrong princess. I wish she were.” She folded her arms over her chest and turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to face him. “I let the magic choose, and it chose Amber. The magic itself chose the princess.”