Page 4 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Hector

My Dear Detested Ida,

There’s friendly rivalry, and then there’s war.

Hector West

Hector lay on his back, soaking in a gray-green bath of marshmallow root and slippery elm bark.

He’d smudged the letter disgracefully, but his fingers were singed and raw, along with the rest of him.

He groaned and set the page back on his bath table, an invention he’d designed and given to himself for his five-hundredth birthday, and sank down into the water.

He found his best creative moments came when relaxing in the warm water with all his long salt-and-pepper hair floating around him like drifts of silver seaweed.

Tonight, it looked like smoke on the water as he stewed in his rage. Irresponsible, foolish, reprehensible, old…

“Witch,” he muttered.

He had so much more he wanted to say but couldn’t bring himself to say what he wanted, not even in his own thoughts and certainly not in a letter.

Even unintentional curses had a nasty way of coming true.

He had a sudden vision of Ida North, dressed in her most becoming white robes, greeting the candidates for Common Princess, transforming into a replica of his hellhound and eating half the eligible girls in six big snaps. It would serve her right, though.

He settled down lower in the bath. He’d come up with something—something really nasty this time, something that would make her smart as much as he was smarting now. The nerve of that woman! Now everything was ruined.

It had started out as such a nice day too.

***

Tinbit began it on a good note by bringing him breakfast in bed.

“What did I do to deserve this?” Hector set his memoirs aside. This was an ongoing project, begun in his seven-hundredth year when he became worried that his memory might fail him on the more obscure details if he waited much longer. “Thank you, Tinbit.”

“Mmmph,” Tinbit grunted, opening the curtains.

Hector spooned chokeberry jelly into a bowl where he could break up the hot buttered scone and eat it submerged in his favorite jam. Sweet, but still retaining an acidic, poisonous tang, it came from his own garden. The espaliered trees were the pride and joy of his orchard.

Tinbit squatted beside the fireplace, scraping at the coals from the night before. He added a few fresh juniper sticks, grumbling under his breath.

“What is it, Tinbit? You’re frowning.”

“I always frown; you know that.”

Hector set his spoon down. “But not down to your shoes. What’s wrong?”

“It’s just you show more appreciation for the little things I do around here than Crowbone does, and it makes me want to thump him. You know what he said yesterday when I scolded him for not eating his soup? He said I was a meddlesome old hen and to go cluck somewhere else.”

Hector repressed a sigh. He’d once lectured Tinbit’s grandmother on the feasibility of maintaining a relationship with no mutual respect and admiration.

He struggled to recall the exact words. Something like “tell that man to go choke on his own selfishness; you can do better,” and she’d listened. Perhaps that might work here.

He glanced at Tinbit.

Perhaps not. They’d been through this before and not only with Crowbone. “Don’t worry, Tinbit. One day, he will see how amazing you are, and carry you off on his best bullfrog to his home in the swamp and you’ll live happily ever after.”

A ghost of a smile appeared, and the laugh was harsh and dark, which sounded right for Tinbit. “What would you do without me? Get your own breakfast? Clean your own clothes? Sweep this castle on your own?”

“Nonsense,” he said, spraying crumbs. “The skeletons do that.”

“Next you’ll be telling me you like bone broth in your coffee every morning.”

Hector eyed his coffee suspiciously. “You didn’t!”

“No, but I ought to, you old relic,” Tinbit said, jerking Hector’s second-best robe out of the closet and tossing it unceremoniously at him before heading back to the fireplace, this time with his broom.

“You’ll have to wear this today. I’m still trying to magic the indigo out of your better one. It may be ruined.”

Hector tasted his coffee dubiously, rolling the first sip around, checking for the foul concoction Tinbit always tried to slip into his meals one way or another. “You know I wouldn’t keep you here if it negated your happiness.”

Tinbit’s shoulders stiffened. “I am happy. Anyway, if he loved me, he’d have come to work at the castle. And aren’t you a little wicked to be matchmaking? That’s Ida North’s job.”

“Since I get the distinction of choosing the villains in the story, I can say I’m an excellent judge of character.”

Tinbit stopped sweeping ashes. “You don’t like him, do you?”

“I don’t know him like you do, Tinbit.” Hector blew on his flaxseed meal to cool it.

With a sigh, the harsh veneer vanished, and the surly, grumpy gnome Hector had known since he was a gnomelet slumped all over his little body.

“I think I love him, Hector, but when I do something nice, like applique his jacket so he can go on the big frog hunt, he doesn’t even thank me.

He grabbed it and left—bye, Tinbit, see you this weekend—like I’d just be there when he got back.

And now when I try to be nice and forget the whole thing, he calls me a meddlesome mother hen.

I don’t know what to do. I just want someone… someone to love me.”

Hector stirred the gruel, thinking. Roughly six months had passed since he’d found Tinbit crying in the skullery, declaring he and Crowbone were done.

He’d thrown a plate across the room and said he didn’t ever want to see the arrogant, toadstool-barf of a man again.

A month later, Crowbone came to the castle with a bouquet of swamp saxifrage, asking for forgiveness.

Tinbit took him back without even asking for an explanation.

Now it looked like they were separating again, and Hector was fairly sure it wasn’t really about the jacket or the soup.

Regardless of his opinion of Crowbone, it hurt him to see his favorite so depressed.

Tinbit deserved a nice gnome who would love him in all his grouchy, overbearing, completely devoted mother hen obnoxiousness.

It would be a happy ending for once. But as Tinbit had reminded him, Hector wasn’t in charge of those.

“Do you want me to go with you to see the Flamelord today?” Tinbit asked.

“No, I’ll have Pocket with me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely,” Hector said. When it came to dragons, a taciturn temperament was useful. Dragons could be touchy, and Tinbit lacked tact, especially when he was grumpy. The giant, at least, would be quiet.

***

Hector left Castle Grim immediately after breakfast. A trip into the mountains, even in a basket perched high on a giant’s shoulders, took most of a day.

He’d packed a good book to read as well as his personal correspondence.

He spotted Ida’s thin script on one of the envelopes and smiled grimly.

She never wrote back so quickly unless she was furious.

He imagined ravenous moths descending on her pumpkin patch and swelled with professional pride.

“Are we there yet?” he asked, taking her letter from the pile on his lap desk and settling back in the comfortable nest of blankets to enjoy it.

Pocket’s voice rumbled up to him. “I can see the Flamelord’s lair now, master.”

“Pocket, I’m nobody’s master.”

“As you say, master.”

Hector growled under his breath. In the past thousand years, significant social changes had happened.

With his reforms, all giants were paid appropriately, and given pensions and paid time off from pillaging, carrying off fair maidens, and building castles in the sky.

Your Wickedness or plain Wickedness was the appropriate address for him, but he’d found it impossible to get them to drop an honorific carryover from the time when giants were pawns, used in war to cause as much destruction as possible and then discarded like the rubbish they left behind.

Giants could be set in their ways. It had taken him six centuries to convince them they could eat something other than magic beans, at what point the air quality in the Dread Mountains became much better.

Now one only needed a mask on the cloudiest days when the dragon smoke mixed with the fetid mist that settled in the mountain valleys.

He slit the envelope open with his obsidian penknife. Ida’s charms were potent, and he’d found them unpleasant on every occasion when he didn’t neutralize them, but obsidian usually did the trick. He pulled the letter—ivory stationery strongly smelling of roses—and read the contents.

He burst out laughing.

The giggles shook him to tears. “Pock…Pocke…Pocket…” but he couldn’t stop chortling.

He gasped, he cried, he snorted until he hiccupped.

Nothing was funny. He stared at the letter, eyes wet, furious.

And burst out laughing again. A mirth charm, laughing gas, the shits and giggles, and he couldn’t stop.

Quickly, he zipped his mouth shut, all but the very center, and spoke through the hole, “Poookett, hume.” He couldn’t possibly be diplomatic with dragons while laughing his fool head off.

“We’re here, master.”

“Cwap.”

A sudden drop told him that Pocket had set his basket on the ground.

Hector rummaged in his satchel for a mirror.

Below his angry green eyes and beetling brows, his mouth turned up at the corners in the worst kind of smirk.

Frothy giggles trickled out of his lips.

Crap indeed! He couldn’t even go in to make an apology looking like this.

The worst thing a person could do was laugh at a dragon.

His gaze fell on his mask.

Thoughtful, thoughtful Tinbit! Hastily, he tied it on, pulling it well up over his nose, mouth and beard, and tightened it around his ears.

He’d go in, find out why the Flamelord had asked for him, and leave before his muffled snorts and chuffs would be taken for anything other than a bad case of dragon-flu.

He feigned a particularly loud sneeze followed by several collapsed giggles and approached the Flamelord waiting at the entrance to the cave.