Page 6 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Ida

Hector,

That was uncalled for. I meant no harm with my laughing charm, and if you found a way to get yourself barbecued as a result, it’s not my fault. If you want to stop our correspondence, I can assure you, it won’t bother me to take you off my mailing list.

I hope you got second-degree burns.

Ida North

A teardrop splashed onto the creamy white paper Ida was writing on and blurred the ink.

A tiny little laughing charm, that’s all it was.

His retaliation was unconscionable, and if she hadn’t been so angry, she would’ve summoned him up and yelled at him face to face in the crystal ball.

But her face was puffy from crying all night, and she’d never let him see he’d made her cry.

Never. That ass of a man! Now she was crying again.

A timid knock on the door made her wipe her eyes hastily. “Come in, Hari.”

The gnome poked his head around the door. His eyebrows crinkled in deep concern. “You didn’t send for breakfast. I thought you might be ill.”

“No,” she said, voice cracking. “I’m not ill. But I’m not hungry.”

“Can I come in? I brought oatmeal.”

She waved her hand at him.

He slipped in, back first, and shut the door gently with his foot before carrying the tray to her writing table.

She glanced at the bowl and the wineglass. “That’s not oatmeal, Hari.”

“So I lied,” he said, shrugging. “Raspberry sorbet goes well with white wine. And I put mint chocolate syrup in it.”

She rubbed her forehead with both hands. “Do I really seem so upset?”

He pulled up a footstool, clambered onto it, and dug his tiny hands into her shoulders. “It’ll be all right. You tell the Council the truth. No one should ever get in trouble for telling the truth.”

Oh, sweet, wonderful Hari, but so, so na?ve.

The truth? She’d sooner let Hector see her cry than let the Council know what had happened. The truth would get her fired.

***

Hector’s letter arrived on the afternoon Ida met with the contestants vying for the role of Common Princess. She hated this day with all of her heart and soul, but it hadn’t always been that way.

Once upon a time, the position of princess was hereditary.

The rival factions of royalty fought each other for the kingship, marrying their sons and daughters by betrothal, all in the name of power.

The world was awash in magical chaos from the witches fighting for the various sides.

Plague, pestilence, famine, and unimaginable poverty blanketed the land.

Ida had been a child during those dark days, but she certainly remembered them. It would have taken an army of witches centuries to clean up the mess that centuries of war had caused—everything from salted earth to battlefields so piled with corpses there weren’t graves to bury them all.

Until Happily-Ever-After.

The first Happily-Ever-After was a beautiful one.

The crown prince married a common girl, the first of many such marriages.

Ida remembered the story well—the downtrodden servant with her wicked stepmother and two horrid sisters, the glass slipper, the elegant ball where her luck changed.

It was the day everything changed. From that time forward, magic worked for the good of the people, for the good of the land, for the good of all.

It was her job to maintain that, and one she took very seriously.

Ida had a great deal of sympathy for the girls who came from farms, smithies, salt mines, orphanages, and taverns.

This used to be a difficult but rewarding part of her job, choosing girls for a royal Happily-Ever-After.

They all deserved Happily-Ever-Afters in her opinion.

Everyone did. She wished she could give a fairy-tale princess crown to every last one of them.

But she couldn’t. Therefore, she devised quests for the girls, challenging them to various tests and trials to prove their worthiness.

At the end, the victorious princess claimed the red rose imbued with Happily-Ever-After magic, ensuring them a wonderful life with their prince.

That’s how it used to be.

But five hundred years ago, the commoners decided no witch deserved so much power in choosing the royal family.

If the common folk became royalty, they wanted a say in the process.

Ida had been all for it. It seemed fair.

Only it didn’t quite work out that way. It got political, then literary, and when things get literary, there’s not much even a very great witch can do to make things better.

Now the position of Common Princess was decided by a committee composed entirely of various upper-class citizens, mostly belonging to the Storyteller’s Guild.

They decided every elected princess needed a story worthy of the fairy-tale rags-to-riches legends of the past.

This year, they’d chosen The Little Match Girl Gets a Happy Ending.

The lucky recipient was Mildred Cheapstreet, an orphan with an upbringing to make even someone as hard-hearted as Hector cry.

Mother died when she was three. Father was a drunk.

At five, he sent her out to sell matches, which she dutifully did, and with very poor sales, since no one in the kingdom had used matches since the dwarf Nikel Tessler made electricity free for everyone.

This enabled her to spend her days doing good for anyone who passed her street corner, where she dispensed everything from advice to little dolls for babies that she made out of matches tied together with strands of her long blond hair.

They were a choking hazard, but it was the thought that counted.

From her bald head to her chilblains, this was certainly a girl who deserved a happy ending to her story.

Ida would have agreed, if she hadn’t known it was completely fabricated.

The girl in question did come from a common background, but her father was no drunk, and he didn’t make her sell matches.

He was a popular tavern owner, and she was a spoiled only child.

Her indulgent father called in a bar tab with three of the committee members.

But that was how the cookie crumbled these days.

It could be worse. There was the current queen—now that had been a fiasco.

Still, as Ida sat in her receiving room, in the uncomfortable, ass-biting chair, fiddling with the red rose, she wished she could give it to any other girl but Mildred Cheapstreet—like the little seamstress who had just left the room weeping.

Hari passed the girl on her way out, carrying the tea tray. Ida was never so glad to see it. She set the rose down in her vacant seat and joined him at the table.

“Tea, quiche tartlets, and prosciutto and honeydew,” he said. “Don’t worry. Mother will see to the rejected princesses. She’s laying out a high tea for them right now. She saved you some petit fours if you want one.”

Ida shuddered. “I couldn’t possibly.” She helped herself to the melon. “How many more are there?” She downed the tea, wishing it were wine.

“Only two. This came for you.” Hari set a letter on the table with the sugar tongs. Hector’s thin, intricate script was on the envelope. A proper precaution—it wouldn’t be beyond Hector to give her a sudden and acute case of diarrhea. She’d never ripped open a letter so fast.

Hari spooned the required sugar into Ida’s second cup of tea. “Is that wise?”

“At this point, Hari, I’d welcome one of Hector’s curses if it would postpone the rest of this day until I’m ready to deal with it.”

She pulled out the soft gray linen stationery and read.

Ida,

What you did was completely reprehensible. You put me in serious danger. I might have been killed. I only escaped incineration by using a sculpture as a shield when a dragon took exception to being laughed at. I’m tired of your little jokes.

Consider this my final letter.

Hector

She crumpled the letter in both hands. In all the years they’d corresponded, he’d never sounded so…angry. From the straightforward address to the furious tenor of the last line, this was a Hector she didn’t recognize.

Hari held out the teacup. “Are you all right?”

“Hector’s hurt. A dragon attacked him.”

Hari’s eyes widened. “But he’s okay? I mean, he’s a witch. He could protect himself, right?”

“Oh, he’s fine,” she said, throwing the letter on the tray. “Well enough to write. Well enough to tell me he won’t write again. Well enough to tell me he doesn’t like my ‘little jokes’!”

“Ida?”

She waved her hand distractedly. “I don’t care. I don’t care if he’s alive or dead, hurt or well. Send the next princess in. I’m tired. I want to finish my work and go out to my garden and forget this. Forget everything.”

She blinked fiercely. They’d been writing each other almost as long as they’d been practicing, as long as they’d been in charge of tending the delicate balance of good and evil in the kingdom.

And they respected each other—a grudging respect but respect all the same.

At times, she’d even detected a teasing, needling amusement in his letters when he spoke of how he’d thwarted her latest spell, and it had made her happy to think he probably struggled to contain her magic as much as she fought to deal with his.

She took her seat and tossed the rose angrily on the armrest. Two girls entered the room together, one of them a wreck of rags and pitiable countenance with a balding head, the other dressed in her finest work dress, clean and starched for the occasion.

Gods. All she wanted to do was get this over with and go upstairs to cry or break something, possibly both. What was it about that man? A thousand years of rivalry, of working against each other, and here she was crying because she wanted him to respect her?

She stared them both down fiercely. “Which one of you is Mildred the Match Girl?”

The ragbag started sobbing. “I’m Mildred, your ladyship. This thug attacked me in the hallway!”