Page 17 of Wickedly Ever After
He took up his pen.
Dear Ida,
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. It was thoughtless of me to write the way I did, even if I was angry. The truth is, so few people that I care about remain in my life. Immortality—as magical as it is—weighs rather heavily on me these days. I keep remembering people I knew who are no longer with me, and their memories are now so faded that I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, terrified I’m forgetting them.I strain to see their faces, like looking back into the grainy tintypes they used to make so we could have photographs of our loved ones—do you remember those? You used to be able to go down to goblin market and step in one of those little booths and they were five for a copper penny.
I’m rambling now. But all I wanted to say is that no matter how I detest you, and no matter how you despise me, I treasured our relationship. Sometimes enemies do make the best friends.
Wickedly yours,
Hector
He burned the letter in the fireplace.
8
Ida
There was mail. Nothing from Hector, though.
Ida thumbed through the morning stack at three in the afternoon. She shouldn’t expect to hear from him. After composing six different ways to tell Hector she wasn’t speaking to him anymore, she’d decided not to speak at all. Coming about twelve hours after the effects of the spell wore off, this epiphany seemed more a stray bubble of the enchantment than a return to her usual diplomatic self.
She apologized to the pastry cook and told him she loved his cakes, cookies, and pies. She’d simply not been herself when she called his claim-to-fame cake a heart attack. He was so happy, he made cream cheese Danish pastries for breakfast. She made a mental note to tell Hari not to feed them to the pigs because now she was worried about the state oftheirarteries.
She sent a note of profuse apology to the Princess Ball Committee, excusing her absence from the festivities due to a sudden and serious attack of diarrhea. Diarrhea of the mouth was a serious illness.
Hari had found the hairdresser sprite confused and sad in the north tower. Ida heard the poor creature out over what the Common Princess said about putting her fairy powders andpixie dust into the anal orifice, and assured the sprite nothing like that would ever happen again. She suggested the sprite retire and open her own hairdressing shop at Ida’s expense. She had the money and who didn’t love a tax deduction?
She stared glumly at the remaining correspondence on her desk to be personally answered: Invitation to the Witch of the South’s soiree (regretfully decline, alternate engagement); the Gardening Club’s tea party (attend, grateful for the opportunity to speak on magical rose breeding); the Council itself, needing to know if she would speak to the Young Witches Society as part of the Unicorn Jubilee festivities (yes, but dinner invitation declined); and an invitation from the palace for the Prince’s Dinner (delighted to accept, can’t wait to see you again, dear Annabeth!). She’d have liked to get out of that last one. She couldn’t stand Queen Annabeth.
Beside her, Hari answered fan mail and the graceless requests for money, magic, and time. He put most of the petitions in the wastebasket, which happily devoured them along with the small stack of Angel’s Dream petit fours left over from the reception.
“Lady Jane, asking you to come visit,” Hari said, holding up a letter.
She rubbed her temples. “Throw it away. If I open it, I’ll say yes, and I can’t say yes again. I’ve said yes to everything except Tara South’s soiree.”
Hari chuckled. “Still remembering the last time you said yes to that?”
She gave him the fish eye. “Three hundred years isn’t enough time to recover from that gallbladder attack. I don’t know how the woman isn’t translucent. Every one of her recipes calls for a stick of butter. Besides, my schedule is packed.”
“You could turn down the garden meeting. Or the Young Witches.”
“I can’t turn the Young Witches down! And the Garden Club has been asking me to speak about my rose breeding program all year.” She sighed. “If I turned down anything, it would be the dinner with Annabeth, but I can’t. That’s the toast to the prince. I have to be there for that.”
“You’re going to wear yourself out.”
She leaned back in her chair. “When this week is over, I’m spending a month in the gardens and greenhouses. I need to get my hands dirty, plant some seeds, talk to the chickens. I’m nine hundred eighty-four years old. I’m allowed to be an eccentric old Baba Yaga.”
“And you don’t look a day over nine hundred.” Hari held a letter in his hand as if it might bite him, but he didn’t throw it in the trash. Instead, he set it aside. It was a small square envelope, addressed in a firm, bold hand.
“Who is that one from? A fan?”
Hari blushed. “It’s…uh…it’s for me. I hope you don’t mind. I used your box—I didn’t want my mother asking questions.”
“A secret admirer?” she asked.
“Sort of.” He turned crimson.
“Well, I’m going to ask questions too,” she said, leaning forward. “What does he look like? Is he handsome?”
