Page 6 of Wickedly Ever After
“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 consultthe 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 theache 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.
3
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, dressedin 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.
