Page 69 of Wickedly Ever After
She was being professional. Good. Professional would help. “Nor mine. The last time I served guests in the main hall, I hosted a masque for the fae university. I didn’t think we’d ever get the smell of mead out of the magic carpets.” He tucked his napkin into his collar and sat back as the skeleton set a bone-colored porcelain bowl of greens sprinkled with borage flowers before him and drizzled it with creamy poppyseed dressing.
“This is lovely,” Ida said, gazing at the bright safflower petals and nasturtium blossoms in her bowl. “From your gardens?”
“Oh, no. Most of mine are devoted to magical plants,” he said. “Tinbit grows the edible flowers at his house.”
“Where is Tinbit?” Ida asked, sampling the soup. The skeleton clattered over helpfully with the pepper grinder. She waved them away.
“He never eats with me,” Hector said, waving the skeleton with the main course into the room. “He considers it inappropriate. He’ll eat in his house. Indeed, he took a bowl of soup to Hari earlier—you don’t need to worry. He’ll take good care of him.”
“It’s notthatI’m worried about,” Ida said, frowning.
“I know,” he said. “Perhaps if they took the potion again—”
“You know as well as I do, it won’t keep them from falling back in love with each other,” Ida broke in, tearing open a roll to dip in her soup. “Separation should help, but—”
“It’s the love magic,” Hector finished. “As long as it’s spreading, it’s a factor.”
The skeleton served the venison next, hot, buttery, andredolent with rosemary and juniper berries. Hector complimented the chef after tasting it. Skeletons as a rule weren’t as temperamental as gnomes, but any chef, even a dead one, likes to hear their work is exemplary. The skeleton blushed blood red to the marrow as he retreated.
“Perhaps it might be best you first tell me everything you can about how you conduct your end of the Happily-Ever-After before we meet with the dragons. The more I know about how Alistair is involved, the sooner we can counteract this magic,” Ida said, cutting her venison into small portions.
Cear, having finished their sweetgrass, gazed at the table with interest, but their plate of food, which Hector had insisted on serving, remained untouched. “Everything about Happily-Ever-After would take a long time to explain, would it not?”
“Not really.” Hector pressed his fingers together. “The tradition has evolved somewhat over time, of course, but the magic itself hasn’t changed in centuries. Once upon a time, the knights were chosen to compete for the hand of the Common Princess since, at the time, there were no true royalty—just warlords. Even before Happily-Ever-After existed, dragons considered roast knight a delicacy. Cooked in their armor, which acts like a cast-iron pot, great tenderness could be achieved, and with a little sage and thyme added—”
“We’re eating, Hector,” Ida said, taking a long gulp of wine.
“My point is dragons have always kidnapped princesses to attract knights. In fact, many of them used to collect princesses much as an angler collects their favorite lures. That made dragons a natural choice for the event. Of course, now that they don’t have to eat knights, there’s little need to collect princesses, but they are still avid collectors—it’s a matter of what and to whatextent. Adair, Alistair’s father, collects folk art. Alistair is slightly unusual in that he collects what he makes. He’s a sculptor.”
“With what would a dragon sculpt?” Cear asked.
“What he has in abundance. Fire.”
Cear’s breath smelled of hot wind, cinders, and sweetgrass “How unique. I long to see it.”
Ida sipped her wine. “So when you give a dragon the black rose, it makes them want to collect princesses instead of what they usually collect.”
“Yes. I prefer to influence the natural instincts of my…monsters, as you would call them. But Alistair was reluctant from the beginning. He said Happily-Ever-After was demeaning to both dragons and princesses.”
“Demeaning?” Ida leaned forward. The fern crawled down from its stand, up into her lap, and tangled its fronds in her hair. “Why?”
“Alistair is a dragon of strong, often controversial, opinions,” Hector admitted. “He felt quite strongly that the whole thing left him no choice, and the girl had less than he. Went on about it for some time. Of course, both his parents and I explained to him the significance of Happily-Ever-After and that the girls actually compete to be princesses. I seem to remember that you have fairly extensive preparation trials—”
“He didn’t come to kidnap the princess,” Ida said, eyes wide. “He came to make a point.” She sat back in her chair, hand absently curled in the fern’s fiddleheads.
Hector irritably set his wine glass down and reached for the water. He hadn’t meant to divulge that much, not in front of Cear. “Perhaps, but in the end, he accepted his role.” At least he’d thought so. “There’s nothing wrong there. Perhaps somethingwas wrong with the princess. She shouldn’t have even wanted to defend a dragon.”
Ida reddened and set down her wine glass too. “Like your dragon, Amber has strong opinions about fairness and right. But like you, I hadn’t changed my love charm since it was handed over to me by my mentor. Once the princess takes the rose, she becomes open to love. It’s as simple as that. When she meets the prince, who has had his heart opened by drinking a potion containing the petals of that rose, she falls in love with him and he with her, and they live happily ever after. After the dragon comes, kidnaps the princess, and the prince goes on his quest to rescue her, of course. Which clearly doesn’t appear to be going according to plan.”
“Alistair did kidnap the princess.” Hector glared at Ida.
“Looked more like a rescue to me,” Ida said. “But, Hector, we’re never going to get anywhere arguing aboutwhowent wrong.”
She had a point. “If there’s nothing wrong with my dragon or your princess, could it be what we did at the end—you tried to protect your princess and I tried to protect my dragon?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. We shouldn’t have needed to protect either of them. The mistake must have happened before then.”
He cleared his throat. “Well, let’s go further back, to the choosing. As I told you, Alistair is a prince of dragons. They’ve built their entire royal hierarchy around Happily-Ever-After, with their king-eggs all descending from Flamelords who have fought princes from the beginning. So how did you come to choose this princess?”
