Page 27 of Wickedly Ever After
“Would you like me to come back early? I can leave the game in the last quarter if it’s not close.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ll be fine. Enjoy yourself.”
As if he could. This Hari, whoever he was, deserved a boil hex on his behind if he was just stringing Tinbit along. Of course, given the way Tinbit acted, Hari might have been hiding in a bush somewhere.
***
Hector left the hotel in a hired coach. He’d have rather taken his own, but it was bad luck to bring bones to a Thieves game. Once upon a time, in the year when Hector got real plumbing in his castle, the Thieves had been up on the Rogues by thirteen points, in itself a bad omen. A fan let loose a skeleton cat, which ran across the field, stopping play. After that, the Rogues scored. They won the game, sixteen to thirteen, and theThieves, favored to win the coveted Golden Cauldron, lost it that year after having won it the past five. They hadn’t won it since. The saying “when pigs fly” had been replaced by “when the Thieves win the Cauldron.” An ardent Thieves supporter, Hector wouldn’t even wear his favorite bone cufflinks to a match.
He arrived about thirty minutes before the coin toss. The moment the coachman let him out, he found himself immediately surrounded by guards.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“Your Wickedness?” A mustachioed knight came forward.
“Yes?”
“Security detail,” the guard said. “King’s orders.”
“I’m more than capable of defending myself,” Hector said, irritated. “I’ve never needed a security detail before. May I ask—”
He didn’t get any further. A blinding flash of light, a puff of pixie dust, and he threw up his hand in a ward.
“No flash photography!” the guard yelled. Two knights jumped forward to deal with a rather irate photographer and his partner, a tiny green pixie with dragonfly wings doing his best to bite the knights’ fingers off.
“What in the enchanted kingdom was that?” Hector asked.
“Pixarati. We’ve had a real problem with them in the last five years.”
The remaining knights clustered around Hector like a swarm of bees, but the flashes of pixie dust continued unabated until they entered the stadium.
Hector scowled and straightened his jersey. “Pixarati?”
“For theStar,” the mustachioed knight said. “Tabloids—worst kind of trash. They’ll lie about anyone for a story, andtheir photographers are the worst. You’ll be safe now.” He aimed Hector in the direction of the royal box and gave him a push.
Hector went, not without a final glare. Rupert didn’t care about tabloids. He rather liked the publicity. It was more likely he’d sent the guards to make sure Hector didn’t slip into the stadium and promptly vanish.
“Hector!” The king boomed from the first landing. He came downstairs, arms out, dragon scale coat flashing in occasional bursts of light from above. Hector shuddered. The garment was ancient, made in the centuries before he’d protected the dragons, but he could never look at it without wondering which poor dragon grieved themselves to death for their deceased mate or child. But Rupert didn’t care. As long as Hector had known him, he’d never had an ounce of compassion for anyone or anything.
The first time Hector dealt with him personally was at Rupert’s Happily-Ever-After. Rupert had been a fine, fit prince when Hector devised the traps and impediments designed to make his Happily-Ever-After stick with the Common Princess, Annabeth. Hector had his reservations about her too—scuttlebutt said she’d bribed the committee—but after Rupert completely destroyed Hector’s troll and wounded Adair, a flagrant violation of the established rules, and then bragged about it, Hector wouldn’t have helped Rupert out of his Happily-Ever-After if it had been as easy as waving a wand. His reservations about Annabeth slipped by the wayside as he patched up Adair and then arranged a nice retirement in the mountains for the troll, wishing he’d never tasked that gentle soul to fight a prince. He still felt horrible about it.
“Rupert.” He made no attempt to rid his voice of the stiffness.
“Come right up!” Rupert said. “Archie’s here. He wants youto give him all your pointers on fighting dragons. You haven’t seen him since he turned eight—you won’t believe how much he’s grown.”
Hector dragged himself up the stairs. Unless someone had put a shrink spell on the child, he’d have grown quite a lot. Whether he’d grown in intelligence or morality was less certain. Hector remembered a surly blond boy, with a pale complexion and freckles, who showed him a collection of dead beetles stuck on pins under a glass case. Hector had asked him what kind of beetles they were. The boy had looked at him dully. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “I just like sticking bugs on pins.”
Hector despised that kind of base cruelty. If a man must be cruel, he ought to at least be intentional about it. Evil should be an art, not a hobby.
No, he didn’t look forward to meeting Crown Prince Archibald Quentin Rupert II again.
A sudden commotion came from the stairs on the left, and he came face-to-face with the one person he wanted to see less than dear old Archie.
Ida North.
14
Ida
