Page 43 of Wickedly Ever After
“Nor did you,” she snapped back. “You’ve never cared about anything or anyone in your entire life.”
“I care about Tinbit.” His teeth were bared, his eyes sparked with fury. “I would never, ever, in any way, do anything that would hurt him. I set a rather high value on hearts, particularly the hearts of people under my protection. Like Tinbit. Like Alistair.”
“I care about the hearts of the people I love as much as you do. Hari is like my son, and the very idea that I would do anything that might cause him pain is unthinkable.”
Hector’s eyes glinted. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t believe you either.” But she almost could. There was a sincerity in his hard, angry face, almost as if he really did care about his gnome and the dragon. Alistair. So thatwasthe dragon’s name. She never bothered to learn them. They weren’t part of her side of the magic.
A sudden smell of earth and moss accompanied a small earth elemental, beetle-black eyes glinting, who entered the room with a soft brown velvet cushion, which they placed in the chair to the left of Hector.
Tara came in, smiling in her butter yellow robes. She smiled as she seated herself across from Ida. “Are you well, my dear? Such a fright today with the dragon. I wonder that you had the courage to face it!”
Oh, that was a slight if ever she’d heard one. “One does what one must. I am not afraid of dragons or any serpent.” Ida sat back in her chair. Tara hated snakes. Let her chew on the insult instead of the strawberry Danish with rose water cream the earth elemental set in front of her.
A blast of humidity signaled Agatha’s entrance. She waved the undine, the one with the mop, away with an impatient hand, and sat, digging her sharp nails like talons in the end of the table. “Sorry to be late. I was delayed. Reporters for theStar, you know.”
Hector grimaced. “I really think, given the delicacy of the situation, none of us should be talking to reporters right now.”
Agatha smiled, showing all her teeth. “Oh, I don’t know about that Hector. People will want answers. Something seemsto have gone wrong with Happily-Ever-After, and just between us, if what I’m hearing is accurate, if it isn’t fixed, a couple of witches might as well turn over the keys to their castles and start looking for huts in the woods in which they can spend their retirement.”
21
Hector
When one has been a Wicked Witch for most of one’s life, one acquires many important skills. One also learns to refer to one’s self in an oddly unnatural way, to monologue when necessary, to never seal one’s power in things like magical rings, or if one must, never live close to an active volcano where heroes are itching to throw your magical doodad in the lava, and a million other things to keep one’s self alive and largely intact. These are all excellent things to know.
Unfortunately, handling a whole council of squabbling witches isn’t taught as part of any curriculum, and has turned out to be about as rewarding as asking the mermaids to stop eating sailors.
A Thousand Years of Wickedness: A Memoir
Hector West
Personally, he’d like some answers too. The immediate problem—his protection spell had struck a princess right in the heart—he could explain, even if he was reluctant to do so. Not that the thing was exactly illegal, but the fact that he’d had to use it at all was certainly suspect, and it would lead to more questionshe didn’t want to discuss. Like why the dragon had needed convincing in the first place.
What he’d wanted to do was give Alistair a strong desire to take the princess in his claws and carry her off to his lair where he would guard her until the prince arrived to rescue her. When it hit the girl, it gave her a frantic desire to protect Alistair, the effect of Hector’s dark magic on a good and valiant heart. Which meant—and this was a particularly irritating admission—Ida had picked one gem of a woman to be the Common Princess. And if nothing was wrong with the princess, he couldn’t blame Ida at all, which was even more irritating, and deeply concerning because he couldn’t, for the life of him, confess thathe’dmade a mistake. He’d been in charge of Happily-Ever-After forever—he couldn’t make mistakes.
He faced Agatha, deliberately disguising his weariness as boredom and said what he’d been rehearsing during the coach ride to the Council Hall. “You’re quick to demand solutions for a problem you don’t understand, Agatha.”
“Then you admit something is wrong with this Happily-Ever-After.” Agatha crowed like she’d scored a point.
“That’s patently obvious to anyone with magical sensibility,” he said, reaching for the dark cup of smoke-flavored tea the salamander set before him.
“Then what went wrong?” Tara asked with genuine curiosity, like she’d never once considered that magiccouldgo wrong. In Hector’s opinion, she was by far the weakest of all of them—far too many of her spells involved cooking and nothing else. She didn’t take real risks.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Yet.”
“Well, whatever happened, we will fix it,” Ida said, leaningforward. “Repairing Happily-Ever-After is not a matter of saving our reputations. This is about saving the world.”
Agatha struck faster than an injured griffin. “And I suppose you aren’t claiming any of the blame? Your princess charged the field like a knight, not a maiden. Just who is this girl?”
Ida flushed an angry shade of mauve. “Aprincess. And I absolutely take full responsibility for her behavior, which I personally found quite understandable under the circumstances. But this is not the time to be deciding who is to blame. Hector is right. No one needs to be encouraging theStarin their speculation—they’ll do that on their own without our help.”
Ida was actually agreeing with him? Had she struck him, he couldn’t have been more surprised. But almost as soon as he felt gratitude, he squashed it flat. Of course, she was. She was reminding him of exactly what she’d do if he so much as mentioned the laughing charm.
“Ida is right,” he said, gazing at her pointedly. “When the magic is corrected and the princess wed to her prince, we’ll see who assumes full responsibility. First, we need to seek out the princess and the dragon and bring them here to untangle the magic. I will go in search of them both. The Dread Mountains are my domain.”
“Not by yourself, you’re not. I’m going too,” Ida broke in. “I don’t trust a Wicked Witch to be versed in how to alter my magic.”
