Page 45 of Wickedly Ever After
Ida
P.S. I know your maternal instinct will be to ask him all about his trip, but I’m begging you, don’t. He’ll tell you when he’s ready.
Hari yelled at her when she told him to go back to her castle. She’d never seen him so incensed, not even when the chickens got out and tore up every last one of the newly planted pumpkin seedlings.
“What do you mean I’m not coming with you? Of course, I’m coming. I’m not leaving you to deal with Hector on your own.”
“I can handle him. I’ve always been able to handle him. I want you to manage things at home for me, particularly the garden—”
“That’s all I am to you? Your servant?” His face flamed.
“Sweetheart, you misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m promoting you. I want you to be my steward.”
But Hari looked angrier than before. “Fine,” he snapped. “As your steward, I say someone from your estate needs to come with you to take care of things like hotel expenses, and to see that you actually eat a decent meal. Left to your own devices, you’ll forget to sleep, work all the time, and not eat, and you know it.”
“Hari.”
His jaw jutted out stubbornly. “You’ll have to order me to go home.”
“Hari, go home.”
He gaped. His eyes widened. He’d not expected her to do it.
Ida turned away from him, empty chest aching. “I’m ready,” she said and walked around to the far side of the coach where she couldn’t see Hari’s stricken face.
The rain had slackened to a drizzle by the time Ida carried Cear’s firepot to Hector’s coach. The skeletal horses glanced curiously at her through burning eye sockets. The red glow followed her as she passed.
Hector waited beside his coach, leaning heavily on his staff. He’d not spoken to her after the meeting, only helped her with the firepot, then walked out to alert his coachman to the change of baggage.
Cear looked impassively at the bone horses. “I won’t ride among the luggage,” they said.
“Of course not, you’re riding in the coach with us,” Hector said. “And we will feed you fuel as you need it.”
“I prefer to sit with Ida.”
“As you wish,” Hector said.
Tinbit glanced down at Ida from his seat by the coachman, a mushroom-like hat pulled down almost to his shoulders against the weather. Like Hari, he stood about two feet tall and had sharply pointed ears and a nose to match, but his expression tended toward the sour rather than sweet, like Hari’s. She watched her carriage pull away slowly, with Hari slouched next to the driver. It rounded the curve in the street and vanished out of sight.
She turned to face Hector sitting across from her. “I sincerely hope you don’t expect me to make polite conversation.”
“I didn’t think you could be polite if you tried.”
“Glad we have an understanding.”
“In fact, I’d like it better if we didn’t talk at all.” Hector closed his eyes and leaned against the wall of the coach. In seconds, he was snoring.
The salamander…well, did whatever salamanders did when they rested. Burned. Smoldered. Glowed like a deep blue gem in the depths of the firepot. Ida watched them at first, and then decided it was like watching another person sleep, and while Hector had practically invited her to watch him saw logs, the salamander had not. Ida placed the urn slightly off to one side where she would not be tempted to look into the flame and wonder if the bright changes of color and intensity were dreams and gazed out the foggy window.
She’d not been this way in recent history. She’d traveled it once about six hundred years ago, when consulting with a dryad queen in one of Hector’s forests as part of a National Forest Protection Act. It saddened her to see so much of thecountryside tamed. Well-ordered farms dotted the landscape between greenbelts, and here and there, a baron’s castle jutted up from a knoll. After miles and miles of the same scenery, she wished she’d thought to pack a few more books.
Hours later, Hector finally jerked awake when the coach hit a pothole. He’d drooled on himself, Ida noted with disgust. He wiped his beard in a self-conscious way, smacked his lips together, and stared out the window at the gray rain falling over the fields, green with early grain. How long they would stay that way was anyone’s guess. Rain today—it might be snow and hail tomorrow.
“How far is it to the mountains?” Ida asked.
He stretched and his joints popped audibly. “Two days’ journey to my castle if the roads are good and the horses fresh, and a day by giant to the dragons.”
“Good. The sooner this is done, the happier I will be.”
