Page 49 of Wickedly Ever After
Hector
Hector ate the rest of his soup beside the fire. Where Ida had slapped him still burned. He’d always considered her temper to be her greatest flaw as a witch—she let her emotions run away with her far too often—but he hadn’t expected to feel so angry.
She’d actually wanted to be wicked like him? He hadn’t reallyknown. He’d guessed at it, from the way her charms outdid his hexes, always so clever, so innovative. Her ingenuity reminded him of first-rate wickedness. He—well, he’d always need to back up his work with a book. He couldn’t even curse without worrying about it. He could almost feel the proverbial pen up his ass after what she’d said to him. His heart was safely locked away under the apple tree at home, but the way he felt now, he could almost believe it was beating in his chest.
Tinbit appeared at the door of the coach, hopped down, and strolled toward the campfire, carrying an empty soup bowl and a spoon.
“Well?”
“I got him to eat,” Tinbit said. “Not much, but it was something anyway. I feel awful. He didn’t even call out.”
“It’s not your fault.”
The spoon clattered abruptly in the bowl as Tinbit dropped it in the freshwater tub he’d insisted Hector conjure because washing bowls in swamp water was about as unhygienic as it got. “Yes, it is. I told him to go home. At the Happily-Ever-After, he came and found me in the stable, and I told him he had to, there was no other decision to make.”
The soft, boggy spot in his chest where his heart used to be throbbed unpleasantly. “Decision?”
“I told him it would be better if he forgot me. He said he’d make that choice for himself, he didn’t care who I was or who I worked for, he couldn’t forget me, not after we’d—well.” He blushed.
“I really am very sorry about all this,” Hector said, feeling miserable. Ida’s philosophy that he’d so recently dismissed as overbearing manipulation seemed rather sound now that hethought about it. He should have been much more discouraging the moment Tinbit told him he was writing letters. That sort of thing could only end in heartbreak, hurt feelings, and the miserable wish that things could be different. For instance, if he’d never written Ida all those centuries ago, his face wouldn’t still sting the way his ego did after her assessment of him. How had she figured him out so well, just from his letters?
“Don’t be.” Tinbit sighed, almost as if he’d heard Hector’s thoughts like he’d heard his apology. “It’s not your fault either.”
Hector didn’t say anything. The unfortunate truth was that Tinbit was wrong. It absolutelywasHector’s fault. A hearty young gnome should not get swamp fever from a rainy day spent on the back of the coach, no matter how lovesick he was. Pestilence and plague—he knew them well. They were one of his special areas of concern, and among the hardest to mete out fairly. They’d also been one of the most challenging things to control with Happily-Ever-After—even with him handling all the details. If the magic was broken beyond repair…but he couldn’t even bring himself to think about that right now. He already felt too unhappy.
***
Hector slept rather badly.
He never slept well away from home, even in hotels, but something about cold hard ground seeping upward through the thick down sleeping bags he’d conjured for himself and Tinbit added a whole new level of discomfort. The horses, however, woke up refreshed and exuberant, the ground being like the comfort of the grave for them. Napoleon even knocked Hector’shat off with an affectionate swipe of his bony nose.
He stayed for a moment, stroking the hard jawbone of the animal affectionately. He ought to retire the ancient horse, let him live out his magic and turn to dust. Horses weren’t meant to live forever, not even the undead ones, and Napoleon had outlived so many others because Hector kept patching him up, replacing bones, reworking sinews. His eyes rested on the silver-coated cannon bone. “Old friend,” he said, touching the horse’s shoulder gently, “some of us might be better off without immortality weighing us down.”
The coachman gazed at Hector with impassive hollow eyes, but he gaped in dismay.
Hector laughed. “Not you. I told you centuries ago you could stay as long as you wished. I’m not putting my best driver out to pasture.”
The skeleton raised himself on his toes, squaring his shoulders proudly, and went back to harnessing the other horses.
“We’ll go easier on Napoleon this time,” Hector said. “I want to stop in town and give him a good twelve hours rest before we set off again.”
The coachman nodded.
The door to the coach opened and Ida stepped out into the morning sunshine.
She wore a silk blouse, red, with ruffles Hector would’ve considered a laughable flamboyance, but on Ida, it looked natural, like the plumage of some bright bird. She’d belted the long, silk tunic around her midsection with a bright purple sash bound with a gold clasp at her hip. She was brushing her hair as she stood outside the door, fiddling with a clip and the brush at the same time, a curiously determined expression on her face. Thetip of her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth as she pulled a vast quantity of unruly waves and curls into her hand and bound it into a single ponytail, then flipped part of it back through the barrette, to give it a softer look. In the dawn light, her hair was almost the color of bright blood, with streams of bone silver running through the red. She startled when he approached, and her lavender eyes flashed dangerously.
“How’s Hari?”
She tucked her hair brush into a handbag she’d set on the steps behind her. “A little better,” she said. “He’s asking for breakfast anyway, which I take to be a good sign.”
“Tinbit is working on it, I believe,” Hector said, like he didn’t know that Tinbit had risen before dawn to gather early swamp huckleberries for a complicated clafouti involving eggs, honey, and rose water.
“I appreciate that. He’s been attentive and kind.”
“He’s a good gnome. He takes the best care of me and my house.”
“Hari is the same way,” Ida said. “I understand, perhaps better now, why they would find so much in common.” Her eyebrows pulled together in a grimace of pain. “Hector, can we walk? I need to speak to you.”
