Page 7 of Wickedly Ever After
It had started out as such a nice day too.
***
Tinbit began it on a good note by bringing him breakfast in bed.
“What did I do to deserve this?” Hector set his memoirs aside. This was an ongoing project, begun in his seven-hundredth year when he became worried that his memory might fail him on the more obscure details if he waited much longer. “Thank you, Tinbit.”
“Mmmph,” Tinbit grunted, opening the curtains.
Hector spooned chokeberry jelly into a bowl where he could break up the hot buttered scone and eat it submerged in his favorite jam. Sweet, but still retaining an acidic, poisonous tang, it came from his own garden. The espaliered trees were the pride and joy of his orchard.
Tinbit squatted beside the fireplace, scraping at the coals from the night before. He added a few fresh juniper sticks, grumbling under his breath.
“What is it, Tinbit? You’re frowning.”
“I always frown; you know that.”
Hector set his spoon down. “But not down to your shoes. What’s wrong?”
“It’s just you show more appreciation for the little things Ido around here than Crowbone does, and it makes me want to thump him. You know what he said yesterday when I scolded him for not eating his soup? He said I was a meddlesome old hen and to go cluck somewhere else.”
Hector repressed a sigh. He’d once lectured Tinbit’s grandmother on the feasibility of maintaining a relationship with no mutual respect and admiration. He struggled to recall the exact words. Something like “tell that man to go choke on his own selfishness; you can do better,” and she’d listened. Perhaps that might work here.
He glanced at Tinbit.
Perhaps not.They’d been through this before and not only with Crowbone. “Don’t worry, Tinbit. One day, he will see how amazing you are, and carry you off on his best bullfrog to his home in the swamp and you’ll live happily ever after.”
A ghost of a smile appeared, and the laugh was harsh and dark, which sounded right for Tinbit. “What would you do without me? Get your own breakfast? Clean your own clothes? Sweep this castle on your own?”
“Nonsense,” he said, spraying crumbs. “The skeletons do that.”
“Next you’ll be telling me you like bone broth in your coffee every morning.”
Hector eyed his coffee suspiciously. “You didn’t!”
“No, but I ought to, you old relic,” Tinbit said, jerking Hector’s second-best robe out of the closet and tossing it unceremoniously at him before heading back to the fireplace, this time with his broom. “You’ll have to wear this today. I’m still trying to magic the indigo out of your better one. It may be ruined.”
Hector tasted his coffee dubiously, rolling the first siparound, checking for the foul concoction Tinbit always tried to slip into his meals one way or another. “You know I wouldn’t keep you here if it negated your happiness.”
Tinbit’s shoulders stiffened. “I am happy. Anyway, if he loved me, he’d have come to work at the castle. And aren’t you a little wicked to be matchmaking? That’s Ida North’s job.”
“Since I get the distinction of choosing the villains in the story, I can say I’m an excellent judge of character.”
Tinbit stopped sweeping ashes. “You don’t like him, do you?”
“I don’t know him like you do, Tinbit.” Hector blew on his flaxseed meal to cool it.
With a sigh, the harsh veneer vanished, and the surly, grumpy gnome Hector had known since he was a gnomelet slumped all over his little body. “I think I love him, Hector, but when I do something nice, like applique his jacket so he can go on the big frog hunt, he doesn’t even thank me. He grabbed it and left—bye, Tinbit, see you this weekend—like I’d just be there when he got back. And now when I try to be nice and forget the whole thing, he calls me a meddlesome mother hen. I don’t know what to do. I just want someone…someone to love me.”
Hector stirred the gruel, thinking. Roughly six months had passed since he’d found Tinbit crying in the skullery, declaring he and Crowbone were done. He’d thrown a plate across the room and said he didn’t ever want to see the arrogant, toadstool-barf of a man again. A month later, Crowbone came to the castle with a bouquet of swamp saxifrage, asking for forgiveness. Tinbit took him back without even asking for an explanation. Now it looked like they were separating again, and Hector was fairly sure it wasn’t really about the jacket or the soup. Regardless of his opinion of Crowbone, it hurt him to see his favorite sodepressed. Tinbit deserved a nice gnome who would love him in all his grouchy, overbearing, completely devoted mother hen obnoxiousness. It would be a happy ending for once. But as Tinbit had reminded him, Hector wasn’t in charge of those.
“Do you want me to go with you to see the Flamelord today?” Tinbit asked.
“No, I’ll have Pocket with me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” Hector said. When it came to dragons, a taciturn temperament was useful. Dragons could be touchy, and Tinbit lacked tact, especially when he was grumpy. The giant, at least, would be quiet.
