Page 71 of Wickedly Ever After
“At the game. Rupert told me he wasn’t happy about Caedan’s influence on the prince. He talked about sending him on a quest, and he mentioned something about hoping he’d be killed—”
“Gods, Hector! You could have told me. I was right there!”
“Since when did I ever interfere with your side of the magic?” he asked, sounding annoyed. “And I had no reason to believe it was anything more than Rupert being Rupert. He’s never been a pleasant person—you should have seen what he did to my poor troll at his Happily-Ever-After. And he wanted Archie to kill the dragon. He’s about as trustworthy as that disreputable rag, theStar!”
“Which got it right.” Ida leaned back in her chair, arms folded over her chest.
“Since when did that infernal tabloid ever get anything right? They predicted the end of Happily-Ever-After last year based on a comet!”
Cear, standing by the fire, folded their hands in front of them. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the spell was not concluded as written, shouldn’t it dissipate? Why did the dragon kidnap the princess? Why would he not immediately leave the field? Why would the princess not simply go home? They aren’t compatible at all.”
Ida squirmed, horribly uncomfortable now. The princess should have left—she’d wanted to from the very beginning. But Ida’d had to go and insist that the magic itself had chosen her. How could she have been so foolish? Hector and his candor curse couldn’t fully account for that. She’d just been so angry, so upset with the way Happily-Ever-After had been corrupted, how she’d not stepped up and said something, all because that would have meant admitting her mistake to Hector. But wouldn’t the magic have gotten it right? It clearly hadn’t.
“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” Hector said, drumming his fingers on the table. “The fact is, they didn’t run, and even if they are accidentally in love, the spell didn’t stop with them. And it’s not just the love magic that’s still spreading: Everything is coming out through the cracks. First the scarecrows breeding out of season, crops ripening before they’re ready—I shouldn’t be surprised if we don’t hear of floods in the south and forest fires up north soon.”
“What I’d give for a copy of a paper right now,” Ida murmured. “I don’t suppose you take theStar, though.”
“I don’t get any papers out here. Eagle delivery is outrageously expensive. Too many of them get eaten by griffins.”
“What if I wrote Annabeth tonight, confront her, see how Archie is doing—”
Hector’s hands curled slowly into fists. “No, no, no—we talked about this. We can’t have anyone going to the papers, and you know she will.”
“Unless she staged that party specifically to refute the paper’s allegations,” Ida mused. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I’m almost positive Rupert knew they were true. I only wish I’d suspected sooner. Maybe we could have countered this then, but what do we do now?” Hector pushed his chair back forcefully and rose. He left the table and crossed to the window that overlooked the courtyard of black roses.
Ida joined him. The roses were silver in the dusk, lighting up as if from moonlight within, but when she looked closely, one of the white lights left a rose and drifted to the next—lightning bugs. Probably poisonous. She pulled her robe tighter around herself. She wanted Hector to put his arms around her like he had at the inn, to squeeze her hand, tell her it would be all right, they’d figure things out, they’d make it right. But how could it ever be right again if it had always been wrong? Somehow, she had to make Hector see that. She had to let him know what had happened at the choosing, what she’d done. He’d never be able to understand if she didn’t.
“Hector, I…”
“Yes?”
No. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t want him as her enemy again. “I…I think I’ll go check on Hari and try to get him to go home if I can. There’s a possibility that the love magic may intensify as we get closer to the princess and the dragon, and I don’t want any distractions. We’ll need all our wits about us to solve this. And after that, I think I’ll read for a while and see if there’s anything in my books regarding dragons in love. Perhaps,you could get my library for me—I’ll give you the location if you could transport the books to my room.”
He shuddered, as if he’d grown cold, although the breeze was unusually warm for this time of year. More climate change.
“I’ll have them sent to the dining hall,” he said. “If your library is anything like mine, I doubt your room would hold them all.”
“Thank you. It was a lovely dinner.”
“Ida?”
Her hand was on the doorknob when he spoke. “Yes, Hector?”
His green eyes shone with steadfast determination. “We will fix this. I promise.”
“Of course.” She inclined her head and shut the door quietly behind her.
***
Hari, as it turned out, was not in the castle at all. A skeleton directed Ida to the courtyard and pointed out an arch in the rose hedge that led to a house that looked so different from Hector’s castle, Ida automatically knew she’d entered a different and somehow forbidding world. A gnome’s world.
This was Tinbit’s domain, and everyone from the skeletal housekeeper to a squat frog carrying a mouth full of keys that he used to open the gate for her looked like they didn’t belong there either. She hurried across the tiny courtyard filled with small potager gardens and a fountain that fed a small pool full of—
“Are those razor-toothed redfish?” She gazed into the water where tiny crimson fish happily fed on what looked like a chicken leg.
“Don’t tell Hector. They’re his birthday present.” Tinbit rosefrom behind a boxy rosemary he’d been trimming. “You’re here to see Hari.”
