Page 74 of Wickedly Ever After
He forced a smile. “I was just going for a walk before I turned in. Early start in the morning.”
She pulled her robe tighter against the chill. “Do you mind if I walk with you? I have something I need to talk to you about. Maybe a few things.”
“All right,” he said. He almost offered his arm, took one look at her tilted eyebrow, and decided against it. “I did promise to show you the gardens after all.”
“You did,” she said. She folded her arms behind her back, pacing beside him.
“What would you like to see first? The poison garden? The greenhouse? My updated bog?”
She smiled slyly. “You were going to enter your bog intoWitches’ Weedscontest, weren’t you? And here I thought it was going to be your front flowerbeds with the three-foot sword thorns.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But that was before your giant pumpkins caught my attention.”
She snorted. “To think, losing that damned contest to you was all I was really worried about two weeks ago.”
“Things change.”
They walked on in silence for a while. “Hector? Do you think anything like this has ever happened before?”
“I don’t know,” he said heavily. He opened the door to the greenhouse. “I hope not.”
“I don’t think it has,” she said, picking up a fledgling bat lilyand setting it on a plant bench—not the one with the sundews, curling their leaves in excitement. “But that might be wishful thinking on my part.”
“Have you ever had a princess who hesitated before?” He surreptitiously nudged an open sack of freeze-dried mice out of sight.
Ida’s cheeks blushed pink in the sunset rays coming through the panes of the greenhouse. “Not…not that I can recall. What is that? The thing with the beetle-shaped blossoms.”
“Oh. That’s a bugainvillea—I got it to feed the bat lilies. Don’t worry—it isn’t spawning at the moment. Or it shouldn’t be.” He surveyed it with some anxiety, but the buds didn’t look more swollen than usual. “There’s always a first for things. I’ve never had a dragon as reluctant as Alistair, although Adair did insist on writing a poem for his event—he was nearly late because he couldn’t get that sixtieth stanza just right.”
“I remember,” Ida said, smiling. “Annabeth yawned.”
“Rude. And he was being nothing but polite.”
“Shewas only polite when it was in her best interest. She’s nothing like Amber.”
“I’d still like to know more about that girl,” he said.
She set down the pot of serpent moss she’d been examining. “What about her?”
“Only—only that she seems a remarkable woman,” he said, surprised by her sharp tone. “I can see why you chose her. She has a wonderful sense of duty and honor.”
“Oh,” she said, reddening further. “Pity it wasn’t Caedan who I picked.”
“Perhaps after this, you can simply recruit as many men as women to select as Common Princess. Prince. Although, I mustsay, it would have been more helpful to have known the prince’s inclination before all of this.” He picked a stem of blood orchid and handed it to her. “Don’t bring it too close to your robe—you’ll never get the stain out.”
She just held the blood orchid like she thought it might bleed all over her hand. “Well, why didn’t we?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why didn’t we?” She gazed out through the windows at the mist gathering over the bog with a disconcerted and pained look on her face. “A thousand years we’ve been in charge of Happily-Ever-After, Hector, and we didn’t even bother to find out if the prince was gay. Who’s to say whether we’ve made mistakes like this before? We may have made hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And not just in matters like this.”
“No one said we were infallible—”
“But isn’t this magic supposed to be?”
“Yes,” he said, dragging out the word. He’d seen her take this line of questioning before, in Council, usually when she wanted to get Tara on her side to go against him—Agatha nearly always sided with Ida as a matter of rivalry. He turned to snap a few dead leaves from his vicious ficus, crooning a few words of calming to keep it from lashing out at him with all its branches. “The magic can’t be wrong. But traditions should change, and it’s entirely possible I have been…a bit absent in this respect—something I intend to rectify. It won’t be that difficult to make sure we keep up with the times. I’m quite sure many common men would jump at the chance to wed a prince in the future. You could send them on quests to test their worth, like you test the princesses.”
She blushed, and he thought the beauty of her face outshone the sunset. A sudden impulse seized him to pluck a flowerfrom his blooming moon-star cactus and twine it in her hair. He shoved both hands, full of dead ficus leaves, into his pockets.
